Library 2.0 Jobs Discussed

Doug Johnson on the Blue Skunk Blog made some annotations on Jenny Levine’s Shifted Librarian coverage of “Another 2.0 Job.” As you may recall, a recent job posting in my department was also featured on Shifted Librarian.

In “School library media specialist for the 21st century” Doug asks some tough questions. Here is my take on some of Doug’s questions and comments. Also included here is a primer for the acronym soup encountered in the job description. Doug’s annotations in the quotes below are italicized. The original material comes from the job description.

Some Thoughts

Together with the systems librarian, innovate search and retrieve experiences for users. Retrieve “experiences” rather than information?

I think we are seeing either a slight translation error or a typo. My guess is they are referring to a search and retrieval “experience” as a way to describe a user’s interactions with the OPAC and other search tools. Was the search effective? Did the keywords I expected to work really work? Did I find what I was looking for? Our current OPACS tend to have a horrible “search and retrieval experience.” One of the biggest problems, as has been reviewed many times, is the lack of a true search that returns results using relevanace ranking instead of displaying the last record entered into the database first.

Promote to and support students and faculty in the use of tools for collaborative work, e.g. blogs and wikis. Guess we better be learning how to use these things ourselves first!

I’m sorry if this offends, but yes, we had better. As school districts around the country wake up and discover than some of the 60 million MySpace users are from their neck of the woods, the most common reaction has been wholesale censorship of all blogs and interactive websites. Last time I checked, one of the things that really attracted me to the library world was a rather strong stand against censorship. Now we can certainly get into a discussion about careful filtering of access to school appropriate material. While we will probably all disagree on some details, I am sure we will also tend to agree on selection as being a professional duty of utmost importance to teacher librarians. So….what more can we do to fight against wholesale censorship of the new Web 2.0? Step one is learn it ourselves. As I have noted before, I see Second Life as being a next big thing – are you know about it? Have you participated in it? Are you living it? If not, why not? (Yes, I know time is the answer, but for how long will that remain an acceptable answer?). Go check out the new Second Life Library perhaps…

Geek and team player, wild about web 2.0, willing to learn and share. Geek in a job description? “Wild” (being passionate) in a job description?

I like a job description that can show at least some humanity behind it. If it calls for someone to be passionate about their job, even better. Wouldn’t you want your child’s teacher to be passionate about learning? Also, I think “geek” has become a very acceptable and widely recognized way of defining a particular approach to things. That is probably a whole other post, but in short when I say I am a geek it probably tells you that I like learning about new technologies, that I try to find time to stay up with what is coming out next, that I maybe like to play around with technologies to make them do new things (i.e. hack with them in the good sense of the word).

Does this sound like an exciting place to work or what? Do you feel as underqualified to work there as I do? How do we as an entire profession re-tool ourselves to remain relevant to our changing workplaces? When will be stop referring to “technologists” and “librarians” as two distinct occupations?

I think you have made a couple of key points here. 1) This sounds like a VERY exciting place to work. I hope that the team I work with feels that our workplace is as exciting. 2) I don’t feel underqualified, but that has made things difficult for me. I know I am coming from an outside perspective that is heavily built on my five years as an instructional technology coordinator. Still, I chose to become a teacher-librarian because I strongly believe that this is the future. 3) We practice what we preach and get back to that old “life-long learning” stuff! In other words, we have to make/find/DEMAND the time to play. 3) I hope soon – bridges have to be built, but those bridges are going to be built using technology.

The Primer

Acronym soup de-souped and other tidbits.

LMAP – Linux/MYSQL/Apache/PHP = software is defined as running on LAMP when it is built to run on the Linux operating system (an open source derivative of UNIX – you may have heard of Red Hat or Ubuntu as two big names) and uses a set of three applications.

1. Apache – This is the webserver software. Again, it is open source. It runs on both Linux and Windows, but is much more powerful (and better supported) on Linux. The other main webserver in the Windows world is IIS (Internet Information Server).
2. MYSQL – let’s break this down a bit further. MYSQL is the open source play-on-words version of Microsoft’s MSSQL. These are databases that use SQL which stands for Structured Query Language. Think MS Access on some serious steroids. Databases are the backend of all modern websites as let the designer store entries which can later be pulled back out for display. This blog post, for instance, may be stored in a databse table called “INFOMANCY_POSTS” in the field “POST_TEXT”. Then it is displayed when you load the page.
3. PHP – This one is a bit harder to de-acronymize (?) as it uses the hip-geekdom practice of recursive acronymization. PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a website language that works with HTML to build database-driven websites. Hypertext is the same concept as found in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) in that it refers to an interconnected set of pages. PHP is a Preprocessor in that a PHP page is read by the webserver and things are done to the page before it is delivered to your browser. Thus when you look at the source (View/Source in Internet Explorer) of a PHP page you will see the results of what the PHP code told the webserver to do, not the PHP code itself.

NOTE: the P in LAMP might also refer to PERL or Python at times. These are two other langauges but they are much more high level. PHP is “readable” in that you can sort of figure out what might be happening. PERL is notorious for being a very “ugly” langauge to try and read.
Another NOTE: You may also sometimes hear a reference to WAMP (Windows/Apache/MYSQL/PHP) or WIMP (Windows/IIS/MYSQL/PHP).

XML – eXtensible Markup Language. This is the language that is most often used to defined and work with metadata. Dublin Core is an XML-based metadata scheme for cataloging. The beauty of XML, as opposed to MARC, is that it uses the same conventions of other markup languages (like HTML) with regards to encoding data within tags. For example a Dublin Core record would use a <title>This is the title</title> set of tags and data to define the title. This makes XML-based metadata much more human readable. XML is also the language behind RSS (Real Simple Syndication) which brings website updates to you via subscriptions to websites’ feeds.

CSS- Cascading Style Sheet. CSS is what lets all those new websites look so nice. Designers can create a single style sheet that defines a template for a site. CSS can handle how things are arranged (two columns? three columns?) colors, fonts, font sizes, what an <h3> looks like, etc. The power in this is that if I want to change a color, I simply change it in one file and then it cascades down to all of the webpages that use the style sheet.

Portals/Template Engines – One of the great uses of CSS is within a Content Management System (CMS) – also known as a content portal. A CMS is used to pull together a variety of content types and display then in a single strucutred site. These tend to run on LAMP and have a backend similar to a blog that allows users to enter text into pages through a webform. Since each bit of text is actually stored in a database field, there is no pre-formatting of text. As such, the same page can be displayed numerous ways using templates (that in turn use CSS). A template engine makes it easier to design a new template for a CMS by defining a number of common things like what the title is called.

Identity Management – Goes with the above and also LDAP which is next. Basically, if I log in to your website I should be authenticated to your OPAC, your blog, your video streaming and any outside databases you offer. Single login is cool!

LDAP – Lightweight Directory Access Protocol – umm…this gets a lot more technical than the other items. I don’t deal with it on a regular basis as it is more of a network engineer thing. Directories in this definition are referring to the listing of users (or computers) and their permissions within a network. So this is a protocol (a basic interface language) for accessing the directory to share login information, pass e-mails, or otherwise connect one site to another.

Ruby – Expect to hear more about this languag as it is one of the new hot things along with AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) that is defining Web2.0. AJAX’s power is that it allows websites to update information and displays without refreshing the page. Ruby’s power is a new flexibility for interacting with databases and data sets. Ruby is a language derived in part from Perl and Python that has been extended based on another new technology, Rails. Ruby on Rails (RoR or Rails) is a programming application that, in a sense, writes the program for you. If you set up a database table (BOOKS) with fields (AUTHOR, TITLE, COPYRIGHT, PUBLISHER) then RoR will automatically create a webpage that lets users enter a database record for a new book by asking for an author, title, copyright date and publisher. The full list of books will also be displayed. Note: This is a very simple example of an incredibly powerful and complex language.

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