Science Fair projects trumped all

I went to my first Hanukkah party yesterday. We played Texas Hold 'Em Driedel and went home reeking of fried food smell. It was great!

'Tis also the season for Science Fair projects at public libraries around the U.S.
(And you thought it was the holiday shopping season!)

We had an interesting discussion today about a trial program we've been running on Yahoo and MSN, to show paid search results for meaningful content in Worldcat. Science Fair projects and related content has been the clear victor, in the results. Likely any Public Library Reference librarian who's driven the desk a year or two could tell you that, but it was good to see the online world bore out the same results.

Recipes were also a big hit--little wonder with the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday in November and baking season in full swing.

Dust off that online cookbook display and consider digitizing a few always-out cookbooks--people are looking for them online!

3. "Resume samples"
4. "Property Tax"
5. "Tax Forms"

rounded out the top 5 visit results. We limited this test to U.S. audiences only, if I remember correctly. Shows you what at least some of America is thinking about:
How can I do my holiday shopping and deduct it from my taxes?

JetBlue has WiFi

Whoah--it's the last frontier: now you can be connected on flights.
JetBlue is set to offer WiFi on select flights.
There will be rioting on the streets: a plane was the one place you could escape the inbox!!
But it only works with Yahoo mail and IM and Blackberries right now.

Note: JetBlue forgot to mention anything about the announcement on their Web site. Their CEO blog hasn't been updated since October! (Okay so he might be a little bit busy running the company...)

Amazon Kindle

Okay, who amongst us has tried a Kindle?

Disclaimer--I know this is no longer new news but remember I've been away in babyland. So it was news to me. And yes, I'm casting about for Christmas gifts. Various news outlets covered it--Newsweek among them. Here's a Cnet review of Kindle vs. Sony eReader.

I saw in the comments that people were bummed they couldn't check out library books to them.
That makes you feel good, huh?

The video makes it look really appealing.



They are backordered now, and for $399 I might think about an iPhone instead. But I heard all kinds of grief about the iPhone because you can't feel the keys. So it is hard to text while you drive, have the phone in your pocket, etc.

But texting while driving. I can't condone it but I can't say I haven't done it, either.

It also randomly reminds me of something I heard the other day--that advocates of the blind don't like the Prius because it's too quiet!

New librarians, new ways of reading

Here are two articles I recently read and found very interesting.

"The New Librarians" is a positive look at several Canadian academic librarians who are blazing some new paths. None the ideas will blow away anyone reading this blog, but the setting is a change: it's not a library publication, it's a university journal, University Affairs, which bills itself as "Canada's magazine on higher education." (I may have cribbed this one from Lorcan Dempsey's blog; if so, I apologize to him and his readers!)

Tam Dalrymple, one of OCLC's terrific reference librarians, sent me this article, "How Reading Is Being Reimagined," by Matthew Kirschenbaum, from the December 7 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education's "The Chronicle Review." This article is a brief but powerful counterweight to the recent To Read or Not to Read report from the National Endowment for the Arts.

"Google and Its Enemies"

No matter how you feel about Google's Library Project, you may find ammunition for your point of view in an article in the December 10th issue of The Weekly Standard by Jonathan V. Last, called "Google and Its Enemies." The funniest single quote:

"Google has, as they say, all the right enemies. Anytime the ALA, Microsoft, France, a trade guild, and a bunch of trial lawyers are lined up on one side of an argument, the other side is going to look extremely attractive."

Incidentally, he actually doesn't like what Google is doing.

London Online 2007

A shout out to those of you at London Online this week. Not a whole lot of chatter about it yet around here...I am sure that will change soon enough.

Saw a Jimmy photo on Flickr. He was the keynote. There's a Q and A in the Guardian insert (PDF). The article starts on page 10.

Here's the most interesting bit, from the perspective of the world's largest library cooperative:

Where do you see Wikipedia in ten
years?
JW: When I think about Wikipedia in ten years I
mostly have been focussing my attention on the
growth of the languages of the developing world.
So I’ve been to South Africa twice this year so far.
I’m going again in November and again in March.
I’m really trying to promote the growth in the
languages of Africa because right now we don’t
have a lot of content there. One of the things I
look at when I look at long term trends is there’s
about a billion people online now and we expect
to see another billion coming online in the next 10
years or so. Not from the US or Japan or places like
that- we’re already online for the most part. It’s
coming from the next stage- South America, India,
Africa. All joining the global conversation.

But it's also important, for that matter, to the neighborhood branch librarian. That's the beauty of what you (we) do, as librarians: you bring the world to people!!

Words of wisdom for group blogs?

I was just having a discussion with a group of people yesterday about different ways to set up a group blog and manage content, posting, editorial direction, etc.

I know how we do it here at IAG (organized chaos!)...but how do you manage the group blogs you participate in? Are you assigned a *beat*? Is it willy-nilly? Is it "Alice posts every Friday." Or all of these things and then some?

Inquiring minds wants to know...

Long live ILL

Or Resource sharing, as I am wont to call it by my brand-hat-wearing self.

One of my colleagues sent me a college student's post The Interlibrary Loan Blues this morning about the agony of waiting for his ILL-requested book. The suspense of it basically takes over his mental life--that's how important ILL can be for people.

So just when you start to think that everything is electronic and who actually uses monographs anymore, anyway? (Much less is willing to wait for them?) Just read Mr. Plexiglass to yourself and be reassured.

And a completely nonrelated, gratuitous photo taken 9 weeks ago...

"Local Government Managers and Public Libraries"

For all you public librarians out there:

The International City/County Management Association (ICMA) sent a mailing to its members yesterday called "Local Government Managers and Public Libraries: Partners for a Better Community." The paper was also shared this morning on the state librarians' listserv, courtesy of my own state librarian, Jo Budler.

The report details ways in which city or county managers can work more effectively with public library directors and staff to achieve their community priorities. The research and writing of the paper was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and is part of the Foundation's ongoing work to strengthen public library advocacy.

This paper would be a great spark for opening new lines of communication with local government managers. There are several other good papers on library-local government cooperation available from ICMA, so check it out!

What I've Been Doing

So what, you might ask, have I been doing?

I will spare you the litany of boring diapers, wipes, goo-goo, ga-ga mumbo-jumbo.

But I have seen how the other half lives. The other half being the men and women in our (this is geared for public libraries) communities who descend upon our stacks, our computers, our DVD piles...during normal business hours.

I have always wondered what the rest of the world does, while we all go to work and stare at screens, sit in meetings and talk on phones. Now I know! They go on walks(!), they volunteer for political campaigns (!), they take naps (!), they do laundry mid-week (!), and they scoff at the idea of needing Microsoft Outlook to help them organize their day(!!!)

Okay, maybe some of them use Outlook. But I seriously unplugged and mysteriously feel no worse the wear for it. I happily admit to having a very large GAP in my blog, news and magazine reading. But I have a very large STASH of photos with family members on beaches, at sunsets, around dining room tables and yes, even in Jackson Square, New Orleans.

Now obviously I am not recommending a wholesale mass exodus of the workforce OR of technology. Otherwise who would be around to read my pontifications? But as a temporary realignment, a small re-engagement with some of the people we serve...it's a great mini-sabbatical I can encourage, to help one remember that the world does not end with deadlines, agendas and achievements.

Sunshine can bring happiness. As can warm cookies from the oven, or to notice the tomato plant that has valiantly hung on past a frost. These fleeting pleasures, born of leisure, were mine for a time.

So indulge those seeming vagabonds among you. They may be building memories.

Alice is back!

Hello IAGers!

I am back, after 10 (count them, TEN) glorious weeks of maternity leave.

I loved (almost) every minute of it. There were a few diapers, crying moments, etc. I could probably stand to delete from the archive...

But I am officially back today and so far, so good.

Lots of stories to tell! None of them particularly interesting to anyone other than parents of young children. I tell you, I am in a whole new demographic but strangely--I am lovin it.

That said, it's also good to be back at work. It's all good.

A Little More on MLA

I mentioned in my last post that I'd been at the Medical Library Association's Southern Chapter Conference this week. I gave a keynote, and my talk was followed by remarks and comments from two excellent responders, Michele Kraft and Gabe Rios.

Michele coined a term on the spot. Reacting to my comments about "disaggregation" and "re-aggregation" of information, she came up with the phrase "information fission" to describe the way multiple atoms of information from many sources slam together to release all sorts of new energy. I told her that I planned to steal this phrase; I'm kind of surprised she didn't use it in her terrific blog entry about the program!

Gabe quoted a terrific maxim that we should all have tattooed in a prominent location: "Information that is hard to find is information that will remain hardly found."

Tongue Tied

Yesterday, I was in Charleston for the Medical Library Association's Southern Chapter conference. I used the church analogy there, as I have done in a couple of dozen speeches over the last year. When I got to the part where I say you can smell the "incense of the old books deteriorating on the shelf..." I accidentally said, "...the incest of the....INCENSE of..." Of course, if I had just elided over it, it may have gone unnoticed. But the moment I corrected myself, the audience erupted in laughter. After stammering for a few seconds, I resumed the speech. Three sentences later, when I usually say, "We aren't there to save their immortal souls..." it came out, "We aren't there to save their immoral souls..." More laughter, and then, as the room quieted, a voice from the back of the room announced, "Paging Doctor Freud!"

The worst of it was, at the end of the program, in the schmoozing afterwards, no one believed it was just a couple of slips of the tongue. They all thought I'd rehearsed this! What kind of reputation am I developing?

Did you nominate an LJ "Mover and Shaker"?

I received the following e-mail this afternoon from Marylaine Block, and she has had one of those disasters that could befall any of us. Read on:

Hi, George,

I'm writing the Movers and Shakers profiles again this year, and I'd appreciate your help getting the word out, especially in view of the calamity that befell the server that was supposed to be keeping track of the nominations. Could you post this on It's All Good, and on any lists you're involved with?

It's time once again for nominations for Library Journal's Movers and Shakers issue. This supplement to the March 15, 2008 issue will profile "50-plus up-and-coming individuals from across the United States and Canada - librarians, vendors, consultants, etc. - who are innovative, creative, and making a difference" in the profession.

If you already nominated people for Library Journal's Movers and Shakers, before November 5, we need you to go back and RENOMINATE those people, because due to a computer glitch, those nominations were not captured and stored on LJ's server. We are assured that the electronic nomination form is working, but if you prefer, you can supply all the information requested on the form and either fax it to 646-746-6734, or send it in an e-mail to Francine Fialkoff. The deadline has been extended to November 28.

Corially,

Marylaine

Marylaine Block
Writer and Internet Librarian
336 375 2195
http://marylaine.com

IL2007 & work with WebJunction - it's fun!

I'm at IL2007 and am having a great time. WebJunction people (pictured on our homepage here) are blogging our conference experiences here and I think we're all having a great time. Be sure to check it out if you'd like to hear more about what's happening at this year's festivities - you can also follow me at twitter if you want the play-by-play.

Meanwhile, applications are rolling in for three open Community positions on the WebJunction team. If you're interested in social networking tools and online community programming, or helping library service agencies build their own communities, please check out these current opportunities on the OCLC careers site (search for Seattle if you want to check out the jobs I'm referring to, or for WebJunction if you just want the general scoop), and LMK if you have questions!

Something else for us to hate

When I saw that ABC (that's the Australian Broadcasting Company) is broadcasting a new series called "The Librarians," I just had to go check out the web site of the show. All I can say is, I hope it gets imported to the US. It looks like it has nasty humor, stereotypes we can all sink our teeth into, and a knockout premise: the straight-laced library director is forced to hire her free-living ex-best friend as Children's Librarian to save her from jail (excuse me, gaol). Here's a quote from the director, just to get our knickers in a knot: "God loves all his children, but especially those who return their books on time."

I always thought that there was a great library-based sitcom just waiting to be produced. When I worked at a branch library in Buffalo in high school and college, I decided that our staff was basically the cast of M*A*S*H. We had the lovable colonel, our branch manager who let us get away with anything in pursuit of higher circulation and more people in the building and who turned a blind eye to a lot of the petty bureaucracy Central handed down. We had Frank and Hot-Lips, the new junior branch assistant, fresh out of library school, who was striving to be perfect and who ended up dating and later marrying one of the student assistants in the branch. (Don't go "yuck!" She was a senior in college when they started dating.) What made them Frank and Hot-Lips was that they didn't want anyone to know they were dating. One day, one of our regulars, a 10-year old terror named Shawn, announced to everyone in the library that she had seen the pair at a basketball game, and they were KISSING! We had the martinet from headquarters, a wily clerk who could make things magically appear as needed, and of course, the guard and I saw ourselves as Hawkeye and Trapper John (pre-BJ days).

Episodes of The Librarians are scheduled to be posted to the ABC website after they're broadcast. I can see myself eating up some bandwidth for this!

sharing, privacy, trust, and vacation in our networked world

I started a week's vacation on Monday. I'm taking some time for a 'writing retreat' so that I can make my next deadline (Nov 1 - ahhh!) for the infamous book I'm writing about libraries and community building.

Serendipitous it was then that the new OCLC report on sharing, privacy, trust, and social networking was published online here (pdf) on Monday. It's perfect timing because it has such relevance to that 'other' work.

But because it also has such absolute relevance to my work at OCLC and with WebJunction, I couldn't help but pop in here and say 'hey! you should read this!' and invite everyone over to my other blog for early thoughts and highlights. As I say over there, there's more to come, I'm sure, as we dig into all those juicy details.

Back to my vacation -- very much looking forward to seeing some of you at Internet Librarian next week, BTW. If you're gonna be there and want to connect, my profile and schedule is up on the IL wiki.

A Vision of Students Today

If you deal with anyone under the age of 22, you need to see this video, "A Vision of Students Today." It summarize much of what we have all experienced in a very real way, in less than five minutes.

Ohio Library Council Conference

I invested a good day at the Ohio Library Council Convention and Expo here in Columbus yesterday.

I spent about an hour in the exhibits area. Since Ohio public libraries continue to enjoy above average funding, many vendors and architects come to this conference.

The program I mentioned earlier on It's All Good about the Underground Railroad Bicycle Route came off very well. My colleague Chuck Harmon (who planned the Ohio portion of the route) had put together three moving photo montages with musical accompaniment to showcase the route's first official rides. Mario Browne drove over from Pittsburgh to talk about his involvement with the project and his work with the Center for Minority Health at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health. We had about 40 people in attendance, and a useful and inspiring time was had by all.

LibraryThing's founder, Tim Spalding, did a very good (and very well-attended) presentation called, "Is Your OPAC Fun?" Short answer: probably not, but he had some excellent ideas about what to do to change that. LibraryThing continues to grow and add new features; they have over 285,000 registered users already.

Finally, I went to a presentation called "Crisis Communication: Sound Like a Star on the 6:00 News," by Bob Zajac of Highland Public Relations. He gave some excellent tips on how to prepare for the public relations fall out of a crisis (anything from a fire to a funding disaster to a challenge to your internet policies to an invasion by the June Taylor Dancers). Bob has many years of experience in TV news and public relations, and his ideas were down to earth and told with a nice leavening of humor.

Kudos to OLC on another excellent conference!

How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm?

I spent this past weekend in New York City with my wife, the long-suffering Joyce, and my grandson, Jake. Jake is a pretty smart kid, but his frame of reference continues to astound me.

We went to see the musical Mary Poppins at the New Amsterdam Theater on Friday night. Joyce and I had seen it in London a couple of years ago, and thought Jake would be thrilled by the outstanding singing and dancing, and especially by the technical wizardry of the production. We were dead wrong. He was only occasionally interested in the show, and he seemed to be humoring Joyce and me most of the evening. (He was really looking forward to the visit to the American Museum of Natural History on Saturday.)

When I was the same age Jake is now, my birthday present from my parents was tickets to Melody Fair, an entertainment park and summer stock theater near Buffalo, to see The Music Man, starring Kolchak the Night Stalker himself, Darren McGavin, as Harold Hill. I'll never forget how exciting it was to see live actors doing amazing things, and when the North Tonawanda High School Band came down the aisle next to me, playing "Seventy Six Trombones," I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Surely Gabriel's horn could not have sounded as sweet as those trembling saxophones!

Of course, when I saw The Music Man, my family had only owned a TV for about three years. It had a 12 inch screen (the only screen in my life at that time), a set of rabbit ears (children, ask your parents...), and three channels which broadcast for about sixteen hours a day in black and white. I rarely went to the movies, except for the occasional drive-in that went on way past my bedtime.

This is NOT a harangue about how much better it was in the old days. Instead, I'm always stunned at how much more of the world Jake has seen, compared to me at that age. His horizons are so much broader.

There was a song that came out either during or immediately after World War I, titled "How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?" The song worried about whether the boys coming back from the front would still be interested in working a plow after they'd seen the lights of Paris. The song sounds like a novelty today, but the farm population of the United States dropped from roughly 35% of the population in 1910 to 1.84% of the population in 2002.

How can a child find wonder in a chimney sweep dancing clear around a proscenium arch, or Mary Poppins flying out over the audience to close the show, when he has seen the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies? So I wonder how we're going to keep people like Jake interested in my two biggest loves (other than the long-suffering Joyce, of course): libraries and theater.

Basically, if it doesn't have a screen, it doesn't hold Jake's interest. I have seen him concentrate for long stretches of time, playing Pokemon or building a room in Webkinz (parents, ask your children...), so I don't think it's ADD, and he loves soccer and baseball with a passion, so I don't think he's simply a couch potato with a proclivity for obesity (like his grandfather).

I don't really have any answers. In fact, after three days of chasing a 7-year old around Manhattan, I'm lucky I've made it this far through Monday. But I think we'd better come up with some answers if either of these traditions is going to survive another generation in any form we would recognize.