Throughout the course, you should keep a journal. This is your journal, so I want you to write/focus on things as you see fit: reflections on what you are reading, on being a graduate student, on the profession, discussions with graduate colleagues/faculty. You are welcome to write as much as you like–in whatever format you like (i.e. pen to paper or word document)–but entries should be approximately half a page a week (8-10 sentences) at a minimum. You will be submitting the journal to me in two phases: once at the midway point of the semester and again at the end of the semester.

Because most accounts of information retrieval are heavily influenced by information theory approaches like those of Claude Shannon and use technology models to understand information retrieval, the way actual human beings retrieve information has suffered from the same deficiency in the literature that accounts of economic activity are notorious for promulgating – namely the exemplification of “rational” decision makers when analyzing various decision activities.

Emotion|Affect was bracketed [ ] out of the model to simplify and to reflect the wishful bias of reason as the post-war antidote to the irrationalities that had gripped much of the traditional science/technology based societies including Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union. But reality has a way of always being there even when it’s ignored and researchers in economics like Tversky and Kahneman, extending rationalizing strategies like Herbert Simon’s satisficing, brought forth a critique of homo economicus as a purely rational construct and injected the evolutionarily derived tools of heuristics to explain why people didn’t follow the script of the rational economic actor – flubbing their lines so often that any critical reviews would have to mark the “talent” for failing to perform at the minimum standard.

This same impulse to add nuance to the models of information behaviors became pronounced in the works of TD Wilson and Carol Kulhthau to expand the scope of the existing skeleton of the process with more human flesh. But do they add enough to the bones? Given the centrality of affect in the psychological literature of the 21st century, it still seems as if the uncanny valley has yet to be surmounted – with real humans eliciting behaviors far more complex and outside the bounds of these intellectual constructs. Adding affect to rational models of information seeking feels a bit like adding a garnish instead of changing the recipe completely and baking the affective ingredients in from the start.

But it’s a start and acknowledges and alternative to the overly rational models which liken people more to machines than living, evolved animals with a long evolutionary history of design history that is earth-centered and acknowledges the evolved design and context as the ground for developing frameworks of inquiry and explanation. By examining a range of the literature on the role of affect in the information behavior of information seekers, it provides a potential correction to bad or thoughtless practice of interface design and methodologies for teaching search skills that fail to take into their accounts other explanations for why a technology or search might not be successful in practice even though it may seem to be perfectly modeled by a machine-like simplification of the activity. This can provide a basis for re-examining previous results and conclusions drawn from them with a different level of description constructs to re-categorize actions in a richer framework. The lost cause can be found to answer many anomalous data sets by introducing them into the model. If color, design, or other contextual environmental elements are not examined for affective contributions how certain are some provisional accepted truths about particular search behaviors. Obviously, as they complexify the models, it becomes much more challenging to speak in a certain narration that such and such was demonstrated and shows x, y, or z. Moving into system theory notions of causality should give researchers pause when designing studies and teaching out conclusions from them. Thin slice models will need to be integrated into “thick” models that move toward greater complexity of interaction rather than fewer.

That said, there is value to building up brick by brick evidence around imperfectly real models to confirm intuitions and to tease out the joins between events. It also highlights the multi-disciplinary mixes to be achieved either through collaboration or broader scopes of professional academic development – riding multiple horses at once – hopefully yoked to a platform and not running as a herd to be leaped onto when one needs to “switch” horses. Examining the literature in a diachronic fashion should help point up “fashion” in the literature itself – slicing open what is only a synchronic moment rather than a deeper fundamental pattern. How much of research is itself only a momentary stop of satisficing because the work was too hard, the funding too limited, or the framework too unclear? But this is the nature of inquiry’s unfolding; to confuse the clothing for the body it conceals.

One of the ideas that occurred to me while I was engaged in my library shadow was how expensive printing material in the library can be. The library charges ten cents per page with the limitation of only single sided printing. While ten cents for a few pages isn’t perhaps too great a financial burden, I really started thinking about having to print tax forms, research articles, or other long documents. Given the better reading affordances offered by print on paper, I wondered what could be done to lower the cost of printing for persons who prefer it, don’t have their own computer, or can only access documents via smart phone or tablet. Having become more sensitive to the role the library plays for less affluent demographics, are libraries and governments putting an extra burden on these constituencies. Tax forms are no longer printed and sent out, more material is only available digitally and those wanted or needing print copies have to pay for that choice. Given the utility of paper for marking up and highlighting, we are expecting a lot of students to use information technologies that don't yet compare to the humble printed page. Ten cents a page maybe a way to fund the library and pay for paper, toner, and maintenance but are we limiting the dissemination of knowledge by moving more items to digital only distribution and forgetting the patrons who need print? Are they more cost effective printing technologies that could be deployed? Risograph? Would this spur the adoption of onsite book printers as opposed to the physical transportation and handling costs of ILL or even make available more out-of-print books to increase library circulation holdings? Large Print? Technologists have been selling us the future for long enough without paying the price for half-baked products, failures to understand human biology and other “take my word” bargains that benefit narrow segments by impoverishing the experience for others. But the technologist gets paid regardless. American libraries should form a library technology consortium that puts technologist on notice to develop products for a more diverse population of users. Just like other government agencies, the Library can bid out technology that is library-centric and find vendors who will provide products that make more sense and fit better the needs of all libraries.

When’s the Future? What does the future of the library field look like from the perspective of a student of 2017? And how should one make that prediction – what factors seem most salient?

To me, the artificial intelligence research that is moving rapidly from science fiction speculation to everyday technology is the most significant development for librarians. We must go beyond the catch-all “technology” and mine the details for the future that seems most likely to unfold and fold around the profession and institution. What can the machine do now? It can record a print source, reconstitute it as image and turn it into machine searchable-manipulatable corpora – and perform various transformation and topological transformations of the “text space” with increasing rapidity, accuracy, and scope beyond human capability. Indexing, grammatical and lexical analysis, semantic mining, automatic linking, creation of a textual ontology, reproduction of the text into different languages and inscription practices, reproduction of the text into audio form, visual transformation of typographical elements by color, typeface, size, emphasis, summarization, epitomizing, and many other transformations that have been developed through human practices and turned into algorithms that can be operationalized by a machine. Facial recognition, plot graphs, event graphs, a point of view, timelines, poetry, data visualization, spatial graphics, storyboards, and more by tuning the various existing scanned corpora. This is creating a complex object that can be joined systematically to other texts in larger computable networks that can recognize patterns of citation, plagiarism, the nearness of expressions, other qualities of family resemblances or developmental features that were impossible affordances for human cultural institutions on their own. The machines allow more affordances of reality to be exploited in turn creating new affordances for human beings assuming they aren’t superseded by other algorithms that have already exploited the affordances. The corpora as corpora take on new affordances like a snowball down a mountainside – adding to its mass and energy as it follows the path of least action. While this unfolding of the corpora will be hindered by the constraints of funding, copyright, and technological limitations, the pace seems likely to accelerate barring unforeseen constraints arising from politics, climate or black swans.

So what of the library and its institutional agent, the librarian, Siri, Viv, Cortana, Alexa, and Watson. Will we need to rewrite our fictional detective making it clear that Watson is the one who solves the crimes with a superior corpora of affordance knowledge as the ontology of the material world is converted into a machine-readable corpora for making inferences with senses that can uncover new affordances of material reality and process it faster or deeper than human brains. Spatial, temporal affordances have already been algorithmized and more will be added with a material corpora evolving along similar lines as the textual and image corpora. Imagine a legislative and affective corpus being readable so that they respond in interoperable and quotable ways of expression when messaging with a human intelligence. Only a surly intellect would continue to believe they aren’t in the presence of a thinking being.

And whither the librarian? Won’t they be replaced by the assistant who can answer faster and deep without embarrassment or need for sleep? Or will privacy concerns still-born these helpers? Will we be the cloth monkey that nourishes the flesh while the wire mesh monkey meets the information needs of a patron? A library is only as good as its corpora and its navigation of it. What happens when the corpora of the artificial intelligence exceed and offers more use than the human librarian? Entertainment, problem-solving and neutrality in a pocket-sized access point. And what questions will we have in the future?

What should the process of research article writing look like in the near future? Librarians as meta critics of the research process Imagineering something better. What would an effective research frontend look like and what would it need to make it possible? Multiple entry points – replace relevance with resemblance – family resemblance – search – flamenco-style interface – add an emotive layer – ampliated – create a standard for vendors to offer competing products on top of to innovate from – create “pocket” search worlds – browse at leisure – auto-cite, text extraction for analysis, collect a document pool – drop in the blender for text analysis – conversion to audio file, citation graph, resemblance analysis, visualization tools, links to levels of description, auto abstract, translate, multi-lit, resemblance graph, definition extraction, table and graphic extraction, insert into research-o-pedia, knowledge base corpus, auto index, create by temporal and spatial map, auto-generate a link map to sources, where free, where pay (existential map), reference list builder, vocabulary analysis, readability metrics. Knowledge dissection citation documents for cut and paste – feed-back documents.

This reflection began as my response to one of my classmate’s posts and their comment got me thinking about the changing nature of the resources that the library collects, subscribes to, and provides access to. The library faces new content constraints that were previously controlled by other parts of the information infrastructure. Television content was regulated by the FCC – with the rise of cable and internet tv, those constraints on content have broadened and become more challenging to the tastes and morals of the government approved consensus of decency. Radio content, popular music, magazines, etc have all been expanding the consensus of decency and meeting with either apathy, toleration, or celebration. The pervasive distribution channel called the Internet has dramatically accelerated the expansion of the consensus of decency. Redistribution of intellectual content, content mash-ups, pornography, government classified information, unfiltered opinion, extremely biased information, collection and dissemination of private and semi-private information, as well as banal content from billions of individuals every day.

I am emphasizing the bleaker side of this situation but that only to make the rhetorical point that the library and the library’s curators are having to rethink policies that a generation ago could be defended with the conviction of a zealot. The tension between being the information provider of last resort – offering relatively free, unfettered access to information, maintaining a respect for privacy, and the new rawness of content channels are the causes of a new balance of values, mission, and librarian identity. If the library doesn’t provide enough of the raw content it loses patrons who are comfortable with the more raw content. But if it gets too raw then it risks losing funding, community support and patrons who will begin to judge the institution by the dissemination of this raw content. As the types of information that libraries handle changes, what was generally accepted by the society has widened throughout the last few centuries and has accelerated even more as the financial and institutional barriers to “publishing” have weakened. Library content is no longer curated through multiple social and publishing gatekeepers before it reaches the library. The librarian is placed in the unenviable role of being a primary gatekeeper over collections of information, entertainment, and expression that have increased in volume, content range, and range of ideological perspective.

The tension between providing free, unfettered access to information, maintaining patron privacy, and raw content channels are going to demand a new balance between these competing claims and the potential harms that can and do arise from large quantities of unfiltered and non-peer reviewed materials becoming available. Should a society expect the librarian to take on this role as super-gatekeeper without developing new tools to assist them?

This week I finished up my library shadow and got to see the library from the inside-out which was something I’ve wanted to do for some time. One of the aspects of the library curriculum that is vital but difficult to lecture about is the way libraries function as a system. Before class started, back in November of 2016 when I completed my first read through of the Rubin text, I was curious about a number of things. I quote a few my thoughts here: Things would seem to be easier if a process map of the library was available for reference. What are the functional properties of a library? “Thermodynamically” how does it maintain and grow itself in various contexts? We have been learning about the library in a number of discrete contexts each week and exploring various slices of the library world each week, but I still find myself wanting an overview of how the library functions as a system and as part of larger systems. Understanding the system constraints is the quickest and deepest way to get a deep understanding of the whys and how’s of the library. Since every system must on the most abstract level get energy, perform work with it, and replenish its energy, knowing a library at this level of abstraction can I think to be a better guide to strategic interventions for stakeholders. This kind of holistic understanding forms the basis of my approach to knowing and I think it helps guide intelligent decision making. Knowing which parts of a system are bottlenecks, which parts give the most leverage for change, and which parts vestigial and can be trimmed away should be common knowledge for institutional decision makers. This “system thinking” approach is one of the reasons I find it difficult to absorb and approach new knowledge without being compulsively driven to reach a more abstract understanding of the relationships that are occluded in most presentations.

Thinking about the teaching identity of librarianship was a good introduction to the actual activities instructional libraries engage in as well as excellent food for thought about what I would need to learn and practice to be an effective teacher. I spent many hours thinking about teaching in the abstract as I struggled to make sense of it in terms of my own philosophical understanding of the roles teaching plays in problem-solving based on notions of constraints as the most fundamental conceptual unit of problem analysis. This idea is more and more the organizing concept in my thinking when I approach new facts and new situations. In this case, I began with the idea that teaching needs to be analyzed first by the constraints that are present throughout the process and practice. I can parrot the information I read in other sources, but I tend to filter it through the lens of a philosophical approach to ontology and epistemology that has changed significantly for me in the last 2 years and I find myself doing double work when I read and think. Absorbing the new material in its own context as well as finding it’s fit in my personal understanding of the world. While this may sound like it would lead to a great deal of rigidity in my thinking, I find it actually liberates me from the material as presented. Reading through the teaching techniques presented in the articles clearly shows there is a huge variety of practice to draw upon but there does not seem to be an empirical method for determining which method would have the best chance of success in various contexts and for the various types of learning styles. I am lead to the inevitable conclusion that there is going to be a move to change the classroom into an automated data collection space with methods to capture vast quantities of empirical data in real time as students are learning in a real classroom. How this will be enacted is probably based on teaching devices linked to a central data collection and analysis system that would be similar to the types of big data extraction and data mining that is common with Facebook, Google, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, and other large data enterprises. Cameras, audio recording, facial recognition linked with affective-learning algorithms, and digital classroom assistants may be part of that mix. I can imagine a day when each classroom in a school is being “observed” in this manner and new recommendations for best practice and targeted intervention coming from the results of these aggregated data sets. This will lead to significant legal challenges and privacy concerns among teachers and students.

While researching my report topic for 810, I selected a topic that guided me to more closely examine the role and history of the rural library. I found myself intrigued by the hidden role this institution can/does play in the lives of 37 million Americans. Living in a primarily urban/suburban context, I really hadn’t thought about what a library would be like in rural American. If I had pictured it in my imagination before beginning the MLS program, I would have assumed it was just a smaller version of what my local libraries were like and I would have been wrong in so many ways. I’ve come to discover how different they are. Small collections, tiny buildings in many cases, old technology, limited internet connections, reduced hours, and a single, full-time librarian service a community of just a few thousand-people spread over a huge swath of land. So different from my experience. And yet I find myself strangely drawn to a romantic conception of the lone librarian serving the needs of a small community and solving problems at a scale different magnitude. Given the ubiquity of the internet, it becomes conceivable to be able to enjoy a variety of cultural and intellectual sources, while avoiding the pressures and costs of urban/suburban librarianship. Clearly, the dangers of crime, poverty, despair, prejudice and small budgets must be put into the balance. But the idea of being employed in a rural setting may be striking an unexpected but responsive chord. Thanks to my research I have a lot of information sources to use to get further information and to research which of the 4,100+ rural libraries are located and what value I might be able to bring to the right community.

Given that the information economy is largely built from practices originated by librarians, why hasn’t the ALA or other body calculated the impact of technologies and methods pioneered by libraries and librarians in the same way that NASA regularly trots out the economic value of space program innovations? I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that it is fundamental to American Domination of Information Science and the huge lead American companies and institutions practically enjoy over other competitors. Without Dewey and LOC classification where would Google be? Bibliometrics? Faceted classification? Marc records? Control analysis? Be proud of the contribution of your ancestors created. It’s a huge value to the US and the world. Does it dwarf NASA? Book scanning? Database development? Classification systems? All from the hard work of library science. Computer science owes a huge debt to these pioneers.

After reading Chapter 8 in Rubin, I came away with a sense of the enormity of scale of information related topics and their rapidly evolving convergence into a huge, interconnected tangle of threads and knots that no individual person would ever be able to simplify into a comprehensive collection of knowledge and relationships. Things blend to the point on near-incomprehensibility. Trying to categorize the various topics into a Wikipedia-style collection of knowledge was extremely difficult. After trying to absorb the huge amount of conceptual information in this week’s reading in Rubin, I tried to find a common thread or theme that ran through the various topics of privacy, intellectual property, security, politics, management, funding, etc. but this almost impossible to do because they are so interweaved and co-evolved that pulling on anything thread invariably pulls on the “threads” of a multitude of concerns. Navigating this much complexity may be beyond the scope of human administrators to adequately understand and effectively manage. This can account for frequent conflicts of values and interests that will only become more common as technology continues to disrupt more domains of knowledge and human behavior. As the velocity of information production and distribution increases, along with an increasing qualitative variety of information types continues, it may become necessary to rely on robust information technology to assist in the management of complex systems. This seems to the normal evolution of any complex system. It starts as a fairly simple system and as more decisions and elements are added over time managing the system becomes more difficult and then new methods to manage the chaos are found.

Can learning to read graphic novels really be more difficult than reading “text” book”? for the computer, so far, yes. If you can read a comic book, then you can read a picture of human activity – a frame at a time. Fumetto. Facial recognition affective recognition, natural language processing, and reprocessing, memory frames, summarization of an index picture, affordance analysis of the comic book and movie as comic strip text. Two streams – continuous and discrete to filter invariants and apply change analysis. Match them with interviews, blogs and numerical analysis of a variety of streams at once. Real-time + filtered transformation to produce quotation effects + frame [citation][caricature][translation]

Visiting the Truman Library was a good experience and a chance to consider the library in a slightly different context as a place of “broadcast” knowledge – an active presentation of knowledge as opposed to a neutral place of knowledge. The library display, the auditorium, and interactive exhibits suggest the library can use different methods to present knowledge to potential patrons. Having spent a good deal of my professional career in marketing communications, I think there are many things that the library world could adapt from business communication strategies to both promote the library as an institution and the resources that it contains. A few well-positioned video screens to promote an ambient awareness of resources, library messaging, and general knowledge would be beneficial to must libraries. A few of the libraries I patronize have these screens and I’ve been more aware of programs and special services they offer because of them.

Because the library and librarians seem to have a prejudice against anything that smacks of commercial practice, they are denying patrons many of the benefits of the library by not doing a better job of making them aware of the services of the library. Why isn’t there a menu of services that your library offers? How many patrons are going to ask about services they don’t realize exists? I have found many times that the library offers access to an online-resource that would have been of interest to me but didn’t promote awareness of it in an effective manner. Every library should have a list of the things it does prominently displayed. How many patrons know about Interlibrary loan? Books-by-mail? Online research databases?

The library should also promote itself and its mission through artwork and infographics throughout the library space. Posters, video displays, or even messages placed inside books and other resources. Library websites and mobile apps should promote resource discovery as well as provide the OPAC and other functional services. There is a problem of source neutrality depending on the nature of the topic presented in this manner. But this could be an effective way to promote the institutional values of the library or particular library skills by using the library space in an ambient informative manner. Glanceable knowledge rules!

This week’s reading in Rubin gets into one of the areas I am most interested in learning about. Having a background in computer programming and web design, I felt very comfortable in this aspect of library science. I enjoy cataloging and indexing materials. I’ve had a lifelong interest in managing collections whether it was comic books or books. When I was 12, I bought my first Overstreet Comic book price guide which was like stepping into a new universe of knowledge. Here were thousands of comic books I’d never heard of before – with information on publishers, artists, characters, chronologies, and cover images. Like the Encyclopedia Britannica, here was a representation of new knowledge and stories that sparked my curiosity. From that beginning, I learned about a series of indexes that had been compiled by a college grad student in the 1970s that tackled popular comic book series issue by issue, featuring a cover image, creator credits, story summaries, and unique elements of the issue like 1st appearance of a character or major events like an origin or a death. I was soon creating my own lists using an electric typewriter and eventually a computer database on an Apple II+ - tracking character and story development for books I would probably never be able to afford to read given the cost of old comics

Looking back, I was learning about collection management, indexing, abstracting, and cataloging. I was unknowingly developing a taste for this kind of work and I didn’t find it surprising that I enjoyed this chapter in Rubin a lot. Having built spreadsheets and databases to organize my collection over the years, I gravitated towards topics that help bring knowledge together. Besides giving me a broad depth of knowledge in comics and later graphic novels, I developed an interest in information theory, creativity, evolution and ecological psychology. Linking all these experiences is an appreciation for the developmental consequences inherent in a “shared universe” which can be thought of analogously to a domain of knowledge. It also points out to me how unevenly knowledge is presented. Without a champion, domain progress is stifled or becomes repetitious – past scholarship is forgotten and then rediscovered - duplicating existing effort. Unlike comic books, scholarship tends to favor the new over the old, calling the “Golden Age” the present moment. The Ancients were smart to be wary of novelty.

It’s now been about a month since class officially began and I am taking stock of my feelings and skills. My writing seems to be less effort than I remember being the case for many years. Perhaps that last twelve years of listening to audiobooks has been paying unrecognized dividends. I also find I can use my practice of visualizing topics in graphic form a helpful way to break down materials that are new and challenging. I took that approach with APA styles and felt more comfortable with it. Although I still feel the authors of the APA style guide should be replaced with competent information designers with a better approach to presentation, I could get better at navigating its clumsy design with practice.

I am also very pleased with my decision to learn and use a personal wiki to take notes, record thoughts and use as a collection point for things that interest me in the readings or in class. I know I can’t rely on my memory as reliably as I used to, so having a single source point for class and library science info has been great. It’s also taught me much about wiki design and should prove helpful if I ever work on a LibGuide or similar project. I do most of my initial composition for class materials using pencil and paper. Handwriting my thoughts and then typing them into Word documents, copying the word documents into my wiki as well. Although it takes a bit longer than typing straight into Word, I am so far more pleased with handwriting as my first draft and Word as my refining point. I seem to get my thoughts out of my head better with this practice. As a cartoonist, I think better with this tool in my hand so I’m going to stick with it.

Because I made a strenuous “dig” into APA citation practice to try to simplify its presentation and teaching, I felt good about being able to format my Reference List properly. I was less confident about summarizing the journal articles. After finally settling on a topic after researching a few interesting areas, I began reading. I tried keeping in mind the ideas and concepts we’re learning in 810 as I read. I must admit it was slow going. I find myself unfamiliar with discovery system in general and still absorbing many of the ways the library science researchers describe and approach their topic. Many of the concepts are familiar to me from my experience developing websites and marketing materials and I had my own experience using the Mid-Continent Public Library system. But still, I found myself not always able to visualize the situation described in the research from lack of experience of concrete practice. I went through several passes to summarize the material and that’s helped me develop a method to approach summarization in future assignments.

On a side note, by a bit of fortuitous timing, one of my previous co-workers showed up at the coffee house I frequent. He works as a mobile app developer for O’Reilly Publishing and is working currently on the mobile app for their Safari online e-book collection. Our discussion was informed by my practice and experience with using a discovery system as well as my frustrations with how poor the citation data is from automatic generation sources. Currently, you can’t search the entire collection of resources for special text or topics. I stressed my frustration at the Google algorithm approach that provides a huge “haystack” but few “needles”. I also suggested he consider adding a citation support when cutting/pasting text from a collection resource. My one-month exposure to library practice and science has broadened my perspective and gave me more insight into thinking about information in electronic form.

This week I spent a good deal of my time finishing up the P.A.S.S. course material. It has been so long since I did any kind of presentation material that I spent a fair amount of my time rebuilding my familiarity with PowerPoint in a Windows environment. It’s much improved from prior versions I worked with. I was initially going to make my presentation a simplified approach to APA reference list citation because of my struggling to apply its esoteric formatting while participating in Dr. Smith’s quiz for 810. To that end, I built a visual algorithm to help me break down the formal elements of the citation. This became my guide for building a cartoon based presentation featuring Prof. Reddi Referntz and a representative student, Kit. I created two pencil drafts but felt creating the digital versions of the cartoons and doing the formatting for PowerPoint would take more time than I wanted to invest.

Instead, I decided to focus on Melvil Dewey. I had read two biographies of his life after reading about him in the chapter in Rubin covering library history. Having both a history and philosophy undergraduate background, I have an appreciation for historical development as one of the best ways to understand a subject. And Dewey was clearly at the center of so much of what goes in library school that I must confess myself surprised that not much attention seemed to be paid to him. Perhaps this was an outgrowth of his clearly flawed values regarding race, financial management, and prescriptive librarianship. He is not always a figure to find a sympathetic hearing. But his vision, drive, and genius clearly stamped itself all over the field. His creations are foundational. American Library Journal, the ALA, professional library schools, the Library Bureau and his ubiquitous classification system. I’m glad I built my presentation around Dewey because I feel I have the beginnings of a historic sense of the development of the library profession and practice that I would have been lacking to my detriment.

This was an interesting week and very helpful in shaping my mood. I wasn’t sure what I would get out of the assignment for looking up library jobs, but it had a positive impact on my choice of librarian as the next direction in my professional life. I was heartened to see the number and variety of positions available. I discovered a new category to my experience – prison librarian. Even though I have seen many depictions of prisoners using libraries in movies, I never made the connection to the need for a librarian to manage and supervise the collection. As I researched the job listings, I ended up branching into reading a prison librarian’s blog and gained a lot of quick insight into the issues and challenges of such a position. Also, reading my classmates posting and comments, was very rewarding – seeing the profession from their eyes and their aspirations as well as being exposed to many other positions and observations that I would have missed. Great assignment for confirming a choice or strengthening weak convictions.

I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what part of the library world I would most want to be in. I didn’t come to any definite conclusions because there is such a variety of institutional settings and I have a broad range of interests. I guess I really ended up coming back to my intimations of the specific institution that most set me on this path…my local Mid-Continent branch. The Woodneath branch is one of the newest libraries in the system and features private study rooms, a story center, coffee shop, comfortable seating, special seating sections for children and teens, has a very open floor plan, and excellent internet connectivity via google fiber – and continuing education classes with two large classroom/lecture rooms with projectors and current technologies. In my mind’s eye, I could picture myself acting as a librarian in a setting like this for many years to come. Assisting patrons, building mini-classes on topics that I enjoy - without the obligation of a long teaching engagement, and a chance to exercise my skills in graphic design and process improvement to increase the fun and function of the library. Even though I am quickly nearing 50, I feel like the library in some capacity can offer me satisfying work and enough variety to be able to continue to grow in different capacities.

Reading about the history of the library was good for putting the development of the institution and practice into perspective. Reading about Dewey got me curious about him and I ended up reading the wiki entry and ordering two biographies from Amazon. I also listened to a book covering Paul Otlet – Cataloging the World by Alex Wright. Reading about the efforts of Otlet and others to catalog the world’s printed knowledge in an analog version of the Internet. This helped me connect the dots – the internet was the fulfillment of library dreams – usurped by technologists and business people. And really Otlet and the other pioneers had in many ways penetrated deeper into the bedrock. How much more satisfying would the net be if some of the ideas from the library world been central in its conception. In many ways, we are still so far from the vision of Otlet and Dewey. There is more data but it’s still hard to find. The judgment of quality was lost over new social concerns.

I felt a betrayal by a profession that lost its zeal. Why hadn’t librarians created Google or Alta Vista? Why wasn’t Wikipedia a library project? Why had they neglected the vision of their pioneers? Was it because of political reality, poor leadership, inadequate resources? Or was there no deep talent to draw upon to inspire and goad? I feel a tinge of embarrassment that Google took the torch and ran further and faster to the point where libraries are now in the role of imitators. Page rank is citation analysis on steroids - concepts derived from library analytics. What do most librarians do to further the representations of knowledge? Dewey and his students seemed a more zealous cohort than what seems to pass for leadership today. Too much social work masquerading as knowledge work. Otlet wouldn’t have tolerated such squishy intellects. There was a clarity of mission in that crazy zealot.

But maybe a new Prometheus can steal the fire back for library science. What big project can librarians embrace?

This is my first journal entry. The first week returning to an academic setting has been strange. There are familiar echoes – syllabus, assignments, deadlines, classmates. But there is much new. Canvas, distance learning, library science, and lots of readings. Education based not around the place but around the computer. That first exposure to professors and classmates on an icy day – in the study room of the library watching everyone on Zoom. What the hell was I getting into? A lot of trepidation and chaos. Learning how to learn again. Not being able to rely on the practices I used in the past and what had worked for me in my professional career. Part of me was rebelling against this – part embracing it. Considering I had already begun reading my textbooks back in October and November, I was intellectually prepared for the domain knowledge I would be learning. I’d make the investment of time to build my own wiki to organize and collect my learning. I was rethinking the practices that would best help me study and retain information. I was modifying the techniques I had used in a corporate setting and in my own practices of reading – using gray highlighters, lots of sticky notes, and recording my notes on loose-leaf typing paper with lots of drawings and sketches to help me visualize what I was reading. It would be alright.