Its been difficult finding time to blog from Denmark since there is just so much to do! The NextLibrary unconference starts tomorrow. Here’s a couple of brief observations.

First, I’m headed to the Hjørring Bibliotek in about an hour. Check out a timelapse youtube video of this place getting set up, and you’ll see why I’m so excited to go!

Also I thought people back in the USA might be interested to learn about “Hyves” the European social networking site. I just joined. I have no friends yet, so friend me! At a glance, it looks more like MySpace than anything else, but I look forward to playing with it more. One of the things that drove me to experiment: I’m locked out of Facebook on my laptop! Facebook seems to be detecting that I’m far from home and they sense something fishy, so I’m stuck! Whats funny is that it works fine on my iPhone. Twitter is the other way around- I can’t get Twitterific, my client of choice, to work right here. On the laptop its fine.

More later- I’m off to see a great library!

I blogged about a fun site-specific project involving QR codes a while back, and I’m absolutely thrilled to show it off now (even in its infancy).  We didn’t launch GPS as an official public library project, instead we are offering it as a public art project which poses a question to public libraries and their patrons.  Can and should the unfiltered creative work of the community be hosted on a public library’s website?  Would the collective, uncensored ‘poetry’ of anyone writing to this site in Greenpoint be appropriate Brooklyn Public Library website material?  How should policies differ between the inclusion of the printed word and the electronically published word in public library collections?  What is appropriate web content at a public library, and who should be creating it: the patrons or the librarians? Perhaps this experiment can help define a mission and vision for the inclusion of unfiltered, localized, community-created content in public library electronic collections. Here’s the project description from our ‘about’ page:

Location, sensation, interaction, and community combine to create place.

Greenpoint Poetry Sites is a platform for creating our collective community poem. We have placed stickers of 2d barcodes in six locations around Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Those stickers are writable nodes that you can access with your smartphone. Taking a picture of the barcode on the sticker will launch an editable mobile blog on your web enabled smartphone. Then you can immediately enter text based on whatever you may be reacting to in that place at that moment. Is it raining and cold? Does a smell in the air remind you of a long forgotten memory? Start writing.

Your participation will create six crowdsourced neighborhood ‘poems’; a reflection of a specific piece of our community’s presence or consciousness in relation to a specific location.

Here is what one of our stickers looks like (though the color is a little funky in this post for some reason):
Will anybody participate in this thing?  Will YOU write to these locations? Can this take off?  That remains to be seen, but its not going to stop us from exploiting a fascinating bit of technology to ask important questions.

Last Thursday I attended the day-long SENYLRC symposium: “Information Commons 2.0- Lessons Learned and Moving Forward” at the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park, NY.  Here’s a link to the pdf of the program.  Here’s the wiki.

I went to this conference with Brooklyn Public Library colleagues Richard Reyes-Gavilan (Central Library Director) and Jesse Montero (Web Applications/IT).  Richard, Jesse and I visited Hyde Park that day to snoop around the academic library world a little bit in order to get a taste for what has and hasn’t worked for Information Commons projects in academic library settings.  A short time ago, Brooklyn Public Library was awarded a $100,000 dollar grant from the Leon Levy Foundation to work with Pfeiffer Architects on a plan for a bold transformation of the “Popular Library” space in our Central Library. Our vision for BPL’s Information Commons is to create an area that encourages prolonged individual and small-group research, reading and studying, quiet socializing and larger group workshops.  So, right in the middle of the first floor of the flagship library, librarians would promote basic media, technology, and information literacy as well as assist with advanced research instruction.   Recreating and rethinking a huge chunk of our service model really is an enormous and challenging step forward in an astounding, classic, art deco, 1941 library building.  There’s really no simpler way to say it: this is an awesome project.

I (and I think I can safely say we) learned a thing or two from  Dr. Russell Bailey‘s (Library Director, Providence College) presentation in particular, but as public librarians I think we all were reminded of how different the scope of our work is from that of academic librarians.  At the public library, we serve the informational needs of EVERYONE who walks in the door, with an emphasis on recreational and self-initiated learning.  An academic library serves a specific student/faculty body.  The students and faculty are a closed, captive market with research needs that fit the scope of the schools curriculum.  At the public library, the scope of the curriculum is whatever any patron happens to bring to the information desk that day.  That said, after a day of viewing images of beautiful academic information commons spaces, all I could think was that when we put one of these in our library, I want it to be 200%, maybe 250% more FUN than anything I was seeing.

BUT-

Before I go off the deep end with funfunfun, I want to note that at this point ‘gaming’ and ‘gaming literacy’ have largely been accepted as a norm in the public library setting (yay!).  While I support the idea that learning to navigate 2-D or 3-D information interfaces like those found in video games is a crucial component of  new media literacy, I think its important for public libraries to make distinctions between *RECREATION!!!!* and “recreational learning”.  I’m imagining the information commons in a public library as a place where we strike a comfortable balance between *RECREATION!!!!* and recreational learning.  In other words, think more along the lines of a space where you’d learn to share your resume on LinkedIn, hear a presentation about l33t, dapple in graphic design, or learn to use a database- it is not like Fun Spot or Barcade (both of which are awesome, just in a different way).

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^ Wyndcliffe, an abandoned 1856 Hudson River Valley mansion just miles up the street from the conference. Read more about it here.
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Here is Otlet’s image before I messed with it (thanks to some blog in the Netherlands).

First, check out this short video about Otlet predicting the invention of the computer.

Here’s my reinterpretation:

This Saturday, I’m honored to be moderating a panel of Pratt Alumni at the Pratt Student Chapter of ASIS&T New Media Symposium. It promises to be an amazing day, featuring keynote speaker Alex Wright, information architect at the NY Times and author of Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages!

What I’m most excited about: the fact that I’m a PUBLIC LIBRARIAN getting an opportunity to pose questions to some brilliant voices in information architecture, usability, taxonomies/ontologies, and content strategy.  On a daily basis, at the Greenpoint Branch of Brooklyn Public Library, I do my best to facilitate productive, satisfying relationships between library patrons and information objects.  (Um, yeah, by ‘information objects’ I mean books for the most part.)  All of the alums that will be speaking at Pratt this Saturday do the same thing I do, only for private enterprises: they also strive to create meaningful relationships between users and information.

Speakers:

Vincent Au- Information Architect, ROKKAN
Terence Fitzgerald – Taxonomy Systems Analyst, AOL
Sari Harris – Senior Information Architect, ThumbPlay
Tim Salazar – Assistant Vice President Client Experience, JP Morgan
Erin Scime – Senior Content Strategist, HUGE
Marc Wendell – Human Factors Engineer, Elsevier

I’m hoping I can reach out to you PLA Blog readers to give me some ideas for questions I should ask these people, or even topics you think it’d be useful to steer the conversation toward.  I regularly yammer on about how we need to create an innovation culture at public libraries, but the truth is that most innovation happens in the private or academic sector.  I don’t hate on that.  As a public librarian I always look to design firms, academic libraries, artists, and everyone else for ideas that I can adapt for use in libraryland.  Can you all help me pick these people’s minds?  What do we as PUBLIC LIBRARIANS want to learn from these successful people?

For a professional web marketer, it is essential to know when people are talking about your product. Many libraries have started using Twitter to announce their programs and events. Its important to recognize that good web conversation is not one-sided. Simply broadcasting about yourself isn’t enough, you need to listen to the people who are talking about you. That is where Twitter search comes in handy, and this blog post will offer you a tool to make it that much handier.

I used Yahoo Pipes to make the ‘badge’ below that displays (every time you refresh the page) the latest Twitter search results for the term ‘public library’. Now is a good time to make it clear that I am NOT responsible for any content that shows up in that window. The content in that window is a display of what millions of users have to say about their public library at any given moment. Think about that. That could be useful information, huh?
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The beauty of Yahoo Pipes is that it makes it easy to configure a search like this and put it anywhere convenient for you. Add it to your iGoogle. Your Netvibes. Or embed it in a blog. This can tell your library marketing professional who they ought to be following on Twitter, and it can offer real insight into what people think of your services.

Here is a step-by-step guide to how you can make a Twitter search badge or widget for your library. Have fun, and enjoy listening to what people REALLY think of your services!

Step 1 >

Create a Yahoo Pipes account (if you use flickr or another Yahoo thing you can use that ID)

Step 2 >

Visit my profile on Yahoo Pipes. You’ll see I’m totally new to this and there’s not much of anything there.

Step 3 >

Click on “Twitter Search for public library”.

Step 4 >

Click on “edit source”.

Step 5 >

In the upper left hand corner of the canvas, there is a module called “Keyword (text)”. In the “default” and “debug” boxes replace the text “public library” with the name of your library.

Step 6 >

Click “save a copy” and then click “back to my pipes”.

Step 7 >

rename it “twitter search for ______ library”, and you are done! Add it as a badge, a widget, whatever!

Generally, I try to let intensive workshops like today’s percolate in the brain a little while before I write much about them.  My mind was turned to mush today after this event.  Larry Nash White was a particularly good presenter.  Here’s a few side notes I took that got me thinking; forgive the stretchy images.

1) FedEx

This started the gears turning.  FedEx tracking, originally just an assessment piece, is wildly popular as a service.  I’ve never tried it myself, but apparently you can log in and see where your package is on a map.  How could libraries make assessment and data collection transparent and entertaining for our patrons without compromising privacy?  Like I say in the tweet, there’s ideas coming… they just aren’t there yet… maybe you have some?

2) Surveying Non-users

This is so simple, it kills me I didn’t think of it before.  It is a challenge to get input on how we could make library services more responsive to the needs of non-users since these people don’t actually come to our buildings.  Where to meet them and ask for their thoughts?  Wal-Mart.  Or Target.  Maybe even Old Navy.  ‘Going to where the people are’ is the oldest trick in the librarian playbook, but it never occurred to me that just offering a couple of pieces of candy for some honest feedback at a local shopping center could be good data collecting.

3) Think Time

This note came out of a story Joe Matthews was telling about a library director who used to set aside 2 hours a week to just sit and think about how to communicate with his board of trustees.  As I understood it, nobody was to bother him during this time, he just sat behind a locked door and thought.  While this was a real hoot for all of us in the room, it struck me that this is more than just funny- in fact, it just might be brilliant!  Never mind the specific subject of his thought, I imagine that if anyone sat down for 2 hours (or even 1 hour) of the week and thought about their job they would do it better.  Consider it part of the workplan for anyone who works for me in the future.*

*maybe.

This is a picture of a book cart on the floor at the Darien Library. It is a wonderful illustration of how even the most innovative libraries are bound to our most treasured statistic: materials circulation. I took this picture last week in Darien when I was attending “In the Foothills: A Not-Quite-Summit on the Future of Libraries”.

John Berry (Editor-at-large, Library Journal, New York, NY) and Kathryn Greenhill (Emerging Technologies Specialist, Murdoch University Library, Perth Western Australia) joined John Blyberg (Assistant Director for Innovation and User Experience, Darien Library) and a room full of clever librarians came together to talk about… you guessed it, the future of libraries. We discussed everything from Benjamin Franklin to Second Life that day, and we began to tackle the issue of how librarians can measure some of the non-traditional (not materials related) work we do. Conversation was very good, but I don’t think any of us walked out of the room with a concrete plan.

Moving on to Nashville…

Tomorrow, at PLA Spring Symposium, I’ll attend “Silk Purses and Sow’s Ears? Assessing the Quality of Public Library Statistics and Making the Most of Them” and look for more inspiration. That said, after doing a little snooping I found Meg Canada’s presentation “Developing Your Social Media Strategy”.  She’ll be offering it at a different workshop (at the exact same time) called “Today’s Library: From the Inside Out”.  How frustrating that her presentation is not part of a workshop about metrics! I was immediately reminded of something that seems to be turning into my mantra lately: creating web content for your library and promoting web content for your library are NOT SEPARATE ACTIVITIES! In addition, usage data coming from google analytics or whatever tool you use is just as important as your materials circulation, and creating solid web content for your community is just as important as buying the right books for them.

Enough rant, I’m looking forward to a good workshop tomorrow.

Follow and use hashtag #plaspring09 on twitter, I’m hoping some people do some tweeting… We’ll see…

Last Tuesday I went to 3rd Ward for the Meme Factory event.  I’d love to see an auditorium full of librarians grit their teeth and sit through the Meme Factory presentation and its brutally pornographic, racist, twisted moments and struggle to understand the idea that the internet can be about *attention* and not *content*.  It is a huge leap for those of us who have long been in the business of providing information content, the kind of leap that makes you squirm in your seat, no doubt.  Because I’m incessantly making the case that public librarians ought to be leaders in public technology training and social media cultural training, I think its worth familiarizing oneself with the landscape (if you have the stomach for it).  Its sort of like familiarizing yourself with things like Pirate’s Bay.  Hopefully librarians don’t know about it because they love to steal, instead they are aware of it because it exists and like it or not it is a formative, driving force in the information world.  To not acknowledge it is like closing your eyes and believing that means other people can’t see you.  Most readers are probably familiar with lolcats, but does everyone know about advice dog, inspirational posters, gentlemen, or ytmnd?  I’m not going to link directly from the PLA Blog to image boards or any of the internet meme world.  Again, internet meme culture is all about exploiting *any* content that can channel mass attention so it immediately gets into material that would offend a LOT of people, myself included.

If we are going to make the case that there shouldn’t be filters on public library computers, doesn’t it seem like its our responsibility to be familiar with this stuff, even if we find it icky and uncomfortable?

Oh- btw- try to find me doing my best sturgeon face!