The Bridge Generation

“I am a generation X librarian. While prevailing stereotypes make many of us reluctant to assume that GenX label (no, I am not a slacker, and, no, I am not especially cynical), I take pride in my generation's accomplishments and professional potential.

After a flurry of professional interest in Generation X a few years back, the next generation of librarians, dubbed the Millennials, have now moved into the spotlight, leaving some of us in our 30s caught in the middle, nestled between boomer and Millennial colleagues, between long-term librarians and their younger customers, and between traditional librarianship and technology.

‘In the middle,’ however, can be an interesting, if at times unsettling, niche, full of possibilities. GenX librarians who recognize this potential are well positioned to take their place as movers and shakers in this profession….

Those asking what Generation X will need to lead should look at what GenXers are already doing. We are already directing our institutions from the middle, building bridges, forming connections. What we need are more examples of true leadership from the top, mentors who are willing to pass along institutional memory and to help us grow, to nurture these important relationships, and to recognize our contributions.” [Library Journal]

This column from Rachel Singer Gordon really resonates with me. In fact, I think there may even be pieces of this embedded in the current discussion of Library 2.0 with Librarian 1.0 (which Rochelle helped jumpstart and Michael Casey continues). I feel some of this myself because I’m a GenXer and it really can be difficult being stuck in the middle, and not just in the context of the potential for administrative positions. I’m not angry or upset with the generations on either side of me, but sometimes it’s tiring (and even frustrating) being the translator. Most of the time it’s motivating, stimulating, and even fun, but there are the days….

Thanks for putting this issue out there, Rachel.

Searching the AADL Catalog as Easy as Google, Delivery as Fast as Amazon

“There's an AADL catalog search plugin for Firefox, written by Matt Hampel. Matt is a regular at the a2b3 meetings and a student at Community High. It adds a very simple little search option to your Google search box so that you can keyword search the catalog from the corner of the screen.

The results are wonderful. In essence, it's just about as easy to search the AADL catalog as it is to search Google, and with a minimum number of clicks (not one-click yet) you can put a book on hold. If you like fairly obscure stuff this will often beat Amazon on delivery times, and certainly beats it hands-down on cost. (Of course you wait for books every so often, but if you keep enough in your queue you can treat the process kind of like Netflix.)” [Vacuum]

This is just one piece of “Library 2.0” – the ability to get your content (in this case, access to your content) out to where your users are instead of forcing them to come to your site to use your catalog with its oh-so-perfect-interface. And look what happens when you do it – easy as Google, faster than Amazon, leaps tall buildings in a single bound praise from patrons. You can also grab the code for the search plugin in order to create one for your own library. Now you really have no excuse for not having a FireFox search plugin!

Matt, the kid behind the plugin, also makes a couple of other interesting observations on his blog:

“I haven’t clicked an icon on my desktop in the last week. A sign of the changing Internet?”

“Hits from the search term ‘facebook high school’ (and all its variations) have nearly exceeded 3 months of hits for ‘Community High School’. You can feel the power of Facebook just churning below the surface.”

Now that we’ve added a microphone to the kids’ computer so they can voice chat with friends, we’re seeing them mash up the various tools. This morning, Brent was on IM [text] chatting, going on quests with friends in Runescape, voice chatting, and taking song requests to play on Rhapsody (so his friends could hear them through the microphone).

I was tired just watching him.

I had heard that one of the reasons our grant application to create a mobile gaming package for MLS libraries was turned down was because some reviewers didn’t understand how you then transition these kids to “traditional library services.”

I could argue that issue a million different ways but thanks to Aaron, today I’m basking in vindication.  :-P

Gaming? In a Library? Don’t We Kick You Out for that?

“When I found out about this conference about gaming & learning - and bringing game-mediated learning into the library environment - I said to my branch head: If I can't go to this conference, I will just die.

Well, thanks to a lot of institutional support (from my branch, from my district chief, from my heroes in staff development, and, apparently, all the way up the chain of command) my death will be forestalled for a little while. Phew!” [Bezazian Rocks]

This is so awesome – Chicago Public Library blogger and colleagues will be attending the gaming in libraries symposium! By george, I think they’ve got it! Must go do a celebratory happy dance for CPL!

CPL Rocks!

BTW, if you’ve procrastinated registering for the symposium, you’d better hurry. We had to reduce the number of registrations in order to fit the gaming equipment in the back of the room, so there are only 21 registrations left!

What I Wish I Had Known

“I wish I had known that the solution for needing to teach our users how to search our catalog was to create a system that didn't need to be taught—and that we would spend years asking vendors for systems that solved our problems but did little to serve our users. I wish I had known that we would come to pay the price of our folly by seeing our users flock to commercial companies like Google and Amazon….

It's about the user, stupid. While we were focused on crafting integrated library systems that served our needs, our users got left behind. Is it any wonder that they can't understand why our systems aren't as easy to work with as Amazon?” [Library Journal]

Pew Internet Report: Search Engines Gain Ground

“According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:

On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.

Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a library OPAC.” [MaisonBisson]

This badly.

<mini rant> Chris Deweese over at our sister Illinois system Lewis & Clark LS went and implemented yet another thing Kate and I have been talking about for months. Except he got beyond the talking stage because he’s a programmer. I hate that LCLS is doing a lot of the things I’ve wanted to do simply because they have someone on staff devoted to implementing this kind of stuff.  And I really hate the fact that Chris has started a new blog called “the lcls weboratory: from our minds to the web” at the URL http://labs.lcls.org/. “Labs!”</mini rant>

Okay, so replace the word “hate” with the word “love” in the above paragraph, but I still really want a programmer at work!

Live, from LPL! Our Podcast!

“LPL's first official podcast! I've created a separate podcast feed for this blog.

Science Project Strategies

I used Audacity and recorded directly to the laptop.” [’Brary Web Diva]

Lansing PL is one of my member libraries, so I can testify to the fact that they are not a large library, not are they a particularly rich library. And yet, they’re taking advantage of free, social tools like blogs, RSS, instant messaging, and now podcasting and beating out larger libraries that have more resources. They’ve even put together a podcast info page that helps explain the whole thing to patrons. Go LPL!

I’ll also note that Kelli recorded the audio from the 2005 SirsiDynix CODI Conference, which is just too damn cool. Even better, SirsiDynix was smart enough to let her podcast the recordings, which you can start grabbing here (depending on when you click that link, you might need to scroll down to November 20 and earlier). That totally rocks, and as Kelli noted to me in an email, “how’s that for ILS transparency?!”

A couple of weeks ago, Michael posted his list of Abram-isms from the CPL Scholars in Residence gig, in part because while listening to Stephen, we joked that we were going to start a random Abram-ism generator from a database of things the king has said.

So here are my additions for the database:

• You can't ask great questions from a standing start.
• We need coaches, rather than technicians; it's no longer a financial decision about buying computers, it's a financial decision about people.
• We like email because we like to send letters faster than our grandparents.
• It's an information ocean, not a highway.
• And my personal favorite that Stephen ended his presentation with just for me: When librarians study something to death, we forget that death was not the original goal.

IM Reference Update

“Overall, we’ve been very pleased with our first quarter of using Instant Messaging in reference, and we’re looking for additional ways to market and promote the service. Perhaps the most important thing that we can share from our experience is that if you set up and promote an IM service, you will have patrons who use the service. In other words, if you build it, they will come.” [Library Voice]

Emphasis above is mine. Click through and check out those statistics. Pretty impressive.

Can’t believe I haven’t linked to this yet: IM Shorthand for Monty Python Fans from ricklibrarian.

I added one – go add yours!

The Second Coming of Content and RSS Feeds

“Dave Winer recently pointed to a post by Adam Green, which explored similar territory. Adam thinks 2006 will be the year the Web explodes:

"The explosion I am talking about is the shifting of a website's content from internal to external. Instead of a website being a ‘place’ where data ‘is’ and other sites ‘point’ to, a website will be a source of data that is in many external databases, including Google. Why ‘go’ to a website when all of its content has already been absorbed and remixed into the collective datastream."

His post specifically referenced Google, but I think this trend is much larger than even Google. The thing which is going to tie all this together is of course feeds. Mainly RSS, but perhaps Atom's much-vaunted extensibility will come into play too.

This gets to the heart of the matter and I think Feedburner is onto something big here. Feedburner now views the item (e.g. a single post from your blog, or a specific search result in a topic feed) as ‘the atomic unit of measure in the feed’, which will in turn lead to Feedburner managing syndicated content ‘at a more atomic level by attaching 'threads' to the item.’ It reminded me of the Design for Data and ’content will be more important than its container’ themes I was big on at the end of last year and beginning of this (and which I will be re-focusing on now)….

If you think about it, focusing on the feed item is a profound change in how we think about RSS feeds. Up till this year, most of us thought of RSS feeds as a way to subscribe to single sources of content. But over 2005 it's become apparent that content is being remixed, mashed up and re-published across many sources - leading to heated ethical debates over content rights and confusion amongst publishers on how to 'monetize' (sorry I can't help but use that word) their content. Fred Wilson had a nice post on this theme recently, entitled The Future of Media (aka Please Take My RSS Feed).” [Read/Write Web]

Ask yourself if your library is ready for this type of shift, because overwhelmingly, the answer is no. Librarians just aren’t thinking like this yet, and we need to change this. It’s at the very core of the whole “Library 2.0” discussion, and this is why it’s so critical. If we keep our content locked up on our own websites and don’t get it out there for people to use as they want to use it, then our content will fall by the wayside.

Search Our Catalog from Windows

“Our new catalog gadget is a nifty piece of software that adds a library catalog search box to your Windows 2000 or XP desktop. Type or paste words into the box and press Enter, and the gadget opens a browser window with your search results. The gadget is available, along with our Firefox/Netscape plugin and catalog bookmarklets, on our Power Tools page.” [Homer Township Public Library News]

This is particularly awesome because my home Library’s catalog doesn’t have an easy URL to remember, so it can be a pain to get there. Great job, Brian!

Do we need some sort of exchange program to get similar Mac widgets set up?

While I had Brian on IM this morning to talk about this, I also found out that he has made a special icon for the Library’s IM service. He used to show a statue of Lincoln (after all, we are in Illinois), but the kids continually told him that was lame. So he made a new one that says, “we look stuff up 4 u.”

Good thought – what icon are you using for your library’s IM reference service?

Today is turning into a very lucky day for me, because I was also going to write about the recent Talis whitepaper on Library 2.0, along with some context for what libraries should be starting to talk about in this area. However, Michael beat me to it on the ALA TechSource Blog. It's a great post, too, so click the link and go read it!

We just got a look at the evaluations from last week's Scholars in Residence program at Chicago Public Library, and I'm thrilled to say that the staff seems to think it went as well as Stephen, Michael, and I did! So a very public "thank you" to CPL for letting me be part of such a wonderful event!

After I came home and digested everything that had happened, I sent a couple of folks there an email with a few suggestions about some experiments they could try to start down the paths we'd discussed. I thought about posting a generic version of the list here, but David King has saved me the trouble. Thanks, David! :-)

Displaying Clustered Search Results

“A big point in my NEASIS&T presentation Tuesday was how new technologies like XML and web services allow us to separate the tools that manage and store our data from the tools that display and manipulate it. This is, of course, part of the web 2.0 infrastructure, and an enabler of so many great hacks and mashups.

In this prototype, I’m using XML access to our catalog to fetch the top 150 results for a keyword search, aggregate the subject headings and authors, and display it all for the user. The data is live, so go get clicky on it. Also, try this version that displays the clusters in a more tag-like way. I’m not sure which view I like better, so I’m experimenting with both….

[update:] here’s a mockup of how this info might be displayed, along with some other ways I’d like to enhance the catalog.” [LibDev]

I can’t believe how quickly this guy throws together these proofs-of-concept. I’m officially nicknaming him the “hardest working man in the OPAC 2.0 business!” Plymouth State University better be treating him right.

You can see a second sample search at http://www.plymouth.edu/library/prototype/clusteredopac.php?srchtype=X&k=harry+potter. Make sure you click through to that mockup, too – I love all of the different tags he used on it. He wrote more about his NEASIST presentation here, and Lichen liveblogged what sounds like yet another fascinating NEASIST event here. And finally, as if all of this wasn’t enough, Casey did a cool mockup of Social Bookmarking for Higher Education. A little like CiteULike and Connotea, but with the clean interface of del.icio.us and the intriguing addition of a section for “your courses.”

On a personal note, I love how Flickr shows me a shared interest with Casey – he visited the Edward Gorey House! Gorey is one of my favorite authors and illustrators, so I’m jealous. Almost as jealous as I am of the Pepper Pad Casey got to play with!

(P.S. Find Exhibit A here.)

Today is our lucky day. I've got two great things to show you, neither of which I can claim any credit for, but both of which have blown me away. Maybe it's because I'm not a programmer, but maybe it's also because a whole lot of really smart people are "getting" this damn fast. Much more quickly than the library world has moved on things in the past. The distributed "think tank" mentality that the coversations in the biblioblogosphere are driving right now is freaking amazing. Exhibit A, via Tim Hodson:

Library 2.0 at Talis Insight 2005

"I Have spent the last two days at the Talis Insight 2005 conference. The main theme of the event was the idea of Library 2.0 being the next incarnation of libraries. (of course there were previews of future products too, with obligatory rebranding!!) library 2.0 follows the web 2.0 idea of using webservices to build web applications.

Talis seem to be embracing the open philosophy of much of the more exciting web developments that are happening. They seem willing to share the bibliographic records in talisbase (I think 27 million was quoted), along with holdings records and the records held in the silkworm directory....

Talis Whisper is a demo of what could be (a beta). I don’t go much for the usability aspects of this offering, but despite my grumblings, this is a fantastic taster of what could be. A google map to locate where the copies of those books are, an ILL form to fill in (THIS IS A DEMO!!), and even a facility to monitor opacs known to the directory for operational status, providing little balloons! All done with web services." [Information Takes Over]

Make sure you read the whole thing, and make sure you view the demo (and make sure you're using Firefox when you do it, because it doesn't work in IE-based browsers).

Talis is really impressing me these days with the speed at which they are moving. They've obviously embraced the whole "labs" idea (Google Labs, etc.), and they're making the most of it. I can't wait to see what they keep coming up with - really interesting!

David Pattern just made my day year, and just under the wire, too.

Taggytastic

"Inspired by Jenny Levine's mock up of an OPAC with keyword tags, I've gone a step further and used our Horizon database (the 'subject' table in particular) to generate a real page based on subject keywords with more than 10 bibs:

http://www.daveyp.com/blog/stuff/subjects.html " [Davey P's Weblog]

Now that's browsing the catalog! I can immediately tell which subjects the University of Huddersfield Library collects most in, and I'm one click away from viewing the subject headings. Suh-weet!

Of course, you can tell that these aren't user-generated tags because of subjects like "Art, Modern", "Europe, Eastern", and "Learning, Psychology of", but what a fabulous marriage of structured classification and the browsability of tag clouds. Excellent job, David; I'm adding a screenshot to tomorrow's presentation!

Glenn Peterson sends word of another patron displaying on his blog a feed of what he has checked out from his home library. How awesome is that? A possibility only because the staff of the Hennepin County Library provides RSS feeds for their patrons. Nice job, HCL!

In case you're keeping score, that makes two known instances of patrons displaying feeds on their own sites (the other one being Edward Vielmetti), one patron who rolled his own feed because his library doesn't provide them, and one person who created a LiveJournal feed of AADL's Book Blog.

I wish I had more examples to show in my presentations, but I don't think that will happen until we start seeing native RSS feeds out of our catalogs. I'm still waiting to see some real-world implementations of feeds that haven't been programmed by library staff in a live, working OPAC. Hopefully in 2006....

In 1995, my brother and I lived in different cities, and we were just starting to get the hang of this internet thing. I remember installing some software (can't believe the name escapes me at the moment), plugging in a microphone, and trying to talk to him over our 14.4 kbps dial-up connections in order to cut down on the long distance bills.

Of course, it didn't work very well, and we run into something I'd never heard of before, the "half duplex" problem. One of us had a sound card that wouldn't let you talk and listen simultaneously, so we had to take turns, like on a walkie-talkie. We would have been able to live with that issue if the quality had been good enough to warrant further efforts, but we're both old enough that we went back to just picking up the phone and paying the long distance charges.

Not so Brent. As he grows up, he won't have to deal with long distance charges because of the cell phone he'll eventually get and Voice over IP (VoIP), but for now he is enthralled with the idea of talking to a girl who lives but a few miles away through a microphone plugged into the computer.

It wasn't even his idea; theyv'e been IMing, but recently she just started talking via AIM because her family had set it up for other calls. So now they talk in the morning and at night, and the phrase we most often make out is, "What? I can't hear you." Ah, youth.

I've had to explain what over-modulation is, and that if he wants to hear better, he should turn down the music he is playing for her from Rhapsody. And of course while they're talking, they're typing text back and forth in an AIM window. There's no point in explaining that they'd be able to hear much better on the phone because for whatever reasons, this new way of communicating just feels more natural to them. I think they just connect better in this medium, they multitask, they can still IM with their other friends while doing it, and even participate in group chats. It's a dynamic I don't think I'd ever want to replicate for myself (although I do end up IMing and talking on the phone at the same time every once in a while at work), but for them, it's just natural.

Which is why I was chuckling to myself while reading Will Richardson's post about Skype Ideas for the classroom.

"But I happened to be watching an online presentation by my friend Alan November yesterday and he suggested a use that just made me slap my forehead in a 'Doh!' moment: Skype to allow parents to listen to their child's presentations at school!" [Weblogg-ed]

Will goes on to give eight great other ideas for using Skype in education, all of which Brent would totally groove on for learning. That's the kind of interactive environment in which he would learn best, because he's a very experiential type of learner. That's why he learns so well from video games, too.

Sure there are some security issues with Skype right now, but it's the concept as applied by Will that is so intriguing. The security issues will work themselves out or better software will come along (there are already good competitors).

While I see it in my job every day, I'm still constantly amazed how quickly the internet has pervaded our daily lives in just ten years. All of which is especially appropriate today as we celebrate the 15th anniversary of the creation of the first web page.

About once a year, the electronics in my house get together and decide to stage a sit-in. Or a turn-off. Or whatever you want to call it. Lately, all of the following have gone on the fritz:

• One ReplayTV (the main one with 75 hours of shows and movies on it)
• One wireless bridge that connects a second ReplayTV to get the channel guide, so it's not recording anything new
• The new wireless adapter I bought Brent for his birthday to put the PlayStation online
• One Treo 600 cell phone
• The screen on a printer/scanner/copier, so all you can do is print to it since you can't tell what else you're doing when pressing buttons
• One LCD monitor whose screen won't display anything
• The talk button on one FRS radio so you can't respond when the other person calls you
• And all of a sudden last night, the wireless card in my laptop

And the full moon is just now starting....

Maybe they're all just tired of the workouts they get, but I think it's karmic revenge for when I tried to convince Kailee that laptops without wireless internet weren't useless. She was right - it's a brick now.

Sony Rootkit Music off the Ann Arbor District Library's Purchase List

“I reported the uproar over Sony's ill-considered decision to put rootkit software as copy-protection on some of its music CDs to the Ann Arbor District Library, my main source for borrowing music these days. I got this reply in return from Eli Neiburger. (Did I mention that I love my library?)

‘I've passed word on to our selectors not to buy any Sony/BMG copy-protected CDs for the forseeable future. Not only is this reprehensible, but we could get into some support nightmares if people try to remove the rootkit since it's gotten so much press’….” [Vacuum – Edward Vielmetti]

Edward then goes on to urge folks to talk to their librarians about this, so be prepared just in case. If you’re not familiar with this completely outrageous story (one that highlights just some of the problems with the ways in which the media companies are implementing Digital Rights Management – DRM), read up at The Rootkit of All Evil. Yet another example of libraries getting caught in the middle.

Nice catch by the ‘Brary Web Diva: Podcasts and Presence

“If you haven't visited the iPodder home page lately, you might not know they have introduced some customized iPodder options available in their store….

If your library is podcasting (or thinking about doing so) why not make a customized iPodder download with your feed already loaded? You could even provide a service by searching out the local news, sports, NPR, etc. podcast feeds and pre-load those as well!

If you can afford the $100 option, think of the constant presence you'd be with your library logo right there on their iPodder!” [’Brary Web Diva]

During the “Jessamyn and Jenny” show at the Internet Librarian conference, I was very glad Jessamyn emphasized that our interest in tagging and folksonomies does not mean we advocate doing away with structured classification or searching. Instead, we see them as complementary, especially if tagging helps users in ways Dewey and LCSH can’t.

So it’s fun to watch new tagging sites and tools springing up. Now there’s one that combines several of my interests at the moment: social software, tagging, and gaming!

Where Tagging Works: Searching for a Good Game

“Millions of Games is just what it suggests: A search tool for finding all manner of games on the internet. What makes it different from other similar sites is that users are encouraged to tag games (this is called ‘mogging’ a game). And with Millions of Games, most of the heavy-lifting for creating tags has already been done by the developers of the site.

The site uses controlled vocabulary (called ‘Gameology’) to describe categories (arcade, shooter, puzzle, etc). Although you can also add your own free-form tags, these category tags are well known to most users, so there's little ambiguity about what the tags mean….

Tagging on Millions of Games isn't perfect, but in general it does seem to work better than other services that aren't as narrowly focused. And the extra information you get on each game, like ratings, the number of people who have mogged a game, its thumbnail image and so on lead to an overall quite good search experience (not to mention a lot of fun new ways to waste time, if you're into gaming).” [SearchEngineWatch]

Here’s another fun one to play with:

Pudding in a TagCloud

“Thanks to Google Blogoscoped for reminding me about TagCloud, which generates clouds of tags based on RSS feeds you specify. The service is free and available at http://www.tagcloud.com/

TagCloud allows you to provide lists of RSS feeds. From there it'll extract the relevant information and generate "clouds" of tags based on the feeds. In addition to being heaps of syntax fun, this strikes me as in interesting way to broadly compare the content of different news sites/blogs.” [ResearchBuzz]

In a quick bit of fun, I set up clouds for TSL, my subscriptions in my aggregator, and MLS (MPOW). Just for fun, I threw one together for bloggers I heard speak at the 2005 Internet Librarian Conference.

We’ve finalized the program for the MLS Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium and added the descriptions of the presentations we have so far. We should have the last of the info posted in the next day or two. It’s amazing how fast the time goes when planning the day’s events! Registration is still open, so sign up today!

Just a reminder that if you want to offer instant messaging on your public workstations but you don’t want to install software or your IT department is worried about the security of IM apps, you can always put desktop shortcuts and quick links in the browser to the web-based versions of these IM clients and/or Meebo.

Your patrons will lose some of the great functionality of the full clients, but it’s a start, and it might be a stepping stone to offering more down the road if you’re meeting resistance. In addition, it looks to me like you circumvent some privacy issues, too, because no transcripts of conversations are saved on the hard drive. Granted, information may still be in the browser’s cache, but hopefully you’re already addressing this issue with software that clears it out after each user.

US Youth Use Internet to Create

“The Pew American and Internet Life Project research suggested that 12 to 17-year-olds look to web tools to share what they think and do online.

It also said they were much more likely than adults to read and have a weblog.

The report found that those who did have blogs were far more likely to remix and share music and images.

A third said they shared their own work - artwork, photos, stories, or video - with others online. Girls were more likely to do so than boys - 38% compared with 29%.

Nearly one in five who use the net said they used other people's images, audio or text to help make their own creations….

‘These teens were born into a digital world where they expect to be able to create, consume, remix, and share material with each other and lots of strangers,’ Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, told the BBC News website.

‘In a very literal sense, the whole world's a stage for them.’ ” [BBC News]

What excellent timing for this report to come out! Very interesting statistics, however I know that every librarian out there is reading this report and thinking, “But what about the kids that don’t have access to the knowledge or tools to do this?” That’s the participation gap, and I think libraries need to start thinking about somehow filling it. I’ll be the first to admit that it won’t be easy, but we’re probably these kids’ only hope.

Of course, this report should also have you asking yourself if these kids can mash your library’s content into that mix, and I don’t just mean what’s in your catalog or databases. No, I mean your online guides, local history projects, podcasts, events (both online and offline), blog posts, RSS feeds, and more. What kind of an online presence does your library even have available to them for this kind of thing? It’s an interesting idea, isn’t it?

I just can’t resist a few more excerpts from the article because it’s so illustrative of what I’ve been trying to say on this site.

“The research noted that those who blogged were also far more likely to use instant messaging, search for news, and buy online.”

Is your library offering IM reference yet? If not, you should be. And we should be using blogs, RSS, and aggregators to teach better searching (and information literacy in general).

“A third (31%) said they downloaded video so that they could watch them when they wanted.”

This generation is completely shifted, and it’s what they expect. You have to start shifting your services so that they can take advantage of them when they need them and where they need them. Don’t just sit there waiting for them to walk up to the reference desk in your physical building.

“Out of those young people who do download music and video from the web, 75% of them agreed that downloading and file-sharing was so easy that it was unrealistic to expect people not to do it.”

Don’t you long for the day you could hear kids talk about online library services as being “so easy that it was unrealistic to expect people not to do it!”

“ ‘These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship,’ he said.”

This gets back to the whole 4Cs thing I’ve been talking about lately regarding social software and library websites: conversation, community, commons, and collaboration. These kids want interactivity, and they want to be able to contribute. And that includes contributing to their libraries, if we let them.

Wow, check out Mr. Man, Chris DeWeese, who has just made my life a lot easier, and maybe yours, too!

Add AIM Presence to Your Website with a Simple IMG Tag!

“I spent a little time this afternoon working on my AIM Presence project. A lot of people want to put online/offline status icons on their websites so patrons and/or readers can see if the person is online and likely available.

AIM offers its presence service, but the big hold up is that connecting to it requires a knowledge of making SOAP requests using some server side language.

I see a lot of glazed over eyes right now.

This is where I come in…. I crafted up a simple webpage that you can put inside an HTML IMG tag and get an online or offline icon.

It's that simple. (For you)….

Q&A
Q: Can I use this one my website?
A: Yes. You are free to use this if:

1. Your website is a library website (YES, your library related blogs count :) )
   
2. You kindly email or IM me with your library name and website URL, so I know who is using it and where they are coming from.” [Clam Chowder]

I added the code to my blog, and it freaking works (see it in the righthand sidebar under “Virtual Jenny” if you’re on the site)! Get on over there and grab the code for your library’s site, too! Next up on my list, add presence icons in the MLS Staff Directory for those folks who have AIM accounts! Oh, and don’t forget that if you’re running Trillian or any other metachat software, this will still work so putting this code on your library’s website will show you’re online in general.

We've gotten some great new people at Illinois Library Systems recently, and I'd love to see us work more and more closely together.

Um, Chris, please consider this a request to use the code on my site.  :-P

Two events I r-e-a-l-l-y wish I could go to:

Web 2.0: Current Realities and a Look to the Future

“Developers are working feverishly to create a second-generation Web environment.  Their objective is ambitious:  to facilitate the creation of new knowledge, resources, and tools, and to replicate the sophisticated information experience previously available only in closed proprietary environments.  But what exactly is this Web 2.0?  Is it a unique entity unto itself?  Or is it the convergence of the diverse technologies that are being created to transform the Web into an open collaborative workplace?

The program will answer these questions and more through an overview of Web 2.0 and the concepts and vocabulary that surround it.  Early adopters will discuss the practical applications of the new technologies that have emerged in its development, - technologies such as Wiki software, blogs, RSS feeds, Newsreaders, Social Bookmarking tools, folksonomies and more.  And industry experts will discuss the difference in functionalities between free services and fee-based services and how Web 2.0 can ultimately impact libraries, content providers and technology developers.”

Innovative Users Group meeting at ALA Midwinter (although this description isn’t posted there yet)

“Casey Bisson will be giving a special presentation on ‘Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0’ which will look at the World Wide Web as a ‘disruptive technology’ and how the Web affects libraries and our users. What role do web technologies and  concepts like social software, web 2.0, search engines, RSS, XML, and AJAX have in libraries? How can libraries catch up to user  expectations of our online services? How can we reinvent the OPAC to take advantage of these technologies?  Come to Casey's presentation for the answers to these and other questions!

Casey is the software developer and information technologist at Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library, where he specializes in building applications and systems to serve libraries and higher education.”

So are any bloggers going to either one of these? Help me, Obi-Wan Bloggers – you’re my only hope!

On a side note, at the Internet Librarian Conference last month, Michael Stephens and I had some great conversations about Library 2.0 (the concept, not the blog, although we heart the blog, too!). As a result, I had decided to try to do some mockups of library services and catalogs that implement some of the ideas (mainly because unlike Casey, I can’t actually create these things myself!). So I’ve uploaded to Flickr a mockup of an OPAC with tags for browsing. It’s an image I’ve been using in my presentations this year, but I haven’t had a chance to go further with it. For example, I’d like to do a catalog record with “see also” tags that are…well…tags, except they’re user-generated. I don’t know how much time I’ll have to do these, but I’ll try to add to them as time allows. I also added a screenshot of Casey’s proof-of-concept LOLA Suggest. Feel free to add your own! I think we could even include screenshots of sites illustrating the types of 2.0 functionality we'd like to see in our online services, so it doesn't have to be a mockup.

Addendum: Great article about Library 2.0 at Publish, a non-library site! Go read Library 2.0 Movement Sees Benefits in Collaboration with Patrons.

I don’t normally write about library funding because I don’t know much about it and I’ve never had to personally handle the entire budget for a library. But even I understand the issues with tax caps and library funding, and it’s difficult to watch the resulting losses erode basic library services. It’s been a very big issue for the public libraries in my System, as well as throughout Illinois.

However, Kathy Berggren, Director of the Matteson Public Library (one of my member libraries), has been leading a charge this year to educate legislators about what’s happening in order to try and change the law and reverse the trend. She’s been working tirelessly on this, and now she’s written a guest editorial called “After Tax Caps, a Librarian Watches the Funds Dwindle” for a local newspaper. It’s so well done and it exposes the problem so clearly that I asked Kathy if I could reproduce the entire piece here since it will fall off the local paper’s site in seven days. Kathy said yes, so all credit and support for the following testimony goes to her. Read it and weep.

“Did you ever have trouble getting out of bed on a Friday morning? Did you lie in bed and argue with yourself whether or not it was necessary to go to work? I've actually heard of people who like to go to work.

Come to think of it, I guess there was a time when I, too, liked to go to work. Unfortunately, that time is not now. Now I'd just as soon stay at home under the covers and hide from all of those problems that others force upon us. You know — those who make the rules but don't have to live with the consequences?

In the late 1970s, California passed Proposition 13, a tax cap ruling. At that time, the state supplemented local communities for their losses in tax revenues. In the 1990s, Illinois looked at California and decided it would offer the tax cap option on a county by county vote. Granted, Illinois didn't make it mandatory statewide, but then it didn't offer to supplement local units of government for their lost revenue either.

How do tax caps work? In a non-tax cap county, a library can increase its tax levy request by up to 5 percent annually. If inflation forces it to ask for more than 5 percent, the library must hold a truth-in-taxation hearing and demonstrate to its constituents why.

In a tax capped county, with non-home rule forms of government, the law says a library can raise its tax levy request by 5 percent or the federal consumer price index, whichever is less. Since 1991, the CPI has not risen above 3.2 percent. Last year, the CPI was 1.9 percent. In other words, no matter how much the cost of living increases; no matter if insurance rates increase as much as 35 percent in one year, and minimum wage increases 25 percent, the library could not ask for more than a 1.9 percent increase.

To put this a little more in perspective, think how much you spend on your home for maintenance in a single year. Now, increase that 10 times. Do this for several years without a pay increase.

So where are we today? Well, in California, when the federal government started cutting state funding, the state stopped supplementing local government. In the most extreme example, Salinas, a city of 150,000, announced it was closing all of its libraries due to lack of funds.

But Illinois didn't have to wait another decade to catch up. Since the state wasn't supplementing local units of government for losses from the tax caps, libraries are already cutting services, staff, and in extreme instances, they are closing libraries for a week or two, or reducing the number of days a week they are open.

And where do the rule-makers stand on this issue? Most of the lawmakers I've spoken to acknowledge that the tax cap law in effect today is a bad law; it was never intended to shut down quality-of-life services.

So what are they going to do about this fiasco? Pretty much nothing, as any action could impact their ability to get re-elected.

The county commissioners I've contacted have been shocked and sympathetic; but that's as far as the conversation goes. State legislators' comments have ranged from "It's a county issue, not a state issue" to "It's a waste of time to pass legislation concerning tax caps because the governor will just veto it." I guess my high school civics teacher was wrong when he said the Legislature could override a veto.

I even contacted my U.S. congressman's office about the problem of keeping Illinois' public libraries open; but he said that while he was sympathetic, it was a state issue.

So, where do we turn next?

Illinois' public libraries rely on property tax dollars for 85 percent to 95 percent of their revenue. Unlike other units of government, public libraries do not receive sales tax dollars, and many are unable to collect impact fees for new development. Some libraries have endowment funds — but not all. Some libraries have foundations, but not all, and since there are so many new foundations established annually, the return on investment doesn't always match the hours of work required, if you could find the volunteers to run it.

Add to the problem of running a business on a budget established one to two years in advance, with not only the headaches of tax caps, but also the added headaches resulting from TIF districts, economic incentives and tax refunds. National chain stores have been doing it for years. Now, the local chamber of commerce and the village are holding workshops to teach others how to file for property reassessment to get their property taxes lowered.

Our public library submits a tax levy request in November to the village. In December, the village adds it to theirs and files it with the county. Our fiscal year starts May 1. Around September or October, the county sends us a report telling us how much we are allowed under the tax cap. Then, as tax refunds are approved throughout the year, the county withholds collected dollars to pay off these refunds — some for cases going back 10 to 12 years.

So, the public library gets maybe a 2 percent increase in property tax dollars to cover an increase of maybe 20 percent in mandatory costs; and then the county can take back maybe 23 percent in tax refunds.

Anyone care to try to run a business like this?

So, going back to getting out of bed. I was feeling really good last spring. Additional dollars from a tax rate increase referendum were coming in, and we were starting to make building repairs that had been ignored for 10 years. Attendance at the library was increasing, and we were able to restore the book budget, enlarge the computer network and replace cut staff,

And then the tax refund reports started rolling in. They weren't too bad in May and through the summer. By September, the number of refunds and amounts going back as far as the 1992 tax year started increasing. We lost more than $36,000 one day for a five-year-old tax case. This week, the biggie was a collection adjustment that took away more than $131,000. In fact, since our fiscal year began May 1, we have lost more than $203,000, and our fiscal year is only half over.

For several years, librarians have been asking their state legislators for help. Before it's too late, citizens and voters need to step up and start putting pressure on their state representatives. Either we find a way to supplement property taxes, or we watch our public libraries lock their doors one by one.” [Originally located online at http://www.starnewspapers.com/star/spedit/col/03-col2.htm]

There’s another interesting poll up at Yahooligans right now. It asks which you would rather have in your bedroom - a TV or a computer. Results? Computer by a margin of two-to-one, and that figure has been constant all day.

Two-way, interactive media trumps one-way, monolithic box.

BTW, another interesting little factoid. If you go to Synonym.com and do an antonym search for “interactive,” the synonym is “synergistic” and the antonym is “antagonistic.” Kind of puts the whole DRM, Broadcast Flag, and “VHS will be the death of the movie industry” debate in the proper perspective.

Today I gave a presentation about blogging and RSS for Loyola University’s librarians. A very cool group of people who are already starting to experminent with both blogs and RSS.

Because the Presentations & Articles page on my site is so woefully out-of-date, I’ve started a new category on the MLS web site where I’ll link to all of my presentations as I post them. And because of our spiffy newish site, there is, but of course, an RSS feed. 

Tonight Google is messing with showing images for your keyword at the top of their search results. I know I don’t have to remind all of you that if you type “jenny” into Google, those pictures are not of me!  :-P

I think Liz was right on target when she talked about search engine algorithms not replacing the wisdom of humans and our networks (and in our case, librarians)!

Just a few cool things I’ve noted on library web sites recently and haven’t had a chance to blog.

• pictureAnnArbor = “Welcome to pictureAnnArbor! Our mission is to gather, capture and share information and images that reflect everyday life in our community. Later this fall we will have many new enhancements. Meanwhile, you may bring your photographs and other items to one of the following scanning sessions.” Every piece of that paragraph is cool (free scanning sessions!), but bonus points because you can also email them your pictures.
   
• BPL Forums = an online bulletin board for discussing library-related topics, computer club issues, and teen stuff. Conversation and community.
   
• Music on iPod: Your Pod or Ours? = more iPod goodness from the South Huntington Public Library crew who continue to break new ground

Digital Divide Multiplied

“One thing that did occur to me yesterday, that I think is important, is the nature of our digital divide. There are lots of digital divides, each with its own seeds for danger. What I was thinking about was the digital divide between tech-savvy students and students with little or no access to networked digital information outside the classroom — and to some extent, the digital divide between tech-savvy students and less-savvy teachers.

The literacy divide of the 20th century distinguished between people who could functionally read and those who could not. Democracy was certainly at stake, but to no small degree, so was commerce. The literate could consume the messages of content producers.

Today, the divide has multiplied, because people with contemporary (digital/21st century) literacy skills not only consume content, but they are the content. Being literate means being part of the network. The difference is not merely the individual who can read and individual who can not. It’s the difference between networked communities of power, and individuals who are cut off. This is a distinction too broad to ignore or postpone.

Consider IM Speak, the abbreviations that students use in their instant message conversations. It is, in no small way, a new grammar, and these students invented it spontaneously in collaboration. The industrial literacy way would have been to assign a standards committee to establish a new grammar, and then spend years teaching it in our classrooms. We should be amazed and in awe of this accomplishment. It happened not because these kids were digitally literate, but because being digitally literate meant being part of a network — a community of power.

Where is our community of power?” [2 Cents Worth]

David Warlick posted these thoughts in regards to education, but I think they’re very relevant for librarians, too. After all, we’re supposed to be the safety net for the digital divide(s), right, whether it’s access or information literacy? I’m becoming more and more convinced that libraries will have to find a way to help fill the coming divide of content-creators (those who think of themselves as creators with the skills necessary to actually create) versus strictly consumers (the old model in which the person simply ingests everything as one-way media and doesn’t participate in these new networks and resources because they can’t or didn’t even know they could). On the one side, you have great models like Lane and Matthew, but on the other side you have millions of kids I can’t even point to because they’re left out of this community.

One model to combat this: Bloomington Public Library.

Side note: check out this other great post by David: Something from my Research, which includes the following statement in the comments (read the post for context):

“I liked these rules because they were worded for the learner, not against undesired behaviors. They grant students the right to learn, rather than defining a container within which to behave like students.”

For oh-so-many reasons, it’s Lane Lawley’s I So Want One blog of recommendations of toys for tweens, just in time for Christmas. How freaking cool is this? I don’t have enough fingers to count the ways! (And heads up on the Fly line of products; I saw them at Target last week and was mightily intrigued!)

Background info here and here. Brent’s gonna love this one.

Since I haven’t been able to blog much lately, I haven’t talked much about the kids and their flavors of the moment. Instant messaging is becoming more and more integral to their daily lives (remember that Kailee is eleven and Brent is ten). I knew Kailee would take to it like a librarian to books, and she has not let me down (not that I even mentioned IM to her – I let her discover it on her own). She’s already gone through quite a few of the IM stages - addiction, fighting with friends, changing her icon every day, and using it as a primary method of communication with the one friend of hers that is still on dial-up. She has also asked me to get her web site up and running (she means a blog, although we don’t use that word).

Brent, on the other hand, has taken to IM in a way I hadn’t expected. He wasn’t much interested in it until school started back up, but I think the fact that most of his peers have IM accounts prompted him to start playing with it. He went to school one day in September determined to get some screen names so he’d have some friends to talk to online and even though I had an inkling, I was still stunned when he came home with 30 AIM names. Now he specifically asks to go on the computer to “check his IM,” usually while playing music on Rhapsody. He especially enjoys chatting with Aaron, who made the interesting observation that at first, Brent tried to get him to log in to Runescape so they could chat there. I’ve seen this to, where Brent’s preferred communication medium is chat within a “massive multiplayer online role playing game” (MMORPG) where he can talk with friends and go on quests together at the same time.

Anyway, what I really wanted to note is that even though Brent has gone back to near total immersion in Runescape at the expense of other games, he chose to spend a good chunk of his birthday money on Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix. I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve only gotten to watch him play for a few minutes, but it’s really fascinating to watch. As long-time Nintendo fans would guess, the company has extended the DDR concept like only Nintendo can.

Unlike regular DDR, Mario DDR has a “story mode” in which you have to conquer levels to advance to new levels and unlock songs. Instead of just arrows scrolling on the screen, various icons also scroll and stepping on them when they hit the top arrows triggers an action (Koopa Troopas that kick shells, Ice Spinies that decrease your dance meter, Boos that cover up the screen, and the like). You do all of this to get “keys” which unlock something, although we weren’t sure what because Brent doesn’t read documentation. (As Kate always says, “documentation is wasted on the young.”)

At one point, Bowser started crying because Mario took his keys in a dance-off, which is when we learned that you want those keys because they unlock music for your soul. Seriously. I didn’t catch the exact language, but like Katamari Damacy, it’s very touch-feely, this time about music and how important it is for your well-being. Overall, though, I have to say that Mario DDR is far more complicated than I want DDR to be, although I haven’t tried workout mode yet because I hurt my knee a couple of months ago and it’s still not quite ready for that kind of strain yet. Brent, however, loves the addition of a story to the dancing, and it’s perfect for him.

I bring this up in part because I haven’t had a chance to evaluate it for use in libraries (hey Eli, have you??), but I have to think that if it’s viable, it’s even more harmless than Mario Kart. When you hear Eli talk about it, he has a great quote that about the worst thing you can say about Mario Kart is that it encourages kids to throw bananas out the window when they’re driving. Well, Mario DDR is actually more harmless than that and has a whole kumbaya theme about harmony and music. Really interesting and perfectly Nintendo.

Michael’s been on quite a roll lately with his posts, and now you can give back and help him with his research for his dissertation.

“Finally - after months of reading, pondering, creating the actual survey in Zope, passing the Institutional Review Board application process, some anxious e-mails to my advisor Dr. Brian O'Connor at UNT and some wide-eyed and awake nights thinking, here is my preliminary research project survey! Please, if you are an MLS, in library school, or working at a library and blogging, take the survey!”

Fill out the survey!