2008-09-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

Sharing my notes from some ALA meetings we didn’t all have a chance to attend…

Top Tech Trends presented by LITA included a successful live chat room for Twitterers in the audience and a split screen real time presence of two additional participants (not quite ready for prime time)

The format of the presentations is for each invitee to take two minutes or so and highlight the “top” tech trend they think we ought to be tuned in to. The net effect is of a series of sound bites.

Marshall Breeding
• Libraries are underserved by their ILS systems
• There is a newfound use of open source with strong tech support eg. KOHO

Karen Schneider
• One sign of viability of Open Source is that people are making money supporting the software.
• There is never enough broadband
• Librarians have gone back to writing their own – user defined – software application
• Small publishing houses are going online
• Librarians need to look at how we stifle innovation in our libraries

Clifford Lynch
• Open Source is not a panacea, warned folks not to over react in either direction
• Important step by LC to make material available in FLIKR. This is letting go of holdings and opening a dialog between cultural institutions and the public
• Worry about information overload in social networking

Roy Tennant
• Excited about age of experimentation with solar based projects, and the extensible catalog
• Need to re-tool for constant change. Need for us to get good at taking data out of static databases and analyze it and transform it.
• With respect to ILS, either take complete control over your system OR give up control to a vendor

Meredith Farkas
• Social software will connect people and collections. Local knowledge is under utilized when we control every aspect of our collections
• Library should be a creative lab, providing hardware and software for creating digital projects

John Blyberg
• Symantic Web. Reuters has a new service which takes unstructured documents and adds indexing to them. As you refine your search the software is helping you find more.
• Drupal is a key tool for moving forward innovatively
• API WorldCat
• Yourbigwig.com/showcase
• www.ustream.tv/griffey
• www.superpatron.com

Eric Lease Morgan
• Wants more BLING in library Websites
• Mobile Devises like the iPhone beg us for the ability to text the results of a search to the phone.
• We need to take a stand to support “Net Neutrality”
• “Next Generation” library catalogs will have to go beyond better searching (Google wrote the book on search) and we will have to have catalogs that allow for user actions such as tagging, sharing, reviewing, annotating, etc.
• Social Networking has gone beyond being a trend to being an Internet fact of life. These sites provide a forum for user generated content at a level no one could imagined. Smithsonian and LC are using FLIKR. It is not really about people using your library, but rather about people using the content you have made available.
• API’s (Web Services based Application Programmer Interfaces) simple on the surface but transformative if used to create content. We need to use these technologies to have patron participation in creation of content.

Karen Coyle
• Wants to search while walking through the stacks
• Warns that librarians have to be making extreme changes or they will be left out.

“Isn’t it great to be in the library? (wherever that is) Lita president’s program 2008
Joseph Janes, Information School of the University of Washington jwj@u.washingto.edu

What do we keep and how do we move on? What do we do? We need to examine the information needs of our communities.
Ask the following question: What does it mean to be IN the library. If we cross the physical threshold in the library, are we crossing the digital threshold as well? Are we in the library when we download an eBook? We are all now using IM with the librarian at the Reference desk. The student using IM could be at home, miles away, or across the room from the Reference desk.

By implication the library is defined by being:
the place,
the supportive help staff,
the stuff,
the interaction, and
the values.
These imply an extended notion of both “library” and “librarian.”

The patron of today finds it easier and easier to be present in multiple ways via twitter, FaceBook, IM, texting, SecondLife, gaming, phone, and in-person.

These multiple presences lead us to thinking about being where the patrons are. We then must be available, positioned and ready to support, assist and participate – on their terms. We have to be better online, we need to be more efficient, more compelling as we move beyond the building. We have to think about why people are adopting and using these tools so readily. They are easy, personalized, portable, and fun. What would a library response be like? Can we put the user at the center? What changes do we then make?

It is not about the stuff, it is about the experience around the stuff.

OCLC Symposium: The mashed up Library
Michael Schrage – Research Fellow at MIT’s Center for Digital Business

Charles Darwin’s observation was that survivors adapted to change.

Economics of innovation involves managing the challenge of risky innovations. It’s harder for a library to be innovative than it is for an entrepreneur. Innovation is not really embedded in the culture of bureaucracies and institutions which rely heavily on consistency. Innovation is the conversion of “novelty” into “value”
Novelty for whom?
Value for whom?
Innovation should be a means to an end. Discussion of change forces an organization to face what it really needs to do for its clientele. An innovation may be rejected or become what customers adopt. Value comes only from successful use.

Ask your users the following question: “What is the most innovative thing you think we do?”

What holds back organizations is usually self-delusion. Believing that you are where you are not. Mashups with data sets is clearly not as important to our future as would inter-operability between enterprise partners.

The most important product of the Net is the networker. Now we set out to ask – what kind of networker we want to be, or want to enable. What is the most important product of the library? A scholar or a person with a mindset about information

I wonder why newspapers aren’t taking better advantage of Web 2.0? The median age of newspaper readers is 56. The newspapers were/are reluctant to compete in the new arena.

Libraries are in the most competitive industry in the world. How do our users or user communities brand libraries as competitors? Who are our “lead users.” We need to learn from our lead users. In Web 2.0 companies, all the best ideas for innovation have come from “lead users.” We need to identify, cultivate and work with our “lead users.” We need to know who we want to collaborate with to create value. Let your users know what is the biggest disagreement about values in your organization. Make your own issues transparent.

“Success comes not from taking path of least resistance but the path of maximum advantage.” It takes integrity to define “maximum advantage.”

The experience is the product.

A library gets better every time it is used if our users leave an imprint on the library. We must encourage, facilitate, even force involvement. This would be in effect creating a “liberatory.”

ACRL President’s Program. Dan Ariely who wrote “Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions”

Ariely is a behavioral economist. His interest is in explaining the environment where people are predictably irrational so that librarians can make better decisions in their efforts to provide services. Visual systems are the best ones we have as humans. Decision illusions are as interesting as anything else. The Opt Out checkbox has enormous public policy consequences. It is hard for us to intuit an effect. The Opt Out checkbox is the default chosen when options are too wide a range. Economics says we are all at optimal points and cannot change anything for the better. We don’t know enough. Context gives us parameters for choice. Note that if context is manipulated, the result can be controlled.

Spoke of the enormous power of “free” in our culture. Our culture wildly overvalues free items in a context of choice. Free credit card with 18% annual interest will be chosen over a $100 annual cost and 10% annual interest charge. Free is a complex number. Studies show that more expensive pain relief works better. We don’t have any regret for not taking advantage of something that we did not pay for.

Use it or lose it has a power.

It is easy to overwhelm people with choices in a library. A clean neat “start here” flow is a good approach to de-mystifying any overview. Emphasis is on autonomy and providing a sense of belonging in any interaction.
Libraries need to change in some important way if they are to become the power that owns the popularization of information.

LITA program -- If We Don’t Call it Distance Learning, Does it Exist?

Howard Carter, Southern Illinois University

In today’s world it is difficult to distinguish Distance Learning student from in-place students. Does it matter if someone is IM’ing the Reference Desk from 500 miles away or from 30 feet away? Technology costs are not onetime, they are in effect a subscription with annual ongoing costs. If a library focuses on serving remote students they will in fact be serving all students wherever they are.

Focus on serving remote students and you will be helping all students wherever they are.

Chad Haefele, UNC
All libraries will be distance learning libraries. IM has to happen. Studies show students will use IM 20 feet from the Reference Desk and not seek face-to-face contact. The “distance librarian” job description will fade away as all librarians take over the role of dealing with students at a remove.

Samantha Schmehl Hines, U. of Montana
She opened her presentation with a quote from Anne Lipow: “Rather than think of our users as “remote” we should instead recognize the fact that we are remote from our users.” She encouraged moving away from concept of library as place to concept of library as a constellation of services. 80% of students turn to Search Engines first, not to a library for online answers. With respect to IM at reference, roughly 75% of the librarians in the room at this program at ALA raised their hands when asked if they have IM/Chat at reference.

FaceBook effect

2008-02-03T14:45:00.000-08:00

I am amazed at the number (10) of students (really ex-students) who have found me in FaceBook. They are all students who have left Cabrillo and are either working or are at a transfer institution. They used to work in the library for anywhere from 2 years to 5 years. You do get to know someone fairly well over that length of time. Anyway, they transfered, some even graduated and now they cruise FaceBook? Looking for someone they know from Santa Cruz or Cabrillo? I always answer and let them include me in their circle. I have only had two contemporaries contact me through FaceBook, one librarian from Santa Barbara and Craig from PRO here at Cabrillo.

Facebook

2007-10-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

I chose to join facebook, listed myself as a Santa Cruz person and cruised through the other Santa Cruz names. Bumped into a few Cabrillo folks. I am not alone but the list is really short.

Bloglines

2007-10-27T10:07:00.000-07:00

I'm set up now for slashdot.com, Wired.com as well as LII new this week and Infoblog. Now I have to bookmark my feed page and start going there every day or so.

Flikr time

2007-10-27T09:46:00.000-07:00

I have been using Shutterfly for years to share "albums" of my own (mostly family) digital photos. Flikr is all about sharing with the world, not just mailing a link to chosen friends to view your latest pics. I'm not sure that I care about the level of detail needed. Flikr folks are describing their camera and production details as well as copyrighting the images. I searched for and found a lot of neat bird pictures taken by photographers with incredible skills and much better cameras than I have access to.

Searching for Blogs

2007-10-27T09:17:00.000-07:00

I found the search tools inconsistent from day to day. My non-academic search was for a Greek word "yiayia" which means grandmother. I found odd uses of the word. I found one interesting long reflective blog entry from an ex-pat living in Greece. In the academic sphere I read my way through a few library owned, library produced "what's new" type blogs. Not sure that they are really valuable to a cc user.

two blogs?

2007-09-14T21:36:00.000-07:00

As I said, I rushed forward and now I have two blogs. One with content and one empty. Task two: find out how to delete my mistakes. Why does that seem so familiar?

creating a blog

2007-09-14T21:28:00.000-07:00

Rushed forward without reading very much. Just clicked into blogger and answered a few questions and voila the blog exists. Good thing the task is to create a blog and have fun at work. I'm a success at this one.