Year of Gratitude - Day 159 - Control + F

On this Monday, I want to shout out to Control + F, or the find function. When I think about what has made me a more efficient researcher, worker, whatever, I definitely look to this old friend.

Read more: Why Using Control+F May Be the Most Important Computing Skill in The Atlantic

Wikipedia: Redefining Research (infographic)

A bit troubling to the librarian in me, but incredibly interesting.


Via: Open-Site.org

Order out of chaos

At a meeting just before Christmas break my boss said that I often made order out of chaos. I chuckled at the thought of my parents hearing that. The last two years of my professional life was figuring out where my department was, where we had to go and getting the team ready to GO. Maybe my boss already saw it then, but apparently some of the chaos was turning to order. As January wraps up and I look back on the first month of 2011, I think I starting to see it, too.

While I love trying to make sense of it all, I realize it's really freaking hard. My work in higher ed has taught me that I can take nothing for granted and that I have to do my homework and check it thrice. It's challenging, but entirely exhilarating when done well. I find in my personal life sometimes others don't see it that way. Though people will banter on all varieties of subjects, they can't go very deep when confronting the complexities of a topic, be it racism, revolution, world economies or poverty. There are many examples of aborted conversations in my personal life. And as a librarian I have seen people crash and burn at the very thought of some real deal research to try and understand those complexities.

Over the 2010 holiday I picked up a few full-day shifts at the public library. It sort of took me back to the old days of 8 hour reference desk shifts at an academic library I worked at. I shuddered. Working that long with the public is exhausting, especially you're pedaling information and not a commodity.

In the first half hour of my afternoon shift, I got a call from who is hands down my favorite caller to date. First, if you know who Underdog Lady is on the Howard Stern show, then you can pretty much substitute that voice for my caller. That afternoon, the patron nervously asked about two cities up north and which was better for a homeless person to live in.

"I know it's not an easy question to answer," she quickly said, her voice teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack. I agreed that it was a difficult question and had a few moving parts. I assured her that with a bit of research we could at least start answering that question.

I commenced with the reference interview. The first city that actually popped into my head was Portland, OR. She wasn't very interested in that. I began to ask her questions about what type of data she was looking for, basically, what she meant by "better for a homeless person."

"No data," she replied.

No data. Of course not. I asked her why she wouldn't be interested in say how many homeless shelters, churches, missions, etc. there were in the cities. I said that there was information about how much private funding goes to counties' humane causes. I asked her why she didn't want to browse some newspapers for stories on the homeless in those cities. Our NewsBank database subscription is tremendous and has a comprehensive collection of newspapers from all over the state, not just the main rags. What about census info on poverty? She would hear none of it.

Anyway, I knew where all of this was going. It was only a matter of time before my trying to answer her question would make her have a mini-meltdown. And so it began with a pause...and then...

"Well, can I have the phone number to (City 1)'s police depart-- no- never mind, this is getting too complicated," and hung up on me. The end of this call was very similar to the last.

The encounter lasted about five minutes and I thought back on how it could have been different. How could the question be answered better? I recalled the first call with this person a few weeks back and decided she was looking for a quick answer from a librarian that is easy to understand, no more than 2-3 sentences and still completely legitimate. The acceptable answer to her question would have sounded like this, "(City 2) is better for the homeless because people are friendly and the police do not harass the homeless too much." Yet, because I would NEVER make assumptions on things I don't know of, I would never throw a quick answer out like that.

Which brings me back to making order out of chaos. It's terribly difficult. Higher education and my adventures in research have taught me that the truth is never served up on a silver platter with no strings attached. In the case above, the truth was there and could have been discovered, but not without work. You must work for knowledge.

Genealogy rules. No, wait. It sucks...errr, rules?

As a graduate student at Wayne State University, I sort of stumbled upon the glorious world of freelance research, a path that has led me to genealogy. I've picked up some assignments from a few law firms and now I'm working with my third client and his request involves finding people's heirs. After putting in some work and then stepping away from it, I think it's pretty darn cool. It's quite puzzling, but I think the challenge makes it fun. Making order out of families, especially when it's not your own family, is like trying to tackle a scavenger hunt and cross-word puzzle hybrid. I guess figuring families out always involves difficulty.

This kind of research does take time, though I got used to it pretty quick. And genealogy takes some serious curiosity. I'm not entirely sure why I was so into it, but I know that each time I thought I was done, I found something new. Each little bit motivated me to do more. The step I'm working on now is putting all these people in to a great big ancestral chart, so I'm hoping I'm not stuck under those before long.

Teachers: Slowly but surely, they will learn.

I remember at the turn of the century how academics rejected online resources, including all those expensive online databases that colleges subscribe to. Time and time again I would lead a student to our databases and I would hear the same thing: "My professor doesn't want us using the Internet." At first, I was frustrated by this statement and then I sort of turned it on its head. I would tell people this: "This database holds all the same information that the print resource would, it's just easier to search for and access." Then I started to bend the rules a little bit by adding, "If you don't tell your professor you retrieved it online, they will never know." This was not necessarily a lie, but it didn't drip of honesty, either.

After about a year or two of that kind of dialogue with countless students, I started noticing that the "no Internet" talk from students was gradually fading out of my day-to-day work. I give the most credit to the librarians I was working with at the time for really communicating with and informing the faculty about the nature of these resources. Also, faculty have realized how much easier their research is with such online products. Further, and this is my favorite, I think faculty are tickled with the new tools out there to detect plagiarism, including free stuff like Plagium or proprietary stuff like Turnitin. And, of course, as is the answer to everything, Google is also very effective at finding out whether students are being honest or if they're ripping off someone else's writing.

Although academics have made me very, very pleased with their acceptance of emerging technologies, I am still a bit disappointed at the turtle-paced acceptance of junior high and high school teachers. As I am currently at a public library, I see many more non-college students. Although some of their assignments sound college-esque (i.e. "I have to find a critical analysis on this poem"), their teachers are still living in the dark ages of "Internet sources are bunk." And it's the same story: "My teacher won't let me use Internet sources." Hence, I have reverted back to my ol' "They'll-never-know" technique.

The questions that form in my head revolve around whether librarians, public and media specialist, are teaching high school teachers about these types of online materials. I truly feel that the faculty at my old college library were shown the electronic resource light by a group of top-notch librarians spreading the knowledge. Are public librarians and school media specialists taking on this role? So far, I haven't seen the proof because I keep having to explain to high school students (and sometimes their parents) that the material in our databases are just as legitimate as those in our print collection.

On Memory and Attention Spans

Nostalgia alert: I remember reading an article called the Incredible Shrinking Sound Bite in one of my undergraduate courses years ago. I reread it the other day and this made me think of Americans' shrinking attention span (and this was written in 1990!):

An analysis of all weekday evening network newscasts (over 280) from Labor Day to Election Day in 1968 and 1988 reveals that the average "sound bite" fell from 42.3 seconds in 1968 to only 9.8 seconds in 1988. Meanwhile the time the networks devoted to visuals of the candidates, accompanied by their words, increased by more than 300 percent.

I think in a way the internet both helps and hinders in a situation like this. Helps because people can cruise over to YouTube or iTunes and get newscasts, speeches, transcripts, etc. We can essentially pay as much or as little attention to candidates as we want. In the same breath, I think that the internet is also crushing our already feeble attention span. We are overloaded and I'm not sure how much information we're really retaining.

I wondered what impact these tiny spurts of attention will have on a more collective human memory. Because we pay attention to much more content in much shorter intervals, does that create huge gaps in our memories? Or does this information overload provide a workable outline in our thinking? How do we fill in an outline of very vague happenings or mere news headlines with actual substanance? Do the shorter but more diverse clips and sound bites paint a complete picture of reality? Is that picture accurate?

I found some interesting facts on short attention spans from a May 2000 USA Today Magazine article entitled "TELEVISION NEWS: INFORMATION OR INFOTAINMENT? by Michael Medved:

• Article calls the remote control the"most destructive invention of the 20th century." It went on to say a "CHANNELS magazine notes that the average adult male...changes stations every 19 minutes.
• In the 1950s, a typical camera shot lasted 35-50 seconds; in the 1990s, it was five seconds.
• Commercials are even more frenetic, often switching images after just one second.
• Americans watch TV 28 hours a week, which is more time than they spend on pursuing their careers or reading (for themselves or to their children).

Further, with these facts in mind, how is a person's memory effected when they are desensitized? When people are beat over the head with violent images or corrupt politicians or the critical state of the environment, do they try to FORGET these problems or understand them more?

For example, people are aware that terrorists are crazy, but are they trying to understand why these people are that way? People know that the earth's climate is changing, but do they know the direct impact of, say, rising sea levels on their part of the world, or others? People know that we can't rely just on energy from oil forever, but do they know that if we use ethanol than world food prices will increase, as has been the case?

Basically, what I'm asking is what the heck DO we remember? Is it more? Less? Or more info with less detail (more awareness, less understanding???) How does the shortness of our attention effect what we remember 10-20-30 years down the line? I think this would be an interesting study to do. I've made a note to myself. If you're looking for a thesis, though, feel free to go for it. I look forward to you doing all the painstaking research and me just reading about it later on.

One final thing, the two articles I cited here are 17 and 7 years old. I wonder how absurdly short our attention spans are now.

Exactly how much housework does a husband create?

Finally, I have some research to back my claim, ha!

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Having a husband creates an extra seven hours a week of housework for women, according to a University of Michigan study of a nationally representative sample of U.S. families.

For men, the picture is very different: A wife saves men from about an hour of housework a week.

The findings are part of a detailed study of housework trends, based on 2005 time-diary data from the federally-funded Panel Study of Income Dynamics, conducted since 1968 at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

Read MORE.

URC investing in 'revolutionary but feasible' energy ideas

Michigan's University Research Corridor is investing up to $900,000 of its own resources in seed grants to speed the development of "revolutionary but feasible" alternative energy research. The URC, an alliance of U-M, Michigan State University and Wayne State University, will consider faculty proposals related to novel research in energy policy, materials (including nanomaterials), clean energy sources, transmission and storage of materials that is environmentally safe, cost-effective and secure. A panel of experts from the three universities will select grant recipients, giving preference to projects that show the best potential for feasibility and impact. The universities hope the seed funding will attract further interest from industry, government and foundations.

EPA to reopen area library amid controversy

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Chicago research library will re-open next month, 17 months after it shut down.

...

Federal budget cuts closed the Chicago library, regional libraries in Dallas and Kansas City, Kan., the national headquarters library in Washington, D.C., and a specialist chemical and pesticide library, also in Washington. Hours were reduced at four other regional libraries, leaving only three regional libraries without a cut in service.“We’ve called what’s gone on here sort of a self-lobotomy,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. He
is the founder of the group and a former California state government employee.

“Overall information is far less available to the public and to EPA’s own staff. There’s a lot less information and what’s there is a lot less accessible,” he said.

Recently, Congress approved an appropriations bill re-funding the library system.

Fountain of Youth discovered at Stanford University

Whoa, just kidding, there, old-timer. Very interesting article though:

Skin Aging Reversed In Mice By Blocking Action Of Single Protein
ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2007) — Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have reversed the effects of aging on the skin of mice, at least for a short period, by blocking the action of a single critical protein.

Read MORE.

Just in Time for Christmas: Knowledge

Before you go lay the smack down on some Christmas shopping for the kids, make sure to check out the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission website. This will provide shoppers with recall information and product safety, especially toys for young kids. Check it out.

Studies: Children obese due to a host of unhealthy pressures

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Unhealthy options and pressures influence nearly every part of children’s daily lives, according to studies released this week in a special supplement of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.

The national studies, which include work conducted at the University of Michigan, reveal that, in most middle and high schools across the nation, contracts with soft drink bottling companies give students easy access to sugary beverages.

Click on the blog title to read the entire article.

Silly human tapestry

In yet another research endeavor, I found some pretty strange titles for various community segments. I was researching Southfield's demographics and found people labeled as "Milk and Cookies," "In style," "Salt of the Earth," and "Midland." These are just 4 of 65 difference groupings. The "tapestry" is quite interesting because random things just come up under certain groups.

For example, apparently if you are a "Boomburb" (#04) you are more likely to read airline magazines. If you are under "Main Street, USA" (#24) you are likely to watch 7th Heaven. "NeWest" residents (#58) like to listen to Hispanic music. There's a whole bunch.

You can look at the poster, which isn't quite as wordy, HERE.

You can view the entire PDF manual in all it's glory HERE.

I looked through all of these things and thought Mr. Man and I fit best in segment #39, Young and Restless. Where do you fit in???

New U-M nanotechnology study will explore better immediate pain relief for soldiers injured in battle

U-M wins $1.3M award to test nanoparticles that may make a powerful painkiller easier to use in battle zones, and less likely to cause side effects.

Click on blog title to be directed to the entire article.

Online Resource Sharing: Is this allowed? Ethical? Great service? What?!?

The other day I was plowing through my pile of journals and newsletters and found a whole list of copyright sources. I will post the list in the future, but it served as an impetus for some pondering.

In addition to this list, I have found myself dipping into all the resources available to me. I work at the University of Michigan - Dearborn, so I have access to their online resources and databases. Additionally, I work at Southfield Public Library and naturally have access to their resources. Finally, I am a student at Wayne State University, so, well, you know the drill.

On a number of occassions I have used my long informational reach to access articles that my patrons or coworkers could not get without me (or without driving elsewhere or without going through ILL). I've also used multiple resources from other places for my own consultation endeavors.

The situations vary: sometimes it's a really wonderful patron that wants that obscure journal article. If you're a really nice patron and you just need a single article or something quick, I won't subject you to having to go to Wayne State, sign up for a computer and then use one of their filthy machines while a homeless person watches porn next to you. Good patrons deserve better.

Other times it's a coworker or client that needs some research done. Sometimes their research sources aren't quite as fabulous as mine.

Although I do research favors for people, I never (until now) publicized it. While looking through my unfortunately huge listserv message box, I found that someone actually posted that they needed an article - full citation and all. They even admitted their library has no subscription, but one of their patrons needed it.

So, my quandry was this: is it legal? Is it ethical? The answer is: neither. I looked it up and found a great discussion at the University of Texas-Austin. Not exactly the most exciting reading, but enough to show that I shouldn't be doing that other than for my own personal scholarly research and that patrons should be going through ILL.

I also found a lovely PDF entitled, Reproduction of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians. It's full of boring copyright mumb0 jumbo and excerpts from political discussions, etc. Pretty much everything you'd ever want to know about copyright as it relates to libraries and archives. Have fun with that.

Does this mean that I'll stop sharing my resources? Not until they take my access away ;) Am I really that wrong to provide excellent customer service? You know, I really can't help myself.

Video games - good for friends, bad for brain.

I found this little snippet in the Research section of my alumni newsletter:

The good news: Video gaming doesn't affect the time kids spend socializing. The bad news: It does affect the time they spend in school-related activities. A U-M study of 1,500 teens nationwide shows game players and non-game players spent the same amount of time with parents and friends. But compared with non-gamers, kids who played video games spent 30 percent less time reading and 34 percent less time doing homework. The teens kept diaries tracking the time spent playing video games, with parents and friends, reading and doing homework, and in sports and active leisure.