The social anthropologist in maintains the belief that community develops one step at a time. What steps are you taking to establish the library within your core population? My talk at ALA focused on the what we’ve been able to accomplish with our public at MPOW; I’d love to hear what else all of you have done. Please leave notes, stories and suggestions in the comments.

Here are the slides from my portion of Sunday’s panel. If you go full-screen, you can see my  (somewhat vague) notes on the whole spiel.

I wasn’t originally going to go to ALA this year. I feel like it’s easy to get tunnel vision from hearing only the library’s perspective time and again. Since MPOW’s travel budget is relatively limited, I figured I’d let other staff members get the opportunity to check it out.

But then 2 things happened: fewer people than normal expressed a desire to attend this year (a phenomenon likely attributed to PLA); and I got an invitation from David Lee King to join his panel on Designing Digital Experiences. I certainly wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to present alongside David, Bobbi Newman, and John Blyberg. I’ll gladly be the weak link in that chain. Hopefully I’ll see you all there on Sunday, from 10:30-noon.

But I’m keeping my “official” ALA schedule somewhat open. I’m going to look at a number of new products, drop in on a few workshops, and share meals with a number of friends, colleagues, and people I’ve been dying to meet.

I’m also going to be drumming up interest in Crave Libraries, a new semi-secret project I’m brewing up with Daniel Nguyen. (A debt of gratitude is also owed to Jason Kucsma, who coined the phrase and has graciously allowed us to run with it. Jason, look me up at ALA, as I owe you a cup of coffee at the very least.) We’re playing a few things close to the vest for the moment, but if you can track me down at the conference I might give you some buttons like the two above.

If you’d like to get in touch with me, the best way to do so is probably via Twitter. Any @ or D message will ping at least 3 places, so it should be pretty easy to track me down. Hope to see everyone there!

Click here to view the embedded video.

While getting ready to leave Monterey this morning, I realized that I completely neglected to mention the contributions of Gail Shaw, my library’s webmaster/systems librarian in my presentation at Internet Librarian 2009, I’m taking the time nowto point out her contributions.

Simply put, there is no way this project would have happened without her contributions, feedback, and support. Implementing the mobile platform – either through the OPAC, the mobile website, or the Shoutbomb service did not happen overnight, and Gail did the vast majority of the legwork in making that happen.

If you’re hoping to implement a service like this at your organization, make sure you’re working closely with someone who knows your ILS inside and out. Not only that, make sure everyone knows of the impact their work on the back-end contributed to a smooth workflow on the user end.

All in all, I had a great time at IL2009, and I’m looking forward to putting everyone’s great ideas into practice. Expect some blogginess in the days to come, and I hope to hear about what everyone else extracted from the experience  – even if you couldn’t make out to California yourself!

You know who you are.

Thanks for a great conference, those of you I met in-person finally, and those I got to talk to on the datastream. Let’s do what we can to continue the conversation, and make great things happen.

The handout for the presentation can also be found here. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions after the fact.

LITA Camp gets off to a good start with a introductory keynote for library futurist Joan Frye Williams. Technology always runs the risk of being alienating, and social media hopefully provides the opportunity to address this issue. But because this stuff is so easy to use, it can also call attention to the walls we create in the library meatspace.

A brilliant illustration of the power of the personal connection emerged from an exercise Williams led, of which you can see the video below:

Contrasting this exercise with our standard “read X resource for Y piece of information” transaction raises a number of questions. We call ourselves professionals, yet we’re reluctant to give out our names. (Would you go to a doctor who doesn’t give out their name?) We’re beholden to building up our numbers for reference transactions, but we don’t really have metrics for the relationships we build. How do we address this? Can we make all of our spaces more personal – and improve our profession in the process?

Williams certainly seems to think so. But to do so, we’ll have to go long. The recession gives us a unique opportunity to accomplish this, as it can make those who are more wary of change a little more receptive to new possibilities.

View Williams’ slides in PPT.
Notes after the jump. My commentary is in italics.

The Everywhere Library: Creating, Communicating, and especially Integrating
Joan Frye Williams

Tough times for libraries

Many who see technology as just “expensive stuff”

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
Crisis gives us cover – gives us opportunity to try new things.
The shock doctrine!

People who wouldn’t otherwise listen are generally afraid – you can capitalize on that fear, if you use the right words.

Beloit College – Mindset List

“The library world in particular is full of former a students. We’re all in touch with our inner know-it-all”

Are we providing what civilians want, or what we think they should want?
How niche can we get, given that there generally is no one demographic (aside from maybe carbon-based) shared by all our customers? Can we create new services acknowledging that certain things just aren’t for everyone?

Blending our thinking – offering different things by synthesizing multiple services and modes of information delivery

Quality and Convenience
Convenience shapes consumer behavior more than just about anything else right now.

Place and Ubiquity
Library is no longer a place for the stuff. It’s a place for the people.
Librarians like searching. Civilians like finding. Civilians like doing stuff with what they find even more.
When people tag information, they usually include tags about its use, not just what it is about – we can’t ignore that but we do.

Security and Openness
Secure or Open? Safe or Accessible? We act like these are mutually exclusive.
Much library security has been guaranteed by hiding.

Accuracy and Opinion
Professionals are supposedly regarded for their opinions. Why are we so afraid of injecting ourselves into the information we find?
By trying to provide accurate and neutral information, we strip the life out of it.

Equality and Customization
Misconception of fairness as providing the exact same thing for everybody.
Circulation policy as model for fairness – “what is the difference between 10 books for 3 weeks and 3 books for 10 weeks?”

Preservation and Innovation
Closing the innovation gap – the tools make it possible for anyone to create these changes – but the system isn’t necessarily conducive to that.
Also question of how to treat work in progress – how do we treat stuff that’s still incubating?

High Standards and Generosity
Library community is rife with perfectionists, which may impede the permanent beta process.
Are we perfectionists because we stand to lose out personally if someone finds a flaw?

Planning and Improvisation
“I am a futurist, not a psychic.” We have to reconcile the need to improvise when circumstances change without abandoning the planning process.
Train ourselves to say “I don’t know that.”

Confidentiality and Relationships
Relationship-based enterprise, not a transaction-based
You do not get trust out of a transaction. cf. Lankes, participatory
“You guys have been doing information hookups. Don’t you feel cheap?”
Would you go to a dentist/lawyer/professional who wouldn’t tell you his name?
Confidentiality and anonymity is not the same. C often squashes the personal side of what we do.

Advice to a new college student: Find a librarian. Get to know them personally. They will help you ace any class. Best BI advice ever.

Expertise and Community Focus
We can be experts – and get to know the civilians – without dumbing down.

New metrics
We think “to know us is to love us” – are we right?
Data can be manipulated so that it is separate from individuals information, but still useful and predictive.

We measure transactions, but we don’t pay attention to what people do.
“Each time we answer a directional question at the reference desk, it’s a tick mark for the failure of our wayfinding system.”

What if it really is hard?
Even if it is hard, I hope you try.

Exercise: 3 minutes. Partner up. Think of a favorite book, movie, play, poem, or piece of music.
What is it?
Why is it important to you?
How has that affected your life

After: How did the person sell the item? How animated did the person get? How important for the story teller was it that the other person was convinced on the story?
It’s about meaning. That is the business we are in.

Go long. This is work worth doing.

These slides have seen a lot of mileage – my co-worker also used them for a public class. Twitter gets around.

Clearly, it’s something on the minds of quite a few people, as we went for far longer than the alotted 5-minute lightning talk. Maybe we could call it a thunderstorm talk!

“This is an unconference. We can do whatever we want.”

–Mark Beatty

So I’ve traveled deep into the belly of the beast (the OCLC conference center in Dublin, OH) for the inaugural LITA unconfrence. Working under the theme of “The Everywhere Library,” we’ve assembled to share what we know and (hopefully) push the state of library technology forward. I’ll be posting my notes here over the next couple of days, with additional bits of context and commentary as events warrant. If you have any questions, or anything you’d like me to ask about, please post a comment here.

You can keep track of #litacamp09 activities on Twitter, and also check out the Camp wiki for more information.

While we don’t use blackboard in the public sphere, I think it might be possible to create a similar space for our patrons. Each user’s experience at the library website has the potential to call on a variety of different sources – our standard pathfinders, catalog content and account info, electronic resources, downloadable materials, blog content, and potentially more – so to put the things each person uses most often could be pretty useful. It also gets me a step closer to my personal Shangri-La of offering single signon to our patrons. Dare to dream.

Jumpety jump jump for (shamefully brief) notes.

Hacking Blackboard: Creating Customized Content Portals

Richard Cox and Lynda Kellam

University of North Carolina – Greensboro

Creating academic spaces

Not Facebook – keeping that as a social area

Pushing relevant resources to students based on field of study

Pointing that it wasn’t a replacement for main library area, just a supplement

Hacking the Library Tab: Creating topic-specific entry points to the library

Creates custome portal based on declared major – when you’re logged in, it uses your information to bring relevant materials (Banner database)

Probably don’t need to get this specific for our patrons, but can use the portal design for inspiration

ASP.net as the app for the portals

Active Directory, SQL Server as database platform, MS Live Mesh

MS Live Messenger for chat widget – able to query specific people. If they’re not, it brings up generic chat. If noone’s available, it brings up email form

issue with double majors – which one to use

Stats: Google Analytics data – showing a decent number of people returning

Next plan: mobile app

What are our resources: catalog – website – blogs – portals – MyDiscoveries/Aquabrowser – e-resources – Overdrive

[Mobile devices are] answer engines, not search engines.

–Megan Fox

Good morning session on the state of the mobile universe, as presented by mobile guru Megan Fox. As I continue to develop MPOW’s own mobile library services, it’s nice to see what’s out on the horizon. I’m a little concerned about the growing diffusion for application platforms – between iPhone, Android, and the newly launched BlackBerry store, it’s difficult to tell if we’re going to be able to create something that meets all our smartphone user needs. Definitely something to pay attention to.

Full notes after the jump.

Mobile Practices & Search: What’s Hot!

Megan Fox, Simmons College

144 million users use mobile data services – mobile or internet

Apple only holds 8% of mobile market share (due to data plan)

New mobiles available: 12mp camera phones

Facial detection, smile detection

touch-screen smart phone watch

Major players: iphone, android, blackberry, palm pre

iPhone: large screen, data plan, HQ audio and video

restriction: carrier, locked into AT&T

New iphone launches this summer, w/copy-paste, search of contacts, more

Blackberry: more universal – launched across multiple carriers

Android: as close to opensource as they can get

Palm pre getting ready to launch – rising phoenixlike from the ashes, synergy feature pulls all your contacts together and de-dupes your results. Allows you to keep multiple apps open (listen to pandora while texting, for example)

Modes of interaction: more than just keyboard-based

Visual access: camera as scanner – SnapTell – “extelligence” – knowledge derived from external services

where is SnapTell for libraries?

QR codes very popular elsewhere in the world

Audio interactions (Shazam for iPhone) – picking up sound and using it to give answers

iPhone Librarian app that monitors noise levels

Location-based interactions using GPS

Gesture-based interactions: using internal accelerometer

Surfing the mobile web- how people use mobile devices to access information

Internet capabilities – some with full internet, some not

Firefox mobile

Novar – browser can access Flash

Mobile web – m.*, mobile.*, now *.mobi

Most information not translated for small screen – transcoding – similar to machine translation

Guides for creating a mobile version: w3c

“Snacking the Web” – content for mobile needs to be short and easy to consumer quickly – “the casual web”

Quick answers, not deep research – flight status, not researching prices

What is most necessary for mobile users?

Best Buy – Find a store, search for a product

Optimizing for blackberry = catering to business users

OCLC’s mobile WorldCat

U of Houston checking out iPhones to give students an idea of what’s available

AirPAC redesign for iPhones

Suzanne Chapman’s Flickr

Mobile Apps – over 30k apps for iPhone

Games most popular, followed by entertainment, but then books

DCPL’s library app

Library app – finds closest public library

Traveling Classics – read-aloud public domain items

Kindle for iPhone – syncs with actual Kindle, too

Margins – organizes citations

International Children’s Digital Library – better than mobile website

Papers – fee-based federated search

NextBio – pubmed search

Charmin’s clean public restroom finder

App store for Android phones: small but growing

Scan app – will link to public libraries

Blackberry app store launched today

Mobile search – ready reference – “answer engine, not search engine” – get to information with as little typing as possible

Spoken/voice search

texting dwarfing calls by a huge ration by younger generation – up to 34 years old

Trash cans in boston will text

Libraries using texting – “Text this to me” feature

some built into ILS, some done from scratch – see mlibraries section of Library Success wiki

mlibraries conference in Vancouver this summer

Mosio – text a librarian feature

Leapfrog Blackberry-type device for 3 yearolds

SMS/Text search – google, yahoo, chacha, KGB

What’s next?

epaper, green

faster connections, longer battery life