6:30-8:00 get myself and kiddo ready, leave for work

8-9:00 is my first email block, I do a poorly managed version of the “inbox zero” and I try to keep two email blocks throughout the day—the first and the last hour. Whenever possible, I try to leave work early enough to get a workout in for the day. I’ve found that it really does make one more productive! However, I don’t have my daughter on Mondays, so I tend to work late those nights. Of course, like most anal er… “driven” librarians, I work a lot from home at night and on the weekends, too.

Checked in on Foursquare

Get to work—open up Outlook on one monitor, Firefox on the other—use App Tabs to keep Gmail, iTweet, FriendFeed, Facebook, Google Reader and Hoot Suite open… but I rarely click over to them (sorry to anyone who tries to ping me during the day).

Plug in my iPhone for music.

Fielded question about constantly replacing headphone on patron internet machines—looking for a source of good, cheap headphones (difficult balance).

Called friend and former colleague, Jack Maness to confirm lunch

Set up Digital Services Team meeting for 9am

Posted picture of my desk on Twitter

9-10:00 met with Digital Services Team. This is my Systems guru, Jon Solomon and my Drupal master, Chris Evjy. We discussed the movement to the newest version of Web Pac Pro, new headers, integrating Library Thing For Libraries. We discussed Summer Reading program, looked at different software products and campaigns, set firm deadlines for the various elements. Discussed Evanced stylesheets and the development of a Feed plugin for Drupal to ease the display of Evanced information. Discussed our developing Intranet – production environment up. Broke down the tasks and discussed who does what and when.

10:00am – Filled out time sheet, generated the report for my staff and turned it in.

Looked into the myriad of suggestions for headphone replacement from Twitter. Many good suggestions – brought these ideas to our Assistant Director and discussed some of the pros and cons of each approach. We decided to take question to the Leadership Team later this week

Checked in with Finance Manager for library on the progress towards a contract with PingV, converting ArtsResource website migration to Drupal. ArtsResource is a web site paid for by the Boulder Arts Commission that we maintain at the library. It provides profiles with samples (audio, video, photographs) of work for local artists as well as art-related events listings. We are working with PingV to convert it over to Drupal from the legacy content management system it’s currently built in.

10:15am Did morning walk-through of the library – I try to do this twice a day so my experience of the library isn’t all just virtual. I stopped in the children’s area and discussed a recent hacking incident that unfortunately resulted in patron shoving our security guard when confronted. Further discussion with children’s staff about other recent security issues and our Leadership Team/Commission’s emphasis as top priority for the coming months.

10:30 – 11:00 Worked on IT governance meeting, implementing a Change Management group as per ITIL principles. I’ve been slowly adopting much of the ITIL stuff in one form or another since I came on board about a year ago.

Then Chris (the web guy) interrupted me and wanted to know where Drupal was installed on the new production server… also needed user permissions fixed. I tweeted about my frustrations with Linux file permissions.

11-11:30am, more follow up on Change Management

11:30 – gave up on Change Management and moving on to making some phone calls… Eric Sissler of the Westminster Public Library, Carson Block of the Poudre River Public Library District, Susan Staples of the High Plains Library District. Working on some Colorado Association of Libraries’ “Network Systems Interest Group” stuff.

Noon-1:30 – I try to make myself have lunch with a friend twice a week because the rest of the time I just eat lunch at my desk while answering email. Twice a week it’s good for me to get away from the screen. Today I had lunch with Jack Maness, Head of the Engineering Library at the University of Colorado up the street. We talked a lot about ALA Emerging Leaders, Technology in Libraries—cool stuff about Data Curation mostly. We talked career development and a *lot* about what we’ve learned and are learning being relatively inexperienced managers. Jack has been a huge influence and inspiration—I can’t say enough good about the guy.

1:30-2:00 check email, Twitter, Facebook … helped out Chris AGAIN with Linux stuffs.

2:00-3:00 It’s all about the performance reviews. I have one for myself due so I needed to prepare materials for my supervisor, and I have a staff member due soon as well. I did a little of both.

3:00-3:30 Got a call back from Eric Sissler and discussed the details of Reading Record, a Free and Open Source (hosted, no less!) summer reading tool that he developed. We’re thinking about participating with the larger Colorado Community in using this software this year. Also, discussion of Rsync and virtualization in libraries and setting up a time for him to come up and see our data center and geek out even more together.

3:30-3:45 Afternoon walk-through – this time of day has a totally different crowd (after school) and I like to check in with Circulation and see how things are going. Have they had a lot of questions or complaints about the system today? I also use the time to do an environment scan in general. What areas of the library are people using? How many laptops? What are they doing? Who looks lost? I try to overhear whatever questions they are asking our desk staff. I always peek in the teen room and see who’s using what in there as well. Then I headed through children’s to see what’s most popular there and observe the age groups.

3:45-4:00pm – Related to children and computing, I came back to check on the progress of getting our new multimedia touch screen computers set up. We’re going to deploy Windows 7 and a whole slew of new software for a wider range of ages. Currently our children’s PCs run Windows 95 and are installed at tables that are only appropriate for 2-5 year olds. The software selection is equally geared for little ones and out of date. Soon these cool HP Touch Smarts will replace them! Really excited about this…

4-5:00 it’s all about inbox zero, baby. Will I make it today?

5:30 – I have *not* reached inbox zero… far from it. I look at the Facebook photos of the After Hours social at ALA Midwinter. Wish I could have been there. Now I want to go home—so back to email! I WILL PREVAIL!

6:00—Inbox Zero achieved. I does a happy dance.

6:00-6:25 – I gather my notes and write up this post. I will then head home but my day isn’t over—we’re doing some system testing later tonight about 9:30pm.

All in all, a pretty typical day except that I normally have a *lot* more meetings.

ADDENDUM: Running the new backup script hung on an SQL table tonight at about 10pm and our server crashed. I emailed back and forth with my Sysadmin for a while before finally deciding I needed to head into the office. He and I were there until about 10 minutes ago– 2:00am. III is still working on the problem as it turned out to be a Millenium issue rather than a Linux issue that he or I could fix. And THAT is a day in the life of this librarian…. luckily late night calls are *very* atypical.

Jennifer Knievel and Jina Wakimota – University of Colorado at Boulder Chinook OPAC redesign

data to examine impact of redesign – took pulse before and after

old interface cluttered and forced user to choose index first

new interface clean, “Google experience” with access to more advanced features for researcher needs

Not just presentation — back end work, re-presentation of metadata

research q: would keyword default increase keyword searching?

are users using catalog less and migrating to Google more?

abandoned using 225 or 229 fields for periodical search– changed to Scope instead so that periodical-specific search could be enabled

reindexed database (had not been done in 10 years) — had been changes in Marc, Millenium features, etc.

Methods

Transactional Log analysis – unbiased, unobstrusive, lends itself to longitudinal analysis

Text Searches- Author, Title, Keyword, Subject

slight increase in keyword searches (about 4%)

slight decrease in Author searches (about 4%)

everything else stayed about the same with a spike in Title searches just before redesign (coincided with intro of periodical scope- search for journal titles)

Did a T-test for statistical significance

beginning and end of semester more known search, mid-semester more discovery (more keyword)

subject lowest used – no surprise

author low use

title and keyword rising slowly over time

downside of transactional analysis– can’t assess user success

Number Searches – Call #, ISSN/ISBN only

dramatic increase in LC call number searches– highest in the beginning of the semester (locating the items given to find perhaps?)

increase in ISSN searching before WebBridge implementation – correlated with making it easier

Total Searches

Catalog use steady – did not see decrease in usage, saw a spike in usage when new OPAC first implemented but then it went back to previous numbers

How to prepare for a migration

Why? Access to the data MY way

web design was stunted

Web accessibility poor

Thick client outdated and tedious to upgrade

Saves TCO

Excited about OPAC interface improvements

Total ILS savings 25%

Setup Koha server and started nightly dump from Sirsi, began z39.50 search into Koha from Drupal website

It was appealing how easy it was to customize for each person

Weekly meetings for changes and bug reports – will go live sooner than expected

Break project into manageable chunks

Improvements are seen quickly

Leave staff time for development

IT not afraid of data migration

Focus on database structure not on what reports you can get, because you can do anything with a good data structure

Koha and web Drupal site each on virtual machine – Linux 2gb and runs fine – MySQL and perl

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

What I’m referring to in the video is the Shanachietour New Jersey.

So, you probably know the drill by now:

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your home page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.

Of course, like my friend the fabulous Colleen, I chose to break the rules and just post it in my blog so I can share it around to Friendfeed (oh yeah, I should check that site once in a while, shouldn’t I?) and other digital places I once had time to visit. (Remember me, teh Internet? Oh hai!)

1. I am the Brewin’ Librarian…. but I rarely have time to brew any more. I hate to confess this, but in the last two years I’ve probably only made about four batches of beer (and one didn’t turn out well– first time in 10 years!). Also, I drink more red wine than beer these days, and except for at conferences, I don’t actually drink very often at all.

2. From the time my daughter was 2 until she was 7 I was a single dad. I didn’t really know that much about parenting or children, but I worked hard and asked a *lot* of questions and she seems to have turned out alright. =)

3. During that same time I returned to school as a “non-traditional student” and received my undergrad in political science. I did this mostly to live off of student loans so that I could keep my parenting schedule open and flexible. I was fairly unfocused at the time but was tired of sales and restaurant management and needed a change.

4. When I first went into library school, I knew I loved libraries but I wasn’t entirely sure it was the right field for me. I primarily did so to avoid paying off my massive undergrad debt (see above). However, I have since found that librarianship has brought happiness and a fulfillment to my life that is only rivaled by being a dad (although libraries are still distant second to that).

5. I am a certified ballet Dad. When my daughter was younger, she was very interested in ballet and I did everything I could to support it. I swallowed my pride and asked for scholarships, I moved my own school/work schedule around hers, and I learned more than I thought I’d ever know about an art form previously bewildering to me. On the day before her first recital, she accidentally tore off some of the sequins from the bottom of her tutu. Although I can’t sew for the life of me, I sat in a restaurant that day, sewing up a child’s lavender tutu and did a pretty damn good job of it. I consider this one of my greatest accomplishments.

6. I got my first computer at age 12, it was one of those old TRS-80s with 4k RAM that you had to program in BASIC, and run off of a cassette drive. Later, I took it apart and upgraded it to a whopping 16K RAM.

7. For years I was part of the “Elite” BBS hacker scene. I ran a series of BBS boards, founded and ran a network of BBSes that spanned 7 countries. However, I was never a “black hat” type hacker, I was only ever interested in learning what cool things I could do with a computer or network– I’ve never caused any harm. This was WAY before the Internet.

8. However, once I heard of the Internet, like every good little hacker, I promptly managed to “borrow” an unused Washington University student’s account to gain access. This was before you could purchase an account. As soon as I could purchase Internet access, I did so, mostly because I had drifted away from the hacking and BBS scene by then anyway.

9. Like most computer geeks, my diet growing up was terrible. I could probably eat pizza three times a day. Sadly, although I struggle with this, my diet still has not improved as much as I’d like it to.

10. I have memorized the lyrics to probably hundreds of songs. I seem to have a knack for it. People used to joke that I could pull out a song for any occasion. I know the lyrics because when I’m alone in my car, or with my daughter, I sing constantly. However, I *highly* doubt you’ll ever hear me singing in public. Last year at Internet Librarian, I was positively mortified at the thought of doing karaoke. Well… until I saw Stephen Abram’s video.

11. If I had my way, all schools, offices, government buildings, etc. would start their business day at 10am, not at 8. Starting the day at 8am is just uncivilized.

12. I am addicted to coffee. And no, I don’t see it as a problem. I have done the research and as far as I can tell the one Mocha I have to start each day is having very little negative effect on my health. I keep it pretty strictly at one Mocha a day. If you see me drinking a latte in the afternoon or evening, look out– I’m getting ready to party!

13. I am gaming librarian partially because I feel it is a professional obligation. In truth, while I enjoy games, I really don’t feel like I have enough time to be gaming a lot. However, I do enjoy Civilization IV to the point where I have to watch myself from being sucked in for 2 days straight.

14. I love technology, but I don’t think it’s nearly as important as being nice to each other, having clean air, providing affordable health care, etc. Perspective, people, perspective!

15. I grew up in an extremely backwards Pentecostal church that not only believed that the world was going to end in 1989 (it didn’t) but hated homosexuals, people of color, etc. To this day, I am pretty suspicious of religions.

16. Because I didn’t fit into my surroundings as a child, I spent hours and hours and hours in the library. Eventually my reading habits caused me to be kicked out of the house. I left home at age 17 and slept under the bleachers of my high school football stadium. I went to school every day and work every night because I knew education was my future. I graduated from high school with honors.

17. Although I’m an old school punk rocker from the 80s, somehow I ended up going to about 8 or 9 Grateful Dead shows before Jerry died, and I’ve been to more Phish shows than I can count. I don’t like to just be stuck in one box—musically, or otherwise.

18. I spent about 10 years of my life essentially “homeless”. During this time I was neither destitute and most of the time I was not miserable. I was exploring the possibilities of alternative lifestyles and gathering material for writing. I’ve slept in abandoned buildings, tents, caves, in trees, vacant lots, you name it. I met an amazing array of people and traveled almost all of the country during this time. I took temporary jobs in whatever town I landed in– often day labor positions– and learned about a side of America few understand.

19. Despite my amount of traveling, I have never been to “the South” other than (grudgingly) Texas and Florida.

20. I grew up during the height of the great 80s punk rock scene. I saw Black Flag, Naked Raygun, Big Black, the Circle Jerks, MDC, Operation Ivy, and a slew of other bands in tiny little clubs. I used to party with the Smashing Pumpkins when they were nobody. Still to this day I can’t resist getting into the mosh pit when a good band comes around– I just do it wearing a black suit instead of a spiked leather jacket.

21. I rode a skateboard daily from age 9 until age 25. I used to be pretty good– just on the edge of competition quality until the 90s broke open a whole new class of tricks. A couple of years ago, I pretty much gave it up. It hurts a lot when I hit the concrete now and between that and my bad knees and ankle it’s just not as much fun anymore.

22. To make up for my loss of skateboarding, when I moved to Colorado about 9 years ago I took a job at the local ski resort for the first winter before I went back to a “real” job. I learned to snowboard and in one season progressed from a total novice to a back-country junkie. I still love it, although I’ve slowed down a bit and stick mostly to ski resorts and the blue and black runs.

23. When I was 18, my Grandma (who was not a part of our crazy church and did her best to expose me to other things) took me to what is now the former Yugoslavia for my high school graduation present. Her parents had come to the U.S. in the early 1900s from there and spoke Serbo-Croatian in the home. We both wanted to see the place our family came from. It was lovely, and the people were kind. But when I spoke to the young punks and anarchists over there, they warned me that trouble was brewing. Two years later, the country was torn apart by civil war.

24. One of the most profound experiences of my life was getting off the plane in communist Yugoslavia and realizing that the people, and their way of life, were really no different. To this day, I remain stubbornly unconvinced that capitalism is always “good” and that communism is always “bad”.

25. Although I always expected to be a writer. I found that the truth is…. I hate to write. I feel like my vocabulary is poor and my ideas predictable, and I just hate making myself sit down and slogging it all out. That’s why my blog is lonely and this list took forever. =)

Tag! You’re it!

The new director at BPL and I share an ambitious vision of what libraries can and should be and are very excited to begin working together toward those goals. I’ll be working with the local Boulder technology scene to create a learning laboratory supporting the creative expression of the staff and community.

We will also be implementing programs to address the digital divide, which I see as more a compelling problem than ever as our job market is not only tightening, but requiring a greater range of technical skills. There are still so many without easy access to computers or the training needed to use even the most common software packages on the job.

An interesting thing about this opportunity is that it really highlights the leadership-management differences we discussed in the recent CAL Leadership Institute. During the interview I asked for clarification on this point and it was stressed that this was *leadership* position in which they were looking for vision, much more so than a management position in which I was to maintain the status quo. That is the most exciting thing about the job!

Here’s to an exciting new year!  I’ll be writing more about what’s coming later….

Oh, well… test video. Consider it an “alpha”. =)

While I use the iPhone app, Wikipanion, for the rare moments that I need to look something up on my phone, I was excited to see that Wikipedia had recently created a mobile version of its site at: mobile.wikipedia.org. However, when I go there on my phone I get numerous “write” errors and its interface and capabilities are definitely inferior to several freely available apps. However, if you’re not using an iPhone, or don’t have the app installed when you find the need arising, be sure to check out the site. I see that there is a setting for “Spoken Wikipedia”, which could add a lot of value to the site, as well as assist those with visual impairment. I’m hoping we see a fair amount of development in the coming months and the site’s bugs are ironed out.

My hacked iPhone home screen

Speaking of the iPhone, like most enthusiasts, I have mine jail-broken in order to expand the range of apps available to me beyond the limited selection of the official app store. At some point I’ll write about what some of those are, but for now I’m excited to announce that hackers have announced that they have found a way to unlock the iPhone. What this means is that soon you’ll be able to download software that will enable you to use an iPhone with carriers other than AT&T. For those with contracts on other networks dissatisfied with the phone offerings, this is a very good day. Of course, I long to see the days that all phones are free of these restrictions anyway. A move like that is going to be necessary to spark the adoption that will bring mobile Internet into the forefront that is predicted by 2020.

Internet Librarian was like coming home. Everyone was as techie (or more) than me. We all had our gadgets, our online presence, our favorite things to share and play with. It was great!

In contrast, all too often in libraries I’ve found there is little emphasis on, or appreciation of, technology– and while I am the first to admit that technology must have a purpose, it must make life easier, to be hostile to technology in a library today means that you are distancing yourself from our users in a way that could quite possibly threaten the existence of libraries in the future.

But I am more optimistic than that. I believe that libraries will adapt, grow, change, and empower our users to learn about and make use of information technologies in all their forms. That will (hopefully) always include books, but it will also include art, games, story-time, community gatherings, video workshops, podcasting, and….. well, we’ll see about that. =)

After Internet Librarian, it was quite a shock  two weeks later to attend the Colorado Association of Libraries conference. While IL had blogger’s table at the front and back of every room, and it seemed like everyone was carrying a mobile device of some kind (see the photo below), I saw none of this at CAL.

Thanks to Laura Crossett for the photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/newrambler/)

I find this odd. Colorado is one of the leaders in technology adoption. In a recent opinion poll done by The USA Today/Claritas it was found that 4 out of the 25 top counties for “early adopters” are found in the front-range of Colorado. The Boulder County area is known as the “Silicon Flatirons” because of the number of tech companies located here. I don’t have to tell any library folks the importance of understanding, and reflecting, one’s community. All of us– public, academic, special, understand this as crucial to our mission.

So I have to ask…. what happened? Colorado was once a leader in library technology.

Well, it’s not all that bad…. There is a lot of support in the area for change and development in our libraries. One of our outstanding library technology leaders is Sue Staples of the High Plains Library District who has done a fantastic job of transforming her library’s online presence and encouraging technological exploration and innovation with the Colorado library community.

Steve Lawson of Colorado College and Joe Kraus of DU have gotten together a Web 2.0 & Libraries Round Table under the auspices of the Alliance.

The Colorado State Library has done a little work at exploring whether the development of an Open Source ILS project similiar the Georgia’s Pines program is viable. This was one of the projects I highlighted as part of my poster presentation at CAL 2007 on “Open Source and Libraries”.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the efforts of one of my fellow CAL Leadership Institute members, Victoria Petersen, who is doing some really cool stuff not only in leading CAL’s Second Life Interest Group but just generally being fabulous down in Mancos.

And of course, he hardly needs mentioning, but who can possibly not be impressed with a library director like Jamie LaRue who not only is willing run Linux on his own machine, but was willing to try adopting open source software on his library system’s public workstations as well. Jamie is definitely an example of someone who is pitching in and lighting fires in Colorado’s library community.

These are only a few examples of the great work being done in Colorado currently (and many apologies to the MANY I left out), but I hope we see more.

So, Colorado peeps…… who else is doing the cool stuff? And where do we go from here?

THAT will be the subject of a post soon. HINT: If we have all this tech knowledge and enthusiasm around– why don’t we use it?