Where It All Went Wrong

Nathan has a point. A damn good point.

While reading his speech, Where It All Went Wrong I found myself nodding my head in agreement, and may or may-not have thrown out "You GO Glen Coco!" a time or two...Mean Girls, anyone?

I have come across so many bad examples of libraries trying to move into the future with a bunch of digitization projects and online resources/services --- just to say they are hip and cool and "with it". It makes me sad. Pumping out all of these digital things does not make you good at digital.  In Nathan's words, it makes you bad a digital. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Now is the time for libraries to step into the forefront of the digital information revolution and make themselves relevant in the digital world. Work together with other institutions - share knowledge, resources and ideas. Sharing is caring people.

Think ahead to future generations and how they may go about searching for digital information. What are they looking for?  How/where are they finding it? How are they using it?

And please, no more shitty digitization project websites. It hurts my eyes to look at them.

Dummy Proof Data

One of my first jobs out of college was working as an executive assistant in an oil and gas investing firm. I got the job through a friend of a friend's mom who played tennis with one of the managing partner's wife.  Along with the normal assistant duties of scheduling meetings, booking travel arrangments and making sure the break room was never out of coffee, I was charged with the task of managing the filing system that included over 90 different well sites across the US spanning three, soon to be four, different equity funds. I was terrified.

For anyone who knows anything about oil and gas well sites, you know that each well comes with a gargantuan amount of data. Seismic readings, well files, fracking data, blah, blah, blah. Not to mention contracts, maps, dig reports, pay-out information for well site personnel - you get the picture. The filing system in place, if you could even call it that, was laughable. I blame two over-caffeinated managing partners who were better at managing the investors' money and picking the next best investing opportunity than keeping their paperwork organized.

Spending a good part of a year with the contents of the filing cabinets strewn about the floor, chairs, and any open table space I could find, I made stacks and stacks of papers, labeled over 300 file folders, divided up the contents of four floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets into a folder by folder masterpiece.

I made it dummy proof.

I created a system so dummy proof that one of the managing partner's 10 year old daughter could find the well report for "X" well at "Y" site from "Z" fund.  I made it so dummy proof that someone who knows nothing about the subject of oil and gas investing could find the exact contract for "XYZ" well they were looking for.

I like to consider metadata the key to making finding digital information dummy proof. As mundane (or exciting - depends on who you ask) as it is to break things down to the tiniest level of organization through physical file folders or digital metadata, it is essential for information management and retrieval.

And I dig it.

WELCOME!

Logging into Blogger this morning to create my course blog for LS 566, I was haunted by the ghosts of past blogs I have created, but then never finished. Some just have clever titles, some have one or two posts and one i had going for a good while but then it lost steam... All good intentions, right?

Well, here's to a new blog! One that I might actually be able to keep up over the weeks/months/years as I start out on my path to a career in libraries.