Thursday was my first day at the iSchools iConference 2010, and I really enjoyed the day (although I was exhausted by the end of it!). Below are some things that interested me that might also interest you.

-Presenters in the first Diversity paper presentation made some interesting points. According to a University of Washington presenter, many Central American countries have made advances in ICT access for persons with disabilities, especially in Ecuador, but so far recognition of accessibility issues has focused on lower body mobility disabilities, largely ignoring other accommodation needs. Blind users in particular face difficulties, since the software they require to successfully navigate the computer interface is expensive and difficult for community technology centers to afford. Unemployment is very high among disabled populations in Latin America, although some quotas are in place to assure that employers hire people with disabilities (I believe this was in Ecuador). However, the presenter admit that often only public employers comply with these, and although having a job does improve the workers’ quality of life, this quota often means that people with disabilities are given jobs that are below their skill level, since they are awarded the employment for their disabled status, not for the technology skills they have worked hard to attain.

-Wolfram|Alpha is an amazing website! I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it before. To put it simply, the website dynamically computes (or calculates) information based on users’ queries, and the ambitious goal of its design is to make “all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.” It’s particularly fascinating to me because of the components of the site that have been designed to use linguistic disambiguation to understand what the user is asking when other possibilities are possible from the same text (such as with homonyms, acronyms or abbreviations) and the real-time data that is provided for many types of questions, from up-to-date weather to current star positions. It seems to me from the brief demonstration that Stephen Wolfram gave during his presentation that many uses of this site are related to mathematics, science, finance, and geography, but it is a fascinating tool, especially since access is free and open to anyone with a computer and Internet connection. I encourage you to give it a try!
-I attended a “fishbowl” presentation, which I had never even heard of before. It seems that the exact format and way it’s conducted can change, but at this particular session there were 5 chairs in the middle of the room, set up in a small circle, and then a larger outside circle of about 15-20 chairs. Two of the presenters sat in the inner circle and invited two volunteers to join them. One chair was left open – this was so that, when a new volunteer from the audience wished to join the group, all that person needed to do was sit down, and one of the other participants would stand up and return to the outer circle. Only the inner circle may speak, encouraging complete attentiveness to the small conversation at the center. There were many interesting effects of this arrangement: 1) all participants really did listen intently to the conversation, and not a single person was using a computer or texting/browsing on a phone during the whole session, 2) participants mentioned afterward that they were actively listening and constantly formulating their own questions and assessing the flow of the conversation, to ascertain if it would be better to jump in “now or later,” in order to make their discussion points as relevant as possible to the other participants’ comments, and 3) participants had much more of an opportunity to have their questions addressed than in the few minutes which remain after many paper presentations. Of course, paper presentations are a different kind of session, more like a lecture than an open discussion, with a different focus and format. Of course presenters who give papers strive to provide an opportunity for participants to ask and get answers to their questions. However, after my first introduction to this discussion possibility, I am curious about the ways in which this may be used in other settings. Perhaps it would be interesting to conduct one of our CI classes this way at least once, such as on a day when one or more students are presenting on a specific article or chapter and wish to allow for intimate discussion of the author’s points and applications to the class and students’ own future work? Maybe we can even picture ways in which this model might be interesting in some types of community meetings or other gatherings.
It’s so awesome to be exposed to so many new ideas at once! Exhilarating and exhausting…I think I’ll sleep well again tonight.

-Robin Duple

Below is an interview with Emily Petty Puckett, a second year master’s student from the University of Michigan iSchool, who will be a panelist for the wildcard session, “Teach, Learn, Engage: Reflections on Community Informatics Curriculum Development” which will take place from 10:30am-noon on February 6, 2010 at the iSchools Conference.

These are her thoughts on Community Informatics (CI) curriculum development.

What expectations did you have in regard to the coursework, extracurricular activities, research, and professional development that you would be involved with when you started the CI program?

I expected this program to provide a comprehensive mixture of experiential learning through extracurricular opportunities with the Community Information Corps (CIC), project-based courses and opportunities for engagement in the Southeast Michigan region. I expected professors teaching in this specialization to introduce students to a broad range of theories that have supported the community informatics professional field, be approachable for career advising, and provide a broad range of opportunities to develop skills in the various subfields of community informatics. I planned on being involved in the CIC as part of my professional development while at the School of Information (SI) and I expected the Kellogg endowed chair to be freely available for consultation and support within the administrative structure of SI. I have been able to participate in research with my adviser and several CI students are engaged in research with professors at our school.

What methods have worked in your experience, and what can be improved upon?

The professors in our specialization do represent a broad swath of professional and theoretical development in the field of CI, including international development, health, open access initiatives, e-governance and e-communities, and archives and information institutions. Our career development office provides a vast amount of support for professional development and supports the CIC’s service and local project partnerships.

Our CIC is currently very student-driven, with little continuity for projects, support, and institutional memory beyond the two year MSI academic term and this presents problems for sustained engagement with communities, partnerships and project opportunities. We currently do not have any mechanisms built in for CIC students to expect to be able to build long-term projects into their degree program that will support the momentum of their individual programs. We also do not have a core set of classes that introduce students to the CI specialization, instead relying heavily on the student group to recruit and manage students’ expectations and interests. We could benefit from a sustained faculty or staff member to “champion” the CIC, in effect, help the students to manage it.

Do you feel the coursework and activities in CI have helped you to learn about the particular needs of diverse communities and how to address them?

Yes. I have taken Information Use in Communities, which was a course that combined historical perspective of community technology centers, information centers, and public access to the internet through public libraries, theory of how to approach information needs in a variety of settings (our focus for the term was on immigrants and their information needs and uses), and case studies of particular experiences with developing information centers in a variety of settings. We developed models for engagement and conducted our own research into information services and specific populations through the course. I have also taken a digital government class that focused on e-governance development, standards, treatment and use in a variety of countries, both developed and developing, local and internationally implemented. Again, this course was a combination of context, theory and practice and students developed poster presentations of methods of information delivery in a civic context. Finally, I am currently enrolled in a course that specifically addresses developing countries and their information and information infrastructure and policy needs and opportunities. There are several other courses I have not been able to take that focus on other populations and activities.

How are you approaching this matter in the Community Informatics Corps Seminar?

Our CIC seminar, which is held every fall, provides further exposure to the variety of professionals working in our field or adjacent ones. The CIC seminar provides students with a brief introduction (through external speakers) of a variety of engagement opportunities and populations addressed through this field. Each year, we invite professionals from the field to talk with the students about their professional experiences and training, and the content of the CIC seminar changes with student interest and input (for example, at the end of the seminar students give feedback on what topics they would like to hear more about and give suggestions for additional topics to address in the next year’s seminar). Students are given the opportunity to join the speaker after the seminar to continue discussing the issues brought up in class and are also given time during the semester to discuss the course with their peers in class. We also occasionally introduce opportunities for engagement in the course, for example the Fall 2009 seminar included researching and developing policy recommendations for President Obama’s National Education Technology Plan in part of an effort to increase students’ experience with policy-making as well as to interact with a working committee that was simultaneously developing a policy for Obama that was presented in January 2010.

-Suzanne Im

In one of my earlier blog posts I posed some very serious questions about community informatics and its effectiveness in solving the social ills we see in our communities. It is now about three months after that post and, I must say, I still have many of those same questions. While I have not found the answers to those questions, a recent class discussion has brought about a very simple, yet vital realization.

This discussion took place in my Inquiry Based Learning course, a course that discusses a mode of learning in which teaching/learning is centered on student questions or interest. This week we talked about educators whose philosophies influenced this sort of learning.

One of these educators was Paulo Freire, a Brazilian who taught working class citizens and rural peasants how to read by using teaching material that related to their experiences. Freire’s philosophy was one that encouraged both the students and teachers to be equal partners in the pursuit of knowledge. My class discussed whether or not there were examples of Freire’s philosophy being applied in the U.S., and it dawned on me that community informatics could be an example of this philosophy.

In the week to come, we’ll tell each other about awesome projects that we’ve been involved in, discuss the results of our CI-based research, and share new ideas related to CI that we hope to explore in the future. However, I hope that as we look at the impact of the iSchools Movement, we’ll remember that the biggest influence that CI can and has had in local communities is to transform community members’ thoughts on technology by helping them to build an understanding of technology and what it can do for those communities.

We can argue about sustainability, tangible results, problems in the practice or research aspects of CI, or the complex relationships that must be formed in order for CI to happen. But, at the bottom of it all, the most important result is that we change how people think and what they feel about technology. If we’ve done that, then we’ve started a process that will hopefully lead to community members having the tools to communicate, collaborate, and raise solutions to problems in the communities where they reside.

-Noelle Williams

Google Wave is a tool intended for real-time communication and collaboration, providing a shared space where you can discuss, work, and communicate with friends and colleagues through text, videos, photos, maps, and other widgets. This has significant implications for any social, educational, commercial or governmental body that depends upon cross-group collaboration, especially if this mode is poised to be the next evolution of email communication. Google initially doled out 100,000 invites for users to preview Wave, and people clambered for this exclusive opportunity. However, I have found the public response to be less than laudatory, with the majority of invitees expressing confusion over how to “wave.” I finally sat down for a few hours to explore Google Wave for myself and found that despite the difficulties, Wave has potential worth pursuring.

Pros:
Google Wave is like a wiki on steroids; multiple people can add/edit/delete a wave simultaneously, in real time. This is a great collaborative solution to me, as I recently worked with some colleagues on a regular wiki that became extremely finicky when we all tried to edit at the same time.

Google Wave encourages transparency. Rather than continually keeping track of who is included in an email thread for a group project, simply adding members once to a wave will ensure everyone is in the loop on the project’s progress. The Playback feature provides visual markers, allowing each member in a wave to see how the wave has evolved, and who has contributed to it.

Google Wave is broadly applicable. From planning a trip to Turkey to ensuring the dispense of H1N1 flu vaccine, there seems to be no limit to how you can use it. Review the Lifehacker article on Google Wave’s Best Use Cases for ideas on how others hope to wave.

Google Wave is “semantic.” It pulls data from other sources, or at least seems to have the potential to do so.

Cons:
There is no quick and dirty way to learn how to wave. One must read through the help guide or find some other means of instruction. A Wave enthusiast further pointed out to me that the tool is in Preview, not in Beta. Apparently, a product under Preview still has many components under development (Example: the Wave Settings page is not even live yet), whereas in Beta a tool is more or less complete but undergoing usability testing. This misunderstanding seems to be a prime reason behind disgruntled users who expect Wave to “just work.”

The user interface on Google Wave is not too intuitive. For instance, when I wanted to edit an existing wave, I had to click on a digital clock on the top right of the wave. Again, this can be attributed to the fact that wave is in Preview.

On my netbook, Wave runs sluggishly due to heavy resource use. Those who want to take full advantage may need newer, more powerful machines for each component to work seamlessly. If Google does not find a way to make Wave more efficient, there will be limitations on which populations can collaborate on Google Wave, depending on access to necessary machines.

Cool features:
Embedded Extensions / Gadgets provide another dimension to the wave experience. Users can engage in video chat, play Sudoku, plan a night out with the map gadget, or take a poll, all in the same space.

You can perform Google web, image, and video searches without opening a new window.

Robots, automated participants in Wave, can modify the wave’s contents, add or remove participants, and create new blips and new waves. Example: A Robot called Rosy can dissolve language barriers by automatically translating a conversation between two people who type in two different languages.

The lists I’ve made above are by no means exhaustive. I encourage people to continue to explore Google Wave and offer feedback, so ultimately we can all benefit from the improved functionality. For those who are daunted at the prospect of watching Google’s 80-minute developer’s preview for Google Wave, Epipheo’s clear, 2-minute introduction, along with Google’s highlight of 15 Wave features are good starting points.

In our Community Informatics Concepts course this semester, we reached out to various community organizations to offer computer classes and technology support. Class discussion revealed many students’ surprise at the number of people who need help on “basic” computer operations that they took for granted. Relating this to the case of Google Wave, we’re on the wrong side of the digital divide, and it’s not fun. Perhaps once we’ve mastered Google Wave we’ll look back at the Preview era and smile at our own naivete.

-Suzanne Im

Tired of the winter holiday? Let Elaine Hicks take you back to Thanksgiving with her experience at the turkey reference desk.

I made it through Thanksgiving day which was actually two back-to-back shifts: the late shift on Wednesday and an early shift on Thursday. Normally when we arrive on T’giving Day, there is a bevy of busy-ness: camera crews and talking head-types everywhere, camera cables, lights, and action. Oh, and lots of coffee and good food. This year..silence, or rather, just the din of our own voices. Our supervisor explained that the TV organizations have laid off the cameramen!  This recession is lapping at my doorstep.

We’re like a sorority. We make treats for each other. This year, someone decorated an iced chocolate cookie with a Reeses cup so that it looked like a pilgram hat. One of our former home economists sent us a pound cake which she does every year since she moved to Birmihgham to work for Southern Living magazine.

I have averaged 173 calls (22 calls/hour) on Thanksgiving day over the last five years, so this year was probably no different. I began the day with a prayer for patience, reminding myself that I am there precisely because people are confused, angry in some cases, and generally uptight, not because they want to chat. I spoke with one woman from New Jersey who identified herself as a single girl just trying to participate in the holiday spirit but we ruined her day because her smoked turkey did not have the gravy packet (a packaging error).  One woman initially put the bird in the oven. When it did not appear to be done, she put it in the convection oven. Still unsure of it’s doneness, she cut it up and put it in the microwave at which point she called us. I advised her to check the thigh near the joint and if it was 180, to consider the poor thing done and commence with eating already. I was invited over to one gentleman’s home who lives nearby the call center (which I politely declined). The darndest call was from a woman who could not understand my suggestion to make a ring out of foil (to function as a make-shift flat rack). I switched from the description of “ring” as in “wedding ring” to “bagel”. Then we were talking about a foil bagel for a while but she admitted that she just really could not understand what I was talking about and we had to gently wish one another well and agreed to sever communication. I spoke with the IT manager of Highlights Magazine for Children (of 36 years) who told me how great it was to work with a company with such a great moral ethic and regard for humanity and children specifically. One woman asked me about the bumps on the skin of the drumstick, claiming that it had Turkey Herpes. Later in the call I caught her laughing and she revealed that she had been drinking Mimosas with her aunt all day. I told her that I thought she was kidding me and we laughed together (I wonder how that dinner turned out?)

So these inquiries run the gamut and the challenge is to figure out what the caller really wants to know and then answer in an artful way so as to impart enough instruction to help the caller prepare a safe bird..and move on to the next call.

Do you think I should include this as reference work on my resume?

Within the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois community informatics as a type of applied field has increasingly become associated with public libraries. While I laud this imagined integration of CI into public libraries, I am not convinced this is enough of an integration between CI as research and CI as a practice within professional activity.

Members of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), a network of individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer us for shaping how we learn, teach, communicate, create, and organize our local and global communities, have recently blogged about Democratizing Knowledge within the academy:
http://www.hastac.org/forums/hastac-scholars-discussions/democratizing-knowledge-digital-humanities

Their insights illustrate that to imagine that within library and information science the proper (or natural place) for community informatics is within the public library is to unnecessarily limit CI’s impact on the formation of the 21st century professional community, and to continue to reinforce an artificial divide between academic and public librarianship (and between the academy and the public).

As the bloggers write “practitioners of the digital humanities can also democratize knowledge by collaborating with their community partners to produce public scholarship, often through action research, experiential learning, and civically engaged pedagogy, all of which ultimately re-situate and reformulate expertise. According to Teresa Mangum (faculty at University of Iowa and co-director of the Obermann Institute on Public Engagement), as with new information technologies, public scholarship can radically redefine who finds, owns, and gives knowledge. Put this way, the goal is for practitioners to forward research and pedagogy while serving the community in a way that is a truly reciprocal partnership.”

If this new paradigm represents the future, the cutting-edge, of research, it seems to me that to train academic librarians as having as their primary (and only) audience those who are University faculty and students is to misunderstand the attempts, using digital technology, to integrate the knowledge of all into the knowledge-production that traditionally seemingly only occurred within the academy.

In any case, I encourage you to join the conversation HASTAC has started. In a professional school where most of the faculty members do not have deep ties in the professional, practitioner cultures of libraries, archives and museums, ultimately it falls upon us as students to imagine how CI can help us to re-define what it means to be a responsible professional in the information age.

What would community informatics for the academic librarian look like? Here are a few tentative ideas, I would love to hear more and to learn more about examples:

1) Academic librarians could fight to ensure that institutional repositories remain open to the contributions of community knowledge. As academics increasingly engage in community engagement librarians can serve as advocates for opening University server space to communities in a way in which most University IT departments are currently uncomfortable because of security concerns related to opening University servers to community contributions. If I am not mistaken some of these tensions and conflicts flared to the surface in the creation of the Community Informatics Multimedia Archive (http://www.communityinformaticsprojects.com/CIMA/). In these conflicts librarians can serve as advocates for opening the new tools in knowledge creation and centralization (institutional repositories) to all.

2) Having IT technology that can be checked out for community use. Often academic libraries have more advanced resources and technology than do public libraries. Enabling the sharing of these tools would help close the divide between academy and public and also make academics interested in community engagement see the academic librarian as a valuable ally in their projects. For some insights into how this could be done see the Historic Filipinotown Project sponsored, in part, by UCLA: http://hypercities.com/pdub/about/

3) Encouraging community use of academic library resources. In most cases the general public DOES have access to academic library resources, but do they feel comfortable utilizing these rights? If not, how much of this is the fault of the academic librarian and what could he or she do to correct this? Currently in the discourse of academic librarianship there is a lot of rhetoric on bibliographic instruction, but how many academic librarians are engaging in BI in local schools, in churches, and in other community organizations, to show and encourage them to take advantage of what the University library has available for them.

–Noah Lenstra

For over a year now I have been a member of the online community known as Reddit.  The site is a massive virtual repository for individuals to share interesting links to images, articles, videos, etc., and provides a space where members can ask others questions which range anywhere from getting suggestions for good breakfast cereals to asking for advice on how to deal with an impending divorce.  The website has thousands of subscribers and has become an incredible source for information sharing.  It should be noted that the foundation of reddit is strongly rooted in geek culture.

In November, one ambitious redditor came up with the concept of a secret santa for the online community.  Through an incredible amount of effort and support from other members the reddit secret santa project was launched.  Over the course of less than a month over 4000 individuals signed up to receive a match which would give them the name and address of another participant in the event.  Users were asked to spend at least $15 on gift and shipping to send their “santee” a Christmas gift.  When I came across the project during my daily perusal of the site I was hesitant to sign up.  I’ve long been taught that sharing personal information such as a home address over the internet is something to fear.  However, I realized that my address is already available online through internet searches and that I felt fairly comfortable that my information would only be shared with one other person.  I put my name into the hat and eagerly awaited my match.

On December 1^st the matches were handed out and the whole project immediately grew into something amazing.  In less than a week users were sending gifts across the globe which were then posted by recipients to an online gift gallery.  It became apparent that many of the participants in the project went above and beyond expectations by looking into their matches’ Facebook profiles, Google name searches, past postings on Reddit, etc. to learn more about them and find the perfect gift.

As of December 17, 2009 the statistics for the project are as follows:

• Participants: 4391
• Gifts sent: 4634 (some users sent multiple gifts)
• Gifts received: 1734
• Total spent: $166,375.02
• Most spent on one gift: $4,017.05 (yes you read that right)
• Average spent on gift: $36.43

As you can see from the statistics this has turned into an impressive display of internet generosity.  It’s incredible to witness and be a part of an online community transitioning its interactions into the physical world.  Not only have users sent gifts to each other, a variety of meet-ups have happened across the globe where redditors came together to open their gifts.  Unfortunately, there was no meet-up planned for Champaign-Urbana, but according to the statistics map 17 users from the area participated in the exchange.  I also noticed a decent amount of Illini gear showing up in the gift gallery.

I received my gift in the mail a few days ago.  It turns out I was matched to a Redditor who lives all the way in Denmark.  It’s amazing to think that some stranger in Denmark spent time looking for a gift he wanted me to enjoy.  His gift to me was a first-edition autographed copy of Isabelle Allende’s Aphrodite: A memoir of the senses.  The book is just lovely with beautiful illustrations throughout; I look forward to reading it over Christmas break.  My santee lives in Washington so I sent him some handknit gloves which I knit from organic cotton and a $15 gift certificate to Amazon because he mentioned in one of his comments on Reddit that he owns a Kindle.

Some of the more exciting gifts have been as follows:

• A brand new guitar and amp
• A Kindle
• An Iphone
• $1500 cash
• 3 undisclosed gifts worth $2,000
• 1 undisclosed gift worth $4,000
• Lots of thoughtful, beautiful and amazing handmade items

This has been a wonderful experience which I look forward to participating in again next year.  Hopefully, the overall spirit of this year’s exchange rings true once again in 2010.

To learn more about the project visit: http://redditgifts.com/

To read news released on the exchange follow these links:

Associated Press: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iQvgUVAR5OrpeNWBBIv-Win5j3NAD9CKODT01

Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/15/AR2009121504136.html

ABC news: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=9357003

-Susan Rodgers

As a future library/info professional you may want to weigh in on the decisions and policies your main professional body, ALA, is taking. Please consider reading ALA’s new “Librarianship and Traditional Cultural Expressions: Nurturing Understanding and Respect.” It includes within it a lot of assumptions about what communities are, and what community information is, that deserves comment.

http://wo.ala.org/tce/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/TCE-Principles-Draft-5-Oct09.pdf

Some quotes:
“This cycle begins with the understanding of the cultural meaning and context in which these expressions are created. Library activities relating to TCEs must recognize and respect these meanings and contexts within the overall mission of the library to serve as a forum for free expression and access to ideas for all people of the community the library serves.”
“Libraries endeavor to develop access guidelines and protocols that respect traditional cultures and fulfill the libraryʼs obligation to serve as a community forum for ideas and information.”

As some of my colleagues have noted, this TCE document articulates a fairly stark us/them dichotomy that overlooks the hybridity of most modern cultural communities. Acknowledging such a hybridity makes the nonchalant use of loaded works like tradition and heritage problematic, at best. The TCE document still also insists on the maintenance of community information outside of communities (what they call “respectful caretaking”). They also note that it does not do enough to acknowledge why we need this document in the first place. In other words, it continues what I have termed the “mythic” version of library history where libraries are (and always have been) forces of good for all, overlooking the ways in which libraries have been forces of oppression and have contributed to structural racisms around the world. This lacuna is odd since seemingly it was this realization that prompted ALA to draft this document in the first place. My opinion is that there is a reluctance to re-assess the profession from a critical perspective, and that such a re-assessment is necessary to truly make change.

Furthermore, the document also touches on digitization issues:
“Libraries continue to play an active role in using technology to preserve and
provide access to intellectual content. Librarians should, when possible, share this
expertise with those communities who choose to preserve and access their own
cultural heritage.
Libraries should be sensitive to the fact that digitizing traditional cultural
expressions could expose the content to a world beyond the boundaries of the
library, and makes it potentially more vulnerable to misuse.”

Since the main focus of digitiziation initiatives is in archives and academic libraries, then, this quote suggests that community informatics could contribute to this discourse. I write this because I find the community informatics = public libraries discourse (for example during the last LEEP advising session there was a “Community Informatics and Public Libraries session”) that has emerged here at GSLIS problematic as it misses the chance to explore the broader application of community informatics across all spheres of Library and Information Science.

In any case, read, and make comments. Send them to Carrie Russell, Director, Program on Public Access to Information
American Library Association Office for Information Technology Policy
crussell@alawash.org

–Noah Lenstra

Last Thursday I attended a brownbag event on the topic of community archives, co-sponsored by the Community Informatics Initiative and the Society of American Archivists, UIUC student chapter. Noah Lenstra, who recently graduated with a Master’s of Science in LIS and is now pursuing a Certificate of Advanced Study, introduced Ms. Anke Voss and the student speakers, who were all participants in Professor Voss’s Administration and Use of Archival Materials course this semester. The students talked about their experiences with the community partners with which they worked as part of the class. The assignment involved talking with members of the organization and surveying each organization’s records and record-keeping system, as well as their archival needs, and applying what they had learned in the class. The main purpose of the brownbag was to allow the students to talk about how the experience informed their understanding of what a community archives project could or should look like.

One of the most interest parts of the discussion for me was when the student presenters talked about how their approaches to beginning archiving or working with existing archives had to be tailored to meet the needs of that particular organization and/or how materials had been collected in the past. For example, Rebecca Crist talked about how working with the Cunningham Children’s Home was actually working with two separate entities: the medical care facility, and the long-term housing facility and school for residents. Because of the private nature of medical information, much of what is archived about the medical facility is for the use of members of the community within the facility only. However, just because it is not open to the public does not mean that it’s not a community archive. Aaisha Haykal explained that archiving with the Central Illinois Mosque and Islamic Center required a somewhat different approach because it is common practice for some records to be kept in members’ homes, and so the existing system is very decentralized, with it sometimes being difficult to discern what is actually being held and where. Ilona Matkovszki, who worked with the Champaign-Urbana Independent Media Center, mentioned that sometimes people beginning community archives projects must cope with how records have been collected and stored in the past, even if that involved busy people just throwing certain things into boxes and then leaving them to sit until someone had time to sort through what had been collected, without a system of organization or any descriptive metadata necessarily being assigned to the collection. Steve Vincent, in speaking about his work with the Champaign County Forest Preserve District, pointed out that depending on what kind of work a community organization does, they may already have strong preservation skills and a focus on the importance of records and history. By its very nature, the Forest Preserve District is concerned with preservation of natural resources, and so it just makes sense that their records would reflect a similar preoccupation with maintaining resources (and information) for posterity.

All students seemed to agree that one of the most important things they learned was how unique each organization’s needs really are. Often, no matter what system is designed to organize and manage records, it will be taken over by probably only one member of the organization, and even then it will most likely only be maintained in that person’s spare time, outside of other job responsibilities. Whatever is designed for the organization must really be tailored to the time and personnel that they can commit to the project.

For those who are interested, Ms. Voss will offer new course on the topic this spring: Community Archives: Documenting Heritage and Identity (590 CA). This course was developed partly to continue the learning experience from Administration and Use of Archival Materials. There is a prerequisite of LIS 581 (Administration and Use of Archival Materials) or consent of the instructor (avoss@tufl.info). For more information, please see http://tinyurl.com/ygd5hxe.

-Robin Duple

Full disclosure: I’m really a home economist and I work on the Butterball TurkeyTalkLine during Thanksgiving week. I have signed a confidentiality agreement with the company that owns the Butterball brand, so my remarks are more about  my experience of the work because I can’t reveal trade secrets!

Personally, I’m not convinced that GSLIS readers want to know about the happenings in the life of a  3rd career GSLIS student involved in the enterprise of the Butterball TurkeyTalkLine (1-800-BUTTERBALL), given the serious nature of the other CII posts. But I have been assured by the authorities that people will be interested in my thoughts and perhaps we all need some levity in our lives with only two weeks left to complete assignments.

I should preface this by revealing that I was first (and will always remain) a home economist although we are now called family and consumer scientists. I don’t imagine myself to be a scientist of any nature, so I prefer the term home economist. As such, I began working on the Butterball TurkeyTalkline in 1985 when I was also testing microwave oven recipes for Montgomery Ward and selling fish at Burhop’s on LaSalle St. in Chicago.

It’s easy to lose your patience in this line of work after you’ve spent eight hours answering (the same) questions (mild, emotionally-uninvolved issues like how much to buy, brining and when to thaw). To apologize to my  husband for calling him names (”idiot”) after my first shift on Monday, I spatchcocked a 3-lb. chicken  in preparation for HIS Thanksgiving dinner as I will be working.  As evidence of my deteriorating brain power at the end of my second shift,  I cooked it (in advance) on my cookie sheet instead of on my nice roasting pan with sides and the house became very smoky. It’s a good thing that the smoke detector did not detect it.

To gauge how in control of my faculties I am today, prior to my third shift (THE DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING), I made bacon and oatmeal pancakes with no mishaps.  Wish me luck as  the emotion-factor escalates. We’ll move from “do you have to brine?” to the inevitable problem of large birds which remain frozen one day prior to roasting for any number of reasons, some of which are quite amusing if you can maintain your sense of humor. I will remain seemingly calm while advising someone in five different ways how to make gravy (praying that in some way we will connect on terms such as broth, fat, drippings); what brining is and its relationship to the marketing term, self-basting (natural language with no controlled vocabulary creating confusion); advising people against cooking a whole bird on low temperatures (below 300) overnight or storing a bird in its whole state after cooking, all in an effort to encourage safe food preparation/storage practices.

Tip of the day: Remember these numbers: 40 to 140 in 4 hours.

–Elaine Hicks

Editor’s Note: At the risk of offending turkeys and human animals who do not eat them, I thought Elaine’s comments would provide another view of applied community informatics. I also learned a new word: spatchcocked.

–Sharon Irish