Thanks to Flickr User Billingham for use of this image.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe

 
Lead Pipe has gone through some transitions. You may have noticed recent additions of regular authors Eric Frierson and Leigh Anne Vrabel. We were just featured on the very cool Librarian Wardrobe blog. We’ve also been kicking around some ideas about future directions for our little community here, trying to figure out if there are ways we can support library-related projects in addition to our blog/journal.
 

Kim Leeder (by Lead Pipe proxy)

 
Just a few weeks ago Kim started a new job as Director of Library Services at the College of Western Idaho. She’s jumping right into her new position and loving it, but she’s so busy that we’re reporting for her! Please help us congratulate and support Kim in this venture. Don’t worry, you’ll continue to hear from her at Lead Pipe.
 

Emily Ford

 
This July I transitioned from having two temporary part-time jobs to one. Yes, still temporary and yes, still part-time. I feel lucky to have a job, especially when libraries in my metro area have laid off tenured library faculty. It’s a nasty job climate out there even without economic woes. I’m grateful for what I do have.

The transition from a part-time hourly position to an Interim fixed-term faculty position has been great. I’ve been learning a lot–soaking it all up like a sponge. Instead of just doing my job(s), I’m able to be more engaged with the university community. I have the emotional energy and the time to do so and have been feeling much more like a nice and pleasant person. I’m happy to know where I am at all times and I’m sure my colleagues are, too.

The switch from institutions has also been a cultural adjustment for me. Now I’m a proud union member at a large academic institution in a state university system. Previously, I worked at a public corporation with a smaller student body, a smaller library, and a completely different organizational culture. Change is good.

To complement my work transition I’ve rotated off of a few (3 or 4!) committees, joined different ones, and even decided to change my division membership in ALA to further explore and grow my professional self.

Prior to my job change the spring and summer were busy as I worked closely with a great team of people to organize the 2011 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit. It’s a local conference that I thought was one the most engaging librar* conferences even before I served on the planning committee. I got to give a lightning talk and I’d be tickled if you watched it and let me know what you think.

Ellie Collier

 
My partner accepted a position at the University of Minnesota, so this May we relocated from Austin, Texas to Minneapolis, Minnesota and I switched jobs from Austin Community College to Normandale Community College (in Bloomington, MN). I also got married. My new position is very similar to my last one, but the environment and the student populations are different. NCC is a more focused transfer institution, while ACC had a very strong workforce program. NCC had three librarian retirements (all reference and instruction librarians), a part-timer take a full time position elsewhere and another librarian on sabbatical leave (the cataloger), so we have five new librarians and only one returning librarian (the acquisitions librarian). My new position also has far fewer librarians per student, so I’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what the typical workload had been and how we want to distribute it now.
 

Hilary Davis

 
The NCSU Libraries is in full-swing preparation for a new flagship library, the James B. Hunt, Jr. Library, set to open in late 2012 or early 2013. With much of the collection being split between several locations, I’ve been helping to strategize how to redistribute the collection in a way that (hopefully) optimally meets patron needs and complements exciting new learning and collaboration spaces.  I’ve also been lucky to be involved in our local team of librarians who are participating in the ARL/DLF E-Science Institute, with the aim to develop a strategic agenda for supporting e-science/e-research.

On the SLA (Special Libraries Association) front, I’ve assumed the role of past-chair of the Science-Technology Division this year, which means I get a chance to continue to work with some really great folks in SLA and review the division’s Recommended Practices for updates and revisions.  And I become part of the vast network of people who have stepped up to lead the Science-Technology Division, a large and diverse group of corporate, legal, government, academic, and solo sci-tech librarians across the globe.

I’m looking forward to participating in the TRLN (Triangle Research Libraries Network) Management Academy in October, presenting a talk at the Charleston Conference in November, and helping to integrate the Hunt Library with our existing and evolving library collections and services.  If you’re interested in joining the team at the NCSU Libraries, we are looking for qualified candidates for the position of Reference Librarian for the Physical and Mathematical Sciences!
 

Brett Bonfield

 
I chaired my first ALA presidential task force, Future Perfect, and presented its report to the Executive Board and to Council at ALA Annual in New Orleans this past June. You can get a pretty good sense of what we recommended by watching a short video interview with me, though the report itself is succinct, and we worked hard to make it both clear and jargon-free. While it’s nice to have completed the report, I really miss working with the other five members of the task force, Kawanna Bright, Margaux DelGuidice, Candice Mack, Ross Singer, and Rachel Van Noord, as well as Roberta Stevens (I still have no idea how she managed to make so much time for us), and hope to work with all of them again, both soon and frequently.

In its July/August 2011 issue, Public Libraries published “Getting Paid,” the first article I’ve written for a publication other than In the Library with the Lead Pipe since we started Lead Pipe almost three years ago. As of August 13, 2011, it carries a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license. If you’re interested in the HarperCollins boycott, you might find it interesting.

I was recently nominated as a candidate for the LITA Board. If you’re a LITA member, I hope you’ll vote for me. And if you’re not a LITA member, but you’re interested in both libraries and technology, I hope you’ll join.

I’m now a few months into my second year as treasurer for the New Jersey Library Association. It’s far more difficult to understand how a professional association’s finances can and should work than I would have imagined, especially given the unpredictability of our economy. I haven’t done nearly as well as I would have liked, though grappling with NJLA’s finances has made possible one singularly energizing experience: working with Peter Pearson, President of the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library and lead consultant for Library Strategies, on a fundraising strategic plan for NJLA. We put together a committee during the spring and early summer, and Peter flew out to meet with us in August.

I’m now a few days into my second year as a Ph.D. student in Library and Information Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. There are more required courses than I was expecting, and fewer people interested in libraries, but the faculty and the other students are bright and interesting, and I’ve been given plenty of freedom to investigate questions I’m happy to invest time in answering. The big challenge this year is to publish and present work that’s more readily identifiable as traditionally academic. If all goes well, I’ll find out in a few days that I’ve been accepted to present at my first academic conference.

Of course, doing “real” research is one of the reasons I enrolled in a Ph.D. program. The other reason is my interest in teaching library school students, a desire to teach that Meredith Farkas put into words for me (and perhaps for a lot of us) during my final weeks in library school. This summer, I taught an on-campus course in web design through Drexel’s library school, where I was mentored by the fantastic Vanessa Morris (read parts one and two of her interview at Tame the Web) and fourteen smart, dedicated, and patient masters students. If you’re in the Philadelphia area, and you have an opening for a superstar intern, part-time librarian, or someone with a newly minted masters, please let me know.

My job at Collingswood Public Library remains incredibly fun and rewarding. In the next three weeks, we’re having a town-wide party to celebrate the Library’s 100th Anniversary, hosting the Library’s third annual 5K, and supporting the 9th annual Collingswood Book Festival. We’re also in the midst of installing new lights and ceiling tiles, trying to move to a virtual desktop environment for public workstations, and investigating grants to preserve the Library’s archives and begin the process of making the collection available digitally. It’s been an interesting summer in Collingswood, and the fall promises to be even better.
 

Leigh Anne Vrabel

 
I’ve spent most of 2011 trying to expand my repertoire as a reference librarian and contribute to the public service team in different ways. The traditional roles for which I was trained in library school have evolved almost beyond recognition, and I’m determined to keep pace with that evolution and stretch my professional boundaries, especially in collaborative situations.

Outreach figures largely into that equation.  Talking to people face-to-face about the library is still one of the biggest thrills of my job, so I’ve worked with my peers on a variety of outreach programs, including tabling local farmers markets and the wildly successful “30 Books in 30 Minutes” program.  Repeated on multiple occasions, this program involves a team of six library workers delivering rapid-fire book talks; half the fun is watching the clock to see if we can squeeze them all into a half-hour slot, and the audience eats it up, as well as checks out many of the books afterwards!  I’ve also been invited back to my alma mater to speak on the future of libraries, which just might evolve into a future Lead Pipe post.

My main responsibility, and first love, is editing the Eleventh Stack blog, which has been named a finalist in the Pittsburgh’s Most Valuable Blogger Awards.  Our competition—in the “Everything Else” category—is stiff, but it really is an honor to be nominated. Knowing that our collective hard work has earned the library a place at the table in the local blogosphere makes me want to work harder to keep the project fresh and exciting.  That’s why I’ve signed up for Podcamp Pittsburgh, an annual social media unconference.  I’m hoping to gain ideas and to network outside the profession, not only to spread the awesome, but to learn from folks who don’t think like we do.

Upcoming projects include teaching a resume writing class, being trained to help facilitate our wildly popular Gadget Labs, presenting with a group of my colleagues at the Pennsylvania Library Association’s Southwest chapter workshop in October, and helping out with a super-secret, amazing advocacy event I can’t talk about just yet.  The really difficult work, however, is all interior.  As Rilke would have it, I am “living the questions”; I have, after all, been a librarian for seven years now, and a library worker for nine.  It’s definitely time to reassess, re-evaluate, and decide what I want now, and next, from my career.  Stay tuned.
 

Eric Frierson

 
It feels like I’ve been turning dials on a control panel for life this month.  Some dials I’ve turned way down: recently, I decided to drop off of Facebook (though I have recently reactivated my account briefly to participate in a contest from the Four Seasons in Austin; I will deactivate once the contest is over), resign from a couple of committee appointments, and take a hiatus from much conference travel, including ALA Midwinter and ALA Annual.

On the other end, some dials have gone up to 11.  Like Brett, I’ve begun a PhD program, and mine focuses on leadership in libraries.  I travel to Simmons College in Boston three times a year for week-long intensive course work.  Throughout the rest of the year, I find time in my off hours to research, read, and write.  Some of what I picked up in the introductory course informed my latest blog post.  The first semester alone has proven that this degree will be the hardest, most challenging thing I’ve ever done.  It has come with frustration, confusion, and that sense of, “Man, I don’t know JACK,” but I’m a firm believer that no real learning can happen without struggle.

In the same leadership vein, Kim and I are co-editing a book to be published by ALA Editions called The Library 2025.  It will feature stories from new and aspiring library administrators and give the library world a glimpse at the vision these leaders hold.  We are accepting chapter proposals now through December, so please consider submitting a proposal.

At work, I’m lucky to be a part of an exciting transformation.  Our university recently received a gift of $13 million for a new library and learning commons.  We were given a two-year time frame in which to plan the new space, close down our old building, and reopen in the new space.  For one whole year, our library will be closed and our collections housed off-site.  When we open, we will not look anything like what we are now, and the building project is serving as a catalyst for making other dramatic changes to how we define “library” and what we do for the campus.  Our new director, Pongracz Sennyey, is guiding us towards a vision of a future library that will require new competencies and a willingness to let go of legacy services that no longer serve the campus effectively.

I’ve also spent the last year acclimating to systems librarianship.  I’m employing my computer science degree more now than I ever have, grappling with new programming languages and new tools to develop solutions for our library.  For example, I’ve recently had to learn how to use Solr and Lucene, implement Omeka, and manipulate photograph EXIF data to determine a photo’s geolocation attributes.

Double Octuple Newspaper Web Perfecting Press, 1903

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is a little over a year old now. We published our first article on October 8, 2008, and we’ve now published thirty-five in all, along with five group posts. By most measures, we’re still a new publication, but we’ve also been pretty successful. About 2,250 people subscribe to our feed, we were one of the LISNews blogs to read in 2009, we’re indexed in LISTA, and many of our favorite writers and librarians have contributed articles or read drafts of our work, mentioned us on their blogs, left comments, or encouraged us in person.

In this article, I do my best to explain why we think we’ve been able to reach people. Although it’s hard to avoid talking about ourselves in an article that describes our experience writing, editing, and publishing In the Library with the Lead Pipe, our motivation is to encourage our readers to produce their own experiments, not to encourage them to adopt our model. When we created In the Library with the Lead Pipe, we had to figure out a lot of things for ourselves. Because we love reading good writing about libraries, we’re sharing what we know in the hope of bringing more good library writing into the world.

Assemble a Team

Treadwell's Wooden-Frame Bed and Power Press, 1822

Writing, at least writing that’s intended for publication, is an odd mix of the solitary and the social. You spend time alone, reading and thinking, working through your ideas and trying to present them in a way that resonates for other people. And then you share a draft of your work, ideally with someone you trust, and that person edits your text, refines it, makes suggestions, helps bring out the best in you. Our writing is only as good as our relationship with our readers, both the editors who help us turn our drafts into publications and the readers who spend time with our thoughts after they’ve been published, just as you’re doing now.

We publish most of our work at In the Library with the Lead Pipe over solo bylines, but all of our posts are group efforts. We usually bounce ideas off of each other before we get heavily involved in any research, and we rely on each other’s differing perspectives and skill sets as we refine our articles and prepare them for publication. We divide the tasks involved in keeping a blog/journal on schedule and have learned together what’s involved in this kind of undertaking. There are probably more small compromises involved for us than there are for people who publish solo, but none of us compromise on the things we care most about, such as open access and productive collaboration. We all feel comfortable disagreeing with the group and suggesting alternatives, and we all value unanimity when possible (or absolutely necessary), but are fine with simple majorities most of the time. We also enjoy co-authoring group posts, such as “What Not to Do When Applying for Library Jobs,” because they allow us to collaborate even more fully than we can in our solo posts, enabling us to include multiple perspectives in a single article.

The team behind In the Library with the Lead Pipe was assembled at the 2008 ALA Annual in Anaheim. Over lunch, Kim Leeder and I were talking about how much we would miss being first-year academic library bloggers at ACRLog. She was also eager to create an outlet for the enthusiastic, creative, and occasionally revolutionary voices she had been hearing as a participant in the 2008 ALA Emerging Leaders program. Kim suggested that we put together a group of librarians and start our own publication. Our goal was to find other people who seemed likely to bring out the best in each other, like the groups who publish ACRLog, Library Garden, and Pop Goes the Library.

Kim had worked with Emily Ford on an ALA Emerging Leaders project. I had worked with their fellow Emerging Leaders Derik Badman at Temple University and Ellie Collier on an ACRL panel. Being a North Carolina State University Libraries fanboy, I approached Andrew Pace for a recommendation from NCSU and he encouraged us to recruit Hilary Davis. It’s frightening to ask people to commit to a new project that may take up a lot of their time, especially when you don’t know them well, but know enough to know how busy they are. Fortunately, everyone agreed almost immediately even though we knew we were entering an area of the publication market that often seems saturated.

Find Your Niche

Modern Delivery Van for Grocers, Druggists, Etc.

As Walt Crawford has documented, at any given point there are approximately 500 active, fairly widely read library blogs. Additionally, there are dozens of non-blog library publications, such as Public Libraries or Library Resources & Technical Services. The world certainly didn’t need another new library publication last year any more than it needs one this year, but we figured we would be all right if we created the kind of publication that would hold our interest as readers. What librarian isn’t always on the look out for a good new read?

Our initial idea, our elevator speech, was simple: “We want to be the NPR or New Yorker of library blogs. We want to combine the intellectual rigor of an academic publication with the readability of The New Yorker or the storytelling of NPR.” This was a huge improvement over my initial attempt to get this idea across, which I’d written about in a piece for ACRLog with embarrassing results. The useful thing about mentioning NPR and The New Yorker is the mystique they carry. NPR is known for its personalities, its tendency to make you care about topics you don’t find intrinsically interesting, and its driveway moments—its ability to make you sit in your car and listen to the end of the story even after you’ve reached your destination. The New Yorker is known for its writers—even people who, like Garrison Keillor, have written for The New Yorker, write novels in which they fantasize about writing for The New Yorker—and also for its credibility: no one takes copyediting and fact-checking more seriously. If we can make In the Library with the Lead Pipe into a publication people look forward to reading and good writers want to write for, if we can be compelling and accurate, we’ll be happy with what we’ve created.

Our elevator speech itself, though compelling enough for our needs, wasn’t strictly accurate. Publications like Library Journal and American Libraries probably have more in common with NPR or The New Yorker than we ever will, but our intention is different from theirs. For one thing, like the stories on NPR and the articles in The New Yorker, we want our posts to be as compelling for people in other fields as they are for librarians. I regularly read articles or listen to podcasts by people discussing economics, philosophy, medicine, and software start-ups, in part because I’ve developed an interest in these topics, but mostly because I like how they think; I consistently get ideas from these writers and broadcasters that apply directly to my library work. What these publications have in common is, like Meredith Farkas’s Information Wants To Be Free and Wayne Bivens-Tatum’s Academic Librarian, they take on broad ideas that benefit from being explored at length. I can imagine economists, philosophers, medical practitioners, and start-up founders developing an interest in libraries, and those who do would probably enjoy learning about our field by reading Meredith’s and Wayne’s long form posts. For us, writing long form posts—limiting ourselves exclusively to articles and essays whose lengths vary between about 2,000 and 5,000 words—made sense because we thought it could broaden our appeal.

Long form work also lends itself to intellectual rigor. We were inspired by open access journals like Evidence Based Librarianship, First Monday, and especially The Code4Lib Journal, whose modified peer-review model we further modified. In our version of peer review, each piece is read before publication by at least one external reviewer and at least one Lead Piper. We encourage writers to choose reviewers with high standards, people who will reject substandard or unclear ideas or phrases. I think of our process as being more like a thesis review committee than like blind review, especially because we’ve never had a completed article rejected. From a scholarly publishing perspective, it feels a bit more like a compressed thesis/dissertation process.

Initially, we propose ideas to each other. Some ideas are rejected before they’re turned into articles, others are encouraged. After writing what we believe are polished drafts, we share our articles with outside reviewers. Sophie Brookover could have scuttled my review of her book; she didn’t, but she did make significant changes to portions of it, as did Meredith Farkas, my other outside reader for that piece. I got the same sort of editorial guidance from Tim Spalding and Aaron Swartz, who agreed to read my second piece. Either one of them could have objected strongly enough to elements of my article that the entire thing would have had to be rewritten or abandoned, and both made important suggestions the led to significant modifications. After incorporating ideas from our external reviewers, we show our revised drafts to each other. Again, in most cases this leads to significant changes to our articles before they’re published.

A key element in our philosophy is that articles which offer criticisms also offer constructive solutions. That first part is important to us—we place a high value on identifying problems in the status quo, we intentionally try to shake things up a bit, and we’re comfortable with a bit of irreverence and humor—but we won’t publish any critiques that aren’t accompanied by what we consider a useful solution. Thus, our name: In the Library with the Lead Pipe, which was inspired by the game, Clue, as was our tagline, “The murder victim? Your library assumptions. Suspects? It could have been any of us.”

The peer review process isn’t limited just to the Lead Pipe team: like ACRLog, which gave me an opportunity to post an article as a guest author before I was brought on board as a first-year blogger, we encourage people to submit their work for consideration, and also make it a point to recruit articles by people whose work we know and like. Having guest authors lets us cover areas we care about but don’t have the expertise to write about on our own, and it gives us a chance to work with a broader range of writers and include other perspectives. It also gives our guests a platform without requiring them to take on the editorial and other responsibilities required to keep In the Library with the Lead Pipe on course. Guest authors still need to recruit external and internal reviewers, they still need to learn their way around our publishing platform, and they are required to submit a short bio along with their article. The idea is that submitting an article shouldn’t be any harder or easier for our guests than it is for us.

In finding our niche and developing our processes, we did our best to find the things we liked and admired in other publications, and we adapted them to suit our skills and personalities. I don’t think the world needs another In the Library with the Lead Pipe, but I’d love to read a new publication whose writers go through a similar process of picking and choosing their favorite elements from the publications they enjoy reading.

Build a Sound Foundation

Accurate Measurements are Essential to Correct Time Keeping

I recently read an interesting explanation of the request that Van Halen included in its legendary backstage concert rider: “M & M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).” According to The Smoking Gun:

While the underlined rider entry has often been described as an example of rock excess, the outlandish demand of multimillionaires, the group has said the M&M provision was included to make sure that promoters had actually read its lengthy rider. If brown M&M’s were in the backstage candy bowl, Van Halen surmised that more important aspects of a performance—lighting, staging, security, ticketing–may have been botched by an inattentive promoter.

I think the same idea applies to publications. There’s no direct correspondence between good writing and either registering your own domain name or creating a unique layout, but at this point I almost always skip past writers who haven’t bothered to take control of their identity. Purchasing a domain, such as inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org is simple, and you can own one for less than $10 per year. It’s a good idea to register your domain with an ICANN-accredited registrar: I recommend Namecheap or Gandi.

Registering a domain is not the same as self-hosting your publishing software. All of the interesting hosted platforms allow you to associate your own domain with their servers. However, even though Google’s Blogger, WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Posterous are reliable, usable, and free, I still recommend that you sign up for a web host and run your own software. Again, it’s about making your site better for your users and, though there’s an initial learning curve, you’re able to get a lot more done with a lot less hassle.

Selecting a web host can seem daunting because there are thousands to choose from and most appear to be fairly indistinguishable from one another. My recommendation would be to go with an inexpensive plan from Blue Host, DreamHost, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, or A Small Orange, four of the hosts featured in Lifehacker’s January 2009 survey of the Most Popular Reliable and Affordable Web Hosts, or with LISHost. This is a somewhat larger commitment than registering a domain. There’s more involved, and the price will vary between approximately $25 and $120 per year, depending on your needs. I feel strongly that your time, and your readers’ time, is more than worth it.

One of the primary advantages of using a web host is that it gives you control over the software you run on your website. For us, the decision to use WordPress to publish In the Library with the Lead Pipe was an easy one. We were already familiar with it, it’s stable, it’s regularly updated and easy to upgrade, and it’s very good at reducing spam. It also has an extensive range of sophisticated plugins; though we actively weed any we aren’t using, we currently depend on twenty-nine plugins to help us present information, manage our data, and collect statistics. That last part, statistical measurement, is especially important: while Google’s Analytics and FeedBurner can be useful, it’s nice not to be reliant on third-party vendors for something so important. We’ve used Analytics from the beginning, but we’ve chosen not to use FeedBurner to measure our feed statistics. Instead, we use WordPress plugins Feed Statistics and StatPress Reloaded. Neither plugin has been updated in a while, but both still seem to be working fine.

WordPress also made it fairly simple for Derik to create a unique website design. By modifying an existing template and adding in his art, Derik gave us some of the best staging in online library publishing. When you visit a website for the first time and see original art, it immediately signals to you that the site’s creators care about your experience.

Six Librarians, drawing by Derik Badman

Go to Your Audience

Sectional View of a Telephone Building: A Typical American Central Office Building, Showing the Efficient Arrangement of the Various Departments

In addition to making sure our site’s appearance made our content more appealing, we wanted to make sure our site’s content license was appealing as well. We wanted a license that was permissive enough to make our content as usable as possible, but we didn’t want it to be so permissive that it would be hard for us to attract guest authors: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 seems to strike the right balance. As a measure of thanks for Creative Commons for creating this license, any royalties we make as part of our arrangement with EBSCO to appear in LISTA, though likely to be modest, will go directly to Creative Commons. Our license and modified peer review policy also qualify us as open access, which helped us get a nice boost in readership early on when Peter Suber’s SPARC Open Access Newsletter linked to us.

The other decision we made early on that’s helped us was the choice to apply for an ISSN. Unlike ISBNs, which cost about $125 for one and $275 for a block of ten, you can request an ISSN for free and you can start the application process before you publish your first issue. An ISSN is the major requirement for appearing in indexes, which was one of our goals. We aren’t going to change our policies in any major ways in order to get indexed—we’re happy with our version of peer review, and we don’t plan to divide our content into volumes and issues—but we still want people searching for articles in academic databases, such as those offered by H.W. Wilson or ProQuest, to find our articles in their search results.

I found it surprisingly difficult to figure out the relevant indexes’ collection policies or what we needed to do in order to submit our work for consideration. Here’s a short guide for others who might want to go this route. I recognize that it seems mundane, but a guide like this one would have saved me ten or twenty hours and a great deal of frustration:

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). We felt that we met DOAJ’s selection criteria, so we submitted our application online on December 9, 2008. The next day, we received a very nice rejection note from a reviewer in Sweden who had been a subscriber nearly from day one. As she explained, “For a journal to be included in DOAJ, the content of each issue, have to be at least 1/3 original research. Translated into blog publishing, I would say that means one issue = one month. So if you publish four posts in one month, at least two have to be original research… We are a bit traditional in the sense that we typically expect scholarly journals to have an abstract, a purpose of the paper clearly stated, references etc etc. Please do suggest the journal again if you feel that the content has shifted in this direction.”
• ERIC. We realized this was a stretch, but we felt we were close enough to meeting ERIC’s criteria that we emailed our information to ericpub@csc.com on December 9, 2008. We received a nice confirmation on December 15, 2008 from a Content Development Assistant, but haven’t heard anything since.
• Google Scholar. When we first submitted In the Library for Google Scholar’s consideration, the process involved sending an email to scholar-publisher@google.com, which we did, but we never received a response. The process has since been updated and a new request was submitted on November 22, 2009.
• Informed Librarian (subscription required). We submitted our request to be included in Informed Librarian on December 26, 2008, were notified of our acceptance on January 7, 2009, and received a note on June 4, 2009 that coverage had commenced.
• INSPEC (subscription required). We couldn’t find information on INSPEC’s website regarding submission contacts or collection policies, so we sent a message to its publishing contact on December 9, 2008. The message wasn’t confirmed and we have never been contacted by INSPEC.
• ISI (subscription required). Another stretch, but we thought people searching the Social Sciences Citation Index might find value in our work. After reading ISI’s guidelines (In six short paragraphs, we get the following friendly reminder four times: “A journal that is rejected for any reason (including timeliness) cannot be reevaluated for 2 years… Please do not resubmit a journal for evaluation if it has been rejected within the last 2 years. A reevaluation cannot be initiated until 2 years after the date of the rejection… If the journal is publishing on time and has not been rejected within the last 2 years, the evaluation will be initiated with the receipt of the first issue.”) and receiving the advice from a friend at Thomson to “make sure you use old fashioned snail mail in addition to submitting using the online form,” we decided to hold off for a bit.
• Library Literature (subscription required). We submitted our request to be included in Library Literature on December 9, 2008 and the next day we got a very nice request for more information from a contact with Library Literature’s publisher, H.W. Wilson. We responded immediately, and wrote back again on August 24, 2009 to let our contact know that our work would soon be appearing in one of its competitors’ databases, but we have not heard back from them since we received their initial response.
• LISA: Library and Information Science Abstracts (subscription required). We initially submitted our request for inclusion on December 9, 2008. At the time, a person’s name was listed and we emailed our request directly to her, but never received a response. ProQuest has since modified its process, so we resubmitted our request on November 22, 2009.
• LISTA (Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts) (free version available at libraryresearch.com). We wrote to EBSCO’s Director of Content Licensing on December 9, 2008, got a confirmation on December 10, 2008, and have nothing but good things to say about Paige Larkin, the EBSCO Publishing representative who has shepherded us through the process. She knows her stuff, she’s patient and responsive, and she’s done a wonderful job of addressing our concerns.
• Ulrich’s (subscription required). We emailed the Microsoft Word version of the submission form found on the Ulrich’s website to them on December 9, 2008 and were informed less than a week later that we had been added to their database.
• WorldCat (subscription version available). We asked a few catalogers at OCLC libraries to include us in their catalogs, but no one has ever stepped forward to receive credit for having cataloged us, and the citation itself doesn’t indicate which library chose to include us in its collection. Whoever you are, thank you for giving us a presence in WorldCat.

We also submitted our work to several other resources that aren’t specifically dedicated to scholarly research, including search engines Google, Yahoo!, MSN (now Bing), and Ask (all via the Google XML Sitemaps WordPress plugin, as well as Alexa and Technorati; DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory; library-centric search engines LibWorm and LISZen, and librarian-created indexes Librarians’ Internet Index, Internet Public Library, and LISWiki; and we requested an article at Wikipedia. There’s no reason not to submit your work to these resources. Depending on your goals, it may make sense to pursue them even more actively than we did.

Be Fearless

The First Missile: The Cave Man of prehistoric times unconsciously invented arms and ammunition

It’s time-consuming to submit forms, edit wikis, or send email messages to people you’ve never met or can’t identify. It’s a lot more challenging, at least if you fear rejection, to send a personal message to people you’ve met professionally asking them to read your publication, review a draft of an article before it’s published, or submit a guest article. Of all the tasks I’ve taken on as part of In the Library, that’s probably my least favorite, but we all do it and it’s worked: getting other people involved has made our writing better and helped us develop an audience.

It’s tempting to start naming names and giving thanks to the people who have helped us, but that would likely come off as showing a lack of humility and may also encourage even more unsolicited email than these folks deal with already. Still, it would be almost deceitful not to mention the two writers whose links to our work put us on the map.

I wrote to LISNews’s Blake Carver the day before we went live. His response, “Hurray, just what the world needed, a new blog ;-) I’ll take a look tomorrow.” He did, and he linked to us, and that resulted in the lion’s share of our incoming traffic the first couple of weeks (an effect not limited just to new blogs; the well established Pegasus Librarian recently experienced a similar spike in traffic after a link from LISNews). Three months later, Blake included us in his list of “10 Library Blogs to Read in 2009,” which resulted in our second highest traffic and subscription increase ever. So far, more people reach us from LISNews than from any other authored website.

Our biggest leap happened the first time Jessamyn West gave us a write up on her blog, librarian.net, on December 9, 2008. We got another big subscription increase when she linked to Ross Singer’s guest post back in August.

Detail from our Google Analytics traffic analysis

Detail from Google Analytics: Traffic spiked the first time Jessamyn West linked to us

Experiment

The Laboratory

We haven’t yet found a substitute for spending twenty-five or more hours writing and editing what some of us still think of as a blog post, but we recognize that’s only half the assignment: we need to keep looking for more ways to ensure that posts reach people. We’ve had some success with Twitter and Facebook, and considerably less success with Lead Pipe News, our attempt to create a Proggit/Hacker News/Stack Overflow for the library community.

We’ve also experimented with deadlines. We thought it made sense to publish weekly, but found that our writing was suffering, we were struggling to manage our time, and many of our readers couldn’t keep up with our output—our articles regularly exceed 5,000 words, plus our average post generates fourteen comments. So we scaled back to every other week and things seem to be better for all concerned.

This is one of the ways we differ from most blogs: as a rule, bloggers don’t seem to publish at specific intervals, while traditional print publications (or publications produced by publishers who are grounded in print-based models), generally distribute their work on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly schedule. I’m not sure that either model is better, but publishing every other Wednesday works well for us. Publishing online allows us to edit up to the last minute when we need to, either because our personal schedule necessitates it or information we’re discussing in the article is changing, and our regular publication schedule enables us to plan our own articles and line up guest authors several months in advance.

In addition to deadlines, we’ve experimented with our internal communication. At first, we started with a wiki, a private Google Group, and a series of chats on Meebo: the Google Group has been our mainstay, while the chats and wiki, though initially useful, proved less important once we got up and running. What we haven’t needed to do is meet face-to-face or via phone. Scheduling meetings is hard because, for the most part, we don’t live anywhere near each other or even share a time zone: Emily’s in Oregon, Kim’s in Idaho, Ellie’s in Texas, Hilary’s in North Carolina, Derik’s in Pennsylvania, and I’m in New Jersey. We’ve also grown to rely on Google Docs, both as an archive and as a way to collaborate asynchronously.

Virtual participation is a huge and somewhat divisive topic in the field, and I often find myself wanting to argue both sides. It can be helpful to get together in person—In the Library started, in part, because many of us attended the same meeting—but, in our experience, almost all of our work gets done virtually. Granted, we’re a small and non-hierarchical group with a fairly simple focus, we’re making our own rules, and we’re beholden only to our readers, reviewers, and each other. But it isn’t because of technophilia or any other ideology that we’ve arrived at our working style. We’re simply trying to do something people value, devoting as much of ourselves to this work as we can without throwing the rest of our lives out of balance. I don’t know exactly what conclusions others will draw from this, but my hope is that I’ll be able to bring what I’ve learned from In the Library to the other committees on which I serve. It‘s rewarding to work so happily and productively on something as successful as In the Library. I’d like to share that experience with others.

All images except for Derik Badman’s drawing of the In the Library with the Lead Pipe team and the screen captures of our statistics are from The Standard reference work: for the home, school and library, Volume 8, edited by Harold Melvin Stanford and published in 1921 by the Standard Education Society. An original of this work, part of the collection at Columbia University, was digitized on June 9, 2009. I downloaded these images from Google Scholar.

Thanks to Derik Badman, Blake Carver, Ellie Collier, Hilary Davis, and Jodi Schneider for commenting on a working draft of this arti­cle, and to Hilary Davis, Emily Ford, and Kim Leeder for help­ing me with its final version.

photo by Flickr user "Muffet"

Happy holidays from In the Library With the Lead Pipe! We had so much fun putting together our November 26 post, “Getting to Know You,” that we’ve decided to do it again! In the spirit of vacation and merrymaking, we’ve put together another trio of semi-personal questions selected and answered by yours truly.

1. What is your professional new year’s resolution?

Brett: It’s sort of a meta-resolution, but I plan to:

1. Make a list of the projects I’m working on (or that I’m thinking about working on);
2. Figure out which ones seem most likely to succeed in ways that are important to me;
3. Determine which ones seem likely to benefit the most from my participation;
4. Identify what I hope each one can achieve in 2009;
5. Specify what I’m going to do to help them get there.

Emily: Simple and completely unglamorous—to find another job for when my grant funding runs out.

Derik: To think more carefully about what I get myself involved in (no, not an allusion to this blog) and how much I get involved in it (I don’t want to dilute my efforts in quantity). Learn more programming. Learn more about learning and instructional design. Start my posts for this blog earlier.

Hilary: I’d like to diversify my professional reading, take a little more time to investigate online tools such as sproutbuilder.com, leverage our library system’s collection intelligence tools to programmatically manage data about our collections and use that information to do targeted marketing of our collections.

Kim: As we tighten our belts I resolve to more fully appreciate what I have: a great job with lovable colleagues, lots of variety, independence, and the freedom (if not the funding) to travel, explore the latest technologies, and try new approaches to my work. Heck, I’ve got one of the Best Careers for 2009 according to US News & World Report! Life is good.

Ellie: To incorporate more of the research I’ve been doing on instruction into my actual practice.

2. What are your three favorite novels?

Brett: Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace), Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides), and Cockfighter (Charles Willeford). I wouldn’t argue that they’re the best novels I’ve ever read (that is, the three novels I think other people should read) or the three I most wish I’d written or anything like that, but if I had to spend the rest of my life re-reading three novels I’ve read at least once, I think these are the three I’d choose.

Emily: I’m no good with favorite novels (my favorite book is non-fiction–Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks–but that doesn’t follow the rules). I’m not apt to re-read much of anything that is fiction. That being said, the fiction I am liable to strongly recommend are as follows: Doris: An Anthology 1991-2001 by Cindy Crabb (I find her narrative voice deeply moving), The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall (sad, hilarious, and gross all at once), and a novel by an acquaintance recently published that is on my to read list– Couch by Benjamin Parzybok.

Derik: 1) The Recognitions by William Gaddis: 900 pages of art, religion, 50s New York parties, fakers, and fun. 2) This is Not a Novel by David Markson: 100 pages of unattributed quotes, famous deaths, odd facts about artists, and more. 3) Le Chiendent (translated either as “Witch Grass” or “Bark Tree”) by Raymond Queneau: Philosophy as fiction, funny and deep, chaotic yet highly structured. (I didn’t even have to think about this one.)

Hilary: Honestly I don’t have a lot of time for pleasure reading now, but at one time I did. So, a few random titles: Five Hundred Years of Printing by S.H. Steinberg; The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, anything by Richard Brautigan.

Kim: I’m ridiculously all over the place when it comes to reading fiction. So I’m going to go with 1) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy for sheer moving tragic power; 2) Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey as a book that changed the course of my life; and as for 3) yes I’ll admit it, The Lord of the Rings trilogy by JRR Tolkien as the biggest, fattest, funnest book I’ve read every few years since I was a kid and enjoyed it immensely every time.

Ellie: Only 3, so hard. I’ll go with a childhood favorite that stuck with me – The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman, a high school favorite that got me bragging rights on an important final paper – David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and a recent favorite that I recommend to everyone – Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

3. What three computer or Web applications can’t you live without?

Brett: Firefox (w/can’t-live-without-’em-extensions Adblock Plus, CustomizeGoogle, Linkification, No Squint, and Scrollbar Anywhere), Dropbox, and rss2email.

Emily: Tab mix plus (the best Firefox extension to exist), Firefox, and I hate to say it, all of those lovely webapps owned by Google: Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Calendar. These might give me a bit of a guilty conscience, but they are so good with interfaces that I have just acquiesced.

Derik: 1) Tinderbox:  A wonderfully versatile application that I use to store my note and records for work, for planning presentations, and for plotting my comic, as well as the occasional html export. 2) WordPress: It runs this blog, my own blog, and my comic’s site. 3) iTunes: Where would I be without my music, podcasts, and online listening to NPR?

Hilary: Google stuff, spreadsheet programs (stuck with Excel for now), starting to get into Basecamp for managing team projects at work.

Kim: Chalk me up as another Google addict. And I’m pretty sure I’d fall apart with Delicious + Firefox’s Delicious add-on. Clicking that button to pull up the whole list of my bookmarks in a sidebar in my browser… it’s sheer organizational beauty. Last on my list, as a more recent addiction, is the musical brilliance of Pandora.

Ellie: Another Google and Firefox disciple here, the imperative extension being Better Gmail 2. I run all my email through one main account thanks to the included Folders4Gmail and Gmail’s account option to “send mail as.”

We’d like to get to know you, too! What are your answers to the three questions above? Please post them in the comments below.

Thanks to moqub on Flickr for the pic!

1. If you could choose one thing to change about libraries, what would it be?

Emily: I would like to dismantle the notion that libraries and librarians are politically neutral. We, as individuals, professionals, and as a professional collective, have a vested stake in what happens to so many items of legislation, state and federal funding, intellectualism and ideas. Mind you, I am not advocating to eliminate discourse from our communities–representing many view points–however, I think we do libraries and patrons a disservice when we claim to remain “neutral.” None of our decisions–what book vendor to use, which software to use or system to implement, what circulation and other policies to create and enact–are made without our personal influences and experiences. Why are we so scared to claim our bias? Isn’t our bias based in our experience and our mission to serve our patrons and communities? Can’t our bias be that, which benefits all?

Ellie: I would change the speed. Coming from a television background where we were setting up an office (location, furniture, computers, etc.), casting a show and breaking down (returning everything, archiving materials, etc.) in 3 to 6 months and 24 hours was far too long a turn around for most things, the speed of doing anything in libraries seems glacial.

Brett: I want a WorldCat, only with Open Library’s license, for serials. I don’t mean volume-level information. What I want is to be able to find, instantly, all relevant information about every article in every journal, magazine, and newspaper. And I want libraries to collectively own, and freely license, the information that makes that search possible.

Hilary: From the birds-eye-view on down to a particular component, I would like to see libraries function in a world where it’s easy to get at the composition of materials in context with the use of resources, the volume of content and extrapolate out to see the rate of growth of continuing resources alongside the cost over time, the state of licenses and the history of decisions behind subscribing or canceling resources, etc.  And an ideal system would be able to show where and how our local constituents are interacting with our collections and services. It should be a lot easier than it is to get at some kinds of information about your collection to adequately serve collection intelligence needs for assistance in strategic collection decision-making.

Derik: I wish more libraries (historically) collected and cataloged comics. If I want to study most subjects I can get sources from libraries, in print and online. In studying comics, I have to rely on sources I buy myself. The public library I worked at had hundreds of Harlequin romance novels, but no comics (except a few contemporary comic strip collections).

Kim: I would turn libraries into for-profit companies. Not because I want to make lots of money, but because looking at our organizations as businesses instead of a public good might actually help us do a better job of using our resources effectively and better serving our “customers.” At the least it would force us to be more active and competitive among other information businesses (such as, dare I say, Google?)

2. What would you be doing if you weren’t a librarian?

Derik: I’d stay home and make my recreational activities my professional activities. Spending all day drawing comics and writing criticism would be my ideal job. I have few illusions about that happening (unless my wife becomes rich); librarian is a good second place. The times I work comics/art into my librarian life are extra special (like the drawings for this site).

Emily: I would either be working in development (money grubbing) wondering if that’s really what I should be doing, wondering if my work were soul-less and contemplating grad school, or being just another Portlander who can’t stand to leave the West coast hippie utopian mothership city of bicycles, coffee, indie rock, DIY culture, and microbrews. Wait a minute….

Ellie: When I was considering library school the other thing floating through my mind was marine biology (specifically the deep sea), but I can’t get past how many creatures you have to kill to learn about them, so I’d probably stick to the reading type of research, preferably for nature documentaries.

Brett: I’d probably have remained a fair-to-middling fundraiser, and I almost certainly would have been an even more frustrated novelist. If you write a book-length story but don’t show it to anyone in the publishing industry, is it still a novel? And if you write a second and won’t submit that one either, are you a novelist, a loser, or both?

Hilary: I started out as a botanist and ended up as a librarian, so somewhere in between with dirt firmly packed under my nails would be where I’d find myself if I were not a librarian.

Kim: I expect I would have gone back to school for a degree in a field related to animals, plants, or the environment. Maybe I’d be a vet or a wildlife expert tracking herds of wild something-or-others around Yellowstone. That would be good fun.

3. What did you do, before becoming a librarian,
that did the most to prepare you for your current career?

Derik (realizing he missed the “most to prepare” part of this question, on that front it was all the time I spent shelf reading in the public library): I went to art school, a major part of which are “crits”: the class puts up work and critiques each other. In that situation you learn not to take criticism personally and how to think/look critically — helpful in many situations. I only wish others were able to not take criticism personally and apply a more critical eye to various ventures.

Emily: In college I learned how to think critically. So much about librarianship depends on our ability to make intelligent and informed decisions and to use creativity and thinking skills.

Ellie: I would say the research I had to do for the papers in my book history classes is what taught me how to really, fully use the library and my work in television prepped me for all the personalities I’ve run into on the administrative side of things. Oh, and being born to a Systems Architect prepped me for the techy side :)

Brett: In my last year at college, and in my first year after I graduated, it was my job to interrupt people during dinner. You know those nonprofit workers who call you on the phone and ask you to give money to causes you would happily support if only you had more money? That was me. What I learned from that job was that it didn’t matter what I said, what towns I was calling, or how much people had given before. What mattered was my attitude.

This became clear the night after my first date with the woman who sat in front of me in African-American Literature of the 1960′s. Aside from my wife, she had the most beautiful neck I’ve ever seen, and this early-90′s bob that brushed just along her nape. We just had pizza, but I was flying high the next day. Donors couldn’t reach their Visa cards fast enough.

Now, just seven months into my first job managing a library, I draw on that lesson daily. My neighbors, colleagues, board members, and Friends are fantastic and want very much for the Library to be great. It’s up to me, in every interaction, to reinforce their belief that the work they do to improve the Collingswood Library is energy well spent.

Hilary: Convinced that I would never become a librarian, I worked in libraries through undergrad and initially during my first stint in grad school to help fund my development into being a plant systematist (a botanist who studies plant evolution and diversity).  It was doing research for other people and then doing research for myself that taught me how to make the most of information resources.  Plus, there’s a decent amount of overlap in the way species are conceptualized and the way library resources are organized.

Kim: For my first Master’s degree I wrote a thesis on a slightly obscure historical character whose memoirs, papers, and reports were not largely available. As part of my research I spent long hours reading and copying microfilm, took a road trip to review the Bancroft’s collections, and dug, dug, dug, for anything else I could find. I sure did enjoy the search, and learned a lot about libraries in the process.