Polling Your Public

I’ve been responsible for two twitterstreams this week: @saclib_central for my library, and @saclib for the library system. It’s hard enough keeping up with one account; two almost did me in. But thinking about bargaining agreement impasses and the declining role of traditional librarianship in public libraries led me to ask a question of the twitterverse: What’s important to YOU about the library? How can libraries truly demonstrate their value to their communities?

Back came the responses: Go where people gather: out in the community. Attend events, set up a booth at the State Fair, advocate for remote and in-house services. Become more visible. Tell people face-to-face about our services and programs. Offer value-added services such as classes, workshops and programs.

It used to be that everyone knew the value of libraries and felt guilty if they didn’t use the materials and services libraries provide. People used to find out about programs because they used the library regularly in person. Today, many take advantage of other online and remote sources and services, and are less likely to drop in. That means we do need to take our message into the market, so to speak. That also means that people who do not visit the library don’t know about the way we have kept up with the digital times, and are stunned to find out how our materials and services have changed.

The observations from our twitter followers are telling. They are telling us we’ve got to change, too, and not sit on our swivel chairs and bemoan the backwardness of the government agencies that control our budgets, and the ignorance of our patrons, who support us with their tax dollars. Whose fault is it that they are ignorant? What are we going to do about it?

Dear Yahoo, Please find Delicious a good home!

Like many others, I was dismayed to hear the rumors that Yahoo may stop supporting Delicious. (12/17/2010)  It took me SO LONG to convince my co-workers to utilize our Delicous bookmarks as a teaching tool and an online resource for patrons who attend our outreach and programming events, and now that we’re on a roll, there’s a roadblock.

What we’ve been doing is tagging the web sites we mention in our computer classes, class visits, and outreach efforts so that those who attend can easily find the list in one place afterwards.  I figure it’s a public service – we’ve represented them as reliable web sites and recommended them to our public.  We bookmark the appropriate set for each class, and publish the links when we visit community organizations.  For example,  here’s the set recently used for our “Dig it: gardening on the Internet” computer class.

I sure hope someone steps up to continue the service and keeps it free!

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.

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

More About Wave

I’m feeling a little better about Wave, now that I’ve been trying things for the past week. There’s a problem with lag, and many of the folks in the waves I’m following are not online when I am, so I have yet to see any real-time chat going on. I think, too, that a lot of folks jumped in like me, and now that they’ve looked around a bit, they’ve jumped out again.

I’ve created and participated in polls, and I added my location to an embedded map. I’ve uploaded a photo and a document, but the only way to collaborate on editing a document is to have its text as a blip on the wave. An uploaded document can only be shared by viewers downloading it, so – no real time collaboration.

So – is it useful? Probably, when the lag issue is resolved. Others are saying that G-mail integration would improve it, as well as some way to follow the threads as participants add comments. I would love to have work time and interested colleagues to experiment with it some more, but for right now, my learning is confined to after-hours at home.  There is also little documentation, but that is changing, and I’m adding some how-to links to my Delicious as I come across them.

I have some invitations – anyone want to play?

Waving

I received an invitation to Google Wave this morning. I’m frustrated that IE required a Chrome plugin and I can’t install it due to lockdown, nor does it work with Firefox Portable or Google Portable (no Flash).  Which means I’m up until ungodly hours at home working on the laptop.

I only know one other person with Wave – any of my colleagues out there Waving? I’m tired of having a conversation with myself.  It actually looks like it has some potential for meetings and collaborative projects, and I need someone to play with.

Twitter: Enabling Customer Conversations

Michael Sauers, Technology Innovation Librarian, and Christa Burns, Special Projects Librarian from the Nebraska Library Commission joined David Lee King, Digital Branch & Services Manager, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library, in this presentation about how to use Twitter effectively as a marketing tool and way to connect with library users.

Most attendees already had Twitter accounts, or created them especially for this session. Christa stressed how important it is to know how you intend to use it, and to create your profile including photo and contact information before sending that first tweetl.

David added that if you’re tweeting on behalf of your library, you should designate someone to tweet; follow all your users who follow you, and forget about following other libraries, especially if they.re not in your service area. Use every chance to “be the library” in your twitterverse, and become part of its fabric.

Michael demonstrated some third-party applications that make it easier to keep track of your followers, your “mentions” and your direct (private) messages.

Some web sites mentioned:
Tweet Deck and Hoot Suite for management; Twitter Bar for tweeting; Tweetstats and Twitter Analyzer for analysis.

Promote your library’s account by placing links on the web site, tell people at meetings and in the community, print it on business cards, and teach folks in your computer classes.

Library Day in the Life – 2009

Today, Monday, is the second day of my weekend. My workweek starts at 11 a.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, and ends Saturday at 5 p.m.  I REELY tried to stay away from work today, but made the mistake of turning on the laptop while waiting for dinner to cook, and ended up checking my e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook accounts and sending a few work-related messages. This now requires me to make a note in my Franklin, or I will forget about the things I need to follow up.

Time Flies

I’ve just put myself through a gruelling exercise: setting down on paper in a Word document a more-or-less (probably less) detailed history of my relationship with the Internet from the beginning.  It took most of a week!

Apple IIe

Remember Prodigy? Prodigy was the reason we were able to buy our first computer, way back in about 1987. (The 2kb Timex-Sinclair doesn’t count in this context.) Husband wanted to play a war game run from a 5 1/4″ floppy, and the library wouldn’t allow anyone to run personal software on its new Apples.  We answered an ad in the paper and picked up an Apple IIe like this one, with a monochrome monitor, dual disk drives, a Hayes modem and a megabyte of memory for $1100.  Oh, and a zillion software programs and a printer were thrown into the bargain as well. The enlisted serviceman was selling the system at a loss to pay for long-distance charges he ran up by dialing into Prodigy and Compuserve in California from Hickam AFB in Hawaii.  We used that system for many years for games, but also for word processing, accounting, tax prep, and, yes, Prodigy. (Photo used with permission under creative commons license.)

The Internet has grown to emcompass so many activities formerly handled otherwise: correspondence – USPS mail to e-mail or facebook; taxes – paper forms mailed with return-receipt requested to e-filing; portfolio of street maps in the car to a printed set of directions from Yahoo! Maps; research – from the Reader’s Guide to Google, from the card catalog to WorldCat Mobile.

I no longer pay for film processing and mount photos into albums; I send them to Flickr instead, or transfer them to the digital photo frame on my dining table.  I no longer build web sites from scratch by hand-coding; I blog instead. And my bank no longer returns checks nor sends paper statements.  If I want to know how much I’ve got, I go online and log in.

The most gratifying use, for me, is the ability to keep in touch with far-flung family members.  We use e-mail, Facebook, Flickr and Skype to share news, photos, stories, and family history resources.  Twitter has beome my antenna for breaking library news.

So, what’s the next big thing? Guess it will be video.  Then mobile.

I’m an Adult Learner

Time passes faster each year. Remember when a school year was as long as a lifetime?  The same amount of time that once equaled 20% of my life as a Kindergartener accounts for a mere 1.6% of my life today.

It seems that the rate at which things chage has also speeded up.  PCs are now obsolete after only a few years.  New services debut weekly. I know I’m not the first – nor the only – one to bemoan the time and effort needed to stay current.  However, my occupation as a public librarian is the best possible career for me, because it allows me to dabble in the new stuff – a grown-up sandbox, if you will – under the guise of keeping library services relevant to members of all ages and abilities.

I just finished reading Clay Shirkey’s book, Here Comes Everybody.  Although his theme is about the power of ad hoc organization made possible by new methods of communicating,  one of the strongest thoughts I brought away is that established organizations almost never understand that customary operating models are hamstrung if “everybody” decides to “do something” to influence the organization.

I see libraries struggling to accommodate the more traditional members of their communities while reaching out to those whose first resource is the Internet.  However, because libraries are handicapped by an infrastructure that is slow to change, there’s no way to make a nimble corporate leap into the present. Retrofitting the collection, the catalog, and the ILS is just too huge an undertaking to be completed in the short amount of time that would be required.  Easier to start a new library from scratch.

As the manager of our Telephone Reference Service, I’ve thought for years that the phone, rather than the Internet, would become more important as a vehicle for delivering library services, but was unclear about whether we could change our delivery processess to take advantage of that medium.  Today, phones equipped with web browsers and MP3 players are in the hands of so many people, adults and children, that we cannot continue to ignore the capabilities of today’s equipment and the expectations of their users.

I.ve been learning how to network on Facebook (still struggling), Twitter (also still struggling), Ning (awkwardly struggling), and by texting (got that one down!) I just hope I can learn fast enough to become conversant with all these new things, and perhaps integrate them into our service delivery, before the next 20% of my life passes. By then, I’m going to have the fastest great-grandmotherly thumbs in the west!