2009 WorldCat Mashathon in Amsterdam

Because I'm an organizer for the event (whahoo!), I am pleased to announce the WorldCat Mashathon registration for Amsterdam is now open. Here is the *official* announcement:

Join fellow coders for the WorldCat Mashathon in Amsterdam, May 13-14. Sponsored by the OCLC Developer Network and International Institute of Social History (IISH), the two-day event will be held Wednesday and Thursday at IISH headquarters in Amsterdam.

The European Mashathon follows on the heels of a previous WorldCat Hackathon in New York City. Participants will spend the two days brainstorming and coding mash-ups with local systems, OCLC Web Services, and many other Web Services to embellish existing, and create new, library services.

WorldCat includes national catalogues from the Netherlands, the UK, Ireland, Iceland, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, France, Spain, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Russia and many more—so there are plenty of potential uses and apps just waiting to happen.

Why attend the WorldCat Hackathon?
• Brainstorm potential uses for and play with the WorldCat Search API.
• Gain development access to 1.2 billion items from more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.
• Integrate these resources with many others to create innovative new services.
• Meet fellow developers across the information industry.
• Share your creative vision and be a part of the next wave of online library development.

Ideas, outcomes and code from the Mashathon, together with a participants list, will be shared during and after the event for others to download and build on.

Learn more and register for the WorldCat Mashathon on the OCLC Developer Network wiki.

One from the Road

Here's the latest podcast in the "Thinking Out Loud" series, a recap of my recent road trip in California with Joan Frye Williams. As always, life on the road can be amazing.

More screen time

A new study measured screen time and found all of us are on about 8 hours a day, unless you're in the magic aged 45 to 54 bracket, and then you enjoy more screen time than any of the rest of us--excluding our young friends under the age of 18.

I find this number actually lower than I would expect. What do you think?

Have you *ever* visited WebJunction?

If yes, please take a moment to tell us about it. All you have to do is complete this short survey about your experiences with our service and about your current concerns and interests in Libraryland. Good? Bad? Meh? We want to hear it all.

We report all the results back to the field (on our site), but the open-ended responses to the field-based questions never fail to provide me with new insights on what we're thinking and doing (in aggregate).

Many thanks in advance to over 1000 of you who have already sent in your responses.

Scholarships for Library Support Staff Institute

Michael Bradshaw at the Ohio Library Support Staff Institute (OLSSI) tells me that in recognition of the sorry state of library budgets these days (especially in the travel and continuing education lines), the group is offering three full scholarships to attend the 2009 Institute, to be held August 2 through 4 at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.

The application form is here.

Sony E-Book Reader Adds Free Content...from Google

Users of the Sony E-Book reader will now have fast access to about 500,000 public domain titles via Google's Book project. The news release details the simple process Sony and Google have developed to provide this access. All of a sudden, Sony can leapfrog the total number of Amazon's Kindle offerings. They had about 100,000 titles before this announcement, now they move to 600,000. Amazon offers just under 250,000 titles via the Kindle store.

Many free titles are also available for the Kindle, but speaking as a Kindle user, I know these are not easy to access.

The implications for libraries are obvious. What is our mission in a world where e-content is widely available for free? And what happens when Google starts making instant paid access to their copyright-protected materials available, not only to e-book readers but to anyone with a computer or a mobile device?

New WorldCat keyword widget

Released this weekend, the WorldCat keyword widget is pretty darn cool. You'll have to scroll down, though, to see it on our antiquated page layout (if you still read on the big screen, rather than your aggregator). Perhaps (sigh) it is time for some actual design skills to help us out here at IAG. I am feeling the need for some visual freshening. Or perhaps it's just spring fever.

Our original intent in keeping It's All Good in its current polkadotted fashion was to encourage everyone in libraries or library school who, like us, had limited design skills, attention spans and hours in the workday to devote to blogging to consider its merits and see how easy it was. "See," we said, "See how we're using it in the totally out-of-the-box, you don't need special tools way." But by now that ship has sailed...

But back to the WorldCat Keyword search widget. Designed especially for content pages or blogs that are relatively narrow in scope, you can build a refined keyword search right into the widget...and then of course you can also change it and get results right in the cute box. Play around with it and see what you think. Better yet, put it on a couple of blogs/pages and see what your users think.

Google Voice coming soon

Just read the New York Times write up on GrandCentral ("One Number to Ring them All", and meandered over to the site to see just how cool it is.

Impact for libraries?
Upside: You'll have a better chance of actually reaching people, to prompt returns, ILL requests available, things like this. Free conference calls mean you may be able to save some telecom expenses, possibly.

Downside: Local users may not have local phone numbers.

Other thoughts?

The big picture, as I see it: Innovation, helped along by Google, is not limited strictly to libraries. Now the phone company (along with the media, news and advertising industries) is getting in on the action. Hey, suddenly being in the library field makes us look as cutting-edge as we feel somedays. We've already experienced the Googlization learning curve and are on the optimistic upswing from it.

Record your WorldCat story

I've been working on a sort of "StoryCorps" project for WorldCat and library cooperation--except it's video. It's really simple. All you do is record a quick blip about Why You Love WorldCat.org, and upload it to YouTube to join the growing collection.

We're inviting everyone to record their "WorldCat stories" in video form. It can be a simple as telling the world why you love a specific WorldCat.org feature (10 seconds), or as involved as relating the time when someone you knew absolutely couldn't find the Ukrainian resource she desperately needed, until a library staff member suggested WorldCat and she found the actual digitized art object itself. (2 minutes or, as long as you like).

If you're headed to the ACRL conference, we even have a videographer lined up to do the video taping for you. It will be at the OCLC hospitality suite at the Seattle Sheraton, room 3102 from 1-4 pm.

If you're at SXSW Interactive, lucky you! Record yourself in the midst of all the fun.

Library coverage in US News and World Report

The latest post over at the Professor's Guide blog on US News and World Report features 10 Tips on Getting the Most Out of your Library. Geared for high school/college students and their parents, it is something you can point to for incoming 1st year/freshmen, etc.

Plus it's written by yours truly! (So true confessions it mentions WorldCat.org by name...but it is meant to promote Libraries in General.)

Alice heads West

We have a series of meetings scheduled next week in Dublin, so I will likely be talk, talk, talking instead of write, write, writing. (Well, truthfully it should be list, list, listening...but there we are.)

The second tip in the series of "How to survive a network attack" comes to you today from the OCLC security team:

Have visibility into the problem.

A key to identifying and recovering from a denial of service condition is being able to quickly and accurately determine its causes. Here are some utilities that you will want to configure in advance, in order to properly prepare for an attack:

* Web server logging: Web server logs are often the best source of information for determining the source of the attack, since they usually contain the client IP address.

* Network connection data: If your network devices don’t already log basic information about all network traffic, you may want to deploy a network auditing tool such as Argus . Argus logs contain the time, source IP address, destination IP address, and traffic characteristics such as protocol and port for the traffic that Argus is inspecting.

* Intrusion detection: Early detection of the problem is critical. Intrusion detection systems like Snort can be configured to send you alerts in the event of behavior that has the characteristics of an attack.

* Log analysis tools: Regardless of the type of logs, you’ll need to search and analyze them quickly. You may want to have a system with a utility like Splunk ready to go before a problem hits.

Wow, with names like Argus, Snort and Splunk, you'll be more secure in no time.

A King cake for Fat Tuesday!

 

Mardi Gras comes to me!

 

Library ROI: A Brief Webliography

First, a confession. I've been holding this list for months. Don Reynolds sent this to me back in the fall of 2008, and I've been meaning to post it every since. Today, the guilt finally overwhelmed me, so I went in and checked all the links, tossed out or updated the bad links, arranged the list in chronological order from oldest to newest, and threw myself on the mercy of the court.

REPORTS ON CALCULATING A LIBRARY’S RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Compiled by Don Reynolds, Past President of the Association of Rural and Small Libraries, and Director, Nolichucky Regional Library, Morristown, Tennessee
Updated February 20, 2009

Public Library Benefits Valuation Study. St. Louis Public Library, April 2001.

Library's Contribution to Your Community. Illinois Regional Library Systems, 2002/3.

Libraries: How they stack up. An OCLC Report. OCLC, 2003.

Value of Public Library Service. Massachusetts Library Association, October 2003. Also available: "Estimated retail value and Values explained" and Calculator work sheet

The Economic Impact of Public Libraries on South Carolina. January 2005.

Taxpayer Return-on-Investment (ROI) in Pennsylvania Public Libraries. Pennsylvania Library Association, September 2006.

Value for Money: Southwestern Ohio’s Return from Investment in Public Libraries. November 2006. Report Summary

Making Cities Stronger: Public Library Contributions to Local Economic Development. Urban Libraries Council, January 2007.

Worth Their Weight - An Assessment of the Evolving Field of Library Valuation. Americans for Libraries Council (Libraries for the Future), May 2007. Two notes:
1.) This report summarizes all the various valuation projects from around the country.
2.) I was having some trouble getting this to download, but was told by Libraries for the Future that the website issue is being addressed.

Update: Betha Gutsche from WebJunction offers this alternate site for finding "Worth Their Weight." Thanks, Betha!

Vermont Library Association’s Library Use Value Calculator - What is your library worth to you? August 2007. (Note: Follows Massachusetts model.)

Return on Investment for Public Libraries. Library Research Service (Colorado), 2007/8. Note: This site also includes numerous case studies of individual libraries. Individual ROI Calculator.

Return on Investment (ROI). North Suburban Library System (Illinois), 2008. (Note: Two calculators are available here, one for a library’s return on investment to the community, one for the ROI for an individual.)

Maine State Library’s Library Use Value Calculator. Updated 2008. Note: This approach also follows Massachusetts model.

New York Libraries: How They Stack Up! Revised October 2008. Printable brochure version, also revised October 2008

Warm up for Code4Lib

A few of us are gearing up for Code4Lib 2009 in Providence, RI next week. Very fun. I am going to be at the OCLC Grid Services Boot Camp, to learn, take photos and I hope take a few videos as well. Promises to be a good time, given the list of attendees. Wish I could stay for the whole conference, but someone has to mind the store (as they say).

As a techhead warm-up and the start of a continuing series of somewhat random but helpful tidbits, I was chatting with one of the security officers at OCLC and he compiled a list of tips for surviving a network attack. I'll give these to you in bite-sized pieces.

Here's the first one:

Reduce the likelihood of an attack.

Like campers who tie their food up in trees to keep bears away, you’ll want to make sure you don’t have any enticing tidbits for Internet attackers.

Here are a few key findings to look out for:

* Unpatched systems: Attackers wanting an easy target will look for systems that are behind in updates.
* Open web proxies: Misconfigured proxies can attract a lot of traffic because they may allow remote users to get around firewall restrictions or to get unauthorized free access to resources.
* Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities: Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of web application vulnerability where an attacker can use your web pages to attack other users.

Stay a step ahead of the attackers and identify these and other weaknesses in your systems with a vulnerability scanner like Nessus. Nessus is a very powerful and potentially dangerous tool, so make sure that you have the proper authorization, that you have familiarized yourself with how it works, and that you choose your targets carefully.

The One Minute Critic

I just stumbled over a delightful site: the One Minute Critic, brought to you by the Fort Vancouver Regional Library District. The vlog is a great example of librarians having fun highlighting their collections, using WorldCat lists to help people in their community connect to their library and providing sheer entertainment value in ways both high-tech and low-tech.

The 10 Classic Cookbooks list caught my eye, and then I found myself wanting to watch all the One Minute Critics! Incidentally (and interestingly)--this library system has one of the highest referrer rankings of WorldCat.org. In other words, lots of users find their materials through WorldCat.org, and they send a lot of traffic to WorldCat.org. It's a virtuous circle--WorldCat connecting people with libraries and great library materials (like cookbooks!)

Watch for the surprise take at the end. So fun!

NYT Gives School Librarians a Boost

Nice article in today's New York Times about the evolving role of school librarians.

Calgary's Design for the Future

Tom Hickerson from the University of Calgary is presenting this morning, as part of the OCLC Distinguished Seminar Series.

He's going to think about the role of the research library on an academic campus--the Convergence of Knowledge and Culture. Specifically, he'll be telling us about the Taylor Family Digital Library (TFDL). It is in fact a building with physical books and digital materials...but they named it as such to help move us into the idea of an evolved digital library.

What role will libraries play on campuses? The building is important but not the only element.

The University
The University of Calgary is a start up--only 42 years old. 28,000 students. Thom is also responsible for the museum and the press. (Budget about the size of MIT or Univ of Utah.)

The building is scheduled to be opening in Fall 2010. 265,000 SF. A new central library, university museum, university archives, the university press, the centre for student success and the alumni association. The library is the hub of the campus--also a close relationship with IT and faculty teaching programs.

There will also be a high density storage facility--will hold books and journals but also archives and art. 1.6 million volume equivalency.

Also will create a quadrangle for a "green space" at the heart of campus.

Learning Commons
Giving students and faculty the capacity to create new knowledge--lots of production capacity and collaborative spaces. Digital touch tables, digital globes, lots of editing and display places.

The Centre for Student Success
Putting this centre in the middle of the building, because it's so important. Student advising, student support, aid for students with disabilities, instructional programming (envision this centre and the library to be seamless).

Physical plant
You can see what's happening in the facility from a physical plant standpoint and from the materials--you can see licensed content being used alongside BTUs being used in the space. Very cool!

Research
Includes a focus on multi-dimensional visualization capabilities.

LAMs--Libraries, Archives and Museums--they want convergence at the university. The building is not essential to convergence and it will not guarantee it. The result?

We Have to Change.

Lots of great things going on with the museums and scholarly communications. For example, there's an open access authors' fund of $100,000 annually for University of Calgary scholars. (Only one in Canada and one of six in the world.)
*Where does the money come from?* (not been a problem.)

A reminder from the telephone technology--we went from dial to push button to cordless to mobile...we don't have to be able to see the technology to interaction with it.

One of the library's tasks will be to make tangible interfaces to intangible objects.
How do we make collections work for our users?

Digital materials, of course, but also more support for peripheral content. Lots of exciting things going on.

Questions on digital materials ownership, Chief Information Officers, and LAM convergence...hearing Tom's presentation reminds me what great opportunities the next generation of students will have--and what we as a profession can do to support the full learning experience. What a great time to be a student!


Audio of the presentation will be available soon.

WJ Connects Staff Competencies to Courses

The WebJunction Library Management Competencies index is now available. This is the first in a series of indices that will link WJ course content with the staff competencies identified by several library organization.

Here's the news release about the project:

Seattle, Washington, USA, 3 February 2009—WebJunction has released Library Management Competencies to help current and aspiring library managers be more successful in their job. These competencies, which are available on WebJunction.org, include dynamic links to related courses and resources on WebJunction that will build knowledge and skills and increase on-the-job effectiveness. By identifying the key aspects of managing a library and defining the associated knowledge, skills, and behavior, library managers will be able to tailor their personal learning plans to address any gaps in their skills. All WebJunction courses and programs take place within its unique social learning platform, where people come together around course work and content to gain the most interactive learning experience available to library staff anywhere on the web.

“We are thrilled to offer this first set of library management competencies to the library field,” said Betha Gutsche, curriculum manager for the Competencies project, who also serves on the board of Continuing Libraries Education Network and Exchange (CLENE) Round Table of the American Library Association. “We’re eager to learn how library managers begin using the competencies to identify and build the skills they need to manage libraries. As with everything at WebJunction, we welcome input from the library field. Your feedback will help us move forward with implementing new sets of competencies over the coming year.”

There are two paths of discovery from competencies to learning resources at WebJunction. For direct access, go to http://www.webjunction.org/competencies. From this page, you can browse the list of library management competency categories; click the Details & Learning button for each competency statement to see related courses as well as a guide to additional resources available on WebJunction.org. Also, when browsing the Course Catalog, the details page of any course associated with a competency will link to the associated competencies page.

WebJunction’s library management competencies are the first set to be launched from the full Competency Index, an aggregate of competency statements that cover a broad spectrum of library practice and service. In the coming months, WebJunction will continue to roll out additional sections on the website, and expects to produce the full Index as a WebJunction publication later this year.

The effort began in 2006 when WebJunction, the learning community for library staff, received a Library Skills Training grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant was intended to increase WebJunction’s capacity to meet library organization needs to continually develop staff with essential skills for today’s libraries. As part of this grant, WebJunction staff have worked closely with the originators of many competency sets in the library field, as well as with a cadre of subject-matter-expert reviewers, in order to complete a full Competency Index. Library staff can use the statements to identify skills they should have or want to develop, create job descriptions, or develop training programs.

"How to Foster a Cooperative Culture"

One of the things Joan Frye Williams and I stress in our talks is the importance of collaboration today in three areas of our work: how we work with one another in libraries; how we work externally to create new partnerships; and how we set up spaces for our users to work together.

For a terrific short article on the first of those three points, check out Lynda Gratton's excellent article "How to Foster a Cooperative Culture," published last month on the Harvard Business Publishing site. If you haven't subscribed to HBP's service yet, check it out; it's a terrific way to get lots of free information on management and leadership issues right in your in box.

Early Career Development Fellowship Deadline Nears

The March 6 application deadline is fast approaching for the 2010 Jay Jordan IFLA/OCLC Early Career Development Fellowship Program. Information is here, and the guidelines are here. The application form is here.

If you know librarians with three to eight years experience working in countries with developing economies (OK, today that might include anywhere, but the list of eligible countries is on page three of this document), please let them know about this program.

Home again, home again, jiggedy jig

Wonderful to see everyone at the Blog salon. It was a tweetable event, as we finally found a hotel who would turn on wireless for us in a ballroom. There were a number of people using their mobile phones to post news. (Me, for one.) One unlucky new friend had actually shattered his iPhone screen, earlier in the day. (But it still worked just fine!)

Blog salon 2009 photos uploaded to Flickr.

In other news, a colleague just sent me a nifty, if not very involved social networking ROI calculator for nonprofits. You may or may not want to hide this from your library director, as this tool is geared more for direct fundraising efforts. I plugged a few numbers into the model and it promptly told me that social networking was going to be negative 90% of the time invested in 3 years. So...YRMV but it is a fascinating look at trying to be a dollar figure on all that "wasted" Facebook/Twitter/Twine time.

Our hearts go out to Perrot Memorial Library staff in Old Greenwich, CT.

Saturday Saturday and my feet aren't as tough as they used to be

So I had a fun-filled Saturday today. It was a WorldCat-filled day, seems like.
I started out at the WorldCat Local meeting at 9 this morning. Went to the booth, collected literature. Trucked to the Hyatt for the WorldCat.org meeting. Very good questions and interest, with all the new features coming out.

One thing it seems like we (OCLC) should be more vocal about is the point of WorldCat.org. It's primarily a way to connect end-users on the Web with local libraries and library materials. All too often we get caught up in feature/function and loose the big flick of why we're doing this in the first place: library visibility.

It is so fun to see familiar faces and meet new friends. There was talk yesterday at the Symposium of a future contact lens that could be embedded with metadata...so in theory as someone is walking up to you, their name and how you know them could flash up at you. That would be REALLY helpful at conferences!

But I digress. I did make time for lunch with colleagues at the Corner Bakery, a popular spot with tasty salads and sandwiches. Then back to the convention center for the WorldCat Local meeting. Panic because no catering. Whoops, we didn't order any catering.

It was really heartening during the WorldCat.org session to hear OCLC's view of the usability test outcomes from graduate students, undergraduates and public libraries...and then to hear the same comments echoed from librarians at the WorldCat Local session this afternoon. There were speakers from the University of Washington, University of Delaware, University of California and...(?) memory escapes me. But all very very interesting stuff.

The gentleman from UW who spoke about their installation of WorldCat Local was saying you have to trust your users and prepare for success--their ILL fulfillment traffic went up by 300% or some ridiculously large number. In terms of "trust your users"--he had staff not believing that people needed all this information! (They didn't need it before...) And I think the idea was, they weren't finding it before, so they didn't know it existed.

The theme of the day seems to have been, "People expect a Google-like experience, and we want to figure out by hook or by crook to make it happen." This is a great shift from what I have heard at previous conferences. There is no hand-wringing or drama about if Google is going to take over the world. Now it seems most people are simply taking it as fact and trying to figure out what to do about it. And luckily, WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local seems to be mentioned as part of the solution, anyway.

So then while the meeting is still going on, I have to hop out to meet with a publisher rep about advertising. Print advertising still attracts eyeballs, but there's not a lot of innovation going on there. Online and event advertising seemed to be a hotter topic, based on the conversation we had. What advertising do you notice most? Notice least?

Then it was back to the hotel to prepare with other groups of people for sessions tomorrow. And I left my scarf in the hotel lobby bar. Shoot. Then a quick hop up to the OCLC Green Suite for the next-to final meeting of the day. A large-group discussion, with food and snacks.

Tomorrow is the OCLC Update Breakfast. There have been so many news releases this week--it will be a wonder if we can cover them all in an hour.

See you at the Blog Salon tomorrow night! 5:30 to 8 pm, Hyatt Regency Centennial I, F/G.

The Evolution of the Web continues, a slide from Nova Spivak's presentation.

 

Nova and David take a break from all the great questions from the audience.

 

David, Roy and Nova discuss the semantic web.

 

Video of Symposium will be available

Thanks to everyone for coming. We'll have a video of the Symposium available soon....likely in the next 2 weeks or so.

Questions and Answers

Q. What are the speakers associations with librarians?
Q. What do they think about the idea that students today aren't able to write long form or sustain deep ideas? (The semantic web is broad but there's not a lot of depth.) What happens to our democratic process?

Nova example: Is Google making us smarter?
Is intelligence the speed at which we get the answer, or the quality of the answer?

Nova Spivak

Nova is a semantic Web pioneer and publisher of Twine.

Library 3.0--the Semantic Web.
Twine.com is based on the Semantic Web, create public or private collections. Combine the wisdom of crowds with automated annotations.

The social graph just connects people.
The semantic graph connects everything.
Nodes and links.

Everything is becoming metadata. A higher resolution Web. (Like megapixels on cameras--a more granular interpretation.)

In the semantic web we're putting the metadata into the data. Transforming the Web from a file server to a database. (But hidden from other applications.) RDF and OWL are the languages.

A programmer has to understand the API, do some work...but on the semantic web our data can talk to each other easily. The Web for machines. Software will be able to understand the Web.

Smart Data. Get humans out of the loop--it's not going to scale if humans have to do everything. The Smarts move into the data itself rather than being hard-coded into the software.

(The Evolution of the Web: Connections between information and Connections between people.)
*PC Era--e-mail. (Front end decade)
*Web 1.0--early back-end issues. (Back-end decade)
*Web 2.0--making the Web more friendly, more interactive with rich media (Front end decade)
*Web 3.0--another shift. (Back end decade)

Web OS will be like middleware. When the Web starts functioning like an operating system.
*Web 4.0--the Intelligent Web. Ubiquitous personal assistants. The notion of the Web spilling out over everything and making everything smarter.

5 main approaches to semantics:
Tagging
Statistics
Linguistics
Semantic Web
Artificial Intelligence

Some approaches make the data smarter, others make the software smarter.

The future of Information Retrieval...the tools make it easy to make MORE information. Leveraging the social Web: but as we move towards Web 3.0...we can use machines.

All human knowledge, of all forms, will be represented on the Web in 20 or 30 years.
How do you add Semantics?
(At Twine we use all of them.)
Manual Tagging--Hard/precise, tagged by experts. Easy/fuzzy, tagged by nonexperts.
Automatic--Hard/precise, database integration

Libraries that learn:
The library brain, fires in slow motion. (Librarians have to have ideas, then put them into place, then people notice, etc. Soon they can self organize.
*Digitize everything and put it all online.
*Automatically self-assemble and self-organize.
*Build personalized experiences for users.
*Detect and adapt to changing needs and usage

As users do this, recommendations and filtering become really important.

Information Finds Us

Roy Tennant kicked off the session, and encourages us to realize that information
Our two speakers:
David Weinberger. Former speech writer for Woody Allen's comic strip!

The Kindle. One significant rev from the Kindle doing to books what the iPod did for CDs. Will make reading social again...rather than something private. (Remember reading on our parents' laps?)

OR...Copyright law. World of books and writing fundamentally change.

We're now in an Age of Abundance. An abundance of good stuff and crap. But we're able to manage the crap okay. What's harder is to manage the good stuff.

Libraries role: social spaces. Access to technology--especially economic disparity. Libraries are sym bols of a community's commitment to equal access.

It also makes sense to have a collection (that we can draw a boundary around.) The idea is that there is a place in town to get knowledge and culture. There is a place where this stuff can be contained and curated.

Books are based upon scarcity...hard to find, hard to publish, premised on scarcity and not on abundance. Books divided into topics, content. Not having links out is an act of stinginess and cowardace. (Stripped of value when they're not connected on the rest of the network.)

As content gets digitized, they become pointers

Manage Abundance.
Warned that we'd be overwhelmed in information. The solution to the information overload is to generate more metadata.

The old way was to physically separate the metadata from the data. But this is impossible in the age of abundance. (There's an implicit set of values and politics in that decision.)

We don't confuse the label with the person.
Metadata becomes the data and the data
Metadata is the thing that you know, and data is the thing you're looking for.

If we're going to manage all this data, we're going to have to do it ourselves. But the old ways of doing things, do not scale.

The Library of Congress experiment. Wikipedia is one example.
We will do it Together. We're just begun to invent some of these things.

And we're not going to get it right. (But metadata will save us...the page needs more sources, more citations. The metadata frees us to learn more.)

It's going to be good enough. Generally, good enough is good enough. In the world of abundance, good enough is good enough. NOW we need the media literacy to know that good enough is NOT good enough (medical information, air traffic control.)

All of these attempts will always be outpaced by abundance. It's yeasty but it's messy.

Our highest calling as human beings--Knowledge. Is being displaced by Google?
No--it's not the highest knowledge. it's understanding. Understanding is plural, is complex, always developing.

We know how to do knowledge and science well. But we're getting an influx now of understanding. The tools are tools for understanding, not for knowledge.

Pragmatic roles will sort themselves out (collection, navigation, social space) but the Symbolic roles (equal access, knowledge is scarce) will change.

Libraries of the future explodes-linked, explodes with content!

OCLC Symposium: From Linking to Thinking

We are about 20 minutes from getting underway with the OCLC Symposium. The room is filling up nicely, and our speakers are getting ready. I forgot I had moved my photo download pointer to the new 500 Gig hard drive...so I will have to post photos up after that fact. Make your way over, if you're in Denver...

WorldCat Mobile pilot meetings at ALA MW 2009

If you haven't already heard, there is a brand new WorldCat mobile pilot available. Go check it out--but remember it's a pilot, so plan on a few hiccups along the way. It's just the first step in making WorldCat more mobile-friendly...and we'd like to hear what you think about that.

How about you tell us at the WorldCat Mobile pilot feedback sessions at ALA MW. One session still has some space for a few more folks--so we'd love to hear what you think. If you don't have a Web-enabled device, here's your chance to see how it works. Join us on Saturday from 10 to 11:30 am. Register here.

I also completely forgot to tell you the details of the OCLC Symposium. The theme this time is From Linking to Thinking—How We’ll Live When Information Surrounds Us.
All the action starts at 1:30 pm at the Sheraton Denver Downtown, Grand Ballroom 1

We'll be exploring ideas of how the Web and always-on access may have changed even our very thought patterns. And from sitting in on the discussions, it is going to be a very good discussion. We've changed up the format, too--so it's more like a town-hall style meeting between two very interesting personalities: David Weinberger and Nova Spivack. I am brushing up on my Twines and making a trip this afternoon to check out a copy of David's book so I will be in the right brain groove. As if you needed additional fodder, check out KGS's review on TechSource.

Roy Tennant will moderate. See you there, or we'll have a streaming video of the session available after the fact. I hope to blog it, too.

Totally random other news
Coke has made a new commercial of two kids sitting in the library. Not some stellar, awesome library. But you know, libraries are good for quiet backdrops every so often. (Not a computer in sight, natch.) But we all know that TV is not reality. Event reality TV is not reality.

See you in Denver!

Texas Library Association Survey Results

The good folks at the Texas Library Association posted the results of their taxpayer survey yesterday. The complete package, available here, is really useful. It not only includes the results of the survey, it also includes the complete questionnaire the survey takers used, and a PowerPoint presentation reviewing and interpreting the results.

These results are especially relevant, because the survey was conducted during the first week in November, after the economic meltdown. Despite the uncertainty, school and public libraries still get high marks for relevance and importance in the community.

U of Illinois/Elsevier Paper on Library ROI

Staff from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and from Elsevier have produced an interesting short paper on the return on investment in academic libraries. They tie success in grant seeking to use of library resources and come up with a figure of $4.38 in grants for every $1.00 invested in the UIUC library.

Pew Presentation

Here is an excellent PowerPoint deck from Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet Project, titled "How Libraries Can Survive in the New Media Ecosystem." The presentation was given by Rainie yesterday at Bryant University.

Your assignment is to read and discuss. Soon---with your colleagues, board members, and public!

DCPL iPhone Application

Here's a pointer to the future: the District of Columbia Public Library has released an application for the iPhone and the iPod Touch to access its online catalog. The app allows you to check the catalog, set holds, see the library's hours, and even read book summaries.

What's even more impressive is that this is a release from the DCPL Labs. That's right, R & D for public libraries and their members, by a public library. What a concept!

Kudos to Ginnie Cooper and her team in Washington. This is a great way to show the feds what an innovative public library looks like.

Blog Salon at ALA MW 2009

Still seems strange to write 2009. But we have arrived here, ready or not!

With January comes various fun activities: my birthday, epiphany, ALA Midwinter.

For those of you braving the snowy weather, please plan to attend the OCLC Blog Salon at ALA Midwinter 2009:
OCLC Blog Salon
Sunday, 25 January
5:30-8:00 pm
Hyatt Regency Denver (attached to the convention center)
Centennial I, F/G

For everyone who plans to stay snug and warm at home, we'll plan to take plenty of photos, more photos and post some videos--so you'll still stay up on all the juicy conversations.

Catching up

Today has been a day for catching up. Not that I'm caught up on all my reading (ha ha ha, does that ever happen?), but at least I've plowed through my inbox.

Speaking of plowing, while I was in sunny CA accompanying a conference attendee (AGU is the ALA of geologists and oceanographers), visiting friends and going to yummy restaurants, we had two feet of snow. That's right. 2 FEET. But I missed most of it, as a lot had melted by the time I (finally) got home.

We met one of the nicest, kindest, most thoughtful airline representative on Christmas Eve Eve when we were socked in with snow at O'Hare. He was incredibly helpful when our late evening American Airlines flight from Chicago to Boston was cancelled. Have you had weather delays, in your holiday travel? Or wishing you could travel, instead of having to work the Reference Desk over the holidays?

Well to cheer you up, no matter what your fate..here are a few tasty, no-calorie morsels that have crossed my desk recently (in no particular order):

• Museums on Us. Free admission to selected museums, if you have a Bank of America card/account. I love this idea!! (Of course, free admission is admittedly less of a draw when you're already usually free.) But the main point is--someone in the museum community has partnered with a bank to give the consumer a great experience. It made me contemplate opening an account with them, just to get the free museum days.
• DIY PS3 supercomputer. Andy tells me you can build one for around US$ 4,000. Here's the recipe.
• smashLAB White Paper on Social Media. A nice guide for social media from the marketing perspective. It's from March 2008, so a bit dated but offers a solid-but-quick overview if you want the basics.

Hope you've been enjoying your snowy or sunny holidays.

"A Library Carol"

Check out "A Library Carol," a little holiday bonbon from "George and Joan, Thinking Out Loud," the podcast Joan Frye Williams and I do for Infopeople.

Many thanks to the rest of the cast...Andy Havens, Martin Helmke, Joyce Leahy, Larry Olszewski, Chuck O'Shea, and Eileen O'Shea (who is also our producer, mixer, and all around heroine).

Happy holidays, and to all, a good night!

Infopeople CLA Presentations

The mini-demos sponsored by Infopeople at the California Library Association conference last month are now available on Infopeople's web site. A wide variety of topics is available, including Linda Demmers presentation on Green Buildings, Chuck O'Shea on Jing, and Joan Frye Williams and me on Strategic Positioning. There are also links to the presentations Joan and I reacted to, featuring Daniel Pink and William Crossman. (These link open the presentations, so check the volume on your computer before opening!)

The Library Building on Wired Campus

The Chronicle's Wired Campus blog has an audio feature on the library building as part of their Tech Therapy segment.

Interesting, as one of my predictions from 2006 of what would extend the library brand too far--that is, treadmills in the library--has now apparently been envisioned for Goucher College.

I love to admit I was wrong about the future. Me, I have to underline things in order to read them intensively. But college students today are probably much less hung up about such things. Flexibility in thought, schedule and outlook on life reigns supreme these days.

Or maybe I just like their restaurant name so much, I am willing to concede that some people would be able to read Descartes on a treadmill.

Another Award for Underground Railroad Bicycle Route

Allow me to brag for my friends at Adventure Cycling. Their Underground Railroad Bicycle Route has won the American Trails Partnership Award for its combination of cycling, minority health improvement, and outreach.

Cheerleaders and Librarians

I attended the California Library Association conference in San Jose this past weekend. Sharing the convention center was a competition of cheer squads. These are cheerleaders who don't cheer for a specific team, school, or sport, but rather compete on the basis of their own athleticism, coordination, and style.

It occurred to me that libraries should both have cheerleaders (because of the importance and the necessity of the work done) and be cheerleaders (to show the rest of the world how excited we are about what we do).

One of the findings of the recent OCLC report From Awareness to Funding was the importance of passionate librarians in making the case for libraries. What could be more passionate than a champion cheerleader?

Libraries make the Huffington Post

Think what you will about the Huffington Post, and there was some positioning against Google that wasn't quite what one might have hoped for in the best of worlds: "Librarians attempt to Outsmart Google"...but still. Librarians made mainstream blogland.

It's all about the new project to help develop a new Web search experience based on expertise from librarians called Reference Extract. Short of sounding like a spice rack essential in a Hogwarts kitchen, it sounds like a very cool idea and look forward to seeing more.

Focus on Tough Economic Times

WebJunction will host three webinars next month on how to deal with tough economic times. Registration is free; we avoided the obvious irony of charging for a webinar on having no money!

The programs are scheduled for:

• Thursday, December 4, 10:00 PT/1:00 ET Register Now
• Friday, December 12, 11:00 PT/2:00 ET Register Now
• Thursday, December 18, 12:00 PT/3:00 ET Register Now

If you can't participate at any of these times, the programs will be archived.

What about Cooperative Effects?

By Arthur Smith
Every time I glance at my RSS feeds I'm up over my boots in discussions about network effects. The example people give is the original Bell telephone concept (1908) that more telephones make each telephone more valuable. The positive effects of more telephones, eventually extend to people who don't own telephones. That is, networks create effects for those who don't directly contribute to the networks themselves. WorldCat.org affects every non-network child who listens to a book read by the librarian who found the book on WorldCat.

Working outside the USA, I'm often reminded of how our members, quite independently of OCLC itself, have the potential to extend the benefits of the cooperative resources to non-member librarians. Often, in fact, to people who may never have heard of OCLC.

Recently David Hirsch, Librarian for Middle Eastern Studies at UCLA, was a guest lecturer in Dakar. David's subject was not OCLC, but, more generically. cataloging, ILL, reference, etc. However, David chose Connexion and WorldCat.org as the platforms for his discussions, to give the librarians in Dakar their first introduction to OCLC.

William Kopycki, Middle East Studies Bibliographer at the University of Pennsylvania, was recently asked to teach courses in Armenia about WorldCat services. This was something the Armenian librarians had been introduced to through their participation in a consortium of multinational libraries called AMICAL. William also "taught OCLC" as part of the IFLA Meetings of Experts on an International Cataloging Code (IME ICC) in Cairo.



Thanks goes out once again to OCLC members who continue to generate positive network effects for the extended global community of libraries and library users.

Heading off to Hackathon

Hey everyone. I've been "head-down" the past few weeks, as we've come to say in our group. I've learned how to host Webinars--or at least I can say that I've wrestled with WebEx with the best of them.

Anyway, before I zip off to the very first WorldCat Hackathon in New York tomorrow (I'm so excited!!), I wanted to introduce a guest post from a fellow OCLC staffer, Arthur Smith. Arthur is the Director for Strategic Business Development in the Middle East and India. He keeps us on our toes and always has great insight into things, it seems to me. He sent a photo last week that I immediately wanted to share with you, because it speaks volumes about the incredible work that librarians do on a daily basis all over the world...

Vision of Students Today, Redux

Several months ago, I posted a link to a remarkable YouTube video by Michael Wasch titled, "A Vision of Students Today." Mr. Wasch, a lecturer at Kansas State University, has published a remarkably candid update of the post, not as a video, but as an essay on Brittannica.com. There's an interesting review of the video and the essay on OpenEducation.net.

Along the same lines, there's an update of a classic presentation by Karl Fisch called "Did You Know / Shift Happens," which should be required viewing for all of the men and women who are clamoring for our votes today. In just six minutes, your view of the world can get much more expansive! The funny thing is, I'm not entirely sure who did the latest remix of the presentation. It was licensed under Creative Commons and there are a number of versions floating around out there. Hmmm...maybe that's one of Mr. Fisch's points!

"Why Public Libraries Close" Webinar

In September, WebJunction published Dr. Christie Koontz's paper, "Why Public Libraries Close," based on research she and her co-authors, Dean K. Jue and Bradley Wade Bishop, had presented at the ALA conference this summer. The publication sparked a flurry of discussion, including considerable critique of the thesis and research methods used in the paper.

On November 13, at 2:00 pm Eastern time, WebJunction will present a free webinar with Dr. Koontz on her research and this paper. Find out more about this important topic, and get the details directly from the researcher!

Great Day in Oak Park

Friday, I had the opportunity to spend the day with the staff at the Oak Park Public Library in Chicagoland. This was my first trip to my old stomping grounds since the Cubs dropped it in the mud (again), but despite that, this was a wonderful experience. For once, I didn't have to zoom off to the airport after giving my talk: I actually had the chance to stick around and participate in the Staff Institute.

I attended four very good breakout sessions on quite different topics: "Dangerous Ideas," based on the PLA program from the Minneapolis conference; "What is a PC?," a hands-on look under the case of a desktop computer, with side trips into peripherals and cables; a program on dealing with homeless people, remarkable for the staff's high level of compassion and low level of whining; and finally, a behind the desk tour of the library that included not tech services or the computer room, but the furnace room, the air handlers, and the library's green roof. It was fascinating!

Overall, I was impressed with the camaraderie and openness of the staff, which seemed to me to be more diverse in age and background than many libraries I visit. Getting to spend a day with library workers helps revitalize me, and I appreciate their willingness to share their day with me.

Nice move, ALA

George Eberhart from ALA just sent me a message, noting that the American Library Association has opened up access to American Libraries magazine and the weekly AL newsletter. In his e-mail, he noted three big changes:

1. The weekly e-newsletter, American Libraries Direct, is now available to anyone who wants to sign up for it, not just ALA members. The sign-up form, as well as the FAQ, is at http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/aldirect/aldirect.cfm .

2. American Libraries has launched its own blog, AL Inside Scoop, http://www.al.ala.org/insidescoop/ . Editor-in-chief Leonard Kniffel offers an insider’s view of goings-on at ALA headquarters and what hot topics ALA staffers are talking about in the hallways. Associate Editor Greg Landgraf offers his perspective from “the lower floors” of what many see as the ALA ivory tower.

3. Login is no longer required to view the current issue of the American Libraries print magazine online (in PDF format), or to view the archives, which date back to the January 2003 issue. Go directly to http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/alonlineebrary/alonlineebrary.cfm . First-time viewers will need to install the ebrary reader to view issues. To download, go to http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ala/Download . Firefox 3 users installing the reader for the first time will need a workaround, http://www.ebrary.com/kb/users/ff3install.jsp, to make the ebrary reader work with their browser.

This is a gutsy and timely move by our professional association. Congratulations to Leonard, George, ALA Executive Director Keith Fiels, and the member leaders and staff of ALA who helped make this a reality!

Where the heck have I been?

This morning I looked at my RSS feeds, and realized that it's been more than a month since I posted to "It's All Good." How could that have happened? It's not like nothing is happening in the library world, or in OCLC land, or even in my working life.

Actually, I do know the answer to the question in my title. Since my last post on September 12, I've been in Sacramento, Phoenix, San Antonio, Vancouver BC, Idaho Falls, Jackson MS, Vancouver WA, Portland OR, and Washington DC (where I'm writing this from the lobby of the Renaissance M Street Hotel). Oh, and occasionally at home and at the OCLC offices in Columbus/Dublin.

Joan Frye Williams and I rolled out our "Futureproofing" program in Phoenix to generally good reviews. I had my first trips to Idaho and Mississippi. I got to meet my old friends and colleagues at a Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) meeting. And today, I porticipated in an excellent meeting of the members of OCLC Eastern, featuring great talks by Jay Jordan, Cathy De Rosa, and Greg Zick, and stimulating dialogue with the audience.

Tomorrow, we begin the first Members Council meeting of the fiscal year, and then on Tuesday, it's off to Seattle for a WebJunction meeting. Then I wrap up the week at the Oak Park Public Library in Illinois for their staff development day.

In Guys and Dolls, Skye Masterson tells Sister Sarah that he's been in more hotel rooms than the Gideon Bible. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm working on it. So if you happen to see me wandering the streets of your town in a daze, just tell me where I am, point me at the airport, and wish me well, OK?

PS: By the way, I'm not complaining about ANY of this. I love this life, and welcome opportunities to get out and talk to library staff, trustees, and users, and to enrich my own experience of libraries. So call me!

Healthy kid food for your cafe

Kidfresh is finally on the ball with making healthy food available for people on the go. Of course, the travelers are intended to be pint-sized, but I couldn't resist the lure of a dinosaur-shaped sandwich. I mean, who wouldn't want to eat a (whole wheat) and (organic) cheese T-Rex for dinner? (Spotted at the JFK airport).

Is there a message in here for libraries?

Fun packaging, smart product, right placement.

Get these 3 things right, and you're 95% of the way there.
That and do you stock these at your library cafe? Could you? (Especially on storytime days for publics?) (Or at Exam time for academics?)

Calling all developers: WorldCat Hackathon

If you're a coder-type or want to hang out with some and brainstorm some great ideas/write some great code, come to the WorldCat Hackathon!

Registration is now open for the Nov. 7-8 event in New York at the New York Public's Science, Industry and Business Library.

I'm excited because I'm going to be there and "cover" the event, interview/blog about the attendees and (very important) make sure there's enough yummy food.

New Report: "Latinos and Public Library Perceptions"

The new report on Latinos and Public Library Perceptions is now available on the WebJunction site. The work on the report was done by the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, and written by Edward Flores and Harry Pochon. The work was funded by WebJunction with funds provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the Spanish Language Outreach project.

Special kudos to WebJunction staffers Laura Staley and Janet Salm for guiding this project from the WJ/OCLC side!

"Why Public Libraries Close" Now Available

A few weeks ago, I mentioned here that the paper "Why Public Libraries Close," which was written by Christie Koontz, Dean Jue and Wade Bishop, would be available on WebJunction when the new platform went live. The paper is now available here in multiple formats.

people are content. networks are collections.

This little tweet warmed my heart when I first saw it last week. I wasn't following Jeremy, but saw his tweet because I have a WebJunction twitter search set up on one of my Google tabs (you can also see a feed on our About Us page).

First, it was great to see because in preparation for our relaunch on the new platform, our team had done some extra work getting new topic areas ready - particularly in the areas that we'd heard from our members that they wanted content or resources, but they just hadn't been collected yet. My colleague Betha went to work creating a nice set of collection development resources as part of this effort and it was very nice to see that it was being noticed.

But perhaps more importantly, it was the way Jeremey said it. "I'm a resource..." This is exactly what we hoped to better facilitate on the new platform - people as resources to one another - and this was one little testament to the possibility that we're on our way.

Thanks Betha, and Jeremey, for being a part of it all.

"Above the Fold"

One of the things that people frequently ask us is "What are you reading now?" Eric Childress has hooked up a feed from WorldCat to the front page of this blog to show what he's reading. Lorcan Dempsey's blog regularly features notes on his vast reading. I am almost done with Book 3 in my Laubach course, so I will be adding to that soon.

Now there's a new newsletter from OCLC Programs and Research and IBIS Communications called Above the Fold. In the words of Jim Michalko, Vice President, RLG Programs, "Our intent is to pull together articles that relate to the work of the RLG Partnership and the information context in which we're all operating -- but that you might not see in the course of your regular awareness routines. Each citation will include a short annotation explaining why we think the article may be of interest to you. And each note will be attributed to the staff member whose thoughts on the issue and its relevance can be tapped."

Free subscriptions to Above the Fold, and other OCLC newsletters, are available here.

The Five Seasons

The day after Labor Day in the United States begins autumn. No, not by the calendar, but by the way we live our lives. There are actually five seasons in much of the US:

Labor Day (the first Monday in September) to Election Day (the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November) is autumn. Back to school time, the World Series, the beginning of football season, lots of yard work, and Halloween mark this season.

Election Day to New Year's Day is the holiday season. Religious holidays, the heart of football season, the beginning of basketball and hockey, and some family time are the hall marks of holiday season.

New Year's Day to Easter is winter. For those of us from Snow Belt cities, this is the season of bad driving but not too much road work. It is also the season that reminds me of a quote from Raymond Chandler's story "Red Wind," which was referring to quite different atmospheric conditions:

On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks.

Easter to Memorial Day (the last Monday in May) is spring. Hope and contrition, an opportunity for the Cubs to be in contention, eating lots of chocolate while worrying about fitting into your swimming suit, and all the other contradictions of our modern world come into play in the spring.

Memorial Day to Labor Day is summer, no matter what the calendar reads.

I guess I'm writing this post as an elegy to the summer of 2008, but also to suggest that planning library displays and events around the REAL seasons instead of the meteorological ones may be a way of connecting to your community. (It's a stretch but I'm writing this on company time and I had to figure out how to apply these thoughts to libraries, OK?)

Electing an American President

We've had more than the usual amount of United States presidential campaign activity near OCLC's headquarters in Dublin, Ohio. Ohio is one of the key battleground states for the election of the next U.S. president so no doubt there will be many more visits by the candidates, but probably not many so close to home with both the major candidates and their running mates appearing together.

On Friday, 29 August, Republican candidate John McCain held a rally (12-15,000 people) in nearby Dayton, Ohio, and announced his choice for running mate, Governor Sarah Palin.

WorldCat Identities for the Republican ticket:
McCain, John 1936-
Palin, Sarah 1964-

On Saturday 30 August, Democratic candidate Barack Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, held an outdoor rally (18-20,000 people) at Dublin Coffman High School, within walking distance of OCLC Headquarters.

WorldCat Identities for the Democratic ticket:
Obama, Barack
Biden, Joseph R.

I was not able to attend John McCain's campaign event, but I was able to attend Barack Obama's (see the scan of the ticket stub above). The message Obama and other speakers at the rally presented was very much an echo of the speeches at the Democratic National Convention. Obama followed his presentation by moving through part of the crowd, shaking hands, talking with those gathered. I and Heather managed to position ourselves close enough to see Obama up close. His interaction with the crowd seemed very genuine as he shook hands and responded to comments. Aides gathered copies of his books that people wanted signed, and he apparently signed them before boarding his bus and departing.

While it's very easy to be cynical about the pronouncements of the U.S. presidential candidates and their lieutenants and supporters, one has to acknowledge that the excitement I witnessed at the Obama rally was very real. Presumably McCain's event garnered a similar level of excitement from his gathered supporters. We can only hope that both of the tickets are composed of worthy people, and that the U.S. electorate will choose wisely.

At libraries (especially public libraries) throughout the U.S. citizens are being offered the opportunity to register to vote, and access to materials by and about the candidates. So, gentle IAG readers, what great things will your library be doing this election season to help your users be informed on the candidates and the issues and exercise their right to vote?

***

Musical note:

This song has been used by both the Republicans (during George W. Bush's 2004 campaign) and now by the Democrats (for Obama's 2008 campaign).

"Only in America" composed by Kix Brooks/Don Cook/Ron Rogers ; popularized by Brooks & Dunn (AMG entry, Wikipedia entry, Brooks & Dunn Web site).

Excerpt:

"Only in America
Dreaming in red, white and blue
Only in America
Where we dream as big as we want to
We all get a chance
Everybody gets to dance
Only in America"

Who's on twitter? Are you?

Last week Lorcan pointed to an interesting article [Even Gen X is aTwitter] with data about who’s using twitter. In addition to 57% being from California (really?) and 63% being male “…the age demographics of Twitterers show a dramatic shift. When the site became popular in early 2007, the majority of its visitors were 18-to-24-year-olds. Today the site's largest age demographic is 35-to-44-year-olds.”

David Lee King recently posted on his blog about how many patrons are already using twitter and other social media tools. “Yes, people in your community are already connecting and engaging with others via social media tools,” says David, “Are you?”

Over the last several weeks at WebJunction we received a number of support requests about user inability to view some of our videos about the new platform (here's an example with others linked here). In exploring the reasons why, we realized that some of our users in libraries still work in libraries that block access to youtube, blip.tv and the like. Reasons cited include bandwidth for networks that are already stretched. What should we say about our own Internet use and access to our IT admins? Our security and privacy colleagues? Our funding councils and governments?

Very simply, we must continue to articulate our need for access to both social media and social tools in terms of relevance to our patrons and our community. Without our knowledge of and participation in the social spheres where our patrons engage with each other, where new content is published and knowledge emerges, we can't stay relevant. And without relevance, we won't be around.

Update: let me just add that I don't care about twitter in particular. It's just a tool and one of many examples of things we should be exploring.

Student comparisons, or, Why Penn State students come out ahead

Eric is madly dashing around the office, trying to get ready for a presentation he's giving in Mexico--or he would have posted this himself.

But he knew I was NOT madly dashing around the office. In fact, I'm here on an almost leisurely Friday morning before the three-day weekend. I biked the baby to school today, as we have been doing for the past 2 weeks now. It turns out, it's practically as fast as the car and it may not be saving a ton of gas...but I decided it saves me feeling like a nincompoop for driving the 3 miles twice a day. Plus the fresh air, a bit of exercise, some drama as I turn onto the main road with lots of cars. All good.

But I digress. Penn State took the results from The College Students Perceptions report and compared it with their latest FACAC results, as reported by E-Tech.

Penn State students regularly came out on top, above national averages revealed by the report. Now, there are a number of factors that could be in play here:

• Penn State students are above average. (Probably quite likely, yes.)
• Students have gotten much more information literate since the report was published (less likely.)
• Librarians have become much more aware of the need to bridge the chasm between student perceptions and library offerings since the report was published (Overwhelmingly likely!)

Any of the above--and in combination--I am ecstatic about the possibilities and excited by the potential. With academic life cranking back up next week (if it's not already cranked in your neck of the world), what's your response to these findings, in terms of your own experience?

Also (unrelated) a colleague just forwarded me a link to Wimba Pronto. Looks like a nice way to carry conversations from the classroom to the dorm room and beyond. Even if it's only for virtual office hours--could be a more formalized setting than Facebook and less stilted than Blackboard. (Not that I've actually used Blackboard myself, but so I'm told.)

Enjoy the holiday weekend.

The Customer Focused Library

There's some great new content to check out on the WebJunction site. The Metropolitan Library System, based in Burr Ridge, IL, and four participating libraries, three public and one academic, engaged a nationally recognized retail space consulting firm to look at what people do while they are in libraries. Research included unobtrusive observation, questionnaires, and videotaping of actual patron behavior.

The result is a short but very useful booklet titled Best Practices for the Customer-Focused Libraries.

Meaningful work

Please see the following announcement for an opening for what appears to be a very interesting position, which was described to me by Janna Greenberg of Benetech.

Thank you so much for offering to help me with my search for a librarian for Benetech. As I mentioned in our conversation, Benetech's mission is to create new technology solutions that serve humanity and empower people to improve their lives.

Benetech has an opening for a Librarian for its Bookshare.org division. Bookshare.org is the world's largest collection of digital electronic books for the blind and print disabled. Bookshare.org has recently been awarded $32 million by the Federal Government to expand their online book collection for print-disabled students nationwide. The role of this Librarian would be to curate and digitize Bookshare.org's online library.

The position announcement and further information are available here. Please note that this is NOT an OCLC or WebJunction position, so please don't contact me directly about this. Thanks!

hi-fi sci-fi li-brar-y

One of the best things about my job is that I get to work with creative, energetic, and innovative colleagues that have a lot of fun with their work (even when they're not getting paid for it and even when they have to work massive and odd hours to get it done).

You've heard about the WebJunction musicals, karaoke, and maybe even our very own "family drinking song," but Michael Porter (aka libraryman) has topped it all with the prep for his talk at LITA National Forum later this fall.

He and David Lee King's original music, lyrics, and video for "hi-fi sci-fi library" are posted now on his blog. And for those of you who are lyrically oriented, they're here and well worth the gander.

Click To Play

Futureproofing

Thanks to Library Journal and John (Blatant) Berry for the big plug and the great exposure for Futureproofing in the August issue. Joan Frye Williams and I developed this concept for an upcoming program sponsored by the State Library of Arizona, and subsequently requested for the Association for Rural and Small Libraries conference as well as staff development days in San Antonio and Vancouver, Washington. We discussed the idea briefly with John when we were each speaking at the Ohio Library Council's Reference and Adult Services conference in Columbus in early July, and LJ ran with it. The additional input from LJ's Movers and Shakers that appears in the magazine will help inform our presentations.

Now that's synergy!

(Note to LJ copy editors: Next time, you don't need the hyphen. It’s just “Futureproofing.")

Early Childhood Learning Materials Available

Washington Learning Systems in Seattle is offering free access to materials to assist in early childhood education. According to the press release I received:

These materials include 14 activities designed to be used outside the home: in the car, while walking, during bus rides, etc. The activities encourage early language and literacy development from birth through preschool. They are appropriate for children with disabilities as well as children who are developing typically. The development of these materials was supported by Grant H324M020084 from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs.

The materials are available in English and Spanish.

You can download the materials here.