virtually a librarian

Interestingly, when I looked at pictures of other #blogeverdayofjune peeps’ bookshelves, I didn’t find myself coveting their book collections (although they were very nice book collections!), but rather, other things in the pictures: Katie’s stool and chair, as well as Con’s fireplace. I think this reflects my current state of being, in which I am trying to declutter – and the first step will be to get rid of the vast majority of my books.

I like having books – I really do. I am, after all, a hoarder and a librarian to boot. But I’m still driven to cull my book collection, for a few reasons. The first is that I have really bad allergies and it is nearly impossible to keep books dust free. The second is that I only reread books that I had a real connection with, so once a book I’ve bought has done the rounds of my family and friends, it really just sits and gathers dust. Another motivator is that I want a new, smaller bookshelf – something low that will run the length of my lounge room and act as somewhere to display all my precious things, too – but this isn’t going to give me a lot of space. The rationale for the new book case is that I just don’t like the way my current one looks in the room – it’s a big room, and although the bookshelf is big, because it’s a different style to all my other furniture, it looks small and out of place. The other driver is that I frequently have small children getting around my lounge room floor, and the towering 7 foot book case always looks a bit precarious next to a tiny crawling child.

Apart from the bookshelf, I have a few stacks of books around the house (one beside the bed, one on my desk) and a basket of cook books in the kitchen. In my perfect world, I’d have all my reading on my Sony Reader, and I’d only buy print copies for books I’ve read and loved, cook books, or books I want to read and share with my niece and nephew. One day…

Earlier this month, one of my fellow #blogeverydayofjune pals posted about an article I wrote in this month’s inCite. The article was essentially about what research is and how new graduates can get involved and get published. I was rather gobsmacked by one of the comments, in which the commenter revealed she’d copped flak from colleagues (including being told she was ‘pretentious’) for thinking that the project she was writing up for a journal was worthwhile publishing about.

First, let’s deal with the cultural issue at hand: this is, at least in part, a case of tall poppy syndrome. I don’t understand why people feel the need to undermine other people’s confidence in this way. I just don’t get it. Here’s a message for the profession: if you’ve got new grads in your organisation who are keen and professionally active and focused on contributing to their profession, *value* it, don’t undermine it.

Now, onto the broader issue – which is something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a long time. Publishing is important, and not just for academics.

This profession has been harping on for a long time about Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP). I’m not going to get into the EBLIP debate here – some of us think it’s a great concept, others of us think it’s overkill, others of us think it’s not very useful at all. Suffice to say that I think anything that encourages us to take a considered, research focused approach to practice is A Good Thing, and that I think there are ways to operate within a lightweight EBLIP model that means EBLIP and innovation can exist in harmony.

When I talk about the need for practitioners to publish, I guess I’m talking about EBLIP in its most nebulous form. I know there is a lot more to EBLIP than contributing to the evidence base (which is what you do when you publish), but this one aspect of EBLIP impacts on other practitioners. (As an aside, I think it’s also one aspect of EBLIP that you can pursue without getting completely invested in the EBLIP models and frameworks, which I know some have reservations about.) Publishing is about responsible practice. It’s about contributing back to the professional literature so that your experience is documented for the benefit of the practitioners who will work in this space in the future.

Consider the last project you worked on. What if you went to the professional literature and there was simply nothing there to inform the direction you should take? How much more groundwork would you have had to do? How many extra mistakes would you have made on the project journey? If we don’t build the evidence base, then finding the evidence we need to make informed decisions is made exponentially more difficult.

We all (hopefully) undertake user needs analysis to inform decision making around service and product delivery. We all undertake environmental scans and literature searches to guide us along the way. We collect and analyse the evidence, and we need to close the evidence loop by contributing back to the evidence base from which we have drawn.

When I completed my professional qualification at QUT, there was a strong focus on EBLIP and on publishing, and on the need to improve our professional literature. Today, the course still seeks to give students an understanding of the importance of publishing. For example, in the semester just passed, students in one of my units wrote an article for an open access journal, submitted it for peer review, reviewed each others’ articles, and then resubmitted a revised article. I’m now in the process of marking those final submissions, and then we’ll be publishing the first issue of Web Content Management for Library and Information Science. It’s a great way for students to learn about open access and peer review processes, and to become familiar with publication workflows. I hope it’s also been the kind of experience that will encourage students to publish as practitioners. Throughout the process, students have been reflecting on their learning experience and critiquing their work, which has been a valuable experience for them.

Which leads me to… the importance of reflective practice, and the fact that publishing supports it.

Not only is publishing important for the profession; it’s an important tool for you as a practitioner. If we write something up for publication, we are probably more likely to undertake meaningful evaluation. It’s also a reflective process, that allows us to think about and critique our own performance, to look for areas in which we need to improve as practitioners, and to make plans to see that improvement happen. For me, the defining characteristic of professionalism is that we, as professionals, are committed to lifelong learning and continuing professional development. Reflective practice has an important role to play in the lifelong learning process, and by extension, is (or should be) a characteristic of ‘the professional’.

I know we’re all busy and the thought of writing for publication can be daunting because of time constraints (and also because we often undervalue ourselves and the contribution we can make to the profession – don’t get me started on the feminisation of this profession and the impact I think that has on our self-image!). Publishing needn’t be so daunting. You don’t have to publish in ERA ranked scholarly publications. Trade publications, blogs, news publications… All of these are places that you can report and reflect on your experiences, for both the profession’s benefit, and your own.

Publishing has nothing to do with pretension, or with making a name for yourself (though that is certainly a great by-product of publishing). It’s about being responsible, and contributing to your profession. We need robust professional literature to underpin our practice, and the only way we can have that is if practitioners invest time, energy and intellect in publishing.

Update: Gotta love serendipity. In the latest issue of EBLIP, editor Denise Koufogiannakis wrote an editorial on reflection that echoes some of what I’ve talked about here. Go read it!

Ooops! This week, I promised myself I’d keep all three dates I’d made to catch up with old friends. In keeping one of those last night, I got home realllly late and forgot-on-purpose to blog (well, I remembered once I was in bed, at which point it was after midnight anyway). So this is technically yesterday’s post.

One of my favourite quick and easy meals is fried rice. I’ve modified a recipe I once found in a Donna Hay magazine (I think the name of the recipe was something like “Pea and chilli fried rice”).

What goes in it:

• Cooked jasmine rice. If I’m being careful with my eating, I usually measure out four cups of cooked rice, which makes about eight serves.
• Snow peas – about 300g trimmed and cut into halves or thirds.
• Sugar snap peas – about 300g trimmed and cut into halves or thirds.
• Kernels from two cobs of corn (frozen is fine but fresh corn off the cob really makes this taste amazing).
• About eight stems of shallots, finely sliced.
• Three eggs, lightly beaten and cooked as an omelet – cook til just cooked in quite a large frypan so the omelet is quite thin, then roll it up and slice it).
• Heaped teaspoon of jarred chopped garlic (because this is a *quick* recipe – I substitute for fresh if I have time).
• Three quarters of a teaspoon of jarred chopped chilli (ditto on substituting for fresh if I have time).
• Small amount of peanut oil.
• Soy sauce (I use Tamari because it’s gluten free – otherwise a mix of regular soy sauce and a dash of kecap manis is perfect). Can’t give you a quantity for this – I just tip and mix, tip and mix til the colour of the rice is about right.
• Two chicken breasts, marinated in sweet chilli sauce and pan fried. Cut into 1cm pieces when cooked. Alternatively, use the meat from a BBQ chicken.

The make-age:

1. So, I cut up the vegies in advance and cook both the rice and the chicken the night before. If you cook the rice the night before, it’s best to lay it out on a bread board or baking tray in the fridge so that it doesn’t clump together.
2. Heat a tablespoon or so of peanut oil in a wok. Stir fry the garlic, chilli, snow peas and sugar snap peas for a couple of minutes. Add the corn and cook for another couple of minutes.
3. Add in the rice and stir to combine.
4. Add in soy sauce – a couple of tablespoons I guess – then mix it through and check the colour. I usually leave about a teaspoon of soy sauce to add later.
5. Stir fry until the rice is warmed through, then add the chicken and the last teaspoon or so of soy sauce.
6. Stir fry until the chicken is warmed through, then add in the egg and shallots. Stir fry for another few minutes.
7. Serve with sweet chilli sauce.

I usually get about eight meals out of this, and it’s really filling and healthy. If I’m starving I’ll bulk it up with more veg. If you’re in a super-hurry, leave out the fresh vegies and throw in a packet of frozen peas and corn.

This post has been in draft since April, when Meredith Farkas first posted about the Davids and Goliaths in the eContent world. A post today from the Librarian in Black prompted me to dig this out and publish it.

I spent the last couple of years managing online collections for a large public library, and a big part of my time was spent supporting customers’ use of eBooks and eAudiobooks. I also own a Sony Reader and have bought and used eBooks from various places. So, like the Librarian in Black, I figure I should be able to use library eBook services, even if they are a little bit complicated. Apparently not. I recently tried to download an eBook from EBL, and I hit brick wall after brick wall. Notably, I’m pretty tech savvy, have lots of experience with eBooks and am willing to persist because eBooks are my preferred format. And in the end, even *I* gave up (the final straw was that Digital Editions (DE) wasn’t installed on my work PC, and of course, I couldn’t install it – but then, I’m fairly sure that should I have been able to get the software working, the DE authentication probably wouldn’t have worked, because typically it doesn’t in corporate environments. And let’s not even start talking about Digital Editions, which I cannot get working on my personal laptop, despite having totally uninstalled and reinstalled it several times.)

The Librarian in Black is right – it’s time librarians took a stand on this and I second the idea that we need advocacy and a united front. For too long, public libraries in particular have accepted broken models because we want to be able to provide *something* in these formats. We put up with the model because we have no alternative, and because we want to make some attempt to satisfy the needs of customers who want materials in these formats.

The situation is even worse in Australia, because not only do we have to put up with broken models, we also have to put up with a really limited range of content – geographic distribution rights means eBook and eAudiobook collection development is really hit and miss in Australia. We take what we can get, and what we can get is pretty limited (although, I do have to say that there are some vendors who are working to rectify this – but progress is limited and slow).

And it’s a similar story for consumers who want to buy eBooks – we just don’t get the range here. The much hyped recent release of the Kobo in Australia seemed likely to help on the content front, with new eBook stores opening to complement the release of the device. I had high hopes that the Borders eBook store would be the messiah for eBook readers in Australia, but what we ended up with was a meagre 12,000 odd fiction titles available there.

The problem really lies with the publishers, who are just plain scared and blinded by their fear. I think we’ve proved, now, through models like OverDrive’s DRM-free MP3 eAudiobooks, that library users will use content ethically. And I think it’s therefore time to start pushing publishers to allow distribution of DRM free content, so that vendors can implement models that *just work*. It would be wise for vendors to start working with libraries to provide a united front on this issue.

I’m not sure what the best mechanism for doing this might be – is it our associations, or is it, perhaps, our consortia, as Meredith suggested?

I know many librarians in Australia would be keen to be involved in the kind of advocacy group that the Librarian in Black has suggested. Perhaps we should be looking at forming such a group locally, to deal with the added issue of geographic distribution rights. Any takers?

I’m in the middle of writing out the recipe for my favourite muffin mix, to stick on the kitchen bench in the hope the baking fairy might make them for me while I was at the office tomorrow. I thought it might make a useful-ish blog post, because trying to find gluten free recipes that aren’t loaded with fat to make up for the gluten free-ness can be a challenge.

This recipe is based on a gluten- and dairy-free muffin recipe I found over at Taste.com.au, but each time I’ve made it, I’ve made an alteration – firstly to get the balance of flours right (it’s really important with gluten free cooking to get the right flour mix – a single flour doesn’t cut it, and you’ve really gotta experiment for texture), and then to reduce the fat. I also substitute non-dairy milk for low fat milk (not skim – there’s virtually no other fat in these, and your need some!).

So here it is!