http://www.flickr.com/photos/margolove/1810357551/

It is a very interesting time. As I gear up for another ALA conference, in the very rare spare moments I encounter I’ve been reflecting a bit on my life, my career, and inevitably… this blog.

I’ve seen the signs– blogging is dead. Well, no it’s not. But I’m certainly not the only one I know who’s taken a hiatus. I know the arguments– Friendfeed and/or Twitter have killed blogs. However, in my case that’s really not it. I remain semi-active on Twitter, but I’ve rarely spent any time at all on Friendfeed.

I have a lot going on right now. The transition from Library School student to full-fledged MLS’d librarian happened in mid-April, when I gave my final capstone presentation. I thought, “Ah-ha! Now I will blog again.”

But I did not. I spent evenings with my daughter. We went for bike rides, we read aloud together, we went to the park, and we spent many, many hours on the swing in the front yard.

And I don’t regret a minute of it.

However, by late May I began to feel antsy again and I started putting together presentations, trainings, reading a few blogs here and there, etc. But I just haven’t had the extra time to blog. As you can see from my last “post”, I had intended on live-blogging the Rocky Mountain Innovative Users Group summer workshop—but I ended up needing to come back up to Boulder after our patron network crashed for most of the day.

Which leads me to why I’m really not blogging. It turns out that moving from a position where you have little power (and therefore little responsibility) to one of great responsibility is a huge shift in many different ways.

Before, I could spend the evening on a whim staying up late coding a cool website or mashup just because I thought it would be fun. I could head off to pretty much any meeting, conference, or committee that I could drive to and afford. I could spend my time exploring and playing with ideas and writing rants about what needs to change.

But now I actually have to *do it*.

There’s no one to blame anymore if things don’t turn out well. There’s no “administration” that won’t let me implement something cool for our department. There’s no lack of ability to control the purse-strings or to delegate the tasks. Now I have to figure out how to be the one to get buy-in. I have to figure out how to take ideas from conception to reality not just in my own little office sphere—but across an entire organization.

I have to manage people. Granted—I managed work-study students at the University Libraries, and I managed all kinds of folks in the past in restaurants, sales jobs, etc. But it’s very different managing people who are mostly older than you, who are highly skilled, and who just plain have a whole lot more experience than you. Let me say this—I am ever more grateful *every day* that I had a management class in library school and that the Colorado Association of Libraries Leadership Institute has been so fantastic. It has really taught me a lot and helped me through some pretty intense challenges.

I also have spent a lot of time adjusting to my new role as professional. It’s no longer my job to do all of the nuts and bolts of coding up some new web tool or bringing online a new gadget. That’s something I have to remember. Now it’s time to trust and, when necessary, coach my staff and let them go do it. I need to keep my head in the clouds for strategic visioning and future casting. I need to participate, contribute to, and help shape policy development. I need to empower others.

I have to remind myself of this every once in a while. I almost spent this last weekend at DrupalCamp Colorado because it was “cool”. But I would have come home and played with Drupal all night, and not paid attention to caring for myself, my house, my pets, or getting ready for ALA—not to mention handling my management responsibilities for the week. I had to step back and remember, “things are different now”.

And that’s just fine. It’s tough to be stretched in many directions. However, I prefer to think that’s just a process of expanding myself. Expanding who I am and what I’m capable of. I only hope I remain malleable like silly putty—and don’t crack like old rubber band.

See you in Chicago!

pop. as a whole doesn’t have as many smartphones yet… still provide good lib services

new 12m pixel phones with face and smile recognition (won’t take pic until person is smiling

palm pre:
has a “synergy” feature to pull together contacts and calenders for multiple sources
multitasking finally
wireless charger

multimodel interaction, typing is not so easy
visual access- pic of book, QR codes, pic of bar code
(extelligence, versus intelligence)

QRcodes all over the world much higher adoption rates

increasing audio interactions

“Tell Me” -  gives audio info

gesture interactions

3 camps of content users could be getting on the phone:

full, transcoded, or true mobile page (created for and optimized)

w3c mobileok checker

study by abphone.com, “snacking the web”

mobile users need fast easy answers with minimal amount of typing

much of reference desk info is now on their mobiles at point of need

Library Journal has a mobile version

Skokie Public Library

University of Houston checking out Itouch’s with mobile lib apps to give patrons an idea of what they could do

III Airpac has been revamped for iPhone use (m.ocls.info)

Suzanne Chapman’s Flickr for mobile library screenshots

Library app, helps you find local libraries

Traveling Classics reads books to you

Istory app – like Choose your own adventure

Paper – for scholarly paper

Sit or squat — clean public restroom finder

Text more popular than calls, especially among 13-17 year old

Boston: trash cans when almost full, send text that they need open to central office — why not our book drops

Libraries: request hold, send call numbers, ref questions

mLibraries section of Library Success Wiki

vLingo works better than Google voice?
can use to run commands on your device… “Send text message to Bob”

Leapfrog is about to come out with “text and learn” blackberry for 3 year olds

SMS/Text Search (check Megan’s slides)

University of Arizona, color, flexible touch screen will be on market in 18 months

projector in phone

Asus selling keyboard for with keyboard and touchscreen built in

Samsung, solar-powered, touchscreen phone made of recycled plastic

Megan’s slides (and excellent site) are here

The way libraries prepare for the future is not sustainable, cultural reaction pushed back against expectations of the users

took everything apart and reexamined their services, both from patron and staff side

meet together and allow innovation to drive change

could be any area– not just technical

best thing about culture of innovation– it’s okay to fail

futurecasting and planning for it, makes leaps– it’s okay, say “we were wrong, we’ll fix it”

ADAPT

adaptation synonymous with being an agile organization

small library so can change quickly

staff has bought into– user expect it, don’t see it as drastic but responding to their needs

experiment, trying new things and share their failures help create excellence

cycle of innovation-fail-adapt effect sustainable change over long term, build in culture of change (all staff, users, new hires expect it)

UX focuses on the user (staff, user to the door, and users of web site)

analyzes interface points and suggests changes, with eye toward aesthetics, community, usability

helps make ure this is pushed out to other departments

Gretchen:
too often children’s dept is treated like an island, not at table for innovation

children’s doesn’t serve kids– it serves kids and their parents….

they see the library as the third place – stay for hours, storytime in morning, stay till lunch

but children’s section not arranged for browsing (arranged picture books in sections rather than alphabetically)

who is it for? what is it about?

had to handle every book and make a decision about it, color coding works…

serves both BROWSERS and SEARCHERS

calling the collection “FIRST FIVE YEARS” coded the spine label as FF instead of call number

circulation is way up!

in order for children to grow, they need to feel validated and “published”

creation station so that kids can create and share something (camera, recorder, flipcam, laptop) NOT CATALOGED, NOT BARCODED we trust them because it’s theirs

Sarah:
1. Teen hang out room — no homework, no service desk, it’s their space and we don’t want to invade it (relax and have fun)
2. then “power library” has 25 computers and service desk
3. then classroom for tech training
4. then several study rooms
5. then a small office home office (all the stuff you’d find at Kinkos)

2 positions that are supposed to investigate tech, post about tech, etc.

Teens are the beta users, they are fearless and will tell us what they think….

iMacs with really big screens so four kids and fit around and then they can easily collaborate

all furniture is designed to be easily movable and make the space their own

all walls are glass and they are allowed to right the on the walls (wrote all over how much they loved the libraries)

they ended up using markers on the walls for their homework

HAVE to have gaming in your library if you’re serving teens, don’t program around gaming– just plop it down for them after school and allow them to play as much as they want… WE TRUST THEM

Have Teen Advisory Board manage the Facebook page and they post the events

On Facebook, make a professional profile and friend ONLY the teens, not your colleagues

Kate:
No reference desk, all roaming– meet people at point of need (without being invasive)

not get rid of Dewey, keep some though

start up intensive one-on-one deep reference, also be the point person to work with local knowledge experts

Created subject browsing, gathered different ranges of Dewey into “glades”

Tools to make it work: tiny laptops, EEE PCs, wireless phones, and a slimmed down Reference point (a little curvy table)

Takes Reference out of tech support, guest pass giving out, and allow us to focus on Reference…..

Most important tool: Nametags

Doing IM reference through Meebo, Meebo is tough on tiny screens (moving to Libraryh3lp)

reorganizing collection was a great bonding experience

having a reorganizing collection gives opportunity to constantly review– why is this hear? a new intimacy with the collection…. do we really need this? now we are thinking about, touching the collection all the time instead of it just sitting there

staff at Darien willing to change– they say, “we try a lot of things and sometimes they don’t work… that’s okay”

Libraries are like open source, the more we give away, the better we get

we’re giving more than just information, we’re giving of ourselves more

no more sitting at the reference desk, sitting “apart”

what is most fundamental is to maintain a genuineness and our chief export is kindness

Nice slides showing app layers (wish they’d post their slides)

Data layer
app layer
XML layer

TechEssence.info for API library info

check worldcat.org/devnet

can pull worldcat searches as XML and remix

xISBN for FRBRizing

MAshed Libraries UK – hackfest

Worldcat hackathon NYPL

OCLC bootcamp for Code4Lib

Visualizing Worldcat Holding
thesecretmirror.com/code/api-fun-visualizing-holdings-locations

Compare Everywhere app for android phone includes library for books through Wordlcat API
(usage spiked after introduction – importance of mobile and of freeing data for machine use)

Andrew:

Why can’t we move the lib workflow to the network?

Chris Anderson- web is all about scale

started with resource sharing… the licensed journal lit….. cataloging…. consortial…. (open source ILS? universal circ policies? Pines?)

sharing cloud storage of google scanned documents

webscale computing helps invert the 70/30 ratio 70% building infrastructure, 30% propelling biz forward

Libs have concentrated on diffusion and syndication

now we’re seeing concentration…. shared discovery layer…. ERM/knowledge base…. repository…..

Eventually ALL library management workflow

do things at scale, in the cloud

Ebay did well:

1. Simplify features of commercial transaction

2. provided platform to allow buyers/sellers to industrialize workflow

3. reap benefits by scaling this up

Library Scale 166 billion transactions per year, 5000 transactions per second

OCLCs goal: build a service capable of that….

when using social networks, need scale…. social networking content would not work so well with just a few library users….
but we still want to handle our metadata locally

practical web scale for libs – looking for efficiency

despite our huge investments, we appear small and fragmented in comparison to search engines

a webscale strategy would provide libs with the ability to just focus on propelling biz dforward

lib management workflow isn’t unique– can stop treating it as such

extend what we’ve done for library users, we can do for staff as well

concentration creates network effects, opens up new world of processes of resource sharing

a single networked source for vendors/providers, e-resources identities, bib item-level details

reports w/real details (financial, collection, circulation)

fund codes, bulk purchases, collection shifting, consolidation patron notifications, identity management

More notes:
http://cil2009reporter.blogspot.com/2009/03/day-one-track-d-moving-libraries-to.html

Redesign or Redevelop?

Redesign if just asked, old, boring

Redevelop if code is poor, usability poor, hard to update

Redesign is cheap (director won’t know difference)

Redevelop is $$$ more like triplebypass

Get off the major redesign cycle. Disruptive to users

Users dislike redesigns

Redesign w/ evidence based

Usability tests, usage logs, feedback show a need

Pitfall 1: not accounting time for assessment

Redesign where the biggest ROI in terms of content, services

Look where people are going

Google Analytics
Clicky
Usability studies
Find and document page rank

Plan for time to get consensus:
Need for change
Desired outcomes

Data is good here

Pitfall: death by committee
Make committee SMALL

Data+evidence based practice

Pitfall: being experts
Don’t design to make librarians happy, design for your users

Pitfall: thinking outside box
Cms
Blog
Wiki
Rather traditional page based

Pitfall spending too much time designing
Why be original when so many choices already?

spend time on content, services rather than arguing design minutia

Pitfall only looking other Library websites

User expectations formed on other sites, not libs

Pitfall use SMART goals

Increase page rank, improve content update times, improve usability x percent, increase in resource usage

Pitfall: not communicating enough
Consider blog or wiki, tool manage user expectations

Execution

Pitfall communicating too much
Redesign by committee
Look to evidence to avoid tedious discussions

Pitfall not providing clear path for users
Define primary functions and these paths are clear

Connecting people / materials get prime real estate

Pitfall reinventing the wheel
Use free stuff

Spent time money on remarkable content, engagement

Librarians are smart provide good content

Remarkable content is rewritten content for the web don’t cut and paste
Improvements in usability in hundreds of percent

Redesign for SEO
Structure HTML well consistently
Simple URL
Alt tags
Descriptive titles

Submit sitemap
Ask Google to remove old from cache

Design with social media optimization

Don’t throw old content

Update robots.txt

Pitfall not planning for maintenance in future

Do it right once

Others who took better notes include:

Bobbi Newman

and

Julie Strange

Boulder Public Library was the very first place I visited when I first saw this town now over 10 years ago. It sits on the bank of Boulder Creek and spans either side, with a glass walkway connecting the main part of the library itself with the community theater and art gallery. I remember pulling into Boulder, parking in the library’s parking lot, and sitting in the sun next to the creek. Like countless Boulderites, I did some yoga, admired the flatirons and felt myself at home. So, Boulder Public Library has been the place of many “firsts” for me– major shifts in my life.

Today I gave my first presentation that was not part of a class. It was on Mobile Computing and it was part of BPL’s “Learn and Play Day” for staff. Tony Tallent is doing a great job of setting the stage as the new director of BPL and since this is my hometown (and favorite) public library, I couldn’t be more pleased. I have to say I’m in the clouds right now.

One thing that struck me about the staff at BPL was how much they genuinely seemed to enjoy each other and the environment that they work in. And they should– Main library is a gorgeous building, and a center for the arts in Boulder. The other branches also have their charms– over the 10 years I’ve lived in Boulder, I’ve used all of them numerous times for nearly every reason you can think of– storytime for my daughter, books to read to her or together, research for classes or projects, reading for pleasure, book groups, film series, theater productions, I’ve downloaded audio books and checked out dozens of audio books on CD for travel and documentaries for when I feel like zoning out of the TV. I *love* this library (can you tell?). It was a honor and a pleasure to come and speak there today and I can’t think of anywhere where I’d rather have had my first official presentation memory.

Helene Blowers came to town for the keynote and as always, her talk was fantastic. She used the metaphor of “Bubbles” to inspire the staff to not only focus on those services that allow us to “break” the bubbles (our “stuff” for people to check out) but also empower our communities to come in a blow their own bubbles. She stressed the importance of providing space for self-expression and that this will engender good will in our communities. I love this…. what better place for people to get together, make art, make a podcast or a Youtube video, to meet each other, and to just…. play!

The other speaker besides myself was my colleague James Ascher, who is a rare book specialist and a scholar and gentlemen of the highest caliber. I had to leave before he came on– but judging from our many conversations, I’m sure his presentation was phenomenal.

So, the title of my presentation was “It’s not a Bandwagon, It’s a Tsunami: How Mobile Computing Changes Everything”. I’ll try to get it up on slideshare within another day or two. Since Internet Librarian, I’ve been really into Mobile Computing. I plan to go further with the research and I’m working on a proposal for the upcoming mLibraries conference next year.

Just a little of what I’ve found so far:

1. Libraries are adapting slowly to mobile computing, more slowly than the shift to Web 2.0. This is a bit strange for two reasons– one is that PDAs and Blackberrys have been fairly common for as long (or longer) than most “Web 2.0″ technologies have been prolific. The other reason is that it is the fastest growing aspect of computing. More importantly, the adoption rates of cell phones are much greater than the adoption rates of social networking tools.

2. While there are well-meaning efforts, some are successful– podcasts for the storytime or library tours. But some have long way to go. Most of the “mobile optimized” web sites I saw were fairly usable. But, almost all the OPACs I’ve explored are completely useless on my iPhone and my Palm Pilot. The text is far too small and the pages littered with far too much information to be useful.

3. There are a lot of possibilities, though. Everything from including “Find in a Library” in the product search apps to use QR codes to link directly to subject guides or recommendation pages for the section of the library you’re in. There are things we haven’t thought of yet. One staff member asked about technology that would detect your presence when you walked into the library and offer to beam information to your phone– I didn’t know about it, but Helene did. Now how cool is that?

Overall, now I’m sitting at home just finished snuggling with my daughter and tucking her into bed and I can’t help but feel hopeful for the future. I am now confident that I can hack this conference thing (yay!) but even more importantly, I love that the idea of play is moving forward in our field.

I think for too long we’ve been a society concerned with how to work with information– but what we’ve found is that once people have been given the tools (and Web 2.0 is just a part of this) that they have preferred to play. I think it’s an exciting time to see how develops– and especially how our society may develop once the effects of play transform our information behavior.