The Changing Role of Special Collections...SIGN ME UP

I really enjoyed reading Waters' The Changing Role of Special Collections in Scholarly Communications for a couple of reasons:

1. My dream job would be in working in special collections.
2. My dream job would include reference, outreach and instruction in special collections.
3. My dream job would consist of making special collections relevant (AND ACCESSIBLE) for scholarly enrichment across all levels of education: K-12, higher ed and continuing/adult learning.
4. My dream job would allow creativity and partnership across campus, between institutions and with the community at large to create meaningful and relevant resources, or as Waters puts it, "finding efficient and productive ways to engage scholars and students in the development of special collections as scholarly resources."

So, who wants to hire me.......UA? Kidding. (No, not really.)

This article also reminded me that I was fortunate enough to be a part of just such a collection connecting project while working as a student exhibit coordinator at the Hoole Special Collections Library at The University of Alabama.

My supervisor was the project manager for Publishers’ Bindings Online, 1851-1930: The Art of Books, a 3-year IMLS-funded collaborative digital project in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. PBO combines about 5,000 decorative book bindings into one digital repository where students, scholars, teachers and more can explore a relatively "unexplored" field of study. Albeit, I was just the student assistant tasked with cataloging, scanning and data entry but, man was it fun knowing I was contributing to something that could open the doors to a a whole new appreciation of rare books. The fact that I was also a graphic design student made it even better. I was totally in my element.

Now 10 years later, I am back at Hoole, volunteering and assisting with outside reference. I have the opportunity to dig through the stacks/boxes (physically and digitally) and make sense of the "unwelcome white elephant". There are endless possibilities on how to incorporate scholarly and student engagement and communication into special collections and I agree with Damen:

"This means that special collections are especially rich in opportunity for those who want to make them more valuable in the same ways that common collections are growing in value."

I really want that opportunity.  

Full Library Discovery and the Loss of Individuality?

Having spent the afternoon with Libwebrarian and Lorcan Dempsey and a whole host of my classmates, I am entering my two cents into the discussion on "full library discovery" (FLD for the purpose of this post).

I started out with blog title "Is Full Library Discovery the LibGuide?" after reading Dempsey's introductory blog post on the topic, with a whole host of reasons of why I think FLD is a wonderful addition to the classic catalog/database collection search. Similar to LibGuides, FLD takes a specific subject and packages relevant resources into a nice little guide to assist you in your research. It cuts out the middle man so to speak. FLD takes your typical academic resources (journal articles, books) and groups them with unexpected, sometimes overlooked resources (open access materials, learning materials, subject specialist and yes, even LibGuides) opening up a whole new world of resource possibilities. Like LibGuides, the FLD system gives you "ALL THE THINGS" relevant to your subject search. 

In this aspect, I think FLD is a discovery service that academic libraries need to pay particular attention to. For unexperienced researchers and library users, this service enables them "get their feet wet" in resource discovery. As a freshman with a research paper assignment, nothing is more frustrating than logging into your libraries website and having no idea where to start. An academic library's catalog is a huge, intimidating beast and it is our job as librarians to make it not so scary. While I think that nothing can replace a reference interview, be it in person or virtual, I do think that a FLD system can be incorporated to ease the learning curve. However, like Libwebrarian, I am posing the question: How far should we go when it comes to a personalized search?

At some stage to use those resources a student will be logging in to that system and that opens up an important question for me.  Once you know who the user is, ‘how far should you go to provide a personalised search experience?’.  You know who they are, so you could provide recommendations based on what other students studying their course have looked at (or borrowed), you might even stray into ‘learning analytics’ territory and know what the resources were that the highest achieving students looked at.

You might know what resources are on the reading list for the course that student is studying – so do you search those resources first and offer those up as they might be most relevant?  You might even know what stage a student has got to in their studies and know what assignment they have to do, and what resources they need to be looking at.  Do you ‘push’ those to a student?

Something to think about: If you crank out personalized search experiences based on what other students search or what the highest achieving students are looking at, what happens individual learning experience? Are you left with a bunch of students presenting the same ideas from the same resources? Where is the individuality? How can new ideas be presented or argued if FLD is relying on resources that other students used? Are you "pushing" your students into conformity?

If students see "here are the top three search results based on what you classmates are looking at" then you end up with 15+ papers all referencing the same three articles.  Tonya's reference to The Principle of Least Effort is so spot on and Libwebrarian even backs up this theory. 

Search for psychology on NCSU’s Search All search box gives you the top three articles out of 2,543,911 articles in Summon, and likely behaviour is not to look much beyond the first page of results.

I think this is where things can get sticky with FLD. While I am all for an FLD option on library websites, there needs to be more discussion on how much is too much when it comes to full library discovery.

Thought on web platforms for professional resume websites...

While this doesn't have anything to do with the current readings for LS566, I thought it was relevant AND related to a tweet I sent out regarding personal/professional websites...

Fellow classmates: Do you have a professional website that you use for the job hunt that includes your resume/cv, past projects, research interests? If so, what platform do you use? Springhare? Blogger? Wordpress?

A Response to Metadata for Breakfast | File Naming Video Series

Funny that I should watch the File Naming Video Series after my last post. Then, I came across Metadata for Breakfast's post, Metadata Hide and Seek. So what else to do but blog about it!

I too, am guilty of some of the things NOT to do when naming files. Namely using spaces and capitalization. In my defense, I am a trained graphic designer so the visual aspect of the filename is just as important to me as the file I am naming.  Spaces look pretty but certainly don't play well with naming files. Capitalization makes things look professional, in my opinion. But alas, I must learn to play by the rules of file naming.

I will admit this, and I am not sure if this is a product of my O.C.D or A.D.D. (or a combination of both) but, I often find myself looking for a file on my computer, discovering said file in a folder filled with similar files, then going back and renaming ALL THE FILES so that they all have the same file name format to appease my constant need for the visual affect of organization.

Applying the K.I.S.S. System to Filenaming

After reading over  "Filenames as a Strategy to Managing Your Assets", my head was spinning. The authors system seemed a little.....overcomplicated? What the author ends up with is a UID for his images and that is whole point, I get it.

I am not knocking what works for him, because clearly he put a lot of thought and possibly, some trial and error into this system. I just think he made it a little harder than it had to be.

I have been raised (by my minimalist father) on the K.I.S.S. system. Keep it simple, stupid. I think this system can be applied to file naming, no matter what type of file it is. In the case of image collections, sure, we have to think about what type of systems we are working with, who is using this information, if the UID is in fact unique to each "asset", but this seems a little excessive...

What do you think? Can you still achieve UID's for image collections by following the K.I.S.S. system?

OR, if I am completely missing the point (which may be the case the more I read over the original blog post), I would love someone to break this down to me.