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!

Shaken, the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Chicago Police detective Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels, is the latest acquisition from AmazonEncore, Amazon.com’s publishing arm. The book will start out as a Kindle exclusive, which you can now preorder for $2.99.

If you were listening to this instead of reading it, this is where you’d hear the record scratch sound. Didn’t Amazon lose the battle with publishers to keep Kindle titles below $9.99?

Konrath isn’t stupid. He’s done the math, and discovered that it’s far more lucrative for him to sell ebooks at the 1-3 dollar range than the 10-15. The sabermetrician in me is doffing his cap at his ability to exploit this new market niche.

But one niche I don’t see here is one for lending of ebooks. This deal with Amazon almost seems like one of those 360 deals concert behemoth LiveNation has been signing with artists like Madonna and Jay-Z. With those, Live Nation assumes total responsibility for the artist’s business – from CDs to concerts to merchandise, in exchange for a cut of all sales. Amazon is in a similar position, as they now handle the production, the sales, and the distribution of Konrath’s book. Not to mention Amazon’s considerable promotional power. Quoth Konrath:

I signed a print deal with a company that can email every single person who has every bought one of my books through their website, plus millions of potential new customers. I’ve never had that kind of marketing power behind one of my novels. I’d be an idiot not to do this.

The 360-degree deal is a win-win for Konrath and for everyone, right? Shaken gets published where it couldn’t previously, Amazon gets to thumb its nose at Macmillan and co., and readers can find out what kind of trouble Jack, Herb, and Harry are up to for a fraction of what they previously paid. But of those 360 degrees, not one of them is something that libraries can be a part of. Shaken will be available in print (again, published by Amzaon) in February 2011. But what do we do for those patrons we have that are used to downloading his stuff from our digital collection. (And yes, we have at least an ebook or e-audiobook for all 6 prior titles in the Jack Daniels series.)

Amazon has been notoriously standoffish in their dealings with libraries. If Konrath’s deal is a bellwether for other authors to follow suit, we may need to be concerned for our digital collections.

What are the key concepts for libraries in the near future? I’ve boiled it down to the following 6 concepts:

• Consolidation – Using APIs and open access to push data into the stream, and making it easier for patrons to use our resources
• The Cloud – Ubiquitous access and synchronous editing changing the way people are learn and work
• Compression – Devices getting smaller, smarter, and more powerful provide us with more opportunities for service at point-of-need
• Control - Gesture-based interfaces offering a whole new way of examining and manipulating data
• Copyright - Digital distribution models will bring publishers to our door closer than we think
• Creation – Our responsibility toward curating user-generated content, and fostering healthy discourse through media

Please view the slides in fullscreen to see my crib notes. What do you think the technological game-changers will be?

They can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.) More librarians are telling me (unhappily) that the number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals. That’s not a long-term strategy, nor is it particularly an uplifting use of our tax dollars.

Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.

Once again, the net turns things upside down. The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books. What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.

I thnk @itsjustkate sums my reaction to this rather eloquently:

so, wait… we *should* be helping ppl learn to find and contextualize info? Oh! *smacks forehead*

Gee thanks, Seth. All this time we’ve been pottering about in our workspaces, dusting and shushing the entire time, with our hair in buns and cats in our pockets. All we need to do to reinvent ourselves is to espouse the core belief behind our profession.

But rather than get too worked up about this, it may be better to consider the big picture. If Godin is seeing our industry this way, then we definitely have a problem. And while the biblioblogosphere/twitterverse/Friendfeed spaces help maintain an active flow of ideas, it’s still an inside-baseball echo chamber. Granted, that’s a feature rather than a bug, but it’s a reminder of how rarely our efforts are recognized on the larger scale.

So I’m hoping Mr. Godin will read this and give someone from the library world the opportunity to demonstrate just how well and how often we help people (in Godin’s parlance) scale otherwise insurmountable intellectual heights.

There are dozens of librarians out there who could do this. Jessamyn West. Buffy Hamilton. Brian Herzog. Bobbi Newman. Jason Griffey. The Darien coterie. Richard Kong*. And that’s just a small sampling – any attempt to list everyone would be a futile effort. I’m inspired by my colleagues every day, and it gives me such hope to see so many people being awesome in public.

To librarians who don’t see this as their raison d’etre, please don’t let the door to the profession hit you on the ass on your way out.

And to Seth, how about it? Why not use your considerable megaphone to let us demonstrate what we’ve accomplished, and how much more we’re capable of?

*full disclosure: I work with Richard, along with a host of other awesome people.

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.

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!

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.