Why the Hoyts Reward Card is (almost) a complete waste of time.

By Anton Posted in half-baked mumblepie Leave a reply

I recently moved up to Christchurch, and loving going to the movies, I got a Hoyts Reward Card.  Christchurch  - or the bits I’m local to by bike – has 4 cinemas, 3 Hoyts multiplexes and Alice’s Cinematique (a 35 seat arthouse I haven’t been to yet, but am dying to).  The Hoyts are your normal multiplexes, run by teenagers than run from freindly to surly, expensive snacks (5.00 bottles of water), badly soundproofed screens.  Normal suburban stuff.

For ten bucks you can get a reward card, and for that a free ticket.  That makes it financially viable.  From then on there is the promise of cheap tickets to selected films, and a points system.  Points are awarded on a price per purchase scheme, 10 points per dollar.  They are then redeemed at an outrageous markup – a couple of sodas costs 1890 points.  I’d love to tell you what a ticket to the films cost, but their website is broken and won’t tell me.

I’ll continue to use it, but the chances of getting enough points for a ticket (and I go to the movies once a week or so) before the points expire in 24 months are kinda small.

The return for Hoyts for me using it are great: they can profile my cinema going and snack buying.  The amount of effort they expend trying to get me to link to facebook is extraordinary, but what do I get for the effort of publicising their business?  Nothing.

The last benefit they provide are cheap tickets.  So far, the offer for the $10 tickets are for movies they are desperately trying to make some return on.  For a typical Hoyts audience that, I suspect, means the kinds of movies I’m interested in occasionally.  Trying to fill up screen 6, or at least, get A warm body in there. (I always seem to end up in screen 6).  There may be some utility in this for me.

In summary, the rewards scheme is a bunch of screaming advertising copy with little real benefit for me.  I wrote to Rialto and asked if they were going to open a cinema in Christchurch, but they have no plans.  Sad.

Autumn

By Anton Posted in fragmentary mumble Leave a reply
View from my cubicle at Canterbury University

View from my cubicle at Canterbury University

Every year, about this time I collect some chestnuts and put them on my desk.  They are tactile, they look nice, and they remind me through winter of the colour of autumn.  My new job at Canterbury seems like a time of change.  There are a few chestnut trees on campus, but there are more oaks.  Its appropriate, oaks are the most English of trees, and this is the most English of cities, or at least it was.  So this morning I gathered a few acorns, and put them on my desk.  They have just as deep and rich a colour and association for me as chestnuts (and I might see if I can find a few of those as well.

Tips from a working holiday (excerpt)

By Anton Posted in half-baked mumblepie, library mumbles Leave a reply

From the excellent Dr Ronnie Coco-Muse in this weeks Point:

Tip 3.  Related to tip 2 – use the fucking libraries!  All of them. Libraries are for books, not faceborg and food courts.  If you’re doing fine arts, visit the dent library.  Doing pharmacology?  Spend time at the Hocken.  Studying music?  Science library’s a must.  All the real work will be done walking from library to library.  If you’re not walking from library to library you’re not doing real work.  Walk. Don’t run.  In fact, dance.  Don’t walk.  And (related to tip 1) dance slowly.

Doing distance study, no-one can hear you scream.

By Anton Posted in library mumbles 1 Reply

[This is a submission for an issue of Library Life ]

Distance study is lonely and frustrating.  As supportive as family and friends are, no-one else quite gets what you’re going through as much as people who have the same deadlines, the same pressures with the same assignments.  I’m almost finished my MIS, doing it full time by distance, and I’ve come up with a  few strategies to help, and some excellent resources.

1) You’re not really alone.

There are others facing exactly the same problems.  In each class, find a buddy – someone you can talk to about the course.  You can agree to IM each other, or text, or connect in whatever way suits you both, but your buddy is your go-to guy for that paper.  Sometimes just a “how’s it going?” from someone else is all you need, so remember its not a one way street.

2) The inter-tubes are your friend.

Not only are there a bunch of people in your class that are sharing the same problem, there are people all over the world.  #libraryschool on twitter is a good place to start – and hear others comment on their experience of doing the same kind of papers you are.  Hack Library School (http://hacklibschool.wordpress.com) is a US based blog that has a huge amount of useful advice, and it’s archives are really worth hunting through.

3) LIANZA rocks.

Your local LIANZA group has meetups and events.  It doesn’t matter if the event is focussed on another kind of librarianship than you are interested in, meeting other professionals locally who have been through the challenges you are facing now is always enlightening.  If they invite you for dinner or drinks after an event, go!

4) Get Mentored.

Mentoring is a funny thing, and it can be hard to ask someone you admire to help.  Remember, mentoring works both ways: it is a benefit for both of you.  Find someone whose attitude and skills you admire  – they can be a boss, a colleague, even someone younger but who may have more experience in what you want to pick up – and arrange to meet occasionally.  You can make it as formal or ad-hoc as you like, but agree between you how you’d like it to work.  LIANZA have a formal set of guidelines for mentoring someone through professional registration (http://bit.ly/Vbamy1) but it doesn’t have to be so hard core.  Mine just buys me coffee, lets me cry on her shoulder, and puts me onto possible jobs.

Distance study is a challenge – but the steps above can help you connect with others in ways similar to being in a class.  In fact, having to actively seek connections with a buddy or a mentor, follow and belong to an internet based community is probably better network skill building for your professional career than just chatting with classmates.

Why the library establishment will wither away.

By Anton Posted in academic mumbles, library mumbles 1 Reply

tl;dr – information is abundant, not scarce, so why are we letting database publishers charging so much for it?

Sometimes studying at library school has felt like monkeys have been flinging handfuls of stupid at me. I’m not someone who likes wasted effort: I’m a very lazy person (hopefully in a lazy programmer = good, rather than lazy slob kinda way). When I feel like I’m doing something pointless, my hackles rise, and I actually get quite angry.

I’ve felt like that a lot recently.

In an advanced online searching class I think I realised why. It seemed to me that the establishment librarians (lecturers, and a lot of my class) did everything they could to denigrate free (libre) sources of information. My lecturer telling me that PLoS wasn’t a real database was the final straw.

As ever, putting myself in their shoes, trying to understand where they were coming from, helped me realise what was going on.

We used to live in an environment of information scarcity. Brand’s famous quote, talking to the Woz:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other” 1

Information feels like it should be expensive, but the marginal coats of finding and duplicating it are getting less all the time. They are not zero, and that is partly what my dissertation is going to be about, but more about that later…

The establishment librarians still work in a world where Dialog charged them for every search, and searches took time. In fact, the readings we are set for class talk about Dialog a lot, and DOIs not at all! The reason PLoS is not seen as a real database is partly that you don’t pay for it, and partly because it doesn’t smell like a database: vendors don’t give you free lanyards for it at conferences, it isn’t centrepiece of advertorial in trade magazines. Institutional repositories that have no marketing budget are the lowest of the low. Just before wikipedia.

Combine that with the nature of ‘research impact’, which is based on how often work is mentioned in the same journals you publish (an incestuous, and I think actually corrupt practice intended as a marketing ploy in the guise of the advancement of human knowledge) and I can see how proprietary information sources have a grasp on librarians who want things to stay the same.

But the world changed. Information is actually now free. Good information. We no longer live in scarcity, but in abundance. What we should be paying for is brains, not bits – this is central thesis of a text that should be at the heart of librarianship, Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar.2 (OK, so Raymond in a gun totin’ libertarian crazy, but he’s right on this). The only money worth paying is on people, not software licences, or database access. I want to pay journal editors and administrators, not publishers, because publishers don’t add anything anymore.

This 180 degree shift from scarcity to abundance terrifies establishment librarians, because the rules all change. No longer are you a gatekeeper, or a shepherd, but a publisher and leader. Book museums become the purview of librarians interested in preservation, not in new knowledge (and there is absolutely no good or bad suggested there – museums are vibrant vital places).

This change is taking time, and its painful. I modify my behaviour to get pass marks, so instead of writing about PLoS, I write about how JSTOR is opening up to wikipedians3 (in a desperate attempt to remain relevant, probably after it was (un)successfully pirated4 – funny how pirating is the first activity in changes like this). Just remember that information is free, and that anything that stands in the way of that will be worn down – like a stone in the way of water finding its own level. Article databases will charge less, trumpet their non-value-add more, and slowly open, but they will fail and wither as libraries and institutions become publishers, and the benefits will be for everyone, everywhere.

Notes

1 “Information Wants to Be Free,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, November 23, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Information_wants_to_be_free&oldid=522286807.

2 Eric S Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Rev. ed (Beijing: O’Reilly, 2001).

3 Igor Bonifacic, “Wikipedia Aims to Bolster Credibility with JSTOR Partnership,” 10 2012, http://torontostandard.com/technology/wikipedia-and-jstor-announce-partnership.

4 Tim Lee, “Swartz Supporter Dumps 18,592 JSTOR Docs on the Pirate Bay,” Ars Technica, 2011, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/swartz-supporter-dumps-18592-jstor-docs-on-the-pirate-bay.ars.

Belonging.

By Anton Posted in half-baked mumblepie 1 Reply

I finish my library school studies in June/July next year, but the way the course is structured means I can start looking for full time work early next year.  I was encouraged to think about this as an opportunity came up at the local university, and though it didn’t work out, it raised a lot of feelings and thoughts about work in general.

Library School, though at times engaging, hasn’t provided much of a community to be part of.  Mostly, I suspect, this is because I am working at distance, but the online tools and strategies provided in the course mean I have made more friends and contacts during an eight week course held out of the US than I have through the NZ one over an entire year.

I think what I am missing is the sense of belonging that work provides: the team, the culture…  I have a lot to do with the people in the local university library, but its different talking to them about work when youhave no legitimacy or effectiveness, as an outsider.

 

Coping with busy.

By Anton Posted in random mumbles Leave a reply

It seems that life has stepped up a gear: I seem to have a lot on: covering for Jeff Harford’s morning show on OAR, on the Otago polytech’s marking panel for their Bachelor of Information Technology projects (thanks to Sam),  as well as handling registrations for Quaker summer gathering, changing my course at Victoria (more on that later), and a bunch of other chores.

I was getting a little nervous at the number of things I had coming up, so I reimplemented using astrid.  Its seems a little odd taking time everythime you think of a job to type it up, assign importance, &tc, but the idea of just getting in out of my head and somewhere to review is a good one I think.

One more week of exam supervision to go: its been a great way to get some solid planning time in.

 

 

Is management theory inane?

By Anton Posted in random mumbles Leave a reply

I posted this on my MIS class bulletin board this morning.  I think I did it out of a sense of spite, as I’d just received a C for an assignment  with the rubric ‘too imaginative’.  

At the start of this course I admitted to being skeptical about management theory, and that I would return to that at the end.  Well, here we are.

My experience with management theory started while I was doing my first degree in neuropsychology. I was tutoring friends who found some of the psychological background in their work hard, and with the stats: I had to do introductory stats and an advanced stats for psych paper for my degree.  I was appalled at the over-simplification of the psychology in the management texts.  I think that I bring an overly-intellectual attitude to most things, something that is not particularly practical, and so I surmised I was doing the same thing here.  The point about research is to question and to improve and build knowledge.  The point of theory is to structure research.  Management theory didn’t seem to do that: it followed other disciplines, took what it agreed with to improve its own agenda, but has never, ever, done anything to radically change its underlying framework.
Later, post-graduate work in anthropology (with more of a sociological bent) showed me what a truly radical approach to theory could do.  Court systems based on restorative justice.  Green product manufacturing and organics. Open source.  The Internet.  All of these come from academics thinking exactly upside down to the status quo.
Unfortunately, little in this course has changed my mind about management theory. Anti-intellectualism abounds, and the status quo is continually entrenched.  I think buried in the text there is a lot of practical wisdom, but it is presented as backed up with poorly quantified research, or as  svenghali style revelations.
Maybe its a kind of reverse snobbery on my part.  Working in the Bennet’s bookshop in Wellington all the business books were ordered by title, not author, because, ‘business people didn’t understand how that worked, and were too busy to try’. I come from a very liberal background, tempered through an education in the humanities and social sciences.  I’m a quaker, speaking truth to power, questioning authority, and holding principles of fairness over economic ‘reality’ are entrenched.  I tend to think all those things would make me a good manager :)
I think the following article from a long time management consultant sums it up better than I can.  I particularly like the idea of the ‘two handed regression’.

Keeping positive

By Anton Posted in academic mumbles, diabetes and health mumbles, library mumbles Leave a reply

When I took on the MIS at Victoria, I knew it was going to be a challenge to keep positive.  I got a lot of feedback from those around be that they thought the course was not great, and that it was a box-ticking exercise to get a professional librarian qualification.  Interestingly, much of the scorn poured on the idea – even though it was thought a necessary thing to do to enter the profession [1]  - seemed to be reflected internationally.  Talk to any group of library school students, and you’ll get the same kind of complaints about it not being intellectually very stimulating, that the exercises are not relevant…

I’m going to save up my reflection on what the courses are like until I’m done.  What I’m going to do here is try and reinforce the idea that what you get out of libraryschool is what you put in, by looking back at my last two semesters.

The first semester had a lot going for it: back studying full time, I was very happy to immerse myself in a new project.  New stationery!  New computer!  I also signed up for a full semester’s worth of courses: in the one I’m attending you need to complete 12 papers, so I signed up for 4.  Near the middle of the semester I started a 5th, based in the States.  At the end of the course my wife was away in the US, and I had admitted myself to hospital with hepatitis, dashing down during the day to use the wireless in the med student cafeteria to get my assignments in.  God it was fun.

Safe to say I like being busy, and I like a little chaos.  I got B+/A- for most of my papers over all, and an A+ for my paper by distance, at least 1/4 of which was completed with a line in my arm.

The next semester I enrolled for three papers.  It was tough at the start, as the hepatitis had turned out to be suspected cancer.  My motivation dropped.  Southern New Zealand spring got grey and wet.  With three papers I just couldn’t keep busy enough, and with the worry about my health distracting me I reverted to the work ethic many around me had admitted to; though I never watched TV during lectures, I taught myself to solder (see earlier posts for a few projects…) code a bit of C for my arduino, and follow twitter.  I dropped the reading, and with a half panic at the last few weeks cracked the books for a few essays.

The cancer scare came and went, as they do, but not after a couple of really nasty gastroscopic exams, and a tattoo.  (Cross one off the bucket list).

The results are not in for this semester finally, but it looks a bit like an A-/B+ kind of return.  Much the same as the first semester.  So, with no ‘punishment’ for a much lower effort, why on earth would I work my arse off for the last semester?  This morning, going in to work for my part time job supervising exams and helping with student IT worries on my local campus, I sat with my wife at the coffee shop, and admitted that the reason I’m not satisfied with library school isn’t all the niggling library school bureaucratic sillyness,  or the shortcomings of my teachers or fellow students, but with my own performance!  It Is What You Make Of It.

Its up to me to halt this spiral of dissatisfaction.  Reading above I realise now how much my own circumstances encouraged me to become a bit negative.  Worrying about getting a job at the end of it all is not helping either.  However, I have to rise above that, use some of the resilience I know I have, and face the next semester square on.  Its going to be hard, as the courses are not immediately that attractive to me, but…  I can make them interesting.  One is the start of a six month research exercise that I’m really worried about, for any number of reasons.  I’ll be blogging about that in detail in the future.

How am I going to short circuit this spiral?  Here are a few practical steps.

  • Keep breathing (always a good one)
  • Work out what I want out of the upcoming courses, and how I can make them practical exercises I can use in my upcoming professional career, and not just do the minimum
  • Worry about the next step, jobs, when I need to worry about it, next February.
  •  Build up a list  things to look forward to (like Whare Flat folk festival, and New Librarians’ Symposium 6)
  • Translate other’s frustration and negativity about the course through the lens of their experience, and not mine.  Often its cool to complain about schoolwork in order to meet peer expectations, or downplay one’s own performance.  That’s OK.  That’s them.  Not me.
  • Document my frustrations with the library school process so that if I can make a positive difference to the system at some point I have something I can use.
  • Keep breathing.
  • Make lists.  Tick things off.  Have fun.  Enjoy the freedom to make my own timetables I’m not going to have again until I retire.
I have a few weeks before the start of the next semester.  Time to relax, not time to get wound up!

 

[1] Librarianship as a profession?  Jeez, if you need a certificate to make a coffee these days, and fitting tyres is a career, then Librarianship is a profession.

Conferences

By Anton Posted in random mumbles Leave a reply

After being invited to be on a panel for nethui south  - talking about digital inclusion – I’ve been asked to moderate another one for ACAB‘s conference in Dunedin, with Colin Peacock and Ian Telfer.  Rarified company indeed!

Its really very satisfying being asked to do these things, and very flattering too.  I have to be careful about not letting it go to my head though.  I also nee to remember to do some work before the gigs as well: I’ve winged these things far too often, and though I get invited back, I’d like to take the opportunity a bit more seriously as well.

With the Nethui panel I’d like to concentrate on access to government funded research by people not lucky enough to be aligned with a tertiary institution.  I’ll have to get some stats together on how many people have access to the places CRIs (or whatever they are) publish.

For the ACAB thing, a quick bio on each and a few pre-prepared questions should do it I suppose.

I am looking forward to it though, being in front of a group.  I suppose what I want to do is make sure the people there don’t just get the Anton show, but I take the opportunity to raise important points.