Adventures in Library School

I probably should be doing homework right now, but I’ve been doing that all day and I need to do something else right now. Aaand since the rest of the biblioblogosphere has already blogged the conference sessions much better than I could and in a more timely manner, I’m going to make this my final post on the subject and then move on to other things. (For those curious about the other sessions - go search the IL2006 tag over at technorati, you’ll find plenty to keep you occupied.)

As great as the sessions were (and they were great), and as lovely as Monterey was, what I’m going to remember most about the conference is the people I met and some of the more informal, and not necessarily library-related chatting I got to do, and I really want to make a point of saying thanks to Michelle Boule, Steven Cohen, Karen Coombs, Mark Dehmlow, Nicole Engard, David Free, Tom Ipri, Josh Neff, Michael Sauers, and Greg Schwartz for being nice to the noob and for helping to make my first professional conference such a great experience. Ya’ll rock!

Here’s the rest of the highlights reel:

Having somebody ask me the first morning if I’d figured out how to long on to the conference center’s WiFi and then turning around to find that the person doing the asking was Roy Tennant, and then being too shocked at finding out who was doing the asking to really talk to him (okay, the too shocked to really talk wasn’t exactly a highlight, but still, I got to meet Roy Tennant, kinda).

The sea of laptops that made up the front row of the Tuesday afternoon Social Computing track. I met so many great folks thanks those sessions, it was amazing. Fun was had, stuff was learned, friends were made.

The impromptu street market that seemed to spring up out of nowhere on Tuesday afternoon and that made the stroll back to my motel a great deal of fun. I still have no idea if there was some sort of special occasion or if it was just the weekly farmer’s market, but there was a lot of nifty stuff, and some of the best looking produce I’ve seen in a looong time (put my Safeway to shame). Pity I wasn’t hungry enough to buy anything.

Discussing the insane distance between Denver International Airport and Denver itself with Michael Sauers. ( I miss Colorado, I really do. Crazy airport arrangements and all. )

Winning a Starbucks gift card from Steven Cohen in the What’s Hot & New with Social Software session for knowing about Digg.
Going out for Sushi with the gang after the conference had wrapped up. This was kind of a milestone for this picky eater: I ate raw fish, and I’m still among the living. Cool.

Listening to Stephen Abram talk politics and libraries at the Crown & Anchor pub.
Being part of the group that closed down the Crown & Anchor pub (two nights running). Mom, Dad, you were right, the best discussions at conferences *do* happen in the bar.

Aaand… maybe I should leave it at that.

All in all, a great conference, and I am definitely going back next year. (And as an added bonus, next year the conference ends on Halloween - that should make for an interesting last day.)

Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about that. That’s that thing that happens to other people….

In the week or so since I’ve been back from Internet Librarian (of which, more shortly), it’s come home to me just how much I have to do during the month of November:

• Finish my part of a group project for my Ethics class (on Intellectual Property) and then glue everybody’s contribution into something comprehensible.
• Do my individual project for my Ethics class (which I’m ashamed to say I haven’t really started yet) - I’m hoping this will be a code of ethics for information architects - I really need to e-mail my prof for a topic okay soon….
• Write three small papers for my management class (including a writeup of Internet Librarian, which I get to do instead of an article survey about facilities management, wahoo!), all of which really need to be turned in by the end of the week.
• Finish up the group project for my management class - a 30-page strategic planning document for a community college library.
• Write a critique of two information-related websites (one good, one bad) for my User-Interface and Web Design class (sooo many bad websites, sooo few good ones).
• Actually keep up with the reading and class participation in all my classes.
• Prepare a presentation on RSS for the LSO Graduate Student Symposium that’s happening in two weeks (oh, and by the way, we had fewer presenters than expected, so instead of sharing the time slot with somebody else, you get the whole 50 minutes). Whee.
• Help out with the pre-class organization of Yet Another Intro to Library School class (my third so far - at least I know what I gotta do by now). Aaaand, they’re actually going to let me teach the intro unit for our online courseware again, so I must not have made too much of a fool of myself the first time around (a minor miracle considering that I had so much other stuff to do, I had no time to prepare and did the intro cold - note to those of you who teach: avoid getting into that situation whenever you can - preparation is a good thing).
• Finish the paperwork for my spring internship. The internship’s mostly lined up - I’ll be doing webby things for the Law Library, but there’s always the bloody paperwork.
• Get the application for a travel grant into the Graduate and Professional Student Council - ’cause I’d like some help defraying the cost of attending ALA MidWinter.
• Making some Christmas presents (of which I can say no more, because the intended recipients are probably reading this).
• Heaven only knows what else.

The scary thing is, I’m having too much fun to be stressed about anything. And since, for reasons passing understanding, school stuff’s pretty much going to be wrapped by the first week in December (something like 2 weeks before the official end of the semester), if I can survive November without going stark raving mad, December should be relaxing.

Only 26 days to go….

I started Tuesday morning at the conference with Cliff Lynch’s keynote about Cyberinfrastructure, which I will confess mostly went completely over my head. I took notes, but the talk didn’t really make much sense to me at the time (I don’t have that deep a background (yet) in the area of electronic scholarly communication - which I think was the general subject of the talk) and my notes make no sense to me at all now. So, I’m going to cruise right into the first major session, which was about mashups.

Now, I’m already fairly familiar with the idea of mashups (for folks reading this who don’t know what a mashup is, a definition is coming a bit further down), and since I have a programming background, I’m confident that I have the skills to create one, should I ever be inclined. What I don’t seem to have these days is a lot of time to keep up with what kinds of mashups are out there, so I thought this talk would give me a good overview of some of the stuff that’s out there now (which it did).

Darlene Fichter, Data Library Coordinator, University of Saskatchewan

What folks think of mashups:

• They’re like the recipes on the back of Jelly Belly jelly beans - somewhat pointless.
• Stupidest term ever.

But there’s a serious side to mashups, too:
Enterprise mashups at IBM:

• Lets employees create applications in 5 minutes via toolkits.
• Gives people the freedom to innovate - short development time for really small projects and widget-like apps.

The way Darlene sees mashups:

• today’s playground
• even the trivial stuff shows the potential for other things

Definition of a Mashup

• A web site or app that uses content from one or more sources to create something new.
• Content is typically sourced from 3rd party via an Application Programming Interface (API) or an RSS feed.

Mashup Ecosystems

• Need open data.
  • Not necessarily free data, some can be licensed for a fee.
• Open set of services.
• Need a programmatic way to get the data.
• Need a culture of trust.
• This is the idea of small pieces loosely joined.

Mashups are building blocks - think about legos - you get a bunch of peices you can assemble into something bigger.

The wild world of mashups (note that I didn’t get URLs for everything, but that’s what Google is for, folks):

• Housing maps - find your next apt via google maps & craigslist housingmaps.com
• Zipcode lookup maps.huge.info/zip.htm
• Routemap for bookmobile deliveries: library route data and google maps api
• Daily Mashup: photos links and news: flickr, del.icio.us & furl
• Newsmap: a nifty visualization of what subjects are being covered where.
• Earthquake data in realtime via yahoo maps & usgs data
• Book carousel: Syndetics book covers and a library’s top 20
  • Darlene noted that it would be better if it was the last 20 returns, so you could see what was actually available to check out.
• Crime statistics: chicagocrime.org
• Placeopedia - google maps and wikipedia
• Digital life aggregators - there are lots of these, dunno which she showed, and I can’t think of any I know of off the top of my head…
• frappr - the blogging librarians! (which I must add myself to at some point).
• Liveplasma: looking for relationships in media content (music, movies, etc.)
• BashR - flickr & wikipedia & del.icio.us
• Weatherbonk: weather data (from diff sources) & web cams
• bookburro.org - Firefox browser extension to find books in stores & libraries (some libraries are doing something similar.)
  • I doubt this is the sort of thing Amazon had in mind when they opened up their API - it let’s you price compare with competitors.

Facts & Figures

• 1105 mashups as of Oct 24th (via programmable web)
• There are about 2.5 new ones per day
• Maps, photos, and search are big

Typology of the Mashup

• Presentation mashups (and unfortunately, I don’t remember what this means).
• Make use of client-side data.
• Have some sort of clientside software.
• Do it via server-side software.
• Make use of server-side data

Where do you start?

• Point, click, cut, paste & publish - there are sites that make building these fairly easy (though I don’t remember what any of those sites are, now).
• Cloning similar source edits - build on what other folks have done already.
• Just program it - for those with mad skillz.

Your First Mashup

1. Get an idea
2. Sign up for a developer token and read the fine print about what you’re allowed to do.
3. Create your first mashup

Commuity Walk is a good place to start - there are lot of cool things you could do with this, and you don’t need a lot of technical knowledge to use it.

Technical Issues

• Tech is still in infancy
• Tools still fall short of ideal
• No universal registery for APIs
• There are scaling and dependency issues
• How much to invest?
• Will the data always be free? Will it always be available?
• Dev is quicker with languages like Ruby (Wahoo! Go Ruby - I so want an excuse to learn Ruby….)

Social Issues

• Do you have the right to remix? - Intellectual Property issues
• What’s the provenance? - Where’d the data come from, and is that source trustworthy?

Unintended Consequences (both positive and negative)

• Somebody created a mashup of people who are interested in suspicious books via amazon wishlists and yahoo people.
  • Okay, that’s just scary. Really scary.
• End users can do a lot on their own (whether we want them to or not).
• Client side scripts to modify pages - this can be both good or bad, depending on what the scripts do.

—–

Paul Miller from Talis then spoke briefly about the Mashing Up the Library Competition

• First round of prizes have been given out, but the contest is still going on.
• We’re moving in the open data direction, and we want to encourage people to make use of mashups in the library world.
• Were setting up the innovation directory.

Summer Winner: Google Gadgets - John Blyberg

• Pulls library info onto the Google personal homepage

Another reminder: Competition has been re-opened, and yes, there are still prizes available (including stuff for little innovations).

Well, if you’re all reading this, it means that “Adventures in Library School” is once again in the land of the living. Something went wacky with my server today - I don’t know when - I noticed it about 18:30MST on the 31st. But since I’ve been too busy today to check before then, I have no real way of knowing how long it was down.

I do find it funny that my site chose today to die, though…. Things that go bump in the night, indeed.

Presented by:

• Barbara Fullerton, Manager, Librarian Relations, 10-K Wizard
• Sabrina I. Pacifici, Editor & Publisher of LLRX.com
• Aaron Schmidt, Thomas Ford Memorial Library & walkingpaper.org

The final session I attended on Monday was all about gadgets. From the really cool, really, useful, may they catch on and get cheaper soon (like the Kurzweil Federation for the Blind Reader), to the totally ridiculous (the Glow in the Duck glowing rubber duckie).

However, since this was one of those sessions where you really had to be there, I’ll just leave it at this:

If you ever have the chance to be there for another one of this crew’s presentations on gadgets, take it! It’s a tremendous amount of fun, and you do learn about some neat stuff amidst all the goofiness.

The first of the afternoon sessions I went to was about a library project I’ve been following from afar for a while: the construction of a virtual library in the online game Second Life. So it was really interesting to hear about the ups and downs of this project first hand. I’ve also been debating about whether to volunteer for the project, and this presentation decided me, although not, perhaps, in the direction the folks presenting would have liked: I have too much going on in my first life right now to have any to spare for a second one (though this might change once I graduate, we’ll see).

The presentation started off with showing a brief video tour of the library site (called Info Island) on YouTube. Then Lori Bell gave us an introduction to Second Life and the virtual library.

Regarding Second Life:

• It’s not a game - it’s a sandbox.
• It’s growing fast.
• Major companies are opening businesses there.
• There’s a definite feeling of “you gotta try this!” about the game.
• It’s important for libraries to be there.

When the project started, they wondered if folks wanted a library. They do. Folks are getting tired of the sex and gambling that can be found elsewhere in the game and Info Island is one place they can go to get away from it. They now get 45,000 visitors a day (and they only just officially opened), and they’re always in need of more volunteers.

There’s lots happening:

• Writers are hanging out here (and some of them are publishing in-game too).
• There are all kinds of programming - talks, tours, exhibits.
• They’ve got ways to access web resources (and some subscription databases that have donated trial subscriptions).
• Trying to staff 24/7 (though I got the feeling they aren’t there yet).
• Reference service is available.
• They have book discussion groups.

They’re still experimenting with services and such - so if you’ve got ideas, come try them.

Info Island is gaining a reputation as a safe and welcoming place to hang out in Second Life.

A bit of history:

• Started in April 2006
  • Since then they’ve had two islands donated, and have gotten free trials of lots of library software.
  • Have a grant for HealthInfo Island - to create a virtual library of medical info.
  • They have a branch library in Caledon, an area that’s a simulation of the 19th century.
• They’re developing lots of partnerships:
  • Tech Soup
  • ICT library
  • World Bridges
  • New Media Consortium
  • Higher Ed Folks
  • Museums

After Lori’s introduction, Michael Sauers brought us back down to earth with a bit of a reality check.

Here’s what you’re getting into if you decide to volunteer:

• You need a hot system to make the game work - you really need to at least have recommended hardware specs.
• Communication is like IMing - so if you can’t follow multiple conversations or are a less than stellar typist, you’re in trouble.
• You don’t have to spend real money to play, but it helps smooth out the experience.
• Lag happens: the more people playing, the slower everything runs.
• Your boss and co-workers probably won’t view this as work, even if you’re doing the same stuff here that you do at your day job.
• The grid (what the Second Life gameworld is known as) is addictive - the more fun you have, the more time you want to spend there. It’s easy for your Second Life to take over your First Life too.
• Software updates are required, and there are a lot of them (and you’re downloading the whole thing, not a patch).
• Bugs happen:
  • Gray goo
  • Purchased items dissappearing (this is BAD - money down the drain).
  • Sometimes the game just barfs.
• So, in some respects, it’s kinda sorta beta software (and not Google’s idea of beta either).

This part of the presentation, along with some brief experience in the game myself (I still haven’t gotten out of the tutorial yet), is what decided me on waiting a bit before jumping in and volunteering. Oh, and they mean what they say about the system specs - I tried it on my old PC and… OUCH. (And I’ve heard some kinda bad stuff about the reliability of the Mac version .)

Tom Peters finished off the presentation with a rundown of what they’ve learned and where they’re going:
What they’re learning:

• How to build the infrastructure.
• Staffing, and how to handle it.
• Governance & management (no, even in the virtual world, you still can’t get away from management issues).
• Collections:
  • Do we need one, and if so, what do we collect?
  • Should we be the archivists for Second Life?
• Catalogs
• Reference Services
  • What does reference servce mean in Second Life?
• Exhibits
  • These are popular.
• Events are big draws - and there’s a lot more to do here.
• Privacy, safety, and security issues abound.
  • There have been problems in this area.
  • How do you deal with backups?
  • They’ve had virtual gang warfare invade Info Island (um, that’s bad).
  • In the end, the only things you don’t have to worry about are vermin and restrooms.
• Has potential to be a great tool for professional development, so how to leverage this.

Fundamental questions:

• What services do we provide?
• What links to Real Life do we provide?
• What buildings do we build, and where do we build them?
  • For instance, people like to be outdoors in the game - how to make use of this?

Challenges

• Self-inflicted burnout (Michael Sauers mentioned this, too).
• External funding (though they’ve had some breaks here, thanks to Talis).
• Implementing library 2.0 concepts in Second Life.
• Dealing with the rapidly evolving environment and people’s reactions to it.

Predictions:

• Library services to the avatars in Second Life will thrive.
• In game architecture will evolve away from real world architecture.
• Libraries, museums, and theme parks are merging in the online world.
• Events and exhibits will reign over collections.
• Immersive, experiential learning experiences will be important (walk in books and more)!

The second session on Monday in the public library track was given by Stephen Abram VP of innovation at SirsiDynix (for any family members still braving the library geekery, they’re a major vendor of library computer systems), who talked about the idea of personas as a means of user-centered planning.

The presentation kicked off with mention of signage goof up outside the room, the session was listed as “Delighting PL Users: Personals in Action” instead of “Delighting PL Users: Personas in Action”.

Abram joked that a talk about library personals would be more interesting - library dating! (but… on to the talk…)

Remember, people aren’t coming into the library for books, no matter how much we want this to be the case. They’re coming to use the computers or to hang out or some such.

Also remember, when you’re adding a room to your house, you think about how you want the space to feel first, not how they’re gonna build it. So why do we send out brochures talking about how to do stuff at the library rather than talking about the experience of visiting the library.

Context is king, not content! It’s not about the library, it’s about:

• learning
• research
• community & neighborhoods (physical & virtual)
• workplace (people want to be able to control their environment)
• entertainment & culture

Remember, libraries were free before anybody knew about the internet, so it’s not just about free services.
How do you find their contexts?

• Usability Tests (but this isn’t the whole picture)
  • We do them, but do we follow them? (Or, why do we keep recommending bestsellers when the waiting lists are so long? How ’bout recommending similar.)
• Personas are better (and more about these shortly)

Remember, kids today (the millennials) really *are* a different generation, are you planning for this?

• Their brains are wired differently, and they’re smarter than the boomers, on average (by 20 pts).
• They have different behaviors.
• They’re format agnostic - they just want the info, they don’t care how it’s delivered.
• They’re very direct & confident (they actually expect service from folks in the service industry, like us, so they aren’t deferential).
• They demand higher info density (those differently wired brains can handle it).
• They have different eye movement patterns than the boomers.

Lots of folks (esp. kids) don’t read “below the fold” (that is, they don’t scroll past the first screen) - so why are we putting content there?

Reading is only one way to engage with info (and for the milennials it’s one of the lowest level of engagement).

Reading’s only one component of learning - remember Bloom’s taxonomy!

There’s also been some recent research showing that personality influences searching (a recently published dissertation, which I should look up at some point).

• Extroverts like informal and thought provoking material.
• Introverts like other stuff.
• And so on…

Can you tune your searches to accommodate this? How can you tune your searches to accommodate this?

So, SirsiDynix is starting to gather the sort of data needed to build a better model of how people are using the library (and the library’s computer systems) by creating personas: hypothetical representations of different types of library users. They’re hoping to learn more about user’s expectations.

Interesting side note: the statistics we keep - they don’t really tell us if we’re helping the users acheive their goals.
The approach for creating the personas:

• Use narrative capture: get people to tell stories.
• Capture characters, issues, themes, problems, behaviors.
• Don’t do the research yourself, the folks you have relationships with won’t tell you the whole truth.
  • The first story they’ll tell is what they think you want to hear.
  • By the third or fourth story, you’re getting to what they really want and what they’re really doing.
• Don’t make them write stuff, too much self-editing - just let them talk.
  • Have them describe a day they came to the library.
  • Have them describe a day when they wanted to come to the library but couldn’t.
  • And so on…

What they’ve discovered about what users want: they want interaction.

What they’ve discovered about what users value:

• Community
• Learning
• Quality

In the end, they created 7 personas that define the main public library user population.

• Discovery Dan (main population)
  • Casual user, mostly interested in the entertaining stuff.
• Rick Researcher
  • Folks engaged in more in-depth research, like the genealogists.
• Tasha Learner (adult learner)
• Senior Sally
  • They’re no longer just the stereotypical seniors with poor computer skills looking for help, they’re affluent, sophisticated, and increasingly computer savvy.
• Mommy Marcie (parent of young kids)
  • Frequently these folks are interested in pursuing their own lifelong learning goals, in addition to helping out their kids.
• Jennifer, parent of teens
• High School Hillery

We ran out of time before all these personas could be covered, but the basic idea is that the personas are fairly detailed descriptions that can help the folks designing library services better understand the needs of their users. (Apparently, this idea is used fairly frequently in the software industry.) Still, it’s an interesting idea, and it seems like personas would be helpful in making user expectations seem more concrete to those of us who are developing library services.

Okay, this is just too cool.

On my way home for the grocery store this afternoon I got to see (for only the second time since I moved to Tucson) a roadrunner crossing the road. Man, those little critters are fast.

Alas, there was no coyote tearing after it, but still way cool.

The second speaker for the public library 2.0 presentation was Helene Blowers from the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. She talked about the program she set up to encourage library staff to learn about new technology, and this has got to be one of the coolest training programs I’ve run across in a while (although considering one of the points make in the talk, I hesitate to call it training).Here are my notes.

Why learning 2.0?

• Because life comes at you fast.
• Technology is changing to rapidly for a traditional technology training program to be workable.

Remember: Training does NOT equal Learning!

So, Learning 2.0 is different from a standard training program.

The Learning 2.0 program in a a nutshell:

• Staff take responsibility for their own learning (it’s voluntary and self-paced).
• It introduces folks to new tech by having them use it.
• Reward staff for taking initiative (everybody who completes the course gets an mp3 player, and there’s a drawing at the end of the program for a new laptop).
• It’s like a summer reading for your staff.
• It’s not training, it’s learning!

Technology covered in learning 2.0:

• blogging
• photos and images
• rss and newsreaders
• tagging and folksonomies
• wikis
• online apps and tools
• podcasts, videos, and downloadable audio

The really cool thing is that it’s possible to do this entirely with free apps and sites that are hosted by somebody else, so it’s not a huge drain on resources.
There are now over 300 people at PLCMC participating in the program and about 200 folks will complete it by the October 31st (when the program officially ends).

Take away messages from learning 2.0:

• Lifelong learning applies to staff too - here’s a way to help make that happen.
• Remember to have fun, the learning will happen along the way.

Other libraries are now starting similar initiatives, the program’s been released under a Creative Commons license, so it’s available for other folks to use and build on.
The presentation will be up on the web soon, and if I remember, I’ll link to it once it’s up.
You can check out the blog for the program by going to http://plcmclearning.blogspot.com

After an amazing 3 days at internet librarian, I’ve managed to drag myself (and my luggage) back to Tucson in one piece. A core dump of conference posts is coming tomorrow - they need a bit of cleanup so my notes don’t sound like they were written by concussed toddler with no typing skills (not that folks wouldn’t find that amusing, too).

But right now I must sleep.