explodedlibrary.info

more on the librarian shortage debate

[18/4/06 update: For some reason, the ALA changed the title and URL for Retirement & Recruitment (2004): A Deeper Look on its website. I have put in the up-to-date information below. The change basically involves changing the year from 2004 to 2002. If you want to see how the Office for Research and Statistics page looked in April 2005, it's available in the Internet Archive]

I've written a short article in the June 2005 issue of InterALIA about this topic. InterALIA is the ALIA South Australian newsletter. One of the questions that I had when I wrote that was wanting to know how similar (or different) the experience of Australian librarians has been from that of American librarians on this particular issue. If only somebody could replicate, or at least do something along the lines of, that Holt & Strock research in Australia...

One other thing about this article. Since drafting it, I've become aware of some more recent research by Mary Jo Lynch at the ALA Office for Research & Statistics which are based on 2000 US census figures, instead of the 1990 census. The report is called Retirement & Recruitment (2002): A Deeper Look [link to pdf].

To summarize, Mary Jo Lynch says that the librarian shortage which was predicted in her widely quoted article  ('Reaching 65: lots of librarians will be there soon', American libraries, March 2002) is still going to happen. Here are two interesting quotes:

The 1990-based analysis predicted a significant wave of retirement that would peak in the 2010 to 2014 period. Updating the forecast with 2000 Census data, as shown in Figures 1 and 2 predicts a similar retirement surge in the near future. The main difference is that retirements now appear to peak slightly later—between 2015 and 2019. In total, the ten-year period beginning in 2010 will see 45 percent of today’s librarians reach age 65. This surge of retirement represents the early-wave of baby boom librarians crossing the threshold of age 65.

...

The net influx of mid-career female librarians, and their later departure from the field, will do little to diminish the retirement surge looming in 2010. It has only served to delay it somewhat. The short-term supply of librarians appears to be bound up with the fate of baby-boom women, while the longer-term health of the field depends on those who follow them.

It is interesting that even the true believers in the library shortage admit that it has been delayed somewhat. Other than that, this most recent update doesn't change the views which I've expressed in the InterALIA article and elsewhere.

am I tempted?

TypePad has a new feature which will allow me to defray my TypePad subscription fees against revenue generated from text-based advertising on my blog.

I guess I'm not ruling this out in principle. It would be nice if this blog could at least break even, so that it's no longer a monthly drain on my finances. That said, I'm not going to be an early adopter with this. I want more information about how intrusive and annoying (or interesting and clever) the ads will be, what sort of  products will be advertised and what sort of click through rates (and hence revenue) I could expect. For me, allowing ads is a significant sacrifice, and so I wouldn't allow this unless it really paid off. It's a no brainer that I would much prefer to pay for 100% of my blog charges and remain ad free than pay for 80% and have ads. But if I knew that half or more of my expenses could be recovered, who knows ...

I'm currently looking for a different place to live right now. I've had some very interesting dealings with real estate agents in Sydney during the past week. With the housing search, and then the packing, moving and unpacking, it's quite possible that I'll be in for a prolonged light blogging stretch. Then again, sometimes I've blogged more in these busy periods, such as in January 2004, just before I left the US. It must be when the blogger and the procrastinator inside me decide to become friends and help each other out.

an iPod playlist to imprint the present and remember the past

[28/7/05 update: I've just added some screenshots of these playlists]

Maybe it's the librarian in me, but I find something enjoyable about organizing iTunes playlists for my iPod.

I have playlists for all sorts of things: driving (some music just does not work in the car), doing the dishes on a mellow evening, cleaning, exercising, good mood music for company (pleasant, but not too demanding or intrusive) and music that usually helps me get to sleep.

But nothing is perfect and there are few things about the iPod which can create a less than perfect music experience.

Firstly, if I am always listening to music for particular moods or circumstances, when I am going to listen and new music and how is that music going to imprint on my present circumstances? By imprinting, I mean when a particular piece of music becomes associated with a particular time/place/event/person in one's life. This isn't always a pleasant thing. Björk's Medúlla makes me recall my time working at Vodafone (not exactly pleasant for me) and reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (which is just plain weird). That said, I still think the association of songs in this way provides a helpful musical map to our lives, and that using an iPod can severely dilute this efffect.

The other problem, kind of touched on in my previous iPod playlist post, that it is so easy for good music to buried and lost in an iPod.

Naturally, I have found one answer to these two problems by creating a new kind of playlist. This is a hybrid smart list, containing two other smart playlists. The best thing is that it's self-updating and requires very little maintenance.

Ingredient 1: Smart playlist of recently added tracks. This is simple, choose "Date Added" in the last 3 months - or whichever period you like, it could also be a number of days or weeks. Make sure that the Live Updating box is checked, so that new things are automatically captured and the old ones will drop off.

Ingredient 2: Smart playlist containing good songs which aren't played very often. The first step here is to specify "My rating" as greater than 2 or 3 stars (depending on how picky you want to be). Of course you need to have most of your music rated for this to work effectively. One easy way of doing this is to make an Unrated playlist, containing only the unrated songs - so that you can rate them when you're ever in the mood. The second step is that this must be a limited playlist. For me it's limited to the 25 least often played songs. You might need to tinker with this number at some point to capture the ratio between old and new music which works best for you. Make sure that this list is also live updating.

Ingredient 3: Another smart playlist which combines the contents of the first two lists. At the top of the window, if you'll need to make sure that you choose "Match any of the following conditions", which is basically a boolean OR. Then for those conditions, choose "Playlist" is - and select the other two playlists, i.e. new stuff and good but less played.

At the moment at least, this is my new favourite list. It's not going to replace the others, because there'll always be times when I'll prefer a mood/situation specific playlist. But this hybrid list is a good one to play when I'm not too sure what I want.

private blogs

I maintain two private password protected blogs.

One is strictly work-related. I use it to it log the various reference questions which I receive. This is an important part of my current position, we are actually audited on it this (sigh, little did I know when I got into librarianship that we too could be audited). My blog of questions and answers is helpful because it is very easy to use, gives me a time/date stamp for each question, allows me to mark some of the resources I point people to via hypertext and track follow up work via comments, and most helpfully, and lets me do full-text searches of my queries. I can also share my work with my supervisor. I know there's expensive software which will do all this and more, but the thing is that this solution is simple and works well for me and I don't need to pay anything extra to set up a blog in this way.

I've just set up a private personal blog to keep in touch with family and friends who are scattered across Australia and the world. I am not a fan of the group email. For one thing, people are always changing their email addresses (I'm notorious, this year Gmail is my main email, last year msn, the year before .Mac and so on). Then I know that some people really don't like receiving group emails. Finally, I find it easier to write a blog entry than a group email. Maybe it's because I don't need to worry about being intrusive. People will only be reading this blog if they choose to enter the URL into their browser or news aggregator. Basically, people will only be reading if they're interested, so I can write with more confidence and not feel so apologetic.

Oh, and I've learned that it's possible to subscribe to password-protected blogs. The method for my TypePad blog is: http://[username]:[password]@[subdomain].typepad.com/[blog_     directory]/index.rdf

There's a bit of crossover between this personal blog and my LiveJournal. I expect to save some time by doing some cross-posting. For a moment I pondered just inviting these family & friends to read my LJ, but decided against it. They would need their own LJ accounts to read the non-public material, and that would be too much to expect for some of my very technologically challenged readers. Publishing a private blog is much simpler. People just need the URL and the username and password and it will work.

I am more and more aware that the words which appear in this explodedlibrary blog have a life of their own. Anything I write here has the potential to be read by potential employers, friends, girlfriends and family members. It's both a blessing and a curse. That's why I have a need for a private blog, because I like this medium but I don't want to give up all aspects of my privacy.

more blogging connections

On Tuesday night I went to a Sydney bloggers meetup (organized outside of meetup thanks to meetup’s new charges) and met Glen Fuller, Mark / Papertrap.net, James O’Brien and Spleenie. It was a very interesting and enjoyable evening with good company.

Then I had another little blogging milestone this week. For the first time I have learned that somebody I know from real life has started blogging in a serious way. MLIS student Laura Crossett has started a great new library blog, lis•dom. I’m really looking forward to following this blog, because Laura’s a great writer, and she is very smart and passionate about librarianship.