Library life day two

Yesterday I neglected to include a link to what the Library Day in the Life Project is all about:

The Library Day in the Life Project is coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates.

This site includes links to all the other people involved in the project:

http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/libday7
http://www.netvibes.com/librarianbyday#Round_6_Library_Day_in_the_Life_Project

I started the day conducting a data interview with one of our researchers in computer security.
This involved discussing several datasets the research centre holds that could possibly be shared with other researchers outside the centre. One dataset I heard about is what they call “honeypot” data that reveal patterns in security attacks. It was fascinating and I came away just a little bit worried about how secure any of us are online. Going by the laws of probability, despite our best efforts some malware will get through and do damage.

The data interview is one of the key roles of a research data librarian. The idea of the data interview is to gather as much information as possible about a research project and associated research dataset or data collection. This information (in our case) then gets written up and described and added to Research Data Australia (RDA) Australia's research data portal. The metadata schema used to described data in RDA is RIF-CS.

There are several elements to this work: one is using the skills a research or faculty librarian would have whereby you learn to understand the client’s research area. Another is having a sound understanding of research data and how that may differ across disciplines. Another is more a cataloguing/metadata librarian role whereby you use a defined metadata schema to describe the data.

I have been working on some research data training and seminars which I will talk about tomorrow…

Day in the life of a research data librarian

I had a late night last night, sitting up watching the conclusion of the Tour de France, witnessing history being made when Cadel Evans became the first ever Australian to win..…yeah go Cadel. It was so inspiring to see him cycling into Paris in the yellow jersey, with the BCM team all in red. With the 8 hour time difference between Europe and Western Australia the event finished after midnight our time. Then at 5am someone rang on my mobile…wrong number from someone in another time zone across the other side of the country. Still, I managed to start the day with a visit to the Joondalup Arena 50 metre indoor pool for a great swim. It’s winter here, so the pool is pretty quiet. At one stage there were just three of us with a lane to ourselves…bliss. The pool is about one kilometre from work, so I bring my breakfast and change of clothes and then head straight on to work.

At work the main activity today revolves around finish off the Seeding the Commons project. This is a national research data project funded by the ANDS (Australian National Data Service). The details about the project at Edith Cowan University (ECU) are here. There are similar projects running at most Australian universities and major research institutions.

This time last year I was getting ready to attend research data management training at the ANDS BootCamp which was held in Canberra in August 2010. Later on I was seconded to work on the project as a research data librarian. It has been a steep learning curve, but lot of fun. I have left my substantive job as the Faculty librarian for Education and Arts at ECU to become a research data librarian. Now, a year later, the project is winding up. We are at Week 25 of a 32 week project and the 3rd progress report is due on 12 August. More on this project and the work involved tomorrow.

The Woman in White

First of all a confession… I am not, strictly speaking, “reading” this book, but listening to an audio version. Audio books provide a really convenient way to increase your amount of reading, if you commute or spend time at the gym you can listen to the audio. Fortunately there are more and more excellent audio titles available through the public libraries in Perth and they are narrated by some fine actors.

At the moment I am “reading” The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Incredibly, The Woman in White has never been out of print since it first appeared in serial form in Victorian England (1860) and it still has readers in its thrall.

The narrative hook draws you into the story right in the beginning when the hero, Walter Hartright, comes across the mysterious woman in white late at night on a lonely road north of London. She stops him, appears agitated and asks strange questions. Later on our hero comes across some men who are searching for the woman, claiming has escaped from an asylum. Then the story moves to another location where Walter meets another woman in white. Is this a doppelganger? As the story develops, Hartright becomes a type of Victorian detective as he follows clues along the way to discover the truth about this mysterious woman: who is she and why was she so agitated, why is she on the run?

In many ways Wilkie Collins' novels were forerunners of contemporary crime fiction and they certainly influenced many current writers of crime and mystery. Collins most famous novel is The Moonstone (published 1868) which Dorothy L Sayers considered "probably the very finest detective story ever written". I plan to read The Moonstone next and I already have downloaded a free ebook copy onto my Kindle.

As an aside, Wilkie Collins was a great friend of Charles Dickens and he lead quite a sensational life for Victorian times.

My post for the July readit2001 Twitter #whodoneit

Searching the online library for known items

One of the findings of our user studies of Summon was that students struggled with finding "known items". Where they had been given an exact citation of, for example, a journal article they did not know where to start. This is probably not surprising ... "twas ever thus". Providing some basic sessions on recognising citation elements and referencing would help students in this area.

Another symptom of the searching known item problem at our library is that increasingly higher percentages of requests that come through our document delivery system are for items the library already holds.

A recent study from University of Nevada looked into this phenomenon in more detail. This appeared in a journal article in New Library World and is worth reading.

It's at DOI 10.1108/03074801111117050

Kress, N., Del Bosque, D & Ipri, T (2011). User failure to find known library items, New Library World, Vol. 112, 3/4, 150 - 170.

"Findings – Participants in the study failed to locate known items for multiple reasons, but from the usability testing and analysis three major areas emerged: finding the correct starting-point for the search, information not indexed for a selected search, and clicking on the call number link. The complexity of library resources was the main contributor to these failures. Participants expected library searching to behave like their other search experiences."

Social Media Competencies for Librarians

On Stephen Abrams' blog last year he wrote about the Top Ten Social Media Competencies for Librarians (& Teachers).

What are these competencies? Where have they come from? Have they been widely adopted?

Dean Giustini writing on The Search principle blog gives some more information: Top ten (10) social media competencies for librarians.

Murphy & Moulaison are advocating that “social media competencies” be recognised as a new set of literacies required for librarians who work in the Web 2.0 environment. They presented a paper at the ACRL 14th National Conference, Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend, Seattle, 2009. The PDF to the full paper is here.

The draft list of these social media competencies is:

• understand, explain and teach others about the main principles and trends of Web 2.0 (and Library 2.0)

• list major tools, categories and affordances of social networking

• apply social media to solve information problems, and communicate digitally with users

• use social networking sites for promotional, reference and instructional services in libraries

• navigate, evaluate and create content on social networking sites

• follow netiquette, conform to ethical standards, and interact appropriately with others online

• explain copyright, security and privacy issues on social media sites to colleagues and user communities

• understand the importance of identity and reputation management using social media

• explain related terminology such as collaboration 2.0, remix and open source

• renew social media competencies, advocate for institutional strategies and policies, and build an evidence base in social media

Murphy and Moulaison are advocating that we go beyond just gaining knowledge of how to use particular Web 2.0 technologies to gain an understanding of the changing information landscape in which librarians operate.

I think these are really useful competencies and have been thinking about how they can be applied. I'll like to see them more widely discussed.

My olive curing recipe

Olive Pickling Instructions

There are two stages in preparing olives. The first stage is all about getting rid of the bitterness and this takes about two months, less for the darker, black olives, while the second stage is where you start adding flavour.

First stage, involves soaking olives in water for a week and then brine for 6-8 weeks. Some people use caustic soda on the green olives, but I do the old fashioned recipe which uses salt only.

Here's what you do from woe to go:

Pick olives when the fruit begins to turn from plain green to pink and purplish black. After picking treat them straight away while they are still fresh and hard. Remove any soft or damaged olives and rinse in clean water in a bucket. Make a fine slit in the side of each olive, using a very sharp knife. This cutting will draw out the bitterness and will allow the water and salt soaking brine to penetrate the olive.

Place all olives in bowl with fresh water and make sure they are under the liquid. You can place a plate on top to keep the olives submerged. Pour the liquid away each day and replace with fresh water. After a week alter this routine so that the soaking liquid consists of 10% salt. To make this solution and ensure the salt is dissolved, bring the salt and water mixture to the boil and allow to cool before adding to the olives. I cook up a few litres of this solution and store it. The amount you need will depend on how many olives you have. Use this salt solution for soaking the olives and every three days or so change the salt water. Do this until the olives are no longer too bitter, which may take 6 to 8 weeks. Then the olives are ready for the second stage.

Second stage
Pour off and measure the last lot of water so that you will know the volume of salt brine that will be required. Measure that quantity of fresh, warm water into a pan and dissolve the salt, this time at the rate of 1/2 cup of salt to 10 cups of water. Place olives in clean sterilised bottles with some dried garlic, some chillies and a teaspoon of lemon juice per litre. Then pour the salt water brine over the olives they are completely submerged. Top up bottles with up to one centimetre of olive oil to stop air getting to the fruit and seal the lids on. No further preparation is required and the bottled olives will store for at least 12 months in a cool cupboard.

When you are ready to eat your olives, pour out the strong preserving solution and fill the jar with clean, cool water. Leave in the refrigerator for a further 24 hours. (The plain water leaches some of the salt back out of the olives.) At this stage you can also add any or all of the following flavourings: grated garlic, basil, oregano, chopped onion, red capsicum, lemon juice and lemon pieces. You can also use the olives just as they are, along with other things as a pizza topping.

Curing your own olives

Perth's Mediterranean climate makes olive growing ideal and many varieties of olive trees are grown in gardens here. But I am always amazed that many olives go unpicked. Do people just grow them for the lovely foliage? Probably. Well maybe it's not that surprising garden olives get left on the tree as the first time I tried to cure my garden olives, it was a total disaster. They were so bitter and ended up being thrown out. Back then I made two mistakes: (1) I was impatient and didn't wait long enough for the bitterness to go out of the olives and (2) I tried to do the green olives, which are more difficult to cure.




By the way green olives are NOT a different variety, but just unripe olives and they need special treatment. They are harder and more bitter. If you are a newbie/wannabee olive curer and want to give this a go, try first with the black ones, or with olives that are just turning pinkish dark, like the ones in the top photo. I actually picked these from someone's verge tree. I will post my olive curing recipe tomorrow.