PLA Blog

The other day I stopped by my favorite little bookstore, Spoonbill & Sugartown, and found a great book called New Graphical Symbols for Many More. New Graphical Symbols for Many More is “a (Swedish) national development and standardization project aimed at making public symbols more uniform and more serviceable in keeping with the concept of Design for All.” What really got me excited- one of the symbols that all 124 competitors had to create for the contest was a symbol for a public library. I’ve posted scans of all of them below for preview and for educational purposes only.

In my last post I promoted the creation of ‘pictotags,’ user-assigned icons that can help describe characteristics of a book or media object. In the case of that post, the images described the physical location of an object, but I anticipate them being more descriptive in the future. Visual literacy is embedded in cultural histories and mores, so naturally the winning pictograms presented to the Swedes by the competitors will have to make sense to people who live in and visit public places in Sweden. In the age of the inernet and simplified global communication via graphic user interfaces, it becomes more and more challenging to create standards that will translate internationally. How does the designer account for the visual vocabulary of every tourist that might come through Stockholm, and should the designer in the age of global communication be accountable to every possible user?

Creating visual standards is analogous to creating a controlled vocabulary. Can one create a global, visual, controlled vocabulary? It has been attempted before; it was part of Otto Neurath’s ‘isotype‘ vision at the Bauhaus. Arguable, progenitors of the field of infographics like Ladislav Sutnar were striving for the same kind of thing. Will librarians work with graphic designers to make these decisions? How will visual literacies determine the structure of information and information retrieval in the coming century?

For me, this provoked a lot of thought about library identity in the eyes of our users. Enjoy these icons. I’ll be away for the Thanksgiving holiday. More posts after the holiday.

Winning Library pictogram:

The rest of the entries:

A few years ago I presented a new service model for urban public libraries that I called the Library Outpost. The Outpost is a small, storefront library space in a busy retail environment with no local, physical browsing collection. It is a space that assumes an increasing number of library users are happy doing their browsing on the web, and that they can have materials delivered to this convenient location for pickup. You can read about it in detail here.

The Outpost service model still remains unrealized in its purest application. It has been a few years since I first proposed it, and in that time GPS and the mobile web has really taken off. In this post I am sharing my sketch of a greatly abbreviated experience prototype highlighting the ‘parking’ feature of a library app for mobile devices. The ‘parking’ system is a shelving arrangement for materials in a Library Outpost. Its organization is based on user-assigned pictogram tags on both the mobile app and in the signage at the physical location. Currently, the user-assigned pictotags (yep, I just made that word up) don’t describe the materials themselves in any way other than their parking location. In a future version, it would be interesting to get users to assign a more descriptive pictotag that could contribute to item level metadata and power some kind of social element, but for now words remain the best tags. Still, I’m proud of the way these pictotags connect virtual and physical information spaces.

Again, this is a mockup, beta, version 1.0, whatever. I invite your commentary and criticism.

Here are the three most important components of the app, as I see it now:

• Because your mobile is connected to the internet, you can just as easily be linked to an electronic version of the item, be it an e-book, a video, a song, whatever.

• GPS takes advantage of your location at the time of your search, so if you do want a physical copy, you can get the physical copy nearest to you and have it sent to the place nearest to you.

• The parking system creates a visual standard linking library users physical and virtual experience.

Link to a large image of the whole thing here, or just scroll down the rest of this post for screenshots.

Below is an image of the shelving with corresponding pictotags.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a little something about how librarians ought to look outside there profession for inspiration from time to time after I read about how the Walker Art Center is using iTunes U to distribute Walker content.  There is a flip side to this as well.  Public libraries and librarians are innovators as well, and it is equally important for us to write about, present, and share our work with other audiences.  Not only is this good advocacy, but it is very much in the spirit of librarianship to share the work you do.

Yesterday I got an email from my friend Lauren who works at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The Exploratorium is “is an experimental, hands-on museum designed to spark curiosity—regardless of your age or familiarity with science.”, and the place really is awesome.  Lauren’s question:

“We’re looking to create programming for the lost museum-user demographic: 18-35 yr old single folk.  Unfortunately, research at the intersection of Adult Education and Museum Studies is pretty scarce, and information about incorporating social networking is non-existent in the museum journal literature (I’d love to find actual data about social networking).  Have you done research into getting 18-35 yr olds into libraries?  I think it could be translated to the museum setting pretty easily.  In a different vein of how I’m thinking about this project - can you think of program models that might be applicable?  Gaming and all that in the library has been successful, of course, but are there concrete models that might be helpful?”

I want to put this out there for everyone to react to and hopefully comment on.  Librarians, share your experience and expertise in these matters!  This is also a perfect opportunity for me to post about an awesome project aimed at that very demographic coming out of the Oak Park Public Library.  Maybe this can serve as inspiration for Lauren and the Exploratorium.  Sorry, this post is going to get long, but I’ve been waiting to find the right time to write about Genre-X and finally, the time has come.  Genre-X in their own words:

Genre X evolved because we identified patrons in their twenties and thirties as being a user group that we needed to target more effectively. We began brainstorming in the summer of 2007 to figure out the best course of action to meet their needs and naturally a book discussion was one of the first things we thought of. There were a few strong factors that we took into consideration before making our decision to hold the discussion off site and at 8pm:

* Many people work later than the usual 9-5 day and would need extra time to make it to the discussion.

* Some of these people might not even have time to make it home before attending. While refreshments are always appreciated, we thought it would be great if we could offer them the chance to have dinner while discussing their book.

* Due to the overwhelming number of activities/events that might appeal to this user base on any given day in the Chicagoland area, we realized that we would need to create a discussion group that would offer intellectual stimulation as well as an opportunity for fun social networking. We also knew at the time that this demographic was not heavily represented at many of our programs and that the library might not be

the most desirable location for them to meet in this fashion.

Thus we decided to “meet our patrons where they’re at” and hold our discussions in a variety of bars in the area. At first we were rotating for every discussion, but quickly we realized that most bars are a little

too loud for holding a solid book discussion. We were also more concerned with the venue’s proximity to public transportation in the beginning, but eventually we identified this as being less important than the venue itself. The Snug is a small room inside Molly Malone’s and has truly turned out to be the ideal location for our discussion. And it is less than half a mile away from the nearest El stop, which equates to about a 15 minute walk.

Before we even planned our first discussion we also brainstormed about how we would choose to publicize it. We knew from the start that the book discussion was probably just the beginning of what we hoped would evolve into a more diverse selection of twenties and thirties programming, so we felt strongly that we would need to brand ourselves early on to build a user base. Again we had a couple of reasons to support our decision that a blog would be the best method to go about doing this:

* We needed a way to reach out to this demographic outside of our internal print publicity and/or library web site. While plenty of people in their twenties and thirties do use the library, we really wanted to reach out to those who, for whatever reason, were not regular library patrons.

* Through our talks we also realized that we really wanted to reach out to those who might not ever be able to attend a discussion. And because we are all such heavy blog users ourselves, we knew that a blog would provide us with the best mechanism for delivering information to these people.

So we approached our IT department and our web master with our thoughts and they were very willing to work with us to make the genre X blog happen. Collectively we spent close to a month looking at different blog publishing applications and making decisions on how we wanted it to look. Since it was launched we’ve met with our web master a number of times to discuss tweaking it to make it more user friendly.

Since the blog’s inception we’ve had over 15,000 unique visitors and we’ve seen a steady increase in its usage every month. Our stats this year alone have quadrupled since January and it is by and large the most popular method of informing new members about the group. Because of its apparent popularity we have recently set goals for the number of times we need to post each week. So hopefully you will begin seeing new content on a more frequent basis!

It is important for librarians to take pride in the fact that we do good work, and to share it with others.  This is one of the reasons blogging is so important to our profession.  Creating good library programming for your local community is your job as a librarian, but when something works or doesn’t work the blogosphere makes it really easy to share that so that others can benefit from your experience. 

Last week, at the NYLA 2008 Annual Conference I felt particularly privileged to have my mind blown by Jim Hendler of Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute.  He talked to us about the development of the semantic web, the web science movement that is being touted as web 3.0. The semantic web is, in my opinion, going to change the way people interact with the world in a very big way.  As librarians who care about things like community, public space, information, and context, we best be paying attention to this stuff.

So I believe the semantic web is going to permanently alter the way we all interact with the world.  I’m still trying to get my head around it, but I’ll try to explain.  The best way to start to understand the semantic web is to read the Wikipedia articles about RDF (Resource Description Framework) and ‘triplestores’ and to watch the Semantic Universe webcasts.  Do not be intimidated, I am not a programmer and I do not write any code other than very basic HTML.  When I read in Wikipedia that ‘triplestores’ are machine-readable subject-predicate-object statements, that suddenly made sense to me. RDF mimics your normal sentence structure but makes it something a computer can understand.  Suddenly the English major can talk to the Math major: ie, your computer is closer to speaking and understanding your language.  To quote the Wikipedia article, “a triplestore is optimized for the storage and retrieval of many short statements called triples, in the form of subject-predicate-object, like ‘Bob is 35’ or ‘Bob knows Fred’.”  If you understand RDF and want to go deeper, look into Web Ontology Language (OWL).

Here’s how all of that applies to you right now.  Look at Twine.  I’d suggest that it is the first application of semantic web technology with potential for mass appeal. An explanation of Twine from the NY Times, a while ago:

Twine can scan almost any electronic document for the names of people, places, businesses and many other entities that its algorithms recognize. Then it does something unusual: it automatically tags or marks all of these items in orange and transfers them to an index on the right side of the screen. This index grows with every document you view, as the program adds subjects that it can recognize or infer from their context.

Context is what the semantic web is all about.  Context is also what real people base decisions on.  A honed understanding of the intricacies of context is what allows humans to make informed decisions rather than random selections as we bumble and boggle through our lives.  As humans we don’t consciously ‘tag’ things or create logic statements in our minds, but as we move through time and events we unconsciously create reference points and associations and thus create context.  The Twine ‘tag’ is modeled after this phenomenon.

When you break it down like that, sharing similar interests on Twine is nowhere near the most important long-term application of the semantic web.

The semantic web would have unique URIs for unique people/objects/items/entities, all of which are further defined by contextual metadata.  So ultimately that’s a page, or a web location, for everything, and the metadata allows all of these pages to ‘speak’ to each other.  This sets up the perfect framework for the forthcoming ‘physical internet’.  Combine contextual linkage for unique people/objects/items/entities with real-world access points like Datamatrix or QR codes, GPS or RFID and there you have the best application of the semantic web.  Hendler mentions in the Semantic Universe webcasts that the web 1.0 giant was Google, 2.0 was Facebook (or one of its competitors), and that 3.0 remains up for grabs.  I want to suggest that the web 3.0 ‘killer app’ won’t be about search, it will be about people, prediction, and location, and it will take place in real space rather than on a traditional personal computer.

I suspect I’ll write more about all of this as my thoughts are further refined.  If there are any taxonomists/ontologists out there reading this entry, I invite your commentary, corrections, and suggestions of how this developing technology might effect libraries and their services.

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN is bringing content to their users on the Walker Channel via iTunes U. In their words:

The Walker recently launched a new site in the educational area of the iTunes Store called iTunes U, Beyond Campus. Beyond Campus features a broad range of audio and video material from sources other than colleges and universities, such as American Public Media, PBS, the Museum of Modern Art, and Smithsonian Global Sound. Now iTunes audiences can easily search, download, and play Walker content just like they do music and movies.

Why aren’t public libraries using iTunes U to share and distribute unique content? Rather than use vendors who offer awkward, unusable interfaces and products, why not use iTunes?  I’ll bet its installed on 90% of the computers in the country.  This is a great opportunity to go to our users, rather than make them come and find us.  Best of all it makes everything mobile on the iPod.

This brings me to another brief point.  I mentioned in the last post after the panel discussion at Pratt just how important it is to stay in touch with libraryland news.  While that is true, in my opinion it is also sooooo very important to look at the rest of the world, and to listen, borrow, and learn from other disciplines.  Clever ideas that will improve your library can come from all kinds of places… thanks to the Walker Art Center for this one…

Wednesday evening I returned to the School of Information and Library Science at Pratt Institute to participate in a panel discussion for John Berry’s Information Professions class.  Myself, Molly Phelan (Young Adult Librarian, Brooklyn Public Library), Gretchen Hams (Director of Childrens Services, Darien Library), and Josh Hadro (Assistant Technology Editor, Library Journal) spoke about our experiences working in the library world and answered questions posed by the enthusiastic students.  It was kind of fun to turn things around 180 degrees.  Just a week ago I was sitting at a lunch table with senior managers and library directors and they wanted to discuss what students need to know that they don’t get taught in library school.

Both senior management and students had specific, pointed questions, but there were some broad issues relating to LIS education and entering this field.  There were a few themes that remained consistent at both the lunch table and the panel discussion.

You have to really want to do this job.  You need to have a vision, and you need to be strong.  Pushing and guiding public library services in an innovative, user-centric direction is very, very hard.  If you think for a second you are going to graduate school, waltz in and make everything work according to your vision, you’ve got another thing coming.  Patience is essential.

Your library degree is entry level.  Not only do you need to be a good customer service agent when working directly with library patrons, but you also need to engage in professional activities and take part in the professional discourse.  If you aren’t up on the news in libraryland, then you aren’t really doing your job.  Don’t wait for professional development to come to you, go and get in on things.  What you do in your free time will define what your job will be years to come.

Initiative and drive is the only way you will accomplish anything.  Write, draw, code, film, or build proposals and presentations with passion.  Speak with conviction.  Sell your ideas, and be inclusive.  Back your ideas up with data.  Again, your library degree is entry level: be prepared to learn everything from municipal finance to graphic design to support your schemes.  Learn whatever you can, and use that knowledge to inform your vision.

I think most of what went on that evening is covered in these few statements, but if I missed any key points I bet Molly, Gretchen, Josh or a Pratt student will jump in.  In a lot of ways, LIS education and its relevance can seems like a tired discussion, like the needle on a record that just keeps on jumping and landing in the same place over and over again.  I’ll tell you what though, tired as it may seem, the discussion is still important.  Comments are invited.

Last night I was lucky enough to attend AIGA Small Talk no. 2 with Amit Pitaru.  Pitaru is “a classically trained musician who strives to create interactive animations with the same fluency as music both in his own web projects and his collaborations with James Paterson.”  

Librarians will be interested in is his work developing assisted technologies based on inclusive game design.  Many public libraries offer assisitive technologies, and Pitaru’s work may really push what libraries can offer in a new direction. His work will be published in a forthcoming MIT Press book called The Ecology of Games, and I found another little piece on the MIT Press site that is rather interesting.

“In this chapter I examine the accessibility of today’s games, or rather the lack of. Even common medical conditions such as arthritis, repetitive stress injuries, and diminished vision may prevent individuals from playing today’s top software titles, not to speak of the barriers that these titles pose to the blind, deaf, and immobile. The clearest and most disheartening manifestation can be found when examining the special-needs sector. There we find children who cannot partake in their most coveted play activities, due to inconsiderate (and therefore inflexible) game design. I chose this sector to both define the problem and explore its solutions. Written from the perspective of a designer, the chapter first describes the lack-of-play and its residual impact as perceived in a school that caters to over 200 children with special needs. In an attempt to create the “ultimate-accessible” game, I demonstrate how games can be designed to be intrinsically accessible while retaining their original playability. Lastly, I show how normalization-of-play may improve upon the social, educational, and therapeutic aspects of the children’s daily lives. Tying this fringe-case with the grander ecology of games, I discusses how better accessibility may encourage more people to enjoy games—be they gamers, students, or patients.”

Also, for fun, have a look at this amazing video from a live performance where Pitaru used dancers and animation together.  Unfortunately the youtube video isn’t great quality, but on a big screen at the lecture it was particularly incredible.

After strategic planning BootCamp last week, I’ve had Nelson and Garcia’s 18 service responses on my mind non-stop.  It’s a significant step to drill down the services we can offer at public libraries to 18 clear bullet points.  My last post on this blog offered a few anecdotes advocating for simplicity in the communication arts.  Having 18 concise service responses for public libraries to choose from is a great starting point as we strive for simplicity.  The next piece of Nelson and Garcia’s process requires that a library creating a strategic plan pick only a few of these 18 responses as priorities.  My assessment of the current climate is that public libraries have had a really hard time spelling out their mission and vision in the digital age, and that is one of the reasons we have wishy-washy statements of purpose.  A little while back Wendy Lukehart of the DCPL wrote a great piece about “Mission Envy” on the Urban Library Council’s Foresight 2020 discussion board.  I republished it here a while back on my old personal blog and it’s a really nice piece.  Read it, and consider how you might clarify your library’s mission.

Still, I keep coming back to my favorite service response offered in the 18.  It is a rather new service response, one that likely does not land high in the priorities at my library.  I suspect that at this point it is not the highest priority at many public libraries at all, but its one that I am interested in and hope to see more libraries embrace in the near future.  Without further ado, it is:

Express Creativity: Create and Share Content

Residents will have the services and support they need to express themselves by creating original print, video, audio, or visual content in a real-world or online environment.

It is easy enough to imagine tackling this priority at your library with physical-world activities.  You probably already do so via arts and crafts programs, poetry slams, or any collaborative activity that results in a finished product like a mural or an exquisite corpse drawing or a work of fiction.  It’s a little harder to figure out how that creative process can be facilitated by a library in virtual or networked setting.   I’m aware of two tools/projects that become activities supporting this initiative, no doubt there are more. I thought I’d share the two I’ve been looking at and invite people to post similar projects.   As I find new things I’ll do my best to keep posting them to this blog as well.

1) Available at Cleveland Public Library, and perhaps at other libraries: Scratch.

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

2) Currently in development at IIT Institute of Design: ThinkeringSpace.

ThinkeringSpace is a system, made of both physical and virtual environments, that aims to promote creative and critical thinking skills for the 21st century. Celebrating the book, it presents opportunities for doing things together, sharing ideas and authoring in new ways. Focused on school-aged children in libraries, the project is part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

Driving back to Brooklyn after our week-long intensive strategic planning course in Cleveland afforded me some much needed time for reflection. I drove with my sketchbook in my lap, jotting notes, steering with one hand, doing my best to see the lines on the road through the water kicked up by the many enormous trucks crawling up the inclines and barreling down the slopes. Not safe. The rainy, sleepy drive delivered me to a rural hotel with a hallway reminiscent of a horror movie, and then the next day took me through mountain passes and a misty, picturesque overlook by the Delaware Water Gap. Mental note: get that iPhone app that makes my phone into a voice recorder, this sketchbook/driving thing is a bad idea.

All week, there was a thought-thread tying together the trip and the workshop, and I had a hard time putting my finger on it. I’m closer now. Here’s my set of five observations.

1) In Pittsburgh, I went to the Andy Warhol Museum. Andy Warhol coined a phrase that we now think of as a cliché, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” The huge collection of original Ronco and Popeil gadgets on display is a shining example of case after case of laughable, tired, tarnished, gimmicky 15-minute time slots of consumer culture. There’s an adaptation of Warhol’s famous quote that social network and bloggy people like to throw around: “In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people”. After seeing display cases of ghostly, dated, decrepit quarter-hour product spotlights, this updated version of the phrase begs further consideration; it gives me Gibsonesque visions of virtual scrapyards of services, profiles, personas, and groups. At least that scrapyard isn’t environmentally appalling- but it is sort of psychologically appalling, and that must have cultural ramifications of its own.

2) A second instance of accelerated culture hit me while I sat in the back of Nelson and Garcia’s panel multitasking, lamenting the fact I was missing CMJ week back in New York. Ben Sisario from the NY Times Arts Beat blog wrote brief little entries he calls Four-Word Reviews of the bands he saw, and my impression was that he was pretty right on. The way people consume music has changed so much in the last few years because of the blogosphere and file hosting services like RapidShare and Mediafire. I had a conversation with a music junkie friend a little while ago, and he said that if a song has been played 3 times in his iTunes, then it may as well be a classic. Sisario’s brief but accurate reviews of live shows and my ability to download 4 albums in 4 minutes 4 free on the internet is significant, and it certainly has bearing on future library service priorities.

3) Picking up where I left off with “4 albums in 4 minutes 4 free”, we saw David McCullough speak at the Ohio theater last Wednesday night, and one of the subjects he picked up on was the demise of the English language and the shrinking vocabulary of the average American. I can’t say I disagree with any of that; it is a statement of fact. I own this wonderful old book from the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The eloquence with which the writers describe building interiors is truly sufficient to build a model of the building based on the description, and all the while it conveys the beauty and emotion present in the architecture and the crowd. That said, having successfully used Twitter with 5 other people to take networked notes at Nelson and Garcia’s strategic planning workshop, I can look back at our terse, abbreviated notes and conversation and have a very good idea of the space, the content, and the mood over a period of time. I’m not ready to condemn the way we communicated, even though there was probably not a word more than 8 letters long uttered all five days.

4) In the workshop itself, the whole group showed considerable interest in ‘taglines’ for their libraries, rather than the clunky, non-descript mission and vision statements many of us publish. The tagline, much like a Four-Word Review, offers a catchy, memorable statement. It gives your library a branded identity that resonates with patrons or users in a manner that a boring old mission statement never could. A marketing strategist would tell you that your library’s success lies in channeling and steering attention toward your services. Less can be more when you define your library services, just as less can be more when you review a concert.

5) Our final exercise in the strategic planning workshop had us in small groups looking at a floorplan for a truly miserable fictional public library. Each group was given a different service priority; my group was asked to rearrange the building to support the priority “provide students with the information they need to succeed at school”. Each group then put up drawings with different colored post it notes illustrating a revised building program. The result was a set of clear images spelling out the fact that library facilities cannot be cookie-cutter style clones of one another. Instead, every facility needs to support the service priorities determined by working with the community. In a large branch library system, this would result in a diverse ecology of services. I’m interested in the way that people relate to architecture, particularly in libraries because they are some of the few true public spaces in America. There’s a school of thought that says that public space is something that is truly produced by its users and participants; that architecture doesn’t exist without people. In our workshop, the theme of specificity (ie, addressing your service priority) directly conflicted with flexibility and spontaneity. My feeling is that public space must be flexible, especially now that we’ve moved from Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame to more like 15 seconds or the even weirder 15 people. How can we address library service priorities and include flexibility in our program?

Its good to be home. Back to my library tomorrow, where I hope to use some of what I learned this week.

Here’s a question from Emily Nichols, The Head of Children’s Services at the Beverly Public Library in Massachusetts. Emily wrote to the blog hoping that the readers would be able to workshop her question, so don’t be shy, lets use our collective knowledge to offer Ms. Nichols some suggestions!

Hello PLA folks,

I’ve been avidly reading the discussion of strategic planning from the Results BootCamp and hope the blogosphere can help me with a design/service problem. I’ve attached photos of the circulation/reference desk in our children’s room. My opinion- It takes up a HUGE amount of floor space and I can’t see the children over it and it is not moveble or adaptable at all. Not to mention the sharp marble corners at the precise height of an average nine year old’s eye. However, by my uneducated guess it probably cost at least $15,000 to custom build in the midnineties. And as my teenage page put it “You can’t change it! It’s the reference desk! It’s perfect! It’s been here my whole life!”