I don’t attempt to predict stuff very often, but I think this one’s safe – I think Apple’s new iPad is most definitely a game changer.

Why? Because it combines so many things into one handy, easy-to-use device. Just watching the video about the iPad and poking around on the website a bit, you find out all that the iPad will supposedly do, including:

• web browsing
• email
• photo viewing
• watch videos (even YouTube videos)
• listen to music (it has iTunes built in)
• buy and read ebooks
• a cool map
• note taking
• a calendar
• Contacts list
• iWork (Apple’s answer to Microsoft Office) is rebuilt for the iPad, so you have word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software
• The App Store works here, too, which opens up 140,000 apps that all do different things

And of course, it’s multi-touch. So instead of having to use a mouse or keyboard shortcuts to operate the thing … you just touch the screen. I’m just amazed that Apple seemingly rolled up a Microsoft Surface, a tablet PC, a video player, a netbook, an iPod, and an ebook reader, and came out with something light, cool, and truly unique. Except maybe the name – sorry Apple, but the iPad is a silly name.

Apple could turn this thing into a student’s best friend. Instead of carrying a heavy backpack around, students could use the iPad to carry all their textbooks (assuming Apple partners with textbook companies), any multimedia they need to watch, their word processor to write papers (or they could just use Google Docs via a wifi connection), multiple ways to take notes, communicate to classmates and teachers via email/IM/Facebook/Skype/etc. And still have their favorite photos, their grand music collection, and a couple of fun games with them, too.

How about for libraries? Think Reference Desk and roving reference here. It’s the same price as a netbook laptop. But probably easier to carry around, easier to show stuff to people, easier to make the text larger for people who need larger text (you just touch and stretch the screen with your fingers to make the text larger – just like an iPhone). And has a 178 degree viewing angle, so it would work well to show stuff to patrons.

Game changer? I think so … or maybe I’m just gushing at the cool new toy. What do you think?

Library 101 has launched! There are a few things you should know about the project:

• It’s a collaborative project – Michael Porter and I created it (with over 500 others!)
• There’s a website for the Library 101 Project
• There’s a video (watch above, at the project site, or on YouTube)
• Download the mp3 for your iPods/favorite mp3 player!
• Become a Fan at our Library 101 Facebook Page
• Even better – read one of the many essays attached to the project, written by some top-notch librarians
• And … read our 101 Resources  and Things to Know essay, complete with 101 links of things Michael and I think you should know!

But even better than watching the video, listening to the song, or reading an essay is this – please participate by commenting! Let us know what YOU think is a “Library 101″ for your library – what do you think librarians need to know to succeed? Tell us in the comments attached to each essay!

My part of this session is above… I introduced the concept and talked about the variety of interactions available using social networks.

Up next was Amy Kearns and Julie Strange, talking about: Tweet What? 5 sweet ways to connect in 140 characters or less. Notes below:

Searching for tweets with a positive/negative attitude – sentiment at advanced search of search.twitter.com

showing examples of types of tweets from libraries

Twitter can be embedded anywhere…

1. use it for reference
2. connect for customer service
3. broadcast news & events
4. solicit feedback
5. broaden professional networks
6. harness the hive

Lists overview

I’ve been asked by quite a few people, so … here’s how I made my Facebook Pages screencast:

1. I used Jing Pro to record the screencast. There’s a free version – I whipped out $14.95 (have to pay it every year) for the pro version. Why? The pro version comes with that cool “webcam in screen” effect I used at the beginning and end of the screencast. It also records in MPEG-4 format, so I could easily edit it. It only records up to 5 minutes at a time, which is no problem – just record separate clips, then dump each clip into a video editing program (more on that in a sec).
2. I plugged in a Samson CO1U USB Condenser Mic to get good quality sound on the speaking parts. It came out a little quiet – will need to play with that some more!
3. Once the parts and pieces were recorded in Jing, I dumped each screencast clip into Apple’s iMovie, which is an easy-to-use video editor. I didn’t do much there – added a fade in and out to the beginning/ending of the screencast, spliced the clips together, added a bit of text … and removed all my goof-ups, extraneous pauses and “uhms” where I could. My goal was to get the screencast under 10 minutes so I could dump it to YouTube (and I was successful!).

And that’s about all! The combo of Jing Pro and iMovie worked great, the mic was easy to use … any questions? Anyone else used Jing Pro?

The second presentation I gave at NEFLIN in Jacksonville, FL was Tinkering in the Techie Toybox – here’s the Slideshare version and a couple of links included in the presentation. Enjoy!

Links to other Techie Toyboxes I mentioned in the presentation:

• Princeton Public Library’s Gadget Garage
• Massachusetts Library Association’s Technology Petting Zoo
• Technology Petting Zoo webinar recap at WebJunction (includes a great starter list of techie toys!)

Remember my post on TSCPL’s Meebo chat widget embedded in our library catalog? Since then, we have stopped using the Meebo Me widget. It was great – it helped us start our IM reference service, and it was easy to embed pretty much wherever we wanted. But we grew out of it!

We discovered a few shortcomings, like not being able to send hotlinks through it, and our public services staff really wanted the ability to send an IM to someone else. So now, we’re using Libraryh3lp for our IM reference service. Libraryh3lp gives us those added benefits and more.

And we’re doing a few different things with the catalog embed, too. Here’s a pic of the keyword, No Records Found search:

We’re trying to make instructions clear, friendly and attractive. If you click the Ask Now button, you get a tiny IM widget pop-up page. Why pop-up? With our Meebo widget, we discovered that a lot of people would start asking a question, then click something … and they’d be gone, because they had clicked away from the page with the embedded IM widget. Bumer! With our new pop-up version, that problem is solved. Users can click away all they want … and still interact with us.

But even cooler than that – Michael, our web designer (one of his many hats) discovered a way to embed a similar thing on the Search Results page:

This provides more opportunities for patrons to ask questions when they get stuck on a search – even if they’re finding things. Basically, they have access to us ON EVERY SEARCH they do.

And not just IM access – that’s provided via the Ask Now button. But we also include our phone number and a link to our email Ask a Librarian form.

We’re excited about this – should be fun to see if we get more catalog-related questions.

I recently visited Darien Library with the goal of checking out their innovative approach to technology – goal achieved! Check out the video in this post (and thanks to John Blyberg for the tour and for putting up with my video camera!). While their technology is amazingly cool, that’s not really what excited me. What excited me most was Darien’s idea of extreme customer service.

During my Darien visit, I had the privilege of chatting with Louise Berry, Alan Gray, and John Blyberg over lunch (great lunch, great conversation – thanks guys!). We talked about technology, new library buildings, and how we should be serving our library customers. Louise and Alan told me about their library’s core message – extreme customer service. Basically, they want to demonstrate extreme customer service in everything they do.

This idea of a “core message” is discussed in the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. Most of the book is devoted to making your core message “stick” – this is what Darien Library has done.

They even provided examples. During lunch, Louise, Alan and John mentioned an after-hours wine and cheese event they held at the library. The library was closed, but doors were open. Patrons not attending the event came in anyway … and guess what? They weren’t turned away – instead, they were allowed to check out books (RFID-based self-check-out machines help). Staff were even seen setting up new library cards for patrons. This is very different from what many libraries do. For most after-hours events, patrons would simply be told (nicely, I’m sure) to come back tomorrow.

So – one example of extreme customer service at Darien. You can find another example in the video. Watch for the mini laptops in the children’s area of the library. Those are staff public service laptops used for roaming reference type stuff. But listen to the children’s staff talk about them – kids pick those laptops up and use them. Patrons even use the public service desktop … and Darien’s staff is fine with that! When I asked about this, here’s what I heard: “why would we NOT allow that?”

John said the same thing later on in my tour (not captured on video). We were in a staff area, and I noticed someone had brought in her personal laptop. I asked what she could connect to … and John said staff can bring in their personal laptops and connect to Darien’s staff-only network. I pried a bit further, and this is when John said “why would we NOT allow that? It would simply hinder their work!” Then John went on to explain that they plan for the exceptions and fix those things, rather than lock down technology so much that it hinders the work of the library. Extreme customer service for their staff, too!

Does your library have a core message, and how does that play out? And … does your library lock technology down so much so that it hinders the work of the library? What would happen if you opened that can of worms up? Would any escape? Something to think about…

Speaker: Nina McHale & Curt Tagmeier ?

Nina:

the embedded, widget-ized library – iphone app for the catalogs, chat widgets, igoogle gadgets

She wants us to share the love – get our code out there so others can reuse

give it away! any place where you can have/show cut&paste stuff – provide the HTML for others

This is easy – copy/paste stuff. So even your patrons can do this

Everyone will start using our stuff! Check with your IT folks first, but it’s ok.

Authentication stops others from using your stuff – but they can copy and adapt your code.

Creating a steal this code tool

decide what kind of widget code chunks you want to offer

Cool – her library IS sharing stuff.

Showing some examples

***************

Curt:

mobilSiteGalore:
build your own mobile website with this tool
We’re building one live …

Gave example of building a widget with this tool.

Speaker: Mary Ellen Bates

links are at batesinfo.com/cil2009

Alltop.com

• online magazine rack
• she’s comparing alltop to early yahoo, just add rss!
• rss aggregator
• built by “2 guys and a gal”
• highly selective, well-done

Think about how you can use this in your own organization…

Viewzi.com

• visualization and clustering and metasearch…
• one of those silly swirly visual search thingies (not a fan)
• claims it’s more immersive feeling
• You eventually DO get text
• gives you a choice – viaual, clustered, text, etc… good.

lexiquo.net

• adds lexical variants
• on the fly, you can get:
• synonym suggestions
• singular/plural
• translate terms into other languages
• does clustering, but only in German
• interface a bit squirrely

keotag.com

• a way to skim across web 2.0
• query example – she did a GTD search…
• ok. sort of a metasearch for 2.0-ish sites like blogpulse, youtube, twitter, technorati, etc

carrot2.org

• clustering on demand
• with a choice of sorting algorithms
• and a choice of search engines
• cool graphic display
• looks like the old northern lights search engine! With the folder clustering thing
• but allows you to choose HOW you want to cluster

Live.com

• add prefer:word to query
• ranks these search results higher
• a cool way to change the relevance ranking – doesn’t narrow the search

awesome highlighter

• highlight text on a page
• saves a copy of the page with a new URL
• then you can direct others to that page with the highlighted text

textrunner search

• looks for assertions
• information mining
• ex: what kills bacteria in google – lots of stuff. In textrunner, it looks for a sentence with an answer.
• so it’s looking at the web in a different way. It’s looking at sentence structure instead of focusing on different words

Google Translate

• translates text into other languages
• shows text side by side
• so you drop in search results, it translates your words into words in other languages, then shows the results side by side

Twitter Venn

• snipr.com/cemmn
• compare frequency of words in twitter
• generates venn diagram
• visual way to see this

viswiki.com

• searches all wikipedia articles
• does a more visual search of it
• it structures the wikipedia article in a more user-friendly way
• gives a tag cloud for similar articles
• lists out recommended articles
• gives a visual mindmap display of related stuff

wikipedia-roll

• another visual thing
• it’s doing clustering

worldwidescience.org

• federated search (she sped through this one)

readwriteweb

• a tutorial
• learn to love social media
• can you:
• ID the most popular blogs on a topic
• rank the blog posts
• eliminate content overload
• check out the hotness of each post
• etc
• Cool – I’ll have to find this and pass it around

How to build a social media cheat sheet for any topic

• also from readwriteweb

Legal Research Engines

• cornell law library
• google custom search engines
• searches legal stuff

Newseum

• newseum.org
• aggregated the front pages of newspapers around the world
• [me - hee. this won't last much longer]

wordle

• makes a visual tag cloud from text

• good way to visually see the underlying message or tone of soemthing you read

Google’s search wiki

• you can comment on search results
• you can move things around
• it’s public – your annotations, anyway
• you can customize your search of google…

deepdyve

• skipped it

searchme

• it automatically clusters and starts asking you questions

powerset

• looks at wikipedia
• it’s a sense-making search engine
• does clustering, looks for sentences similar to your search

searchcloud.net

• beta search engine
• lets you weight your search results
• looks like a search/tag cloud – you can change the weights visually by changing the weight of the font. Nice.

get conference buzz

• bloggers live blog, live tweet, etc
• So check those things out – technorati, google blog search, twitter search, etc

Google audio indexing

• speech to text indexing

Google Maps Mashups

• very interesting map mashups!

My way cool web team recently built a Facebook app for our library catalog! If you’re interested in trying it out, simply search for tscpl catalog in Facebook and our app will appear.

Not necessarily a new thing (do an app search in Facebook for library catalog and you’ll find quite a few) … but very useful, nonetheless.

Why haven’t we built an iPhone app like the DC Public Library? Our big goal is to focus on our local community, and build for them. I’m guessing that DCPL has quite a few iPhone users already (or at least potential library users that are also iPhone owners). Topeka? Not so much. I’ve been watching our web stats – last month, we had 63 iphone visits … about .18% of our total web visits. Not enough to design for (yet).

But Facebook use in Topeka? Judging by a quick walkthrough of our building (and peeking at what patrons are doing) – huge.

More Facebook app screenshots:

• Finding us in Facebook’s app search
• Our app page
• Results page
• single result

Enjoy!