Comments for In the Library with the Lead Pipe

Comment on Social networking with a brain: a critical review of academic sites by pligg.com

pligg.com — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:50:35 +0000

Social networking with a brain: a critical review of academic sites…

Social networking may have started out as a way for students to keep track of their friends, but it has expanded in just about every direction. These days, you…

Comment on The Importance of Thinking about Thinking by Ellie

Ellie — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:19:23 +0000

Thanks for those meeting strategies! I am definitely going to have to try those out.

Comment on The Importance of Thinking about Thinking by Ellie

Ellie — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:17:37 +0000

My favorite deck is a red/white one.

I really appreciate constructive criticism. Film school really grilled in its necessity for me. Everyone was a bit overly nice though. I never had to deal with actual negativity.

I even noticed myself fighting my instant rebuttals doing the rewrites on this article. :)

Comment on The Importance of Thinking about Thinking by Ellie

Ellie — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:58:23 +0000

Thanks again for the recommendation Brett. I think we have plenty of real cheese. It’s just all in that obnoxious blister packaging that can’t be opened without industrial scissors ;)

Comment on The Importance of Thinking about Thinking by Hilary Davis

Hilary Davis — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:10:07 +0000

Thanks for this post, Ellie – it was a nice break away from the constant momentum of work! And a great reminder to reflect on why we do the things we do the way we do them. It reminds me of a LLAMA webinar I attended last year with Pat Wagner as the presenter. She focused on the importance of reflecting on why plans fail and encouraged asking hard questions when bad things happen to our well-intentioned plans. Her advice for any major project was to build in time and money for reflection, getting everyone on board, giving people time to think, ask questions, take breaks, celebrate small successes along the way, repair from getting burned out, and limit doing work under crisis to minimize mistakes. In another LLAMA webinar, also led by Pat Wagner, she discussed decision-making strategies and focused on what she called ways to “neutralize data for decision-making.” She described using “graphic models” (grids and T-bars) to avoid cognitive bias. In group settings, she recommended setting up a T-bar chart on a whiteboard so that everyone can keep track of what’s been discussed (and avoid redundant comments) with costs of making a certain decision on one side and benefits of making a certain decision on the other side. Start with the negatives (costs) first to allow the criticisms to be aired, then go through and list benefits without making value judgments yet on either costs or benefits. Then, weigh the results before deciding, making sure to distinguish between facts and opinions. How often do we actually use a cost/benefit ratio when making group decisions or individual decisions? This post gives us concrete examples of how we can make better decisions and I’d recommend this post to anyone thinking about how to develop better personal or professional leadership skills.

Comment on The Importance of Thinking about Thinking by Derik Badman

Derik Badman — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:05:45 +0000

Oh, the hours I spent playing Magic (I preferred blue).

If there’s one thing I learned from four years of art school, it was how to take negative feedback and learn from it. It’s something that I’ve learned (the hard way) that most people don’t have. They take negative criticism as attacks, but you can only go so far with “that’s great”.

The thinking about/analyzing your emotions section is very similar to what I’ve been reading in some books on Zen (particularly by Brad Warner).

Comment on The Importance of Thinking about Thinking by Brett Bonfield

Brett Bonfield — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:09:59 +0000

I first read about Lehrer's book when Joe Posnanski, a writer for Sports Illustrated, reviewed it on his blog. He summarized Lehrer's description of an experiment comparing rats to Yale students that reminded me of my experiences providing reference services to students at another Ivy League university:

Scientists put rats in a T-shaped maze and put food at one of the top corners of the T. They put the food on the left side 60 percent of the time and food on the right side 40 percent of the time. What they found is that once the rats realized that the food was on the left more often, they ALWAYS went left, figuring in their own rat minds that more often than not, they would get food. But when they did a similar experiment with Yale undergraduates — I’m not sure what they use as a reward for Yale undergraduates — barbecued Fritos? — they found something else. The students also came to realize that the reward was on the left most of the time, but they tried to figure out the pattern. There WAS no pattern, but their brains simply could accept that and so instead of going left and simply getting the reward 60 percent of the time, they tried to outsmart the system. And so they only ended up with the reward 52% of the time. As Lehrer says — outsmarted by rats.

Maybe this explains why the same brilliant, high achieving students and faculty members were repeatedly frustrated by pretty similar searches. It wasn't that they didn't know how to get to or use Business Source Premier or Factiva or the various execrable Thomson Reuters databases -- they just didn't believe the cheese could be found in the same place over and over again. At least that's one explanation. It's also possible they were after real cheese and often the best we had to offer was Velveeta.

Comment on Not Just Another Pretty Picture by Hilary Davis

Hilary Davis — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:23:13 +0000

Hi Tom – thanks for your feedback – I hope you read beyond the first few sentences of the article. In my lead-in to this article (“Trying to decide between a stacked column bar chart and a 3-D area chart is par for the course in my work. Microsoft Excel© is great for many practical needs, but it doesn’t always support the need to create simple, compelling and interactive graphical data visualizations that are critical for libraries to best express value, communicate trends, and test assumptions about library services and collections.”), I was using that example as a way to describe how ineffectual my strategies as limited to Excel and other standard visualization tools has been. The main points of the article were (1) that there are better, more effective ways to make your point with data as folks like Tukey, Tufte and others have elaborated on much more fully, and (2) to try out other tools beyond Excel, and (3) to highlight some fun examples from libraryland and beyond that use good visualization strategies.

Comment on Not Just Another Pretty Picture by Tom in Raleigh

Tom in Raleigh — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:59:32 +0000

Great site! But I hope you’re kidding about the choosing to use a 3D area chart. 3D display of 2D data is a cute trick by MBAs, but serious data display does not use this sort of fakery, as Ed Tufte often points out.

Comment on Teen Tech Week: Create, Share, Learn @ Your Library by Robyn V

Robyn V — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:29:40 +0000

We have about 25 teen librarians in our system, so we do what we can to keep abreast of what’s new and current, and to make sure that our programming and materials are relevant to the population we serve. Naturally not all of us are as tech-savvy as others, but we do our best to help one another out so that teens across the system get consistent service.

Our vision statement for teen services is

“Akron-Summit County Public Library provides customized library services that connect teens to their local community and the larger world.”

While it does not mention technology in any specific way, communication and connection is what drives many of the most popular technologies used today, and we try to keep that in mind when reaching out to our teens. Having a firm idea of the purpose behind our programming is very important to us.

We have a “Technology Committee” comprised of several teen librarians. Their mission is to keep our online presence relevant, to educate other librarians about trends in that area and how we can use them to our advantage, and to help create programming that utilizes computers and other technologies. Currently, they are working on expanding our teen volunteer program to include computer help volunteers.

We also have a “Gaming Committee”, who helped to organize four system-wide gaming tournaments last year – no small feat with 17 branches!

Our library hosts ‘Invent-a-palooza’ in the fall of each year, and this year we are hoping to use it as a jumping-off point for a robotics program in conjunction with our local Girl Scouts organization.

Essentially, basing a program or service around a certain use of technology should be a means to an end, not an end in itself. If a popular trend is being used by the library just because it IS popular, but doesn’t otherwise fit the vision or mission of the library, it won’t necessarily be a positive experience for library or patron.

You ask a lot of difficult questions, but I think asking them is the first step. I’m lucky to have an amazing administrative team who supports many of the new ideas we want to try, and understands the importance of teen services – I’m sure many other libraries have more of a struggle to promote teen services within the system than I do.