I noted Aaron Schmidt’s points on IM in libraries previously, but what I didn’t say then was how certain I was that popular instant messaging clients like AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo!’s or Google’s are far superior to the so-called virtual reference products. Why? They’re free, our patrons are comfortable with them, and they work (three things that can’t be said about VR products). Ah, heck, just take a look at what Michael Stephens was saying about them last week (as quoted by Teresa Koltzenburg at ALA TechSource):

“Back in 2002, my library jumped into the virtual reference game, and we wrote a gigantic check to an unnamed VR company. We spent the summer doing intensive training. I was training at that time at my library, and I designed a four-session, four-hour-apiece training course to get people comfortable with this huge, scary thing that was virtual reference.”

According to Michael, after the large initial investment made by his library in the VR product, plus probably another $5,000 on the training, and the staff time spent promoting it, his library’s virtual reference service, via the vendor-supplied software, “fell flat on its face.” He explains, “After you pulled your users into this Java-enabled, chat queue, they got the message, something like, ‘Hold on. The library will be right with you.’ Then the whole thing would crash. What kind of message were we sending with that one?”

IM, for SJCPL, was meant to be a temporary VR fix, but as of today, says Michael, “It’s permanent. We cancelled that contract on the unnamed VR product, said ‘good-bye,’ and today we use IM. I can’t tell you enough how great it is.”

Perhaps I like this story because it gives me another chance to bang the drum on my not invented here story, but the point is that none of this need be expensive or complex. And while I’m tempted to suggest you ask the kids in the young adult section about it, the truth is that AIM is larger than that, it’s just another facet of our ballooning internet use.

AIM, aol instant messenger, change, changing modes of communication, communication, communication technology, im, instant messaging, modes of communication, aim, virtual reference, library, libraries, reference desk, reference, future libraries, library 2.0, lib20

There’s a bit of discussion of AIM’s role in personal communications over at Remaining Relevant. I mention it here because I’ve been thinking about this lately.

We’re seeing some great shifts in our modes of communication. Take a look at how “webinar” technologies have changed sales forces. The promise is lower costs and faster response time, but it also challenges our expectations and the skills of the salesperson. Now imagine the generation of kids who are growing up with AIM entering the workforce. Imagine how much more effectively and naturally they’ll be able to communicate remotely (and also imagine how they’ll probably not tolerate today’s mostly one-way “webinars”).

IM will significantly rearrange the communications landscape, even if it may not completely replace any previous mode. My worry is my doubt about my ability to communicate effectively and naturally in the communication mode that is so common to a generation just younger than mine.

aim, im, instant messaging, aol instant messenger, changing modes of communication, modes of communication, change, communication, communication technology

I talk a lot about the Google Economy here, and how that and other ideas are driving changing modes of communication. Today I learned of arXiv. Henry Farrell describes it at CrookedTimber:

[I]t’s effectively replaced journal publication as the primary means for physicists to communicate with each other. Journal publication is still important – but as an imprimatur, a proof of quality, rather than a way to disseminate findings to a wider audience.

This is news on its own, but what Farrell was really reporting was that arXiv now supports trackbacks and pingbacks. These technologies play an important role in fostering and tracking online communication, and in the Google Economy. “[T]his strikes me as a Very Big Deal indeed for academic blogging” he says, and he’s right. It’s a big flashing sign that modes of communication are changing in academia, it’s a sign that there a bunch of physicists who get it. And with all that, one has to assume that standards of promotion and tenure will change too. Is a well received pre-pub in arXive as important as for a print publication? What role does the online response, the trackbacks, the paper’s position in the Google Economy play in such evaluations?

This seems to me to be the nucleus of something like the new approach to academic publishing that John Holbo [link added --Casey] has advocated, in which blogs and bloglike tools become an integrated part of academia, creating conversation around interesting recent papers, filtering the good ones from the not-so-good ones etc etc. I can see potential problems down the line (trackback spam, attempts to game the system etc) – but the promise that this holds for physicists (and for non-physicists when we get around to creating arxiv equivalents) seems to me to be nothing short of extraordinary.

tags: pingback, academic publishing, arxiv, blogging, blogs, disseminate, google economy, journal publication, modes of communication, trackback

Ken (I wish he had a blog to link to) pointed out Bloggers Need Not Apply in the Chronicle Of Higher Ed over the weekend. The story is to some a highly cautionary tale:

A candidate’s blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant’s blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger’s tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.

…and there’s more juice in the full story.

I had a lot of thoughts in response to the piece, including some scatter about changing modes of communication, the Google Economy, and whatnot, but in the middle of it I stumbled across Ryan Eby’s post about the MIT Weblog Survey. Upon completing the survey, respondents are allowed to view their standings in the preliminary results.

That’s where the graph above comes from. It turns out that of the 38,220 respondents so far, 88.71% report blogging about personal matters 20% of the time or more. I claimed that I posted on personal matters less than 10% of the time here at MaisonBisson (hopefully I correctly self evaluated that).

With those numbers, it’s easy to make the leap to presuming that the Chronicle author was seeing a lot of personal detail — much more than I would be comfortable with here.

David Rothman picked up on this story at TeleRead, where he sees some big upsides in blogging. For my part, I believe that blogging is the most open form of social bookmarking and that bloggers play a vital role in helping Google and others properly rank and organize the world’s information. While the Chronicle piece makes a good point about being careful about what we say and how we say it, I hope nobody sees it as an admonition against blogging.

Update: Had we known before hand what we’d get from TV and radio as those technologies were developing, we might have smartly given up. Technology, be it in the form of newspapers, blogs, or broadcasting can do little to change the problem that has troubled us since the birth of language: very little of what is written or said is worth paying attention to — even here at MaisonBisson.

That said, the technology is enabling new and different modes of communication. It’s worth alerting readers that old-media expectations don’t work with blogs. It’s not the publishing that matters, it’s the linking. The vetting process is in how and where a blog post is cited and the value is in the distributed conversations that develop.

tags: blogger, bloggers, chronicle of higher ed, many2many, modes of communication, personal matters, survey, weblog