Scholar | Speaker | Writer | Teacher | Advocate
“Year of the Librarian: Of the People,” Keynote Pennsylvania District Library Center/Library Systems Meeting. Hershey, PA.
Slides: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/Presentations/2010/PennDL.pdf
Audio: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/pod/2008/Penn.mp3
Screencast:
A state senator was driving home late one night when he realized he forgot to pick up a book his wife had needed the next day for an event. Having already passed several closed book stores he spied an open public library.
He was nervous entering the library because he had gained some fame in proposing library budget cuts, and had once called for the outright elimination of public libraries. He was quickly put at ease when the library director greeted him warmly and asked how she could be of assistance. The senator told her the name of the book he needed, and the director looked up the call number, ushered him to the book, and then checked it out and sent him on his to his wife with a smile.
Afterwards a librarian approached the director and asked “do you know who that was?”
“Yes” said the director.
“Then how could you be so nice and help him?” asked the librarian.
“I didn’t help him.” said the director.
“Of course you did, you found the book and helped him check it out.”
“If I really was helping him,” said the director “I would have told him about the lipstick on his collar.”
“What Does the Future Hold for Reference Services” Institute on the Future of Reference and its Impact on Library and Information Science Education, Philadelphia, PA.
Slides: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/Presentations/2010/IPL2.pdf
Audio: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/pod/2008/IPL2.mp3
Screencast:
R. David Lankes, director of the Library & Information Science program at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool), will speak at the U.S. Embassy Rome’s spring event “Libraries in the 21st Century.” The event will be held Wednesday, April 21, 2010.
The day-long conference is being organized by the U.S. Embassy to Italy and the American University of Rome. The conference is an initiative to engage the Italian library community in a dialogue with American peers, with the aim of sharing the best and most innovative practices taking place at American libraries.
Speakers at the event will include professionals from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), NATO, Università degli Studi di Parma, Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” Università degli Studi di Cagliari, and Università del Salento. Topics covered will include libraries as participatory places, new librarianship, social media for libraries, catalog sharing, marketing libraries, and the future of books. Lankes’ presentation will focus on how to build a new librarianship.
In addition to speaking at the U.S. Embassy event in Rome, Lankes will also give a presentation the next day in Naples at the Palazzo Donn’Anna to approximately 70 local librarians.
Lankes is LIS program director at the Syracuse iSchool as well as associate professor and director of the Information Institute of Syracuse (IIS). The IIS houses several high-profile research efforts, including the Educator’s Reference Desk and projects related to the NSF’s National Science Digital Library.
Lankes co-founded the award-winning AskERIC project in 1992 and served as director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology from 1998 to 2003. He also founded the Virtual Reference Desk project responsible for building a national network of education expertise. In addition, he was also one of the architects of the Gateway to Education Materials, a standards-based system for describing and finding educational materials on the Internet.
Lankes has served on advisory boards and study teams in the fields of libraries, telecommunications, education, and transportation, including at the National Academies. He has been appointed as a visiting fellow at the National Library of Canada and the Harvard School of Education. He was also the first fellow of the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy.
So after the fun of Pandora to organize music, I thought you might like this example:
Pretty picture you say? Well, how about a couple of thousand. The wheel represents the colors used in Flikr photos over a one year span:
More pictures of white snow in the winter and green grass in the summer. Check out http://hint.fm/projects/flickr/ for more information.
One last little thought…this is an example of how humans (in this case a designer) organizes a huge collection of information, not just some blind algorithm. I love how information organization is seen here as much about art as informing.
So I know this borders on self-promotion (what me – never), but there is an excellent article on credibility and newspapers on the Columbia Journalism Review site at:
http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/trust_falls.php?page=all
I found it because it quotes from my Journal of Documentation piece, but other than that it is a good. Seriously it does a great job of making real some of the points I raise in that article. I think it has a lot of food for thought (the Columbia piece) in terms of librarians acting as authorities versus authoritarians, giving it a reality I could never muster.
Thanks to Joanne Silverstein for the pointer to this article on the Chronicle:
Report Measures Librarians’ Time Reading Job-Related Materials
By Jill Laster
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Report-Measures-Librarians/21641/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
Does this ring true to you?
OK, so I want you to watch this cool video from Pandora. But before you do, a bit about why.
I talk a lot about how how people organize things is unique. How i would put ten books on the shelf, or songs into my play lists, or CD’s in my car, are not necessarily the same way you would. That’s because the way things are related is not prescribed by the things being organized, but by my way of thinking, which is influenced by how I know things. It’s why organizational schema like DDC and LC just aren’t universal. You have to learn them, and even then, it can be VERY confusing.
Furthermore it is the relationship between items that is as if not more important than the way we describe things themselves. So the fact that Mt. Everest is 29,029 feet tall only takes on real meaning when related to the fact that the plane I am using to fly over it only goes up to 29,000 feet. This is why keywords and tags are so problematic…they lack connective tissue.
These ideas are behind things like Scapes and Reference Extract and play a big role in the whole New Librarianship thing. It is also why I say we should scrap catalogs and start fresh not with inventory systems, but with knowledge discovery and building systems.
Anyway, the video. I’m always looking for good examples of this sort of organziationa nd discovery by relation. I think Pandora has done a brilliant job:
By the way, this is also an excellent example of why cataloging is not the ony way to organize information. These are the kind of tools and connections that librarians should be making…or at the very least aware of. Imagine how your music collection might look using these kind of tools. Take all your music, plug it into Pandora and see what kind of recommendations it pops out for your next acquisition.
“Participation and Leadership” ILEAD U Keynote, Springfield, IL.
Slides: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/Presentations/2010/ILEADU.pdf
Audio: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/pod/2010/ILEADUScreen.mp3
Screencast:
Just received a package with my author’s copies of Reference Renaissance: Current and Future Trends. The book is built from the papers and presentations at the Reference Renaissance Conference in Denver. It is a really great volume of what is happening in reference and I am thrilled to see the tradition of good research and good practice continuing from the VRD conferences of ‘ole.