Historic New Orleans Collection

I spent several hours over 2 days in the research room of the New Orleans Historical Collection exploring the New Orleans Riot of 1866 because of the implication in my GG Grandfather’s obituary.  (“He was absent for two years in New Orleans, where he contributed a series of fulminating articles to the Republican Press against the political ostracism of the freedmen, which culminated in the sanguinary riots of 1866.”  The Gleaner and DeCordova’s Advertising Sheet, June 23, 1876)  However, I found no mention of him in any of the books, indices nor in the Picayune archive.

So I decided to use the time to become familiar with the names, events, and political background of the Riot. The Library staff were very helpful, and brought me three books that were, in themselves, quite interesting.  The first was a “slim” 596-page volume, the “Report of the Select Committee on the New Orleans Riots”, published by the Government Printing Office in 1867. It is a verbatim transcript of the hearings, testimony and interviews with most of the people involved.  The second was Caryn Cosse Bell’s meticulously researched “Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Louisiana State University Press, 1997.)  And the third was Gilles Vandal’s doctoral dissertation, “The New Orleans Riot of 1866: the Anatomy of a Tragedy (1978).

By scanning the references in the dissertation, I found a handful of newspapers of the time, which, upon querying the reference staff, led to the discovery of a union list: “Louisiana Newspapers, 1794-1961″ (Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1965.) This volume listed many dozens of newspapers published in New Orleans during the time.  Which led me to wonder how, when today, cities are struggling to maintain 1 or 2 newspapers, the City of New Orleans was able to support so many different newspapers.

Although I didn’t meet my objective, the exercise allowed me to visit two libraries in New Orleans that I would probably not have ventured into otherwise, given the rich offerings of the ALA conference and the need to walk about in the heat and humidity that is the norm in New Orleans during this time of year.  I also have some starting points for further research.

The Future is Now!

E-books are HOT in Sacramento right now.  It seems like every adult just got – or is getting – an e-reader, and many non-residents are driving into town to get their Sacramento libary cards so they can take advantage of our e-collections.

E-books are hot at ALA this year, too, and one of the most eye-popping sessions was “The future is now: e-books and their increasing impact on library services.”  It looks like there are two movements converging: libraries buying and circulating e-book readers, and the provision of DRM-free e-books that can be read on many devices.

Jamie LaRue contends that “the bullet has gone into the brain of established publishers; we’re just waiting for the body to fall.” This is based on stats he presented showing that established publishers are producing only 7% of published e-books now. With the proliferation of self-publishing venues like Smashwords, it’s easy to get your e-books into the hands of buyers without going the agent/publishing house route. He suggested that one scenario has libraries buying the entire output of an e-publisher, and just deleting the titles we don’t want to keep.

Chris Harris gave a brief overview of the available e-readers, and then Brewster Kahle and Peter Brantley talked about Open Library, which buys e-books (rather than licensing them) and makes them available for loan to the public through participating libraries.

California libraries will soon be participating in Open Library through the advocacy of the California State Library. This will probably put a lot of pressure on publishers and other e-book vendors, and ultimately make the experience easier and more intuitive for patrons who are all thumbs.

Library Ideas, LLC seems to be taking this arena seriously. Freegal is their music download service, and they are just launching a new product: Freading, which will make e-books available the same way its music is: unlimited simultaneous downloads of both new and older titles, but with the DRM that manages the check-out period.

My perfect e-book experience: the titles are discoverable either from within the e-reader or the library’s catalog; they are always available (no hold queue); downloading is simple and can be done from any device; the checkout terms  are clear, and the title can be transferred to multiple devices during the lending period. If I don’t like it, or if I finish it early, I can return it any time during the lending period.

I do not own a dedicated e-reader; I do, however, read e-books on my iPhone during my morning and evening bus commute, and on the iPad while reclining in the La-Z-Boy. I have Nook, Kindle, Kobo, iBooks, Bluefire, FreeBooks, and OverDrive apps installed on both. I don’t like to buy books, because I rarely read them more than once, so if publishers, vendors, and libraries can get it together to create a model that works as well as lending print copies, I will be in e-book heaven!

 

New Orleans Public Library

I’m staying on in New Orleans to do some family history research. I’m hoping to find something in newspapers from 1867-70 about my mother’s great-grandfather, who was imprisoned in Jamaica and then deported. His obituary in the Jamaica Gleaner says he spent the next 3 years in New Orleans, and was recognized by the City for assistance during an epidemic.

However, family history research is notoriously full of plot twists and brick walls. So far, there is no mention of him at all in the card index to New Orleans newspapers, nor in the city directories for 1867-68. NOPL subscribes to NewsBank’s historical Times-Picayune, and again it was a dead-end.

So tomorrow I’m going to visit the New Orleans Historical Collections in the French Quarter to see if there might be something there that would provide additional information about this elusive ancestor.  Wish me luck!

Oh My Gosh, My Feet Were Sore!

I could hardly hobble out of my room this morning, so when I discovered I was in the wrong location for my morning session, I opted to stay where I was and make the best of it.  And I’m so glad I did!

It was a panel “conversation” among librarians from a public library, middle school library, and others about using audiobooks to engage students and their families.  Major points included the benefits to ESL students of hearing spoken English outside a classroom context, providing cultural enrichment through use of narrators with appropriate accents, providing “personal shopping” services by matching the length of audiobook selections to the length of a car journey, and showing kids it’s OK to do other things while “reading with their ears”: drawing, playing computer games, watching the Windows Media Player visualizations, jogging, etc.

But the MOST interesting fact to come from this session is a program called Sync, in which a classic YA title is paired with a contemporary title, and both are able to be downloaded as MP3 files free AND free of DRM from OverDrive for one week.  You get to keep the books forever and put them on any listening device. A couple of pairings, for example, include Shiver / Romeo & Juliet, and Immortal / Wuthering Heights. Sync also offers text alerts when new free audio books are available.

All the panelists were on the original Odyssey award committee, and all review audiobooks for Booklist. Mary Burkey provided a link to her blog, Audiobooker,

Libraries Build Communities

For a mere ten bucks, I signed on to partipate in ALA’s Libraries Build Communities work day. Due to an e-mail mixup, I missed the opportunity to select my project, so I was assigned to the St. Bernard Project. This is a nonprofit group working to help those still displaced by Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed or damaged 100% of the homes in this parish.

Eighteen librarians were bused to two houses (nine on each team), and we worked for 6 hours removing debris from inside the house, mowing down the weeds in front, removing the brushy jungle that had grown up in the back, and painting the street side of the house.

Just as we were wrapping up, Kevin, the owner, stopped by with his son to thank us for helping to take his house one step closer to rehabilitation.  They’ve been living in their truck for the past 6 years, unable to afford the repairs necessary to make the house habitable again.

Although the weather was hot, we had plenty of water, and a nice breeze for most of the day. Altogether, a satisfying way to give a homeowner a leg up, and great advertising for the library!

ALA – New Orleans

I feel privileged to be able to go to New Orleans this month for ALA’s annual conference. And I’m going to enjoy it, too, if this head ever clears and I stop blowing my nose! The doctor grudgingly allows it might be a bacterial infection and I will pick up the antibiotics, Flo-Nase, and nasal rinse apparatus this afternoon. And I will be better by flight-time.

The reason I feel privileged is that, in addition to all the library stuff I’ll get to see-do-learn, I can spend a couple of days after the conference trying to find more information about my mom’s great-grandfather, Noel Crosswell, who lived in New Orleans for a few years in the 1860s and allegedly was recognized by that city for services performed during a yellow fever epidemic. If I can corroberate the story, I’ll be very pleased!

Geolocation Games

At Internet Librarian this year, InfoToday mounted a couple of geolocation games. They invited attendees to check in with FourSquare, and also to log the QR codes scattered about the conference signboards to become eligible for prizes like an iPod Touch. 

Most cell phones today have the ability to “know” where they are, and to interact with those places and nearby objects. Some librarians are putting this to use by setting up their libraries as a “venue” in FourSquare, leaving “tips” for those who check in there , and offering prizes to those who check in often enough to become “mayors” of their library.

My library hasn’t gone that far yet, but I can see it happening within the next year.  It would be fun to create a geocache or some kind of recognition for “mayors” of the Central Library.  I promised Boss I’d work on the geocache with a colleague after the first of the year.

Internet Librarian 2010

I didn’t feel much like an Internet librarian this year – didn’t bring the Unix Dell Mini, and hand-wrote my notes in a spiral notebook with a pen.  Because of the collaborative presentation I was giving about Info Quest text reference, I felt I needed real PowerPoint and Windows, and my Windows laptop isn’t very portable.  Here’s a summary of the most important sessions I attended:

Search engines and Super-Searcher tips: 

Chris Sherman: Google now has real-time feeds from social network sites like Twitter. It also includes TV episodes, rich snippets (which provide additional info on mouseovers), and new filters for sites with images.   New search engines worth watching: Blekko, which allows you to create “slashtags” and thus a customized search tool; watch the demo video.  Factual – which looks for structured data in an unstructured format and builds a structure around it.  Semantifi searches pages in the 90% of the web that is invisible to major search engines – the “deep web”.

Mary Ellen Bates lined out some of her favorite web sites that should be known by anyone who uses the web for research.  The ones that I want to explore for my work are: Yahoo Correlator, a good way to get an overview of an unfamiliar topic; Google Public Data Explorer, which compiles public data that you can then manipulate, and Google Fusion Tables, where you can upload your own data table and create visualizations like maps, heatmaps, charts, or a timeline.

Other Conference Themes

The theme this year was “Insights, Imagination & Info Pros: Adding Value”.  So most of the other conference sessions I attended centered around innovative ideas for making library services visible, convenient, interactive and current.  They recommended ways to leverage social media, the new QR codes, geolocation tools (Foursquare and others) and games, and branding your online presence.  They stressed interactivity, such as touch screens, online meeting spaces, collaborative presentations, polls and using “cloud” services for storing and sharing documents and presentations.

The potential was made real at the presentation near the end of the conference about the DOK Library Concept Center in Delft, The Netherlands.  This library is not publicly funded, but charges a membership fee.  Its innovative concepts are tested here before being rolled out to other libraries and institutions.  In addition to shelving on wheels in the kids’ section (allows reconfiguration of space for programming), library signage is on the back sides of wii screens, which can be flipped over for gaming programs.  There are no rules, only one service desk (for signing up new members), music is playing, and roving staff is identified by the tool belts they wear.  The library is 100% self-service.  The latest innovations are music chairs ($10,000each) that allow kids to sit inside and listen to music as loud as they like without disturbing others in the library, and the Touch Table, which recognized your library card when you lay it down on the table’s touch surface and shows you historical photos from the city archives based on your address. The photos appear on the touch screen and are manipulable (zoom, reposition, rotate, etc.)

I have never attended an Internet Librarian conference without coming away with a profound respect for the people in my profession that have the vision and courage to take new ideas and put them to work making library services better!  For that reason, I avoided the “failure” track, which was touted in the keynote sessions as a place to feel better about ideas that didnt work – and what you could learn from them.  In the next year, I would like to use some of the cloud services and interactive tools to make delivery of “remote” library services more intuitive and effective.  This would include creating how-to documents for library users, hyperlinking catalog records to online services and help screens, and actively promoting our virtual services like Ask Now and Info Quest text reference to library staff so they can understand them and help market them.

Having training materials and help documents online would also make it easier for branch staff to use them for their own outreach projects.

Most presentations are available on the Info Today web site. I invite you to explore!

RefRen: Pecha Kucha

Pecha Kucha has become a standard feature of conferences.  It is a way for many presenters to share ideas and projects in one conference session without having to prepare a full-blown presentation.  Each presenter has 20 slides, which are advanced automatically every 20 seconds – so the entire presentation takes about 3 1/2 minutes.  Following are a couple of Pecha Kucha presentations I thought might be do-able at SPL:

Paraprofessionals in reference
Emily Chan, University Of the Pacific
Data show 3/4 of questions asked by patrons are fielded by paraprofessional staff.  To streamline, they put training materials on a wiki platform: materials are  freely accessible, archivable, web 2.0.   Assignments collated, available in multiple formats (video, docs).  Confidence scale is measured at beginning of training and at points throughout on survey monkey; there was an 84% confidence increase (sample size=2).  Challenges: the training is asynchronous; time-intensive; self-directed; there is a learning curve; requires staff buy-in. Recommendations: identify learning outcomes from the beginning; be strategic in terms of reference service; address staff and student perceptions as they vary from librarian perceptions.

Roving reference

Sarah Davidson (UC Merced)
Has never staffed a ref desk with librarians; students who need reference assistance make appointments, or use 24/7 chat.
The university tried roving reference because they were receiving conflicting info: stats show few questions asked, but also felt there was a need for reference assistance.  By instituting roving reference, they hoped to increase visibility. For 20 hrs/week staff wore red shirts with the infirmation “i” on the back; when not roving, would staff desk.  The service was publicized by student assistants already working in the library who had strong customer service skills; by table tents, signage, promotional video on web site; campus newspaper. Staff used a debrief form for stats: length, types of questions.  Roving averaged 2.7 q/hr and each question took less than 1 minute. Common questions involved printing issues, or finding a known item.  Challenges: marketing, approachability, and proactive vs patron privacy.  Overall: number and type of questions do not warrant a libn at the ref desk.  Recommencation: start small, evaluate from outset; give some thought to advertising and branding.

Chat/text ref
Ahniwa Ferrari
paid/free options; new: quora, hunch, own vs cooperative; several ways, one way.  AskHoratio: phone, email virtual study room: google tools; social tools – create as many access points as you can so you can reach as many as possible; nice thing about using all google tools is that you can use them all in one spot w/ gmail account; Google has ways to tag questions; google voice: can see transcripts; can push to ref desk or mobile phone. Google Talk allows librarian with a cell phone to rove. Elluminate: everyone can get a free room (3 users) video upload, chat, whiteboard, application sharing, transcripts; Facebook: too many users for lib to ignore; twitter: not as many as FB, goes mobile easily even on dumb phones.  Free is good; but need staff time for training; cooperation is great. askhoratio.weebly.com

Danger ref libn! Danger! Admin Approaching!

Get your admin involved; they need to know what the front line does, help you secure new resources to make public service more efficient; teachable moments – let your admin see you houre using new tools to promote outreach that dont cost a lot of money.  Builds relationship and understanding each other on personal and professional levels..  thin opportunity.

Radical patron
Jean Costello
Current public library funding models are unsustainable. Staff are bogged down with the basics, creating and recreating the same wheels.  Public libraries don’t have staff or funding to hire or be top notch librarians and top notch IT professionals. One solution might be to create a national public library corporation like NPR or PBS funded by public donations and  fed support what do you get? We could leverage IT, generic content development; we should retain personal service, local content development.

Helping teachers overcome resistance to e-content
Charlotte
Student ideas:
explain what a pdf is
conduct reality check with faculty and students in the classroom at the same time? students are informed, just not using trad sources
EBSCO effective in providing access to 1000s of subscriptions
Do reality check about the next environment you’re going to

How to get what you want

… from electronic resource vendors.

Billie warren-king, head librarian, Archbidhop Mitty HS, San Jose; vp of BASL
Build personal relationships; have regular, effective meetings;
Know vendors, size, age, product lines beyond electronics, competition and their products; licensing, redistribution rights, pricing.
Know your community: population, budget; rank needs and want; know the total amount you are spending on that vendor in your organization (ex. textbooks vs e-resources); who else is negotiating for your groups.
Get your free trial – insist on 30 days. Look at content authority, how many users, easy to use?
Licensing models
User population – all have access
Simultaneous Users – limited #seats.
Pricing models:
Flat fee, tiered pricing (per size of school)
Price per student
Ask for what you want – longer contract for price reduction. Longevity counts, too.
Be creative. What works for you – and present it to the vendor.
Negotiating points:
Higher #schools=less$
distribution rights
admin support, customer service, training
Use goes up, price goes down
remote access
no auto renew;
offer to beta test products
prorate for partial year
annual increase – negotiate annually, but it won,t go higher than a firm percent.
ask for whatever you want
Don’t respond to things right away; don,t be pushed into something you’re not comfortable with. Let me thingk about this for a few days.
look at stats, poll users, market constantly.
Keep track of changes in the databases.

Gillian Harrison, Director, BCR Libray Netwok Cooperative
Do your homework: products and vendors; compare with similar products and vendors; use A’s pricing to get B to give you what you want.
Be familiar with your library’s policies and guidelines.
Document everything – notes of conversations, conversations over coffee; visits, phone calls, save e-mails; remember personnel often changes – both people and terms.
Negotiation – it’s a process. Give yourself time, drafts are good things, keep everyone informed of status. Be honest with the vendor when you’re not ready to make an immediate decision.
Push a little: it never hurts to ask; remember, you are the customer, and the customer is always right.
At the end of the day, you both want a deal; vendor wants to keep you happy; always ask for what you want; have the vendor tell you what the database costs; don,t indicate what you,re willing to pay. What’s your pricing structure – ask to see the whole structure.
Be well armed with info, questions, confidence
Your responsibiity is to get the best deal for your library.
Get addl info from: colleagues, consortia, vendors (who elst publishes stuff like that?”), publishers, attend conferences and webinars, talk to others.