Here are the slides, if you’re into that sort of thing:

Was there a handout, you say? Was there. (PDF) I’ve also made a list of all the relevant links on my Delicious page.

All in all, I think it was a pretty successful program. Lynn Dennis from Roselle Public Library discussed the ins and outs of her library’s Ning network, which has managed to weather the initial burst of enthusiasm and become a site with a core user base and real longevity.
Jonathan Bullington and Katie Cousino from Triblocal helped to highlight ways libraries can leverage hyperlocal media to raise their profile and identify new community stakeholders.
And Bill Pardue of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library wrapped things up with his thoughts on “predatory reference,” taking a more active stance in pursuing reference service beyond the walls of the library.

It also marked my first attempt to do a talk using Prezi, the nifty Flash-based presentation software. In addition to looking nice (looking at all the slides at once – click the circle below to see the birdseye view – looks almost like certain Andy Goldsworthy pieces), I found the design and navigation interface to be fairly easy to use. Check it out below.

Because it’s true. Like Soylent Green, it’s the individuals within the institution that make it great. A big part of my job is harnessing these online resources to bring that same level of personality online. I’m hoping these slides serve as an crash course in many of the tricks of the trade.

Be sure to click on the links in the presentation for other relevant resources. And please share your strategies for organizational identity management in the comments.

I have a feeling that the title “Catalog Notices to Cell Phones” isn’t the most descriptive thing in the world, so I’ll also include a more fully-fleshed out description here. With any luck, they’ll get this added to the full website as well. Here goes:

Texting Your Library: Designing a Mobile-Friendly Service Platform

People are doing more and more with their mobile phones, but the market is a confusing mishmash of proprietary hardware, software, and service providers. How do you offer mobile-friendly library service that speaks to many types of mobile users, while providing the most bang for your buck? Toby Greenwalt, the Virtual Services Coordinator for the Skokie Public Library shares his experience building a suite of mobile services, including a mobile catalog and website. Special attention will be paid to ways libraries can use text messaging to send out account notices, offer reference service, and allow patrons to reserve items using their mobile phones.

Looking forward to (virtually)  seeing you there! If you have any questions beforehand, please leave me a comment and I’ll try to cover it in the presentation.

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.

A few weeks ago, my Twitter Local feed stopped working. I finally got it into my head to investigate. The main page for the site states:

Since Twitter cut off their Jabber feed from TwitterLocal, we had to rely purely on the XML API, which meant that only about 20% of Tweets from the public timeline got into TwitterLocal. Now that Twitter has a location-based search API, we don’t have to cache the posts anymore.

I’ve been playing with the features on Twitter Search, and so far I haven’t been able to replicate the simplicity of Twitter Local. Does anyone have any advice, or has anyone come up with a suitable workaround? I’m looking for a steadily updated feed of tweeters from a given area. This could be ZIP code, town name, or some other geographic location.

This is great, but it tends to overlook the biggest reason to have a good Twitter Search feed set up: it lets you know when people are talking about you. Much like having Google Alerts set up, you can identify and respond to all the good and bad chatter taking place out in the cloud. Right after I made that last post, I found the following conversation in the feed:

A few days later, it garnered the following response:

Without the feed set up, I would have had no idea that we were being praised as such. Perhaps that’s a zen koan: If a tweet occurs in the tubes and you’re not around to hear it, does it actually count?

It probably counts to our patrons, not to mention our potential patrons. And I’m sure we’d want to know even more had it been a negative comment. (Comcast – a company which has given many people cause for complaint – is using Twitter for this very reason.)

That’s the great thing about Twitter – it takes such a massive tool for broadcast communication, and uses it to enable very specific personal conversations.

But I’ve been working on some other ways to make Twitter useful from an institutional standpoint. As I mentioned in the comments on that Tame the Web piece, I’ve set up a number of widgets to troll the outer rings of Twitterdom to see how my library fits into other people’s lives. Among these tools is Twitter Search.

I’ve got several feeds for my library’s location, as well as several other key sites in the area. This includes the names of several parks, schools, and local businesses. If it’s appropriate, I can respond with appropriate information. Here’s an example of a tweet that popped up on my radar:

Of course, I knew that the Skokie Swift train line restarted its weekend service this summer. Good little reference librarian that I am, I sent out the following response:

And I got this response in return:

Our reference stats go up, the CTA gets an extra customer, and I may have just converted a non-patron into a patron. The library is getting out there, and finding ways to help where they didn’t previously exist. And it’s all thanks to Twitter Search.

We’re hard at work to set up a network of library blogs at MPOW. In our efforts to find natural linkages between our existing web content and the incoming blogs, the blog planners and I thought it might be helpful to come up with a shorthand term to denote what’s coming from the blogs. If you look at our website, you’ll see we make liberal use of the RSS icon, and we’ve found that it helps out considerably.

But there’s no such thing for blogs. Probably the closest thing we have is the Blogger icon, as seen below:

But we’re not running on Blogger, and I’m certian the WordPress/LiveJournal/Movable Type would have something to say about this becoming the standard.

So I put it to you, fair Interwebs: What’s should the blog icon be?

Inspired by Sarah Houghton-Jan’s excellent presentation “Reaching Patrons: Online Outreach for Public Libraries” (soon to be archived at LibrarianinBlack), I dove into Twitter Local and started following most of the names that came up. (I skipped over a few, mainly if I noticed that they hadn’t tweeted in months.)

And some of those people have already started following me back! It’ll be fun to see where this goes. One person in particular had a great response:

Hopefully we’re not coming off as stalkery, but who knows?