PLA Blog

Great session this afternoon on being cutting edge.  Here’s what I learned.

The session I went to this morning was on Library 2.0. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, “we have Helene ( Blowers with us now in Columbus, Ohio, we don’t need to hear other folks talk about this.” Not true! It’s not going to be a reality for CML unless we all hop on that same train, my friends!

Points I gleaned:

• Design for uncertainty - you never know what is going to happen, and you should be ready to shift if needed to better serve the customers
• Keep experimenting! There is no right or wrong, there is just experimentation - if it works do it more, if it doesn’t work, try the next idea.
• In Boston they have Youtube vids of teens booktalking - on their website!
• Learning 2.0 is amazing (GO HELENE!)
• Web-based activity (i.e. on a teen website the library runs) is higher when it’s associated with a program.
• “Reminder me later” feature on their events calendar. They can program themselves to get a reminder 3 days before the event is going to take place.
• Michael Stephens is really as much fun in person as his blog would indicate.
• Speak in a human voice - remember that your customers will respond to this better than to another lecture.
• Circ staff is blogging about books for customers - and they’re sending circ staff to Book
• Expo to help them! They’re our front line - if they don’t know about the books, and they’re the ones who are known, we’re losing and opportunity.
• The library should be transparent, meaning we should allow comment in the catalog, etc.
• Throw out the culture of being perfect.
• Aim to satisfy the hearts of your customers.
• Learn to learn.
• Adapt to change.
• Scan the horizon.

Ideas I had while listening:

• Start a FlickR site where kids and adults and staff can post pictures of library events.
• Start a “1000 readers” project where we get a series of photos of people - maybe all reading the same book? Maybe each reading their fave. Why not even maybe use those things for our promotions? Our customers using the library!
• Stop worrying about controling the content of library blogs, and just let it go.
• If you haven’t read it yet, go read Tame the Web’s post on the library that disallows MySpace and Facebook. Pay particular attention to the comments - there is a good discussion going.

On Saturday, January 12, I attended the “Best Practices in Cooperative Reference: Reference and Social Networking” session presented by QuestionPoint, with panel speakers Stephen Francoeur (Baruch College), Beth Evans (Brooklyn College) and David Lankes (Syracuse University). While the panel seemed targeted at academic librarians, I actually found a great deal that would be of interest to public librarians. (more…)

10 Ways to Make Your Library Great in 2008—via Web 2.0
1/16/08 11 AM-12 PM PT / 2-3 PM ET (registration is optional)
Excellent note: WebJunction’s webinars are now closed captioned in real time as well as in the recorded archive.

As you think about your resolutions for the New Year, why not resolve to make your library a great educational asset within your community? This webinar will show you how to leverage social networking tools such as del.icio.us and Librarything to enable knowledge sharing and create collections of information around professional development. Ten key themes are presented to empower library staff as well as to increase a library’s value within the community. Presented by guest speaker Ed Rossman, adult services librarian at Shaker Heights Public Library and author of Castles Against Ignorance: How to Make Libraries Great Educational Environments.

Be Safe, Not Sorry: Protecting Your Data
PC Magazine Learning Center self-paced course, four 30-minute webcasts

Are you doing everything you can to protect your data? Malware—from viruses to spyware—continues to plague many businesses, not to mention internal security threats. Does your small business have a holistic security strategy in place?

Don’t have a plan to secure your business data? Let the expert editorial staff of PC Magazine teach you everything you need to know. Attend this course of four dynamic online webcast lessons each of which includes practical downloadable coursework.

Even though we aren’t “businesses” per se, libraries are large organizations dealing with computers — public and staff — and their issues. This course, which you can do at your own pace, offers something a bit deeper than your average article about vanilla virus protection, and will give you excellent fodder for your next coffee with the tech folks.

How very exciting! It turns out that Sophie Brookover and Liz Burns, two of the intrepid librarians who blog over at Pop Goes the Library, are working on a book titled Pop Goes the Library: Using Pop Culture to Connect With Your Whole Community, to be published sometime in 2008.

And they need *your* feedback! Here’s why (via a quote from their post about the book):

So while we feverishly research, write, and revise the manuscript, we have a request of all of you, dear Readers & Friends of Pop: we have this survey, you see, and it would help us out tremendously if you’d be willing to answer our questions. It’s one thing for us to write about what we think makes a great marriage between pop culture & libraries; it’s quite another, more powerful thing to quote our experienced colleagues on this topic.

Please take a few minutes to help by filling out their survey. Understanding the fit of popular culture in the library is one of the many keys to staying relevant with our patron communities, so this is a very worthy cause for your time. Thanks!

Navigating the new online landscape, with all of the new social networking sites, means navigating a whole new culture. Interacting in the new culture also means understanding the etiquette of that culture.

It’s important to understand that, on a certain level, the new culture is making it up as they go along. On the other hand, much of the etiquette is really being adapted from early social networking sites like LiveJournal, and even from instant messaging (IM) and email etiquette.

Chris Brogan, co-founder of PodCamp, online community builder and contributor, and all-around networking guy, posted a really interesting and to-the-point post titled “Considering Social Network Etiquette” today, with the open invitation to all to participate in the conversation via the comments. The post covers a few sites like Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but the discussion is certainly not limited to these sites.

Ask your questions. Debate the merits of the etiquette tactics discussed. If you’re experienced and feeling like sharing, definitely participate. Consider this your chance to write a “Dear Abby” to the social networking world on how to interact, or even just to read along and learn a little something.

ALA Session held Monday 1:30-3:30

OK, I’ll be honest and say that although I found the summary of this program enticing, I wasn’t sure if I’d spend the whole time at the session. It appeared to have an academic focus, and come on - it’s technical services and I am SO not a technical services kinda gal, so I staked out a seat close to the door so I could make a quick, unnoticed getaway if necessary.

It wasn’t necessary. This session grabbed my interest, piqued my interest, and held my interest for the duration. This was due to some great presenters -all of whom approached the topic differently, but with equal levels of engaging style. I’ve located copies of all slides used, and you can access them here.

The session began with Matt Barnes, a consultant with R2 consulting. He was throwing out ideas and applications left and right - and I was wishing I’d taken shorthand at some point in my life. Sure, he touched on the usual concepts like Wikis, tagging, and mashups - then followed these with more exotic (at least to me) things as the new “Geotagging” phenomenon, the Croquet Consortium, IBM’s Web Fountain and web outsourcing using the overwhelmingly amazing/cool/can’t really even get my head around how innovative Amazon Mechanical Turk Wow, wow, and wow. Other Matt nuggets:
- (re: OCLC OpenWorldcat) “Don’t get stuck thinking the only devide is the PC. Think cell phone, PDA, iPod, etc.
- 2.0 isn’t just about deploying new technology. Use Web 2.0 to solve problems based on your mission and goals
- There isn’t a final solution or correct answer - only continuous change. (Preach it, brother!)

Next up was Beth Picknally-Camden, who reported on the University of Pennsylvania’s successful “PennTags” program. The folks there created their own social bookmarking tool for their students and faculty to use. This allows them to tag catalog records and articles, and to create annotations. Beth said that in addition to the benefits of sharing and collaborating, she saw this as an excellent way to reinforce the “playing to learn” concept that is so important to web 2.0 tools (and is so undervalued in many of our organizations, I feel). She also learned very quickly that “people are watching” - meaning that she was encouraged to contribute because of the responses and connections her own contributions were making in others’ contributions. They use a tag cloud to highlight the popular tags. You need to have a “Pennkey” to contribute, but anyone can observe. Check it out at: http://tags.library.upenn.edu/

The final presenter was Elizabeth Winter, from Georgia Tech. She began her session with a slide that stated: PLAY v. PRODUCTIVITY. She then asked:

What if playing with new technologies was increasing our productivity? She also asserted that it’s OK to throw something out to “see if it sticks”. (Say it again, sister)
She then told us about their recent “see if it sticks” pilot - a GTJournals wiki. Using the easy and free pbwiki web tool, the folks at Georgia Tech set out to find a way to accomplish their goals of: cutting down on email volume, allowing all staff to share and get involved in a “common area”, track their progress, and avoid duplication of effort - relating to changes and cancellations of their many journals. They’ve locked it down, because they are including pricing and other sensitive informaiton, but you can see screen shots of their wiki in Elizabeth’s slide presentation here

An excellent presentation that sparked more than a few ideas in my “public librarian” head. Thanks academic folks!

Jed Moffitt of the King County LIbrary System began the PLA-sponsored Wiking the Blog and Walking the Dog with family stories that somehow led to a disclosure that the topic of social software in libraries is not so cutting-edge as it was eighteen months ago when the topic was chosen for the American Library Association Summer 2007 conference. The topic has matured a bit. He thought it was still worth discussing. The overflow crowd agreed.

At this “late date” in social software, the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenberg County has already reached its second generation in training programs. Matt Gullett, the Emerging Technologies Librarian for PLCMC, described the library’s online tutorial series Learning 2.0. He invited all libraries to use what his library has created. PLCMC generally gave staff nine weeks to complete the tutorial in a voluntary program, but other libraries can take as long as they want. Gullett said the key is to be flexible and let staff learn at their pace.

The objectives behind the PLCMC effort are as follows, according to Gullett:

expose staff to tools
encourage them to play
empower individuals
expand their knowledge
eliminate their fears

PLCMC now has debuted its follow-up Learning 2.1, which is more self-directed learning. Gullett says that the results of staff training is a change in the work culture and the form of his library’s organization is changing. The new departments in the library are 1) community engagement, 2) library experiences, 3) organizational resources, and 4) research, innovation, and strategy.

Librarians in virtual worlds were the focus of Alliance Library System’s Tom Peters. Peters has been involved in Second Life for over a year. His avatar is based on his dog’s name (one of the references back to the title in this program).

Peters said that there are now at least 500 virtual worlds online. He said they are not games in the strictest sense of the term. They are alternate lives. Because many clients are going there, libraries should, too. Alliance Library System has created Info Island in Second Life and is providing services to participants in the virtual universe.

Peters thinks that libraries in a virtual world are great for answering reference inquiries, linking to digital collections, creating interesting exhibits, and running book discussions or other event programs. Libraries can design buildings that defy physics in their innovative service of clients in Second Life.

Transforming the online catalog for the Ann Arbor Public Library into social software is the trick for which John Blyberg won awards. With its tagging, reviews, ratings, and comments, the catalog has now become a community footprint and portal to the library. The catalog even has a tool for generating old catalog cards with comments written on them. So far the features have been most used by teens, as shown by the number of ratings for teen books.

Blyberg said the code for adding these features is free for other libraries to use, though it is not “plug and play.” He cautioned that libraries may want to find ways to “prime the pump” on the social features by getting a group of clients to use them to attract more general use.

In the little time that was left her, Meredith Farkas spoke about the use of wikis and blogs by public libraries. She found that wikis are well-designed for creating community knowledge bases. They foster contributions from individuals who join the community and are keyword searchable. She recommended that libraries go to Wiki Matrix to find comparisons of the competing software.

Farkas also showed examples of how libraries and businesses have used blogs to keep clients informed. In the case of Southwest Airlines, its public blog actually became an agent of service change, as clients expressed themselves through comments.

At the end of the formal presentation, the audience had many questions about applications of social software. The topic may not be so old-hat as Moffitt thought.

Held Saturday 1:30-3:30

This session was an interesting one, but from my viewpoint, it’s one that got better as it went along. The first speaker, Lori Ayre, focused on things that I didn’t think really fit with this topic. She even said that she was going to talk about technologies “with levers and buttons, not we applications”. She covered things like central sorting systems, automated check in, and remote physical library service points, like book dispensers at airports, and library kiosks. And in my opinion, though interesting, this would’ve been better suited to the session on transforming your library space.

Anyway, next up was Casey Bisson who talked about the cool things he’s doing at Plymouth State University, and highlighted other library systems that have done innovative stuff in their OPAC. He began his talk with the statement “the library is more than about books – so should our library websites”. He said something I totally agree with: “the website is not a marketing tool; it’s a service point – as important as our physical library branches.” He highlighted small but innovative Tamworth Public Library, whose director utilizes a blog feature on their website to reflect questions received from customers. The example was regarding a particular gardening question received. Well instead of just answering the query (with book titles to try) for the one customer, this became a blog entry that all of their customers (and the rest of us!) can read and comment upon. What a fantastic approach to anticipating community information needs, and really making the most out of staff time spent doing readers advisory and/or reference work! He also carried a theme which I felt lends itself to the “Wisdom of Crowds” philosophy – epitomized, I think, by showing us the example of Beyond Brown Bag digital initiative that goes beyond the usual scanning and indexing of historic photographs, but then allows people to comment on the pictures themselves. It’s a fabulous project with over 11,000 pictures documenting the history of the Brown Paper Company of Berlin, New Hampshire from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s. This project allows everyone – but particular the older citizens in the area – to comment on the people in the picture, as well as what the picture is demonstrating or showing (the story behind the picture). What an inspiring way to use 2.0 technology to encourage connections and conversation about a city’s history – seen through the eyes of the people who worked there. Fabulous.

The third and final speaker of the session was Roy Tennant, whose respected reputation preceeds him, and I was not disappointed. His first main point was:
1) Technology is a tool… 2) used by people… 3) to accomplish goals

He then went on to elaborate why this very statement creates a tricky business: it can mean significant risk, we humans are messy and unpredictable, and there is a complicated mix of organization mission and vision, people and their abilities, society, and technology. Each of these variables change rapidly, independent of one another. Since this is a game of tradeoffs, Roy suggests that before making decisions consider the following:
-Understand the needs of your users
-Consider your mission and priorities
-Choose where to make a difference
-Get good advice from folks in the know
-Know your sources of support
-Consider a pilot or prototype
He then talked about finding the right people to help implement techology changes in your organization. The characteristics he advocates are:
-an ability to learn constantly
-demonstrated flexibility
-project management experience
-deep technical experience
-excellent communication skills
-enthusiasm.
Roy also made it clear that he would avoid folks that are always adopting the “latest and greatest” - there needs to be a balance between seeing something cool to look into, and rushing into implementing it in your organization because it looks so cool.
He then talked about the goal of creating agile organizations. He had the following tips:
-use committees for communication…
-and use task forces to accomplish work. These groups are specific and focused, and disband after the project/task is complete
-use the best people for the job (regardless of where they are in the “pecking order” of your organization)
-reward innovation (don’t directly or indirectly punish it)
-punish loitering (defined as folks just taking up space)
-take risks (and heavens, stop striving for unattainable perfection!)
-invest in infrastructure (lose your “poverty” mentality and stop trying to run your critical technologies on a shoestring budget. This is particularly critical for your human resources)
-invest in your staff (offer training opportunities and create an environment where staff is encouraged to play, learn, and have fun!)
-realize that not all changes are created equal (meaning: choose your battles)
-be opportunistic (exploit opportunities) and entrepreneurial (create opportunities)

Roy then finished his presentation with sharing the rules HE follows to keep himself running strong:

Learn only enough to get by. (What? We don’t have to learn it ALL…RIGHT NOW? I realize that this is simple common sense, but honestly I think we need to tell ourselves and our collegues this every day if necessary. Librarians are by nature “A” students, and in our attempt to be thorough and knowledgable, we are killing ourselves with unrealistic expectations.
-Learn when you have a problem to solve (He elaborated by saying he learns “just in time” - NOT “just in case.” Again I say a firm AMEN to that! How many times do we time our learning so that there’s no way to practice or apply what we’ve learned to a real life solution? That’s a perfect opportunity to fall prey to the “Use it or lose it” reality.)
-Find somebody experienced to show you 3 things about… (Well, anything, really. This encourages us to seek out collegues across the building or across the country to become “mini-mentors”. Then to return the favor. It forces us to admit that we DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING, and whew! what a relief to let that go, right?)
And the FINAL nugget ‘o truth:
Use what you learn, write it down, or kiss it goodbye (I’ll elaborate upon this to say that I believe there are times when each of those actions are completely appropriate. And I hope you notice what is NOT listed as an option: obsessing about things “slipping by” you and stress about keeping multiple balls in the air. Decide which balls to keep up in the air yourself, pass some off to your co-workers, and darn it - let some fall…and don’t rush to pick them up - just see what happens…)

Zeke Killbride, a librarian at the Finkelstein Memorial Library in Spring Valley, NY, wrote to us about a digital collection recently posted to the library’s site:

I’m writing to suggest a library link for your blog. I’m a librarian at the Finkelstein Memorial Library in Rockland County, New York, north of New York City. One of our patrons and her mother donated her late father’s drawings to our library and we have made them available online.

[Link to the collection]

It’s an interesting story. David Friedman was a Holocaust survivor. Friedman documented his agony and torment during the Holocaust through a powerful series, “Because…They Were Jews!” While he was working on this series he found comfort by visiting local libraries and sketching the people he saw. Timeframe: 1962-72.

Friedman’s words: “I needed to forget about the concentration camps and the horror that was there. So it was a pleasure to go to the library.” There’s a poignant human interest story here; showing libraries as a place of relaxation and sanctuary.

I would argue that this is more than a lovely human interest story. This is an example of librarians telling a story, something that Karen Hyman so often speaks about, a low-tech option for offering digital photos (fast-loading HTML, thumbnails for quick viewing, an HTML slideshow that simply refreshes the page and doesn’t require a special plug-in), and definitely taking content from the community and presenting it to the rest of the community in a new and interesting way. It’s providing context for content and communing with patrons. That’s Library 2.0 if I’ve ever seen it.