virtually a librarian

Thirty days ago, I accepted Con’s challenge to blog every day in June. I knew it would be a struggle to meet the daily quota, but from the outset, I had a ‘bigger’ reason for participating. The point of the exercise was, for me, to reach a decision on what to do with this blog. Given how inactive a blogger I’ve been, I was at the point where I was pondering whether I should just shut this blog down. Con’s challenge came at a perfect time, and I thought that trying to blog every day for a month was a pretty good way to test whether I actually have the energy and drive to continue blogging at all.

I started this blog, as I’ve mentioned before, because I wanted a space to reflect on professional issues – a soapbox, perhaps. Life has gotten in the way of blogging over the years, but my lack of posting has not been for want of things to post about. I have an opinion on everything! When I made the move to academia early this year, my intention was always to start blogging more actively and with some regularity. Unfortunately, I started my new job just before semester began, and my time was so quickly taken up by teaching and other commitments that I didn’t really have an opportunity to create a blogging habit.

Over the years, my blogging mojo has waxed and waned… But on the whole, it’s been missing in action quite a lot of the time.

During the last 30 days, I started to think that I was getting my blogging mojo back. This was confirmed for me yesterday when I inadvertently uninstalled WordPress and deleted my database, thereby taking out my entire blog. I felt sick when I realised what I’d done – over three years of posts and comments down the drain. I know I’m not the most prolific blogger, but some of the content I have posted here – and more importantly, the comments – is important to me. I also have a lot of content sitting in draft, where ideas are germinating. The thought of losing all of that content was pretty scary.

The #blogeverydayofjune challenge has made me reflect on a few questions:

• What do I want this blog to be, if anything?
• If I discontinued this blog, would I miss the opportunity to espouse my opinion on professional issues in an informal, conversational forum?
• What role might this blog play for me as I start work on my PhD?
• How do I want to shape my online profiles – both personal and professional?

In essence, I’ve come to the realisation that, in addition to this being a space in which I can grandstand on professional issues, (because I know you *all* want to hear my opinions!), this blog has a lot of other potential for me in the coming months, and maybe even years. It could be a space to

• talk about my research, and hopefully capitalise on serendipity as a result
• reflect on my practice as a researcher and an educator
• chronicle my experiences as I work through my PhD
• test out ideas and seek others’ input
• share a little bit about myself, on a more personal level, from time-to-time

So in the last 24 hours, I’ve decided that virtually a librarian will continue to exist, although its shape may change a little. Because I’ve introduced more of the personal element here, I’ve decided to set up a second website to act as more of a portfolio (www.katedavis.info coming soon!). The new website will be the space I use for more formal documentation – publications lists, project summaries and so forth – while this site will still be the space I use to discuss and reflect in a more informal way.

What you won’t be seeing here is a post every day. But you will be seeing a post every now and then – hopefully with less gaps in between than I’ve been known to have in the past!

This challenge has been lots of things: at various times, it’s been fun, painful, a journey of enlightenment (!), educational, amusing, a bane, conversational, inspirational, and more… So thanks to Con for laying down the challenge, and to all the other #blogeverydayofjune-ers with whom I’ve shared the journey. You helped me get my mojo back!

Yesterday I learnt some very important lessons, all learnt through a rather painful process.

1. When you uninstall software, you should make sure you’ve chosen the right instance. Even if the different instances are installed on different domains.
2. Don’t mess around with important stuff when you’re tired and unwell.
3. Taking regular backups may be a boring administrative task, but it’s worth the effort.
4. Taking backups before making changes to software is not an optional task.

You might have noticed this site was down for most of yesterday and this morning. That’s because I thought it was time to uninstall my test instance of WordPress. So off I went and did just that. Only, I managed to uninstall (and delete the database for) the instance of WordPress that runs this blog. I didn’t realise til hours later, by which time, my hosting provider had run that day’s backup, thereby backing up big fat nothing and deleting the previous day’s backup. Awesome!

Just as I thought I was going to have to reenter all of my posts, my provider turned up a back up from 26 June. That means I lost any comments made in the last three days, but that’s a lot better than years worth of my blog. *Phew*

So I’m off to by an external hard drive, on which I intend to back up my life (because, you guessed it – not only do I not back up my website, but I also don’t have a back up of my research or teaching files, my music, or my photos).

I’m working on some research with Kathryn Greenhill. It involves a self-administered questionnaire in which we need to establish the depth of participants’ technology knowledge and skills. We’re aiming to establish which of the respondents are technology specialists and which of the respondents have a general interest in technology as it applies to their broader non-technology job. I guess you could say we’re trying to determine which respondents fit into the category of “library technologists” and which could be described as “librarians who have a general interest in using technology to enhance service provision”.

We could simply ask participants which category they see themselves falling into, but there are two inherent issues with this approach.

Issue number one: objectivity

While the nature of surveys as data collection instruments means that data is necessarily reflective in nature, my feeling is that, rather than asking participants to classify themselves, it would be more appropriate to have participants rate themselves against a series of competencies, and to rate the importance of each competency to their current position. It makes more sense for us to classify all participants from our objective viewpoint, based on what we know about participants’ perceptions of their level of technology skill and the relevance of these skills to their current position, and based on our conception of the categories. This seems to me to be a slightly more objective framework within which to undertake the categorisation.

This approach does not, however, solve the issue of objectivity – both because we’d still dealing with perceptions, and because the approach is not really viable. Certainly, there are many models in the literature that we could use to inform the design of a series of questions that would measure respondents’ level of competency across a number of skills and knowledge areas within the umbrella of technology competencies. However, the problem with all of these models is that there are a significant number of skills and knowledge areas that we would need to ask about. And that would make this small section of the survey unreasonably lengthy. This is not the primary focus of the research, but rather, represents a characteristic of participants that we need to know about in order to facilitate a particular view of the data we’ll be gathering. As such, we don’t want to weigh the survey down with too many questions on this topic.

So we’re back to asking participants to tell us which category they belong to, which brings us to the second issue.

Issue number two: what exactly is a library technologist?

I may just be looking in the wrong places, but I’m yet to discover a robust definition of the term “library technologist”, although there are plenty of instances in which it has been used to describe a type of professional. (And I have to confess that I haven’t completed a full literature search – just some quick and dirty trawling.) This makes me question my own conception of the term, which is in essence based around what you might call a “propensity to tinker with tech”. In a nutshell, my personal definition of  “library technologist” does not exclude people who don’t possess highly technical skills (like sys admin type skills, for example). But I’m conscious that the term is used to describe professionals with far more technical expertise than is possessed by many of us who exhibit a willingness to tinker.

We need a definition of “library technologist” because, before we ask people if they *are* something, we need to define that something. We need to ensure there is a shared understanding of the term. In the absence of a definition in the literature, establishing a shared understanding sounds like a research project of its own. There are certainly other avenues to explore (like, for example, whether we can work with definitions for similar terms – for example, “education technologist”), but for now, I guess I’m just a little surprised that we don’t have a definition yet.

I’m totally due a think post, but my brain is somewhat fried tonight. So today’s post is a bunch of stuff I’ve read lately and been inspired by or that have caused a light bulb moment for me. Here they are.

• If you don’t read Luke Wroblewski’s blog, you should go and subscribe right now! For any library types who work on the web, Luke’s latest post, 10 things I learned in web school, is essential reading.
• I was involved in a debate recently over on Sophie’s blog about my contention that if students instinctively head to Google when they’re looking for information, then we should make sure our information is findable there (rather than forcing them back behind our walls. Lorcan Dempsey posted recently about the concept of ‘indirect discovery’, which says everything I was trying to say with a whole lot more eloquence.
• I know I’m starting to sound like I’m obsessed with productivity (and maybe I am), but I came across this post on Web Worker Daily about getting more done with a work buddy, and I love this concept. I think this could work for me.

Right, now I’m off to watch successive episodes of Relocation Relocation. Ah, Saturday night!