Shala K. Howell's Blog

It’s been quiet here at Caterpickles, because it’s been a busy semester. I have a break coming up in theory, and I hope to use it to add some posts to liven up the place in the new year. But for now, here’s a summary of what I’ve been up to.

I’ve been learning things

This semester I took classes in information literacy instruction, cataloging, emerging technology, and the digital lifecycle. Some of these classes involved creating projects that live online for anyone to view. So if you’re interested, here are some links.

Digital Data Dashboard
You can do amazing work, but if your administration and the central district office never learn about it, your budget will still be cut. Advocating effectively for your library means collecting data about your programs and services and using it to create user-friendly and eye-catching communications that connects library services directly to district (and/or institution) priorities — all year long. For one of my classes I had the opportunity to create a digital dashboard for a mock middle school library. I used Google Sites to make a website to house my dashboards along with some explanatory text, but in the real world I might embed something like this on my existing library website or use it in a presentation to admin.

A screenshot of the data dashboard I created for my information literacy instruction class. The goal was to create a dashboard that would automatically update as new data on library usage came in all year round. All of the data for this dashboard is completely made up, of course. (Credit: Shala Howell)

Emerging Technology
For my emerging technology class, we were asked to blend a number of technologies to create a new service for a group of users. I picked adult children of aging parents who may no longer be capable of living independently and might need to transition to assisted living and/or memory care services. The service I dreamed up connects users to resources based on an initial assessment of their information needs, provides virtual reality tours of nursing and assisted living facilities around the country, integrates Google Meet, Zoom, or another video conferencing technology to allow patrons to make calls to nursing home residents and staff, and provides on-the-fly translation of online information. This Senior Solutions Hub information kiosk could be housed at a local public library or incorporated onto a BookMobile to be used by homebound patrons. In an ideal world, patrons could use this kiosk to research, evaluate, and access resources and services to support themselves or their aging parents.

First slide of the creative use case I created for my emerging technologies class describing the audience for, purpose, technologies needed for, and potential for creating a senior solutions hub at a public library. (Credit: Shala Howell)

Information Literacy Instruction
I also had the chance to dream up some standards-based unit plans for my information literacy instruction class, again with a focus on integrating technology into the classroom experience. I was paired with a different partner for each unit plan, and had a great time dreaming up plans for students to write their own graphic novels, film their own documentaries, and record podcasts.

My last partner and I also worked on a unit plan that called for students to choose a person from history, and conduct an historical inquiry into their society, situation, and access to both common and specialized knowledge. The students are then asked to use their insights into information flows in their chosen society to program an AI chatbot based on their historical figure. For this project students need an in depth understanding of both what their character could know as well as what they could not. They also need to consider the limitations of AI chatbots, troubleshoot the responses generated by their chatbot to identify what it gets right and what it hallucinates, and figure out how to write constraints to keep the AI historical chatbot on track in a multiple question interview. Getting this last part right also requires them to understand how our biases to accept information generated by machines can complicate the process of troubleshooting their chatbot’s responses, making it just a really interesting exercise in information literacy, even if I do say so myself. You can find these unit plans and the rest of the work I completed for my Information Literacy Instruction class here.

A final note: These units incorporate AI technologies. As a writer, I feel I need to point out that this was a course requirement. As a librarian, however, I believe that Generative AI has ethical, environmental, copyright, and disinformation implications, and that as information literacy advocates, it’s incumbent upon us to talk about AI in our information literacy lessons, just as we would bias in the media or plagiarism. In these unit plans, my partners and I use guided exploration and project-based learning to enable students to assess Generative AI’s capabilities and limitations for themselves.

The header for our Think like a College Student Film/podcast project. Designed to be taught by a team that includes high school teachers and academic librarians, this project invites high school seniors to use the resources at their local academic library to research a social issue and develop a short documentary film or podcast about it. The project is designed to begin building the information literacy skills high schoolers will need for a successful transition to college and is based on an article I read about a similar project being done at Utah State University.

Cataloging
It is hard to imagine that anyone would be interested in what I learned in cataloging class. But it was a blast, thanks largely to my daughter and brother convincing me to build an Obsidian vault to track all the things I needed to learn for it (screenshot below). I know. I’m a nut, and I got an A in cataloging, which I absolutely credit Obsidian for.

Screenshot showing just a small part of the extremely obsessive Obsidian database I created to track every single detail I could think of regarding the persnickety practice of cataloging library materials. (Credit: Shala Howell)I’ve been writing things

This semester, I had the opportunity to submit two articles for publication. One is still winding its way through peer review, but the other — a review of a book on collection management for school librarians — was published on December 21.

I’ve been researching things

I’ve also had the chance to work as a graduate research assistant for one of my professors who is working on a research project related to community college libraries. I can’t talk too much about that right now, but it’s been a tremendous learning experience, and I look forward to continuing it next semester.

Only 1 more year to go!

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to when I haven’t been here. Thanks, as always, for using part of your day to read Caterpickles.

If I don’t have a chance to say it later, Happy New Year, y’all!

Related Links:

Using electronic resources to extend library services into the community (Caterpickles)Library Collaboration to Improve Information Literacy (American Libraries Magazine)A better way to track your diverse reads (Caterpickles)

However you are spending this end of the year season, I hope the last few days of 2024 bring you joy, laughter, love, and peace.

A hummingbird at feeder on a bright summer day in Florida. (Photo: Michael Howell)

Last semester I took two classes that had me doing a lot of thinking about effective marketing and outreach for libraries in the United States: Information Professions (which I typically described as my “survey of the profession” class) and Graphic Design for Librarians (which was what it sounds like it would be). While doing some background work for a weekly assignment, I came across the website for the Prince George’s County Memorial Library.

It’s a wonderful example of using your website to extend the reach of your public library to potential patrons who for whatever reason, may not be able to get to the library on their own or who need the resources of the library during hours the library is typically closed. You’ll note that some of those resources are the very electronic databases that I talked about in my last post.

It’s worth taking a minute to click through to see how they have it organized, but I wanted to point out a couple of things that caught my eye.

Home page for the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System. (Source: Prince George’s County Memorial Library System)

Every icon in the Online Library bar of icons takes you to a different set of electronic resources, tailored to the needs of specific communities. The yellow pencil leads to a Homework Help collection, which includes Gale in Context Biography, Mango, Brainfuse, and other databases designed for use by K-12 students. The red glasses lead to the Senior Center, where older patrons can find information about getting financial and food support, or senior activities at the local rec center. The green globe takes genealogists and researchers to the Discovery Suite, where they can access primary records from our nation’s past from sources such as the Ancestry Library Edition from Proquest, Freedman’s Bureau records from 1865-1872, and the American Indian Experience for research projects or simply to trace their own family’s history.

The site can be translated on the fly to any of 19 languages, using Google Translate technology. Here’s what the home page looks like translated to Haitian Creole.

Same home page, this time in Haitian Creole. (Source: Prince George’s County Memorial Library System)

It’s a thoughtful and inclusive piece of marketing and outreach, and an excellent example of how public libraries are using their electronic resources to extend 24/7 access to information to patrons who may or may not be able to visit the library in person.

References & Related Links

Prince George’s County Memorial Library SystemHmmm…. Should my library buy a subscription to Elsevier ScienceDirect or a cabin on the lake? (Caterpickles)

Libraries are increasingly replacing their print reference collections (think World Book Encyclopedia and individual subscriptions to peer-reviewed magazines like JAMA), with more easily searchable electronic databases that patrons can use 24/7 from wherever they can scrape together a computer with a reliable web connection. These databases provide direct, searchable, online access to current and past issues of thousands of journals, ebooks, and online open access publications in one place. I use them all the time to retrieve assigned class readings or sources for various grad school papers. But the cost for that convenience is becoming increasingly steep.

Bah. How much can one database really cost?

While hunting for price information on general interest encyclopedia databases for a class project last semester, I came across this somewhat light-hearted post from the Charles L. Tutt Library at Colorado College comparing the price of its electronic database subscriptions to luxury goods such as lake houses, speedboats, and yachts.

According to the Charles L. Tutt library, Elsevier ScienceDirect, which provides searchable access to more than 18 million articles and chapters; 2650 peer-reviewed journals; 41,500 ebooks; 3,065 open access publications; and 1.4 million open access articles, is available for roughly the amount you would expect to spend on a vacation cabin with a lake view.

Another popular database, the Wiley Online Library, is available for roughly the same price you’d expect to pay for a brand new, fully equipped Cadillac Escalade.

Chart from the Charles L. Tutt library, tracking the rising costs over time for its electronic database collection. (Source: Charles L. Tutt Library, 2023).

Libraries regularly join consortia to pool their resources and negotiate a better price for these reference databases. Still, according to Tutt Library, the rising costs of electronic database subscriptions are projected to consume the vast majority of its multi-million dollar annual library budget within the next 20 years.

This doesn’t just affect academic libraries. One of my friends works at a private K-8 school library in Nevada, which needs a serious update collection- and space-wise. Fortunately, it has an excellent budget. Or at least, I thought it did, until I learned that two-thirds of that budget was earmarked for an annual subscription to the EBSCO database, severely limiting the funds available to my friend to update the outdated and tattered print collection, and reimagine the space to be just as welcoming to students in Grades 6 through 8 as it is for the kindergartners. Understanding when and how her students actually use the library and its resources (both print and electronic) is a crucial first step in my friend’s long-term plan to update her school library.

References & Related Links

Charles L. Tutt Library. (2023, October 18). Electronic Resources: Cost$. SJSU Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library home page

I spotted these flowering bushes on a recent walk through my neighborhood.

Photo: Shala Howell.

I hope you and yours are still doing as well as can be expected.

Related Links:

More Wordless Wednesdays on Caterpickles

When I worked at the middle school library, movement was baked into my day. I walked to work (admittedly a short distance), spent the day on my feet shelving, helping students, moving things around the library, running errands around the school, and walking back home at day’s end. This is a terrible description of my work in the library, but the point is, I was in almost constant motion for six to seven hours a day. Lots of it was standing, of course, but my standing job was active enough that the few times I tried sitting on a chair, I ended up pushing the chair aside because it was too much trouble to sit and have to get up again all the time.

The upshot was I logged an hour’s worth of exercise per my Apple Watch every single day without doing anything particularly fancy to accomplish it. And since I did all this in an N95, my cardiac health improved. My blood pressure, which had been flirting with being too high when the pandemic started, dropped back to normal ranges. My resting heart rate plummeted 10-15 points to start hanging out in the 60s for the first time in my life. Aah, the under-appreciated benefits of masking – fewer allergies and healthier hearts.

Me, prepped to enter the library, after taking a lunch break outside in April 2023. (Photo: Shala Howell)But I’m at home now, and I tend to forget to take exercise breaks when I’m writing

I also don’t need to mask at home, except for when I’m doing those things that kick up a bunch of the dust and cat dander that I am so profoundly allergic to — or on the random days when I need to pick up something from the store. I like not wearing a mask all the time, even if I am more aware of how socially awkward is to wearing a mask in public on the few occasions that I need one. And I really like not having massive allergy attacks and spending the rest of the day sneezing just because I spent five minutes dusting, cleaning the litter box, pushing laundry, or emptying the vacuum cleaner.

The trouble with being able to live most of my life now without the increased cardiac load of an N95 is that I’m just not getting as much cardio as I used to. My resting heart rate began to inch back up.

Solution: PE, Shala-style

I keep a planner logging all of my coursework for my regular grad school classes, so naturally I use part of it to set aside time for “PE.”

My stated goal for this self-made and self-directed PE class is 150 minutes of exercise per week as recorded on my Apple Watch. That’s the easiest for me to track. But what I really want is to preserve that sweet low resting heart rate and the newly reclaimed normal blood pressure which all that movement baked into my days at the library gave me. I am not an athlete. I am not training for anything in particular. What I want is something sustainable that raises my heart rate and I’m not that precious about what that thing looks like, other than it needs to be a thing that I will be willing to do at regular intervals over time.

Walks, bike rides, and house cleaning… oh my!

I love walks and bike rides. So at least three days a week, I take a 45 minute walk or bike ride as a brain break between my two major daily working periods (yes, this is a fancy way of saying “lunch”). When it’s too rainy to walk or ride, I tell my Apple Watch I’m taking a walk and then start cleaning the house in a manner that boosts and keeps my heart rate in my target heart rate range until an hour has passed or my Apple Watch congratulates me on closing my exercise ring, whichever comes first. This works best if I make sure to take the stairs a lot in an extremely inefficient manner while I’m cleaning.

Once or twice a month, Michael and I will go on a hike somewhere over the weekend, which gives me a chance to check in to see if I’m improving, staying the same, or being too easy on myself during “PE” each week. Sometimes my daughter joins us. (Photo: Shala Howell)Decluttering for health and sanity

Once or twice a week, I spend an hour sorting and decluttering my house. It’s really important on decluttering days to only pick jobs that I can finish completely within the span of an hour. During the week, I don’t have “Clean out your entire pantry” kind of time. I have “Clean out one shelf in your pantry” kind of time. Fortunately, my house has a seemingly endless number of small but irritating and fixable jobs that I can start and finish in an hour.

To find them, I simply allow myself to notice things that I would otherwise purposefully overlook as I’m moving around the house, and I write them down on a decluttering list.

The kitchen cabinet that is so full I have to stuff and pile and plead with our dishes to fit every time I clean the kitchen. The top of my dresser. The top of my desk. The expired tea. The medicine cabinet full of expired cold medicines and lotions. The stack of pictures under the stairs that has been waiting so long to be hung up that I’ll need to dust them before I even think about hanging them up. The carpet of old shoes that I have to kick aside or stand on when I’m reaching for things on the top shelf of my closet.

On the days I’m not decluttering, I allow myself to notice things like this that bother me about how our house does–or, more accurately, does not–work, instead of forcing myself to ignore them. On decluttering days, I work on whatever surface or cabinet I’ve noticed currently bothers me the most. If I can’t think of anything in particular to do that day, I pick a thing off my list.

One week, it was a kitchen cabinet’s worth of random glassware and coffee mugs that I cleaned out and took to Goodwill. The week after Halloween, it was our leftover Halloween candy (we always buy as if we are going to get a horde and never get more than two sets of Trick-or-Treaters), 40 mini party-favor sized bubble jars that I also bought to give out and didn’t need, and two boxes of compostable tableware that I bought for a Spring 2020 party that we ended up storing instead of using (lockdown!), all of which I donated to the Wellness Center at my daughter’s high school. Eventually I’ll need to tackle those shoes.

My “homework” is to clear one box or two bags of stuff every week, including dropping it off at its target resting place so that I never have to think about it again. This means focusing on things I have too many of and already know how to dispose of, like books, kitchenware, catalogs/magazines, and clothes. I am not dealing with things that require work or additional planning before they can safely disposed of, like electronics.

I’m really enjoying seeing empty–or at least more functional–spaces take the place of all those piles that I used to have to actively ignore. I have a long way to go, but frankly, there’s no danger that I’ll run out of One-Box-a-Week Decluttering jobs between now and finishing my Masters in May 2025.

My final project for “PE” last semester was making full use of our city’s November clean-up day. The city took away our old lawn furniture, an old plasma TV, and a broken fridge to be recycled, donated, and/or otherwise responsibly disposed of, solving some hard problems for me. I love this program. (Photo: Shala Howell)What about this semester?

This semester, I’m focusing on the essentials – the why of all this and have added in some weekly blood pressure “quizzes” to my weekly decluttering drops. At semester’s end, I’ll pull together another “Hard Decluttering Problems” final project for the city to deal with on its May Clean-out Day. But I’ll also add in a 7-day series of blood pressure measurements to see if I’m getting enough movement to keep my blood pressure in normal ranges, and adjust my exercise / decluttering ratio according (decluttering is great for my mental health, but it doesn’t do much for my heart rate).

Is it really fair to call this “PE” though?

Does it matter? It makes me smile to think of it this way, because it is absolutely the lowest PE bar ever. It certainly hasn’t made up for the hours and hours of movement I got each day while working in a proper library, but it’s a start. I track it in the same planner I use to track my other coursework, and that helps me remember to set aside time to get it done, and to celebrate my intermittent decluttering milestones.

If I were to grade my progress, I would give myself a “Yay!” in decluttering and a “Meets expectations-Sigh” for walks and bike rides. Fortunately, I am not training for the Olympics here. I am just training to still be able to walk 2 miles a day when I’m 80, and in the meantime, make it a little easier to like living in my house. A different bar, but it works for me.

Related Links

The most surprising thing about decluttering (Caterpickles)Intermittent masking is harder than I expected (Caterpickles)

At the end of my first year as Library Assistant at my public middle school library, I published an infographic with stats to give stakeholders a sense of how the students used the library that year. Total circulation, which grade used the library most, the year’s most popular book, that sort of thing. You may remember it, as I wrote it up here on Caterpickles (“An end of the year library report and why it matters“).

That report landed on the district superintendent’s desk within 24 hours. I’d like to think that is evidence of my powerful marketing skills, but truly I think it’s evidence of how powerful tying the work in your library directly to the district’s larger goals can be. Our district’s top five goals include a commitment to diversity and equity, and as my infographic included a stat about the percentage of titles circulated that were diverse reads, it naturally caught the attention of folks at the district office who passed it on to the superintendent.

The final stat on my year-end infographic showed the percentage of our checkouts that were diverse reads. (Poster design: Canva, Content: Shala Howell)Compiling that stat took most of my work week

It is easy enough to pull a list of titles circulated through our library catalog software, but at that time I compiled the infographic in May 2022, there was no easy way to discern which of those titles met my criteria to be counted as diverse reads, meaning:

by or about people from traditionally marginalized groups, including BIPOC and LGBTQ+by or about people who are neurodivergentby or about people with physical differencesby or about people from socioeconomically disadvantaged groups

As the person working the circulation desk, I was familiar with the most frequently read titles, but even after sorting those, I was still left with hundreds of titles and authors that I didn’t recognize. I ended up having to research the hundreds of remaining books one by one to assess whether they made the cut.

That took hours. Most of my work week in fact, along with many unpaid hours in the evenings and weekend at home. Which is why, reluctantly, I decided not to do the work to compile the stat for last year’s infographic.

And no, without the direct tie-in to the district’s promise around equity, last year’s infographic did not land on the superintendent’s desk. (As far as I know).

The middle school library as it looked in May 2023, when I did not have time to do that diverse reads stat. (Photo: Shala Howell)Fortunately, there’s a better way to track diverse reads

While doing some background research to support a book review I wrote for last semester’s Reference Services class, I came across a 2020 article by Sarah Jorgenson, EdS and Rene Burress, Ph.D called “Analyzing the Diversity of a High School Collection.” In the article, the authors explain that conducting a diversity audit of an entire collection can actually interfere with the work of increasing the diversity of the existing collection.

As the authors point out, the time a librarian spends doing the grunt work of a comprehensive check-every-title-on-the-stacks diversity audit, is time they aren’t spending evaluating, sourcing, acquiring, and promoting more diverse titles. Jorgenson and Burress argue that it is far better to audit the diversity of just the Top 100 most popular titles, and use that as a snapshot to guide acquisitions, Reader’s Advisory, and other book promotion efforts.

Seems like this might work for that year-end diverse reads stat as well

It occurred to me while reading this article, that limiting the diversity audit to the Top 100 Most Popular Books might be a reasonable approach to compiling that year-end diverse reads stat as well. After all, as long as you were clear in your infographic that you are only including the top 100 titles in your diverse reads stat, and used the same method for collecting the data from year to year, this approach should provide a reasonable snapshot that you can use to track trends over time.

It makes intuitive sense that the list of the 100 most popular titles will gradually become more diverse over time as diverse titles from your new purchases replace older titles in your collection, book talks, Reader’s Advisory, and displays. Kids may be more likely than adults to give themselves the gift of rereading a book they love, but everyone loves a new book with a shiny cover.

Even better, since you are limiting the stat to the most popular titles, you are more likely to be familiar with the diversity representation, if any, within those books. Even if you decided to double-check each of the 100 books individually, you would save time. Looking up 100 titles is relatively quick work.

A thank you note I received from one of my students during the 2022-2023 school year. Just one of many reasons I am looking forward to finishing my MLIS so that I can go back to working with students again. (Photo: Shala Howell. Note: REDACTED)This is all just theoretical for me for now

Sadly, while I’m on leave, I don’t have access to any circulation data to test this theory, but I suspect if we compared the Top 100 Most Popular Titles in our library from 2017-2018 to the Top 100 Most Popular Titles in 2022-2023, we’d find that the more recent list features a higher percentage of diverse reads. After all, 2022-2023’s list was the result of years of focusing on acquiring and marketing diverse books, whereas in 2017-2018 that work had just begun. It would be an interesting thing to track over time, and would probably give us a fair idea of whether we are making progress in not just acquiring diverse reads, but in getting them into the hands of the kids who need them.

Oh well, an idea to tuck away for later, I guess.

Have you tried this in your library? Does it work?

Related Links

Analyzing the Diversity of a High School Collection (Knowledge Quest via ERIC): To download a PDF of the article, look for an option in a grey box that reads “Download full text.”An end of the year library report and why it matters (Caterpickles)A belated year-end report for 2022-2023 (Caterpickles)

As a librarian, I am often expected to have read all the books. Here’s the thing though. I don’t actually like reading all the books. Like you, I really only like reading books that I enjoy. I’m one of those pesky people who believes the refrain “If you read a book for entertainment, it should be entertaining” should apply to me and not just the students at my middle school library.

But as a librarian, it’s important for me to know my collection so that I can guide readers to the books they may or may not realize they are looking for. How do I do that, if not by reading as many books cover-to-cover as I possibly can?

Sample books, don’t read them

One of my favorite concepts from last semester in library school comes from an off-hand comment my Reference Services professor made about book sampling. In one of his lectures, Dr. Aguiñaga mentioned that as librarians we need to get in the habit of reading just enough of a book to get a sense of its content, style, and the type of reader who might be interested in it, before returning it to the shelves and pulling out the next one. Don’t try to read your collection cover to cover, he said, but do spend some time each week sampling your collection and any new purchases you’ve made so that you can gain a sense of what is there.

I love this idea, because at its heart it acknowledges a few things:

Not every book is for every reader.Librarians need to know their collection, and they deserve to reserve some reading time for their own enjoyment.If librarians try to read every book cover-to-cover that a patron might one day be interested in, they are setting themselves up for a lot of stress and potential burnout. Books I collected in the process of making a Reader’s Advisory Sports list for the students at my middle school. I sampled these books before adding them to the list, although I didn’t know to call it that yet. (Photo: Shala Howell)Why not read books cover-to-cover?

I mean, if you want to and have time to, go for it.

But at my public middle school, we have a 15,000 book collection. I walked in the door after a lifetime of age-appropriate reading. The renaissance in middle grade publishing happened after I had graduated into adulthood, which meant that when I started as a Library Assistant I had read relatively few books in our middle grade collection. Let’s be generous and say I had read a couple hundred of them for one reason or another. Let’s be even more generous and pretend that all 200 of those books were books that today’s middle schooler would also be interested in reading, instead of the hodgepodge of popular and outdated picks they actually are.

That still leaves me with 14,800 books that I haven’t read.

The thought of reading all those books is just exhausting. (Photo: Shala Howell)

Still, not every book in the collection circulates every year. Let’s assume that only 20% of those 15,000 books in the collection actually circulate in a given year. Setting a goal of reading the actively circulating books cover to cover would still require me to read 3000 books. That’s… not going to happen any time soon.

On the other hand, I can wrap my head around setting aside time to sample between 3-4 books a day, a rate at which I could sample 750-1000 books a year. A much less stressful plan. The idea of book sampling becomes even more useful when I consider doing targeted book sampling, in which I search for and sample books in response to direct patron requests or patterns of requests. (In fact, this is how I made the book lists at my middle school library.)

Book sampling is a freeing concept in my personal life as well.

I start so many more books than I actually finish. I used to hold on to so much guilt about not finishing books that weren’t working for me. I have an entire bookshelf that is nothing but books I’ve started, read enough to justify using a bookmark, then set aside to finish later. Later never came for most of the now-dusty books I stashed on that shelf.

But now that I’ve learned about book sampling, I am ready to let go of the psychic weight of having to one day finish them. Instead, I’m going to reclassify them as Books I’ve Sampled, spend a minute thinking about which type of reader would enjoy them, log that thought on my Books I’ve Sampled shelf in Goodreads, and donate the book itself to my local Friends of the Public Library Book Sale.

A stack of books that I might sample, might read. Only time will tell. (Photo: Shala Howell)Reclaim my mental space. Reclaim my time. Reclaim my book shelf.

Logging a sampled book on Goodreads is one thing, but here on Caterpickles, I’ll only review books I have read cover to cover. Book reviews are a different beast. I also don’t need to do a thousand of them every year.

What about you? Do you read every book cover to cover?

Note: This review contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org. If you use them to purchase books from Bookshop.org, I’ll earn a small commission. Read more about why I decided to use affiliate links here. The Cat Who Came in off the Roof

By Annie M. G. Schmidt
Yearling Books. January 17, 2017. 160p. $6.99 (paperback).

Ages 8-12 — Bumbling reporter Mr. Tibble is on the brink of losing his job for writing too much about the exploits of the neighborhood cats, when he spies the lovely Miss Minou, trapped in a tree, quivering with fright at a dog barking at her from below. After he rescues her, she begins feeding him tidbits of news that make his reporting shine. Together the two uncover some pretty shady dealings around town. But where is Miss Minou getting her information from, and will her sources dry up if she chooses her present life over the one that came before?

A perfectly silly story in all the best ways, filled with funny moments caused by Miss Minou’s surprisingly cat-like behavior. I definitely had to suspend my disbelief to enjoy this story, but it made for a pleasant afternoon once I did.

The Cat Who Came in off the Roof and other children’s stories by Annie M.G. Schmidt have been staples of Dutch childhood for decades. David Colmer’s translation captures the charm of Schmidt’s classic feline tale for English-speaking audiences.

RECOMMENDATION: A good choice for readers in the upper elementary and lower middle school grades who are in the market for animal stories to read on their own. It would also make a fun read aloud for the elementary school set. Think 101 Dalmatians or Mr. Popper’s Penguins, but with cats.

Related Links

Book Review: Mr. Popper’s Penguins (Caterpickles)More book reviews on CaterpicklesAffiliate Links & the Caterpickles Bookshop (Caterpickles)

Long-time readers of this blog and folks who read this blog because they know me in real life, know that my husband was a practicing clinician for 20 years or so before taking a job at Google Health. It was great, except for the long hours and the way they cut into our family time.

One of the minor social benefits of being married to an ICU doctor is that it is really easy to explain to people what my husband does. Everyone has a mental image of an ICU doctor, so all I had to do in response to the question “What does your husband do?” is say “He’s an ICU doctor.” Their internal preconceptions of what that meant generally took it from there.

But since my husband started working at Google it’s been a bit trickier. “He’s an ICU doctor, but he’s working at Google now” is typically not a response that people have a pre-existing frame of reference for. But I can’t just ignore his ICU background. He uses his clinical expertise every day at Google.

“But how? What’s a doctor doing at Google?”

I’m not great (yet) at answering this question, but you know who is? Michael. He’s done several interviews lately in which this question has come up.

Why Michael went to Google in the first place

In an interview for the podcast Raise the Line, Michael describes his motivation in working at Google Health this way:

“When my dad gets sick, he has a Harvard-trained physician looking over his shoulder, helping him know what to type in and what queries to ask. I just want that for the world.”

- Michael Howell, in an August 2023 interview on the Raise the Line podcast

The 41 minute interview with Michael covers a lot of ground, from why Michael became an ICU doctor in the first place, his work on improving healthcare quality and patient safety during his clinical practice, what he’s doing at Google Health, and how he sees AI changing medical practice going forward.

AI in medicine? Tell me more about that.

As you might imagine, Michael’s been interviewed a lot lately about his work with Generative AI in healthcare.

In September, Michael was interviewed by JAMA Editor in Chief Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, MAS, about the potential for AI in healthcare and possible pitfalls in the form of AI hallucinations and gaslighting. (The published interview is approximately 25 minutes long, and there is a transcript.)

(Image source: JAMA/JN Learning)

In the interview, Michael was asked about how he views this moment in medical history:

"...understanding the [AI's] capabilities are really important. And those are totally different than what came before. I read a bunch of old papers and I've thought sometimes what it must have been like to be in practice when penicillin showed up. You're like, okay, that's different. I don't know all the things. I may overuse it a little bit, but it's a marked moment."

- Michael Howell, MD, MPH in an interview with JAMA Editor in Chief Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, MAS for JAMA/HIMMS

Although the title for this interview makes it seem like it would be quite technical and hard to follow, it’s not that bad actually. After all, Michael wasn’t just an ICU doc back in the day. He was also a teacher, and as a result, he’s pretty good at explaining things. For example, this is how he explains what AI hallucinations are, why they happen, and how AI engineers are working to correct them going forward.

"I'll add that in any domain, but in healthcare in particular, there's a concept called automation bias of people trust the thing that comes out of the machine. And this is a really important patient safety issue. Like with [Electronic Health Records], they reduced many kinds of medical errors like no one dies of handwriting anymore, right? Which they used to do with some regularity, but they increased the likelihood of other kinds of errors.

And so the automation bias is a really important thing. And when the model is responding and sounds like a person might sound, it's an even bigger risk. So hallucinations are really important and what they are is the model is just predicting the next word.

And if there's one thing for people who are watching this to remember it's that the model doesn't go look things up in PubMed.

[....] It just remembers stuff out of that embedding space or the concept space. And so it'll be reading along it'll be predicting next word, doing a good job and then it'll say, oh, this looks like it should be a medical journal citation. That's the kind of thing that comes next. Here are words that are plausible for a medical journal citation and then that will look just like a medical journal citation. [....] It was a big problem in the earlier versions of them.

There are a few ways from a technical standpoint that this is getting better but it remains an important issue. One example, it turns out that these things are bad at math. They're good at two plus two equals four because there's like a lot of that on the internet. But if you give it, you know, whatever 13,127 plus 18,123, they say, oh that looks like it should be a five digit number. Let me get a plausible five digit number. They don't ask. So what folks are doing to mitigate that is to say, oh this looks like a math problem. Ask a calculator and the calculator will get the answer. And then to put that in. Or this looks like you should do a journal citation. Go look it up in the source of record and then report back. And so that's one area. And for folks who want to look at more research in this the evolving areas are called grounding, consistency, and attribution."

- Michael Howell, in an interview with JAMA Editor in Chief Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, MAS for JAMA/HIMMS

The entire interview is here if you are interested in watching/reading it.

Wait? I thought you told me that Michael went to Google to tackle the problem of medical misinformation?

Yep, he’s definitely still doing that. Here’s a three-minute interview Michael and his colleague Dr. Garth Graham of YouTube did recently with Yahoo/Finance about how they are dealing with medical misinformation on YouTube.

References & Related Links

Bibbins-Domingo, K. (2023, September 20). AI and Clinical Practice—AI Gaslighting, AI Hallucinations, and GenAI Potential [Video]. JAMA/JN Learning Network.Gaglani, S., Carrese, M., Acer, H., & Apanovitch, D. (2023, August 23). What AI’s Rapid Progress Means for Healthcare and Health Information – Dr. Michael Howell, Chief Clinical Officer at Google [Audio podcast episode]. Raise the Line. Jacobino, N. (2023, November 13). How YouTube Is Addressing Medical Misinformation [Video]. Yahoo Finance.