Ballad in Plain E

After reading about Ubiquity in Simon Fodden’s Slaw post yesterday morning, and then watching Aza Raskin’s video, I *had* to download Firefox 3 so that I could try out it out. (Even though some of my favourite add-ons aren’t available in 3.0.1 yet.)

Simon’s right – it’s really, really cool. After just ten minutes of mucking around, I’m impressed. You can send a link by e-mail on the fly, call up and paste google maps into an e-mail (though I’m going to have to train myself to drop the hyphen in “e-mail” if I want it to work properly!), and a ton of other handy actions.
There are definitely still glitches (it is a prototype, after all) but overall I think this extension has huge potential and I’m really excited to see it develop.

Dinosaur Comics over at Quantz.com has been really good lately. This one struck a chord, though, because I noticed the same thing a little while ago. Now that we’re completely desensitized to the usual ultra-explicit subject lines in spam, spammers are getting personal.

I’ve probably gotten one with the subject line “What a Stupid Face You Have, [my name here]” several dozen times. And strangely enough, I feel a barb of hurt (or at least, offence) every time, no matter that I’ve seen it before.

I’m relieved that T-Rex (er, Ryan North) and I aren’t the only ones who’ve had this experience. It was widespread enough for the New York Times Bits Blog to post about it back in June (see “What’s behind the stupid face spam scourge?“).

The experts explain:

“It makes the mail personal, because it is a direct insult using the recipient’s name.”

“Is it successful? It’s successful enough for them to keep trying it.”

Ugh. I haven’t had one of these in a while. But no doubt they’ll replace it with something worse–it’s only a matter of time.

SLA Legal Division just released the summer issue of Legal Division Quarterly, which contains a bunch of session summaries, including a detailed synopsis of “If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Tales from the Dark Side”, written by Tracy Leming. (At the conference, I caught only the tail-end of it.)

There’s also a good article on “Navigating the Exhibition Hall” by Devin Gawnemark. Check it out!

Some sad news: as of this month, LTAIG (the Library Technicians and Assistants Interest Group under the auspices of the BC Library Association) is no longer an active interest group.

I was a brand-new library tech when I moved to Vancouver in April 2003, and I knew I wanted to get involved in the library community. Joining the LTAIG committee was one of the smartest moves I ever made! My friend and fellow grad Courtney and I went to our first LTAIG meeting the next spring and were thrilled to meet a fantastic bunch of enthusiastic, approachable, genuine library people who were happy to have us on board.

Over the next four years, I had many great opportunities to develop my CV, by doing things like:

• Being co-Social Convener and organizing a post-conference social
• Working on several salary surveys
• Starting up and editing an LTAIG Newsletter
• Proposing and convening a session at the annual BCLA conference
• Planning and attending fun library support staff events

All these things are fine and dandy, and of course, are impressive to employers. But more satisfying and rewarding were the experiences I had working with others throughout all of this time. Because of LTAIG, I have many amazing colleagues whom I also consider friends. These are people I can share ideas and talk candidly with, count on for support and look to for inspiration.

And as it happens, one of these connections became my employer (Steve Matthews was the speaker at the session I arranged for a BCLA conference a few years back – and now he’s also my boss at Stem!).

June was a tough month for the group of us who were on the LTAIG committee: we were all entering new phases in our lives, be they geographic moves, career transitions, family changes, or shifting priorities. We were sad to disband but we hope the group will be revived in short order. I have no doubt that there are passionate techs and assistants out there who are looking for ways to get involved.

I feel privileged to have had the chance to get to know such an amazing group of people. So thanks, Diane, Rob, Jen, Christine, John, Vandy, and Courtney; and to all my fellow former LTAIGers, for making my time in the Vancouver library community so rich and memorable. I hope to run into each of you at a library conference down the road, and to read about what great things you are doing with your marvelous skills. I will recognize you by your big smiles, awesome LTAIG buttons, and Cutter-numbered name tags. It’s been great!

My parting message is to encourage new grads to get involved with any library groups they can. It’s a surefire way to meet new people with similar interests; make super-valuable connections that will, cliched as it is, be infinitely useful to you in your career; and to foster a sense of pride in your profession.

Via Library Link of the Day, there’s a really interesting article in the July 17th edition of The Economist entitled “Great minds think (too much) alike“. The article describes research that shows how digital access to scientific journals doesn’t necessarily encourage use of long tail information. Sociologist Dr James Evans:

“has found that as more journals become available online, fewer articles are being cited in the reference lists of the research papers published within them. Moreover, those articles that do get a mention tend to have been recently published themselves. Far from growing longer, the long tail is being docked.”

My reaction is that this is somewhat analogous to the average user not looking past the first page (first ten results) in Google. The other day, I watched a friend of mine try to search for some basic instructional information on the internet. If within the first few results, she didn’t see what she was looking for, she’d immediately change her search terms. I made some suggestions for different terms and what order to put them in, and she had a bit more luck, but we still had to look at more than a couple hits to find what she was looking for. (It’s pretty satisfying when you can put your madd library skillz to use outside of work!)

On the whole, we are growing more and more impatient and unwilling to spend any time to find high-quality information. This isn’t news, obviously, but it’s something I need to remind myself of, too – because I know I do it even though I know better. I loved the quote that ends the article:

“As a wag once put it, an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing. It would be ironic if that is the sort of expertise that the world wide web is creating.”

In the digital realm where, in theory, it should be easy to find highly specialised information about almost anything, we need to remind ourselves that good info doesn’t always float to the top. We still have to go digging for it, be critical of it, and not assume we are experts about any of it.