How to avoid misunderstandings with e-mail

Earlier this week I sent out an e-mail to the METRO Librarians listserv announcing the next meeting of the Science Librarians Special Interest Group. I assume that it goes out to hundreds of recipients. Yesterday I received a very insulting e-mail about my meetings being boring with some weird people attending. It was sent by an assistant library director at a small college in Brooklyn. I felt the need to confront this person with a phone call.


She said that she meant to send it to someone internally about an unrelated matter. She apologized profusely about this and I accepted the apology. There are a few “lessons” that can be learned from this incident.

Always be careful of whom you are sending an e-mail. She replied to the wrong e-mail.

Before you even send an e-mail, think if it is the right form of communication. Very often you must speak to a person face to face or phone them. Sometimes sending an e-mail can be cowardly and create misunderstandings that could lead to animosity.

If you do send an e-mail, please use the same language and tone as if the person were standing in front of you. E-mail does have its place in business and personal communication, but it should not be misused, abused, or overused.  I must admit that there were times in the past that I used e-mail inappropriately, but I feel that I learned from my mistakes.

Big College Sports Do Affect Library Usage

On Sunday there was an article in the Education Life section of the New York Times titled How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life by Laura Pappano. She quotes from the following book:

Clotfelter, Charles T. Big-time Sports in American Universities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Print.

“During March Madness library patrons with universities with teams in the tournament viewed 6% fewer articles a day as long as their team was in contention.When a team won an upset or close game, article access fell 19 percent the day after the victory. Neither dip was made up later with increased downloads."

2 Library Instruction Classes During the First Week of Classes

It was unusual that during the first week of the spring semester I gave two classes. On Thursday I gave lecture to Chemical Engineering 396 as I have done for several semesters. There were 3 parts to this lecture:

• Introduction to the literature of chemistry and chemical engineering
• Scifinder Scholar
• Scopus and other resources

For the first time since I first taught this course, the professor attended most of the lecture. I suggested that she do this since last semester the students were very inattentive. I had two “Murphy’s Law” moments during this lecture:

• The computer installed the Windows Update and rebooted during the lecture. I was able to continue the lecture without the Powerpoint during the rebooting.
• The training passwords for Scifinder Scholar did not work and I had to contact Chemical Abstracts who reset the passwords.

All’s well that ended well at least. The students seemed attentive and interested in my lecture.

For the first time I taught a class to students of Science, Technology and the Environment. Their assignment is to find information on the environmental effects of the Keystone Pipeline. There were about 100 students in the class making it by far the largest group that I have ever addressed. It was the first time I used a microphone during a library instruction class.

Random Thoughts at the Start of the Spring Semester

It is the first day of the Spring semester and of course we are getting the usual questions about textbooks and students forgetting their computer passwords.  Kate Wiggins joined the reference staff at the NJIT Library. We all wish her the best as she starts her new position. I remember that I was anxious when I first came to NJIT.

There is an article in the New York Times about the proposed Research Works Act backed by the Association of American Publishers. It would forbid the NIH to require that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. It seems to be a battle in the war between subscription based journals and the open access movement.

In protest of the proposed anti-piracy act  the English version of the Wikipedia is down today.  However, I was told that the iPhone version of the Wikipedia is working.

Joel Bloom is Appointed President of NJIT

When I first came to NJIT in 1992, the library reported to Joel Bloom when he was Vice President for Academic and Student Services.  I heartily congratulate Dr. Bloom on his appointment.  The official announcement from the Board of Trustees may be found at http://www.njit.edu/about/boards/trustees/pdf/2012/2012-01-10-bot-announcement.pdf

Short Summary of the 2012 VALE/NJ ACRL/NJLA CUS Users' Conference

VALE , an acronym for Virtual Academic Learning Environment, is a consortium of college libraries in New Jersey. Every year in January there is a meeting on the Busch Campus of Rutgers. There were 295 attendees at this year’s meeting from 45 of the 53 member libraries. This blog entry is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of the meeting. I am just summarizing the sessions that I attended to help me remember what I learned. Hopefully, this summary will be useful to librarians reading it.

Brian Mathews, Associate Dean for Learning and Outreach at the Virginia Tech Libraries, was the keynote speaker whose address was titled Startup Style: Elements of an Entrepreneurial Librarian. He stated that libraries should be entrepreneurial and learn from the start up culture. He emphasized the importance of innovation and said that both frontline and back office people should push for innovation. He felt that in academic libraries there was too much assessment and not enough innovation.

There were 3 time slots set aside for breakout sessions. Nobody can be at two places at once so I decided to attend the three sessions about the VALE Open Source ILS Project. The goal of this project is to create a single-instance shared library system for all VALE libraries. In the morning session Tim McGeary of Lehigh and Michael Winkler of the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated the acquisitions module of the system. In the first afternoon session the members of the VALE OLS Implementation Task Force (VOIT) demonstrated two of the Discovery Tools that are being evaluated for the OPAC. The two were XC (extensible catalog) and Vufind. They should how these tools moved the OPAC into the next generation by allowing it to meet Web 2.0.

In the final afternoon session I served on a panel with three other librarians to discuss the benefits and challenges of collaboration in this Open Source ILS Project. In my role representing the Reference Services Committee I discussed how it may be difficult to reach a consensus among all parties devising the system. Also there would be difficulty in fulfilling the different needs of 53 libraries in the consortium.
The lunch hour was productive since the Reference Services Committee held its meeting.

Of course a large meeting is a good place to reconnect with old colleagues who once worked at the NJIT Library and who have moved on to other positions. It was also nice to meet socially with colleagues who are also Facebook friends. I am hoping that Powerpoint presentations from sessions that I missed will be posted.