On Wednesday night I ate at a favorite restaurant of mine when I have visited Philadelphia in the past. That would be Alma de Cuba on Walnut Street in the Central City (just a few blocks from Rittenhouse Square and only eight blocks from the Convention Center.) I recommend the Sugarcane Tuna but if you love Cubano cuisine you will love this restaurant on either the first or second floor.
Find Alma de Cuba at 1623 Walnut Street, 215-988-1799
Another terrific choice for Cubano food is one I discovered on Tuesday night. (Do you detect a theme here?) It is located in the historical district on 2nd Street and it is Cuba Libre. Choose a table by the open-front of the restaurant and watch the action on the street while you enjoy a delicious meal. Or sit on the second floor for the a more intimate setting. Try the Vaca Frita and the guacamole made with avocado and pineapple served with chips of crispy, dried plaintains. Check out the a dinner menu, if you are skeptical.
Cuba Libre is found at 10 South 2nd Street, 215-627-0666.
Discover new restaurants all over Philadelphia. It is a delicious city!
I’m the Youth Services Librarian at the Marion County Library in Marion, South Carolina, and I have the great privilege to attend the 2012 PLA Conference as a result of winning the video contest. Thought I might post a few notes as a first-time conference attendee. I attended both Book Buzz sessions this morning and I can’t wait to start ordering some of the great upcoming titles I heard about in the first session, including Year Comes Round (I love haiku!) from Albert Whitman, the hilarious-sounding Boy Recession from Little, Brown, and Huff and Puff from Abrams (I’m always looking for fairytale reinterpretations to develop into live theater!), to name a few.
The second session gave me a chance to see Nancy Pearl live and in-person which was very exciting. I find her to be much more animated and attractive than her action figure, (which graced the desk of my former director), although they are roughly the same height. Actually she is very much larger than life, and demonstrated that with her diplomatic response to a rather angry audience member who (forgetting to read the program description) thought the program was to be all Nancy all the time and didn’t realize we would also enjoy lively booktalks from the various publisher representatives.
I’ve also got a long list of titles I hope to convince our library director to order for our adult collection and a few to buy as gifts for family and friends! (One Shot at Forever published by Harper and MacMillan’s Shine, Shine, Shine are two at the top of my list.)
The opening keynote address by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was both enlightening and encouraging; his views on the future of energy in our country paint a bright portrait of a world no longer dependent on carbon-based fuels. His advice that it is more important to change our legislators than to change our light bulbs hit home with me….Time for me to stop dragging my feet and sign up for Twitter, if only to get his informative tweets!
I picked up lots of treasures during my visit to the Exhibit Hall all of which have already been shipped back to my library, thanks to a handy Fed-Ex office in the Convention Center.
Looking forward to lots of wonderful programs tomorrow! I don’t want to miss a minute.
I’ve arrived in Philly for the PLA 2012 conference. After checking out some local favorites like the Mutter Museum, the Magic Gardens, a great cheesesteak and yet another great cheesesteak, it’s time to buckle down and get ready for the real deal. Tomorrow morning Aaron Schmidt and I will embark upon an 8 hour course called “Building a User-Centered Library Website”, which we expect to be a marathon of discussion, exercises, and inspiration. With any luck, attendees will return to work and start moving library services to the front of their websites, while de-emphasizing much of that ‘about us’ type content that patrons generally don’t need.
After that it is off to the sessions. I’m not quite sure what I’ll actually attend, but I thought I’d take a moment to point to a few that I’d consider Thursday’s highlights.
Thursday morning at 8:30 AM is “Getting eContent to your Customers: Challenges, Best Practices and Solutions” in room 122 A-B at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The speakers are a who’s-who list of heavy hitters in the eContent discussions at the top of your reading list these days. We’ve got Gina Millsap, Michael Porter, Alan Inouye, Tom Peters, and Lisa Hickman in the house and the conversation will be deep.
At 10:45 AM on Thursday, why not check out local librarian Joel Nichols, who will talk about the iPad in the library, both for patrons and for staff productivity. This should be good stuff; computers and computing have definitely evolved far beyond the desktop paradigm and it’s due time we started thinking about this as we provide library services. Represent! Learn a thing or two from Joel that morning.
After a good lunch, you’d be absolutely NUTS to miss the session about the Digital Public Library of America in room 120 A-B-C. The DPLA is something I write about frequently on this blog, but it can’t compare to witnessing this excellent panel discussion including Martin Gomez, Michael Colford, and Susan Hildreth, moderated by John Palfrey. This initiative, proto-organization, movement, or what ever you might call it has great potential to change the way public libraries provide service in the digital age. It would be almost irresponsible to miss this!
At 4:15 I’ll find myself torn between the session by folks from the Brooklyn Public Library about their public information commons project and Daisy Porter’s presentation of San Jose Public Library’s centralized programming model. Both completely awesome topics, both drastically different topics. The Information Commons in Brooklyn does promise to be a special type of library facility, and I know that team will give an excellent presentation… but at the same time, find effcient ways to deliver high quality library programs across a library system is challenging. Daisy will offer great insight.
Any time after 6:00, you are on your own my friends. Enjoy Philadelphia. There’s plenty of trouble to get into. What a wonderful city!
Floating Collections are becoming more prevalent in multi-site library systems. Materials are not owned by a specific branch; rather, they “float” among the sites. When an item is returned it is shelved at that location, whether or not it was checked out there. The catalog constantly updates to show where items are shelved.
Has your library implemented such a system? How long has your collection floated? Why did the library make the change? Was it difficult to persuade administrators, managers, and/or staff? How did you implement it? Is it effective? Are patrons happy? “Perspectives” wants to hear from you! Essays of up to 1000 words will be considered for publication in the May/June issue of Public Libraries,the PLA journal. Photos are welcome!
Email your essay by March 21, 2012 to Nann Blaine Hilyard, Perspectives Co-Editor at .
In today’s environment, library management need better tools to support internal decision making and advocating on behalf of the library. PLA, in partnership with Counting Opinions, now offers a state-of-the-art, real-time solution for the capture and report generation of the annual PLDS data, for benchmarking, trend analyses and custom report generation.
• Includes access to PLDS public library statistics (FY2002 to FY2010) and IMLS Public Library (Public Use) Data Files (FY1998 to FY2009)
• Supports strategic planning and advocacy efforts
• Complements budget presentations and grant applications
• Enables peer benchmarking
• Delivers multi-year trend analysis
• On-demand, 24×7 secure browser access
• Comprehensive customized report outputs
• Easy repurposing, sharing and publishing of report outputs
Come and see this new tool in action @ PLA 2012 Conference!
When: Thursday, March 15, 2:00 PM to 3:15 PM
Where: Room 117, Convention Center
Registration closes next Wednesday (March 7, 2012) for the next session, week of March 19 – week of April 23, of Turning the Page 2.0.
This free, six-week advocacy training program has been developed and presented by the Public Library Association (PLA) with generous support from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Turning the Page 2.0 will be offered two more times in 2012. See the full schedule with registration dates.
Turning the Page 2.0 addresses core issues of advocacy in a convenient format with weekly one-hour virtual classroom sessions, development of an Advocacy Work Plan and personalized feedback from facilitators. Highly interactive units cover topics such as creating and telling your library’s story, building relationships with key decision makers, project management, and making the all-important ask.
Participants will spend three hours per week on this training. Registration for Turning the Page 2.0 is open to all public librarians, library staff, and library supporters, including board members, Friends and local officials. Libraries are encouraged to complete Turning the Page 2.0 with an advocacy team that works through the program together. For more information about the program, please email Lynn Slawsky, .
The other day I wrote a post describing a two-part plan for a publishing platform for public libraries, and two days later I discovered that much of what I described has been prototyped in Escondido CA in a project called LibraryYOU. This is worth paying attention to. LibraryYOU is the first iteration of something very important for public libraries. This project is the work of Donna Feddern, Digital Services Manager of Escondido Public Library, who I was fortunate to catch up to on the phone today. She agreed to answer a few questions about LibraryYOU for the PLA Blog.
Donna, can you explain a bit about what the LibraryYOU site is, and why it makes sense for a public library to host such a service?
The LibraryYOU site hosts How To videos created by community members that they have either created themselves or made in our library’s new recording studio. It’s also a place to get tips about making your own multimedia web content. Libraries have always supported literacy and people communicating through the printed word. We now want to help our communities communicate through video and audio formats, which are just other ways to convey information. My first job after library school was as a trainer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s library program. I believed in our mission to help those without access to computers and the Internet be able to connect to the world at their public library. This just feels like an extension of that. We’ve provided computers for years. Why not provide multimedia tools to keep helping our communities learn about using the latest technologies?
I’ve also been hearing a lot of librarians talk about how the library’s strength (over Google, for example) is that we bring our communities together. You could argue that people watch a How To video on Youtube, but we’re calling attention to our local experts so they can connect with their own communities. Also, many of our LibraryYOU contributors do not have the knowledge of or access to the recording equipment to make their own videos so we’re helping them with that.
How did LibraryYOU come to be? Who made it? Who paid for it? This looks like it was a lot of work.
I love going to conferences because they always inspire me. I came up with the rough idea for LibraryYOU at Internet Librarian 2010. Presenters were just starting to talk about libraries being content creators and I was in love with Chicago Public Library’s YOUmedia project. I had originally envisioned patrons making videos as part of a library advocacy campaign, but realized it would be better to focus on How To videos. The contributors see the benefit of this because they can share their expertise and embed the videos they make on their own websites and it also helps us add to our collection. If you look up a topic in our catalog, you may find a book or a LibraryYOU video.
My boss asked me to come up with something for the California State Library’s Pitch an Idea LSTA grant and since I had been playing with this idea for months, I wrote up a proposal. Everyone liked it, so I wrote the grant and received the funding.
I then did the research and created the website. I am now maintaining the website and doing cataloging, outreach, and training. With the grant money, I was able to hire a part-time Recording Studio Coordinator who helped finalize the list of equipment for the recording studio. His main responsibility is to film and edit the videos and podcasts but he also helps manage the talent (our LibraryYOU contributors) and helps with networking and outreach. Luckily, our Digital Services Librarian position was unfrozen at the beginning of the grant and now I have more help with the LibraryYOU website. And we’re about to hire a high school student with grant money to assist in the recording studio. So yes, it is a lot of work but I am lucky to have a lot of excellent help!
How can I get something like LibraryYOU for my own community? What tools did you use to make this?
All you really need is a digital video camera, a computer with video editing software (Windows Movie Maker, iMovie) or a webcam, and a place to host your videos (Youtube, Vimeo, etc.) That would be the bare bones way to start the project. Then of course you’d need to have staff who knew a bit about filming and editing or would be willing to learn.
We did a little more than that. We took over an office as our recording studio, then bought an iMac with iMovie software and some recording equipment (digital video cameras, microphones, backdrops, lighting, etc.). You can see a more complete list here.
iPad 2s are also fun for movie making. They have a quality built-in video camera and you can get the stripped-down iMovie app to edit your videos. We plan on using the app to teach our patrons basic video editing skills.
I’m happy to talk to anyone who is interested in starting their own LibraryYOU. You can get more information at The LibraryYOU Project site.
If you were to do something differently, extend, or improve LibraryYOU, how would you do it?
I would have loved to use Omeka to host our LibraryYOU site. It is an open source tool created for libraries and museums to host digital collections, but it uses LAMP and we don’t have that kind of server. Instead, we are using the mojoPortal CMS which is what we used to redesign our library website. I’m familiar with it so I didn’t have the learning curve which would have really slowed me down. It works out well for us.
I’d also love to extend this program by having a YOUmedia grant or Library Lab to give more people access to equipment and a chance to collaborate and teach one another.
Frequently when people speak of ‘the future’, they speak of that which they believe to be inevitable. They take a determinist approach. They cite facts, figures, and statistics that back up their vision, be it bleak or blue-skied, and show you how x ,y ,and z will be totally different in 2020, 2030, or 2050. The audience is then left with a singular picture of what the world has in store for them. Usually this approach is bleak rather than bright blue and it paints a picture of an uncomfortable future; something scary, something disruptive, something negative. We’ve seen a lot of this predictive style coming from self-described futurists speaking about public libraries in the age of the internet and digital books, and I find it frustrating and unproductive. I’m here to offer you a positive spin on the future; I’d like to describe a future for public libraries that we could consciously aim for, steer toward, and build strategies to actually make happen. I’ll describe new services that would take significant investment to implement, and I hope readers and library supporters won’t be shy about the call for that investment.
In a sentence: Public libraries will have tremendous value and support in their communities if they strategically position themselves as community publishers. ‘Publisher’ certainly is a loaded word right now, as the publishing industry is currently victim to a lot of the same negative determinist futurecasting as public libraries, so let me describe what I mean by publishing here. As ‘community publishers’, I’m suggesting that public libraries can and should support the creative activities of residents by 1) providing access to equipment and expertise, 2) facilitating connections and conversations between those creative residents, and finally 3) serving as a distribution mechanism and access portal for much of the the work they create. This might mean assisting in the scanning and publishing of photographs from a patrons’ basement, offering basic recording facilities for local teens interested in making music, or the production and distribution of a local author’s novel. Here are the two components of a system that would truly reposition the public library as a local publisher.
The first piece is a design pattern for a media lab. Media labs are not uncommon at public libraries nowadays; many people have done great work in this area. All of these wonderful facilities and curricula considered, I’m most excited by librarylab.org because it is modular, portable, flexible, open source and creative commons licensed, all of which are values I believe to be important to promote and uphold in public libraries. There’s a tension between what it means to be local versus what it means to be web-scale, and there are advantages to both. The original vision for librarylab.org was connected to the Digital Public Library of America beta sprint; it was to be a networked physical architecture acting as a gateway for contribution to a national digital library. In that sense, it was a web-scale idea. At the same time, because the plans are open source and hackable, the various modules could be customized, tweaked, and branded for almost any imaginable local use. In that sense, it is a local concept. As public libraries move toward knowledge production as a core piece of their mission, I see great value in some agreement on standards, principles, and even talking points around these media lab type facilities, while never losing sight of the things that make every community unique. Currently, librarylab.org only exists as a set of conceptual drawings. If you are interested in supporting prototyping of the librarylab modules so that sound construction plans can be made available to all, contact the folks at Noll & Tam Architecture and Planning.
The second piece of this community publishing puzzle is a software platform for producing and publishing localized ‘ebooks’ and I intentionally use that term to describe a broad assortment of digital media. While a media lab largely supports the production of single-channel media, this platform is intended to work as an authoring tool to bring those pieces together into finished ‘works’. The best way to describe this is via a hypothetical use case.
Imagine that Jenny Jane in Anytown USA aspires to write a book. Via this platform, JJ could log on to her public library website and ‘create a project.’ Perhaps she’d log in from the comfort of her home, or on her mobile device from a park bench, or perhaps JJ isn’t comfortable with or doesn’t have access to the technology herself, so she would actually visit the public library to start her project. One she logs in, she’d have a series of templates to choose from. Maybe she wants to write a paperback book… or a comic book… whatever. Next, when Jenny creates that book project via her library, a record with a ‘work-in-progress’ item type is automatically generated in the library catalog. JJ’s work in progress is now discoverable in the same context as Charles Dickens or John Grisham, a huge psychological boost for her as a new writer. As she writes her new book, JJ has tweaked her settings so that other interested library patrons are able to watch and track the progress. They can comment and even participate if she invites them to do so; group authoring could be supported on this platform.
Most exciting of all for JJ is that this library software could work like a Kickstarter for printing books. If a sufficient number of patrons felt her project had the merit to be published as a print volume, they could vote it up to the top Reddit style, and then commit real money toward editioned printing via lulu.com or even an in-house Espresso Book Machine at the library. The community then actually determines what gets published beyond the web. Once the book is committed to print publishing, it no longer exists only as an eBook in the library catalog, but there will be a hard copy at the library as well.
The new public library needs to establish itself as an institution with a commitment to the production of knowledge just as deep as its existing commitment to the consumption of knowledge. The public library needs to be involved in all the touchpoints of the creative life cycle rather than just the beginning and the end. Content creation cannot be viewed as a targeted developmental service for kids and teens, it needs to be reconsidered as a core part of lifelong learning. The future I propose and the means by which libraries might create it requires an intentional shift; no future is inevitable. This investment in appropriate spaces, facilities, and staff as well as software, servers, and developers is the new infrastructure for the new library. It is not a small investment, but it is one worth making. Let’s make this happen.
February 21, 2012 by Kathleen Hughes ( 1 Comment )
Two winners have been chosen in the ‘win a trip to PLA 2012’ contests that were recently sponsored by the Public Library Association (PLA). Winners will receive free registration to the PLA 2012 Conference, March 13-17 in Pennsylvania, four nights hotel, and up to $500 reimbursement for travel to and from the conference.
The first, an essay contest aimed at current MLIS students, required entrants to submit a 150 word essay detailing why they would like to attend PLA 2012 and also showing their creativity and enthusiasm for the public library world. Essays were then evaluated by members of the PLA Board of Directors. Amy Mikel, MLIS student, University of Washington Information School, Seattle, was selected from more than 60 participants to receive the trip to PLA 2012.
PLA also held a short-video contest for librarians, which required entrants to create a 60-second video describing their library and what they would get out of attending PLA 2012. Fifteen contestants submitted entries. The top five videos (judged by members of the PLA Board of Directors) were placed on PLA’s Facebook page for final voting by the public, with the video drawing the highest number of “likes” named the winner. Catherine Pruett, youth services librarian at the Marion County (S.C) Library received 322 likes for her game-show themed video and won the prize.
February 16, 2012 by Kathleen Hughes ( No Comments )
Job Searching and Libraries
During these difficult economic times, people searching for jobs are turning to libraries more than ever. What is your library doing to help job seekers? The co-editors of the Perspectives column in Public Libraries want to know! Please submit your essay (no more than 1500 words) for inclusion in the March/April Perspectives column no later than Friday, March 2nd to Nanci Milone Hill, co-editor at .
On Wednesday night I ate at a favorite restaurant of mine when I have visited Philadelphia in the past. That would be Alma de Cuba on Walnut Street in the Central City (just a few blocks from Rittenhouse Square and only eight blocks from the Convention Center.) I recommend the Sugarcane Tuna but if you love Cubano cuisine you will love this restaurant on either the first or second floor.
Check out the a dinner menu, if you are skeptical.
