cil2008

Speakers:
Michael Casey & Michael Stephens

This session is a standing-room only session!

Organizations are starting to let their staff blog - huge change from not long ago

Not always easy to implement new things

Quote: “Every time people really like something, we get rid of it.” real quote from librarian at PLA. Ouch.

Showing signs from libraries - bad signs from libraries! People are talking about us. What stuff are you giving them to talk about?

Asking - What are your roadblocks?
inability to use open source software
we’ve always done it this way
control-freak IT support
No admin priviledges
only making cosmetic changes
budget
no time
The excessive love of process
Luddite trustees

Road map to transparency
open conversation (aside - nice slide!)
visit the front lines
cross train, provide learning for all staff
consider the role of anonymity
what would you add?

Don’t ask staff for input if you are not going to use it

Going to the field:
bring them out (managers)
visit the front lines
examine different staffing models
develop big picture understanding
administrators should understand everyone’s roles
get out of the office!
decisions are not made in a vacuum
crucial if administrators are not librarians

Circ staff at Darien Library:
they are blogging
they are buying books for the collection
they are going to BookExpo (a conference)
They are trusted and encouraged

Face to face is important!
Casey - taking an academic approach with office hours - once a week for 3 hours, anyone can come in and meet with him, off the record if need be, but face-to-face.

Say “Yes!

Speakers: Helene Blowers, Tony Tallent

How do we get the innovation and change to occur? This track is about that - how to move our organizations forward.

Talking about the ingredients of innovation

What’s innovation NOT?
process improvement
strategic planning
best practice
benchmarking
etc…

What is it?
it’s an intersection
a pivotal point

Creativity is thinking up new things.
Innovation is doing new things. It’s action.

Book to read - the seeds of innovation by elaine dundon.

Innovation is Fresh Practice! (rather than best practice)

4 components of I:
creativity
strategy
implementation
profitability

Creative is I

I am an innovator:
i have ideas
i have done my homework
I’ll do the initial legwork
i am capable of more than my job description
i am a leader, too
i take risks with you

More:
I offer you a framework
i put \resources behind my expectations
i create growth opportunities
i SUPPORT your work
i celebrate your success
i take risks with you

Create alliances - get others on board with your ideas - sell them

prototype your idea

Don’t ask for permission - ask for support!

Sell your vision personally - don’t do it on paper. Actually, I’d say it differently - sell it multiple ways. On paper (BRIEF), person to person, via presentation, etc.

People need to SEE something, so prototype it

What’s wild success look like?
IT will not feel like business as usual.

It’s also about failure - if you’re not failing once in awhile, you’re not being innovative enough.

Two years ago, Delft bought a mobile recording facility - to teach kids how to tell their own stories via sound and video.

These guys do a fun presentation. They talked about the documentary they made, visiting libraries across America. Their first stop was New York - so Eric asked if anyone was in the audience from New York Public Library - someone raised her hand, so she was invited onstage to site with the speakers… and was offered a cookie, too (she was actually from Georgia…).

They showed snippets of their documentary, then spoke, then more snippets, etc.

Next, they invited Matt Gullett on stage and talked about PLCMC’s story-making initiatives

At Imaginon, they measure the creative things that come out of it in addition to things like door counts. And they tell and share stories to show usefulness.

Then they showed a clip of library science students, and invited a library science student on stage…

One skill all librarians need - from the MLS student - “the ability to adapt to change.”

Speaker: Roy Tennant

Why?

more content is better
more access is better
can help provide personalized service

Kete
kete.net.nz - not heard about this. Looks like a web app for housing digitized stuff, that’s more social than the usual. EX - some people can create ads on the site…

Descriptive Contributions
ex - allowing customers to add content to old photos (ie., who are the people in the photo?)

WorldCat
Customer reviews seen on both worldcat and worldcat local
Library of Congress Flickr feed - getting good tag additions and comments
they got more than 10,000 unique tags our of 55,000 total!
also got more than 11,000 friends/contacts
more than 3,500 comments posted by more than 1,400 users

Even cooler - LoC is using Flickr community content to add into to the LoC records in their catalog. Nice.

What has LoC accomplished?
- higher profile of its collections
- community engagement - in this case, their “community” is the world…
- some corrections and additions to metadata
- sparked discussions and elicited personal histories related to photos - started conversation
- Higher visibility for the LoC Blog

Boston Public Library - doing a similar thing

Exploiting the knowledge of the Masses
- many eyes increases likelihood of getting things right
- library staff are often distant from localized knowledge of items in tehir collection
- web can provide a feedback loop

Contributions to discovery
- bookspace - Hennepin’s thing. They do a good job at connecting people and content

Tags:
user terminology - people using what works for them

LibraryThing - tagmash - powerful tag mashup search in LibraryThing

Third Party Providers
LibGuides
LibMarks
(both from SpringShare)

LibraryThing for Libraries (put the pig in a dress!!!)

ChiliFresh.com a review engine for your library

What to Know
Our idea of content may not be theirs
Going to be messy (and that’s ok - it falls to the bottom)

Issues to consider:
- what are your goals?
- are you set up appropriately to meet those goals? Human and back-end tech stuff?
- can you maximize benefits? ie statistical evaluations of tags?
- will you need to moderate?
- how to distinguish between user and library content?
- is the potential impact worth the investment?

where to from here?
- user engagement is a good thing
- need to get up to speed on how to foster engagement in our systems
- need to get savvy about how to use things like tags most effectively?

Speakers: Darlene Fichter, Frank Cervone

Firefox tools:
safecache: protects privacy, defends against cache based tracking techniques
safehistory: protects your privacy by defending your history cache
FoxMarks: automatically synchronizes bookmarks
FEBE: Firefox Environment Backup Extension - syncs extensions between computers

Other webtools for collaboration
meebo chat widget
LInkBunch: lets you put multiple links into one small link
DocSyncer: automatically finds and syncs your document files to Google Docs - this means everything.
Twhirl: desktop client for twitter
polldaddy: fast simple way to put a poll on your site

VisCheck: shows what things look like to a colorblind person…

Feng GUI: automatic alternative to eye tracking - creates heatmaps based on algorhythms…

Browsershots: creates screenshots in different browsers - service actually visit browser/PC combination. Cool!

Photoshop Express: coo new online photo editor

Think website distribution: get an “add this” tool - lets customers bookmark your stuff on different site

Google Gadgets: gadgets you can add to your site - things like countdowns

altavista babelfish translator: gets at the gist of what’s going on - not perfect, but good enough

Nifty utilities:

ProcessTamer: monitors CPU usage of processes, reduces the priority of apps that hop the cpu

FIle Hamster: real-time backup and archiving of your files while you work

Syncback Freeware: backup all files with a single click, scheduler to automate backups, versioning, incremental backups, machine to machine via ftp - encryption and compression, too.

LinkExtractor: pulls links off page

Moving large files: mailbigfile.com, slipload, yousendit, mediafire, panda (peer to peer)

reCaptcha - interesting…

anonymouse: check if resources accessible outside your ip range, or for privacy

Prism: app that lets users split web apps our of the website and onto your desktop?

Find more widgets:
widgetbox, google gadgets, previous cool tools presentations

Speaker: Jeff Wisniewski

Keep content fresh

- Update your copyright date! You can use code to do this
- add a last updated script to your page (do it as an external script so you use one script in many places
- add photos to contacts! Goes a long way in increasing user’s trust in a website

Turn boring old contact info into exciting hCards
- using microformats extension - allows you to import contact info into your address book

Don’t use click here. Instead, use Current articles are available here (with current articles text as the link)
- “Current articles” - a trigger word, it’ll be highlighted as a link, so it’ll stand out more

Harness the awesome power of the 4 question survey!

surveymonkey.com
Great questions to ask:
1. what’s the purpose of your visit to our website today
2. were you able to complete your tasks today
3. if you weren’t successful, why not?
ps - ask for their email

Web 2ify your site

update look with web 2.0 stylr, etc

Use graphics when possible

Speed:

Yslow (firefox extension) - helps figure out why your page is slow

Exploit the user’s cache to speed up your site

For server admins:
- set certain file types to stay fresh/not expire
- image file types, css, js files, pdfs
- this helps speed

add an expiration date code thing in your .htaccess file - another speed thing

single image rather than multiple combined images will speed the site up - fewer http requests

eliminate inline scripts - call scripts externally instead

spring cleaning - tidy your homepage
validator - will automatically fix your css
CLEANCSS - it will unbloat your css, compresses it, etc

Move important info our of the blindness zone (top header area, far right, etc - “banner blindness”

Page titles
Google Webmaster accounts? sign up for account, get lots of goodies, including title tag analyzer

page titles - best way to structure:
document title | section name | library/site name

accessibility
add labels - screen readers read this, the checkbox text becomes clickable - not just the checkbox itself

make sure to use radio boxes and check boxes appropriately

Make your site social media friendly

add social bookmark links
- social bookmark creator - select bookmark service, it spits out html code to dump into your website

Q from me - is it dynamic?

Speaker: Jenny Levine

Computers and the Internet will not save the world (Clifford Stoll, from 1995) - what’s missing is human contact. This is also true in libraryland.

We know how to do this in our buildings:
- Delft Public Library (DOK)
- they have electronic based contextual digital signage (run off a Wii, of all things)
- they integrate games, etc so it’s clear everything is content
- iTunes booths
- Gaming is a social event - the social aspect happens around the games - not the games themselves

Our jobs - connecting people in these spaces

It’s not the tech - it’s the touch

Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody - another mention of that book. I need to read it.

***”We don’t own this but… We Can Get it For You” (linked to ILL) - much better than a normal ILL link.

Database of the week via SlideShare idea…

Human presence is important - showing that (IM “I’m online” button)

Tampa - having kids make videos advertising the ask a librarian service

ACRL is using the Meebo Chat room to bring people together. 65 people appeared…

Creating Serendipity for Users:
technology is making it easier to connect with people
LibraryThing for Libraries - extends the catalog via people (tagging, related books, etc)

BiblioCommons -
Very social opac - stuff like coverflow visual viewing, saved items and viewing other save item lists, people connections via in-boxes, etc. They’re focusing on the people parts

Tagging - they prompt for adjectives so you get the tone of a book

You can add trusted sources (what other people like)

David Free and I had a great time with our preconference workshop yesterday. Here’s a link to my presentation, and David Free’s post on the session (includes a link to his presentation and a link to the podcast we made). And of course, the video we made is at the top of this post.