This is a pecha kucha format presentation I gave at Internet Librarian 2008 and also at the Hawaii Library Association annual conference. Enjoy!
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Speaker - Jeff Wisniewski
problem: old opacs weren’t designed for usability
- they were designed for the back-end of libraries
- designed to store data
Look at Jeff’s library’s OPAC - pittcat - much nicer looking than most other opacs (it’s still in beta)
they plan on keeping the more traditional-looking opac search for the forseeable future - eventually they’ll look at useage stats and go from there.
goals for new interface:
- does it have an intuitive interface?
- zero instruction needed, like amazon’s search interface
- no dumb error messages
- expose more of their collection (faceted search thing)
- integrate various silos (other databases they had, locally-created stuff, etc)
- get it up and running yesterday!
If you can, don’t do an RFP. It’s sorta backwards, hard to write, frequently states the obvious
instead, they made a features list
- must have
- highly desirable
- and a third category
- had to have the must have features
made a spreadsheet for the selection process with each vendor and their features listed.
Do this for your users - not your staff!!!
- boolean, advanced search, etc - your users DON’T CARE. So don’t offer it.
- resist the power search…
they renamed the old catalog the “classic” catalog - funny!
Do publicity on the new thing!
Usability
- call it what it is - map, not cartographic resource; music, not sound recording (that’s what the majority of them are)
- hyperlinks - you can put them practically everywhere
make sure it’s visual - use book jacket pics, etc
give your catalog legs:
- create facebook search widgets
- embed search widgets elsewhere, too
social stuff - do it even if you’re not quite ready yet
integration with other databases (federated search)
- some have them
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Speaker: Jeff Wisniewski
Why be social
bad reasons - it’s cool, my boss told me to, etc
better reasons - provides innovative ways for libraries to connect with ysers we may never see face to face, to encourage, promote, innovate, learn, adapt, to improve customer service, to discover and deliver what users want, to market without marketing
Listen first
is it a conversation? What’s being said?
Listen first to see what the tone is
Developing a social media plan
define a strategy
define goals - ie., increase awareness of library services, increase the number of new cards issues, etc
pick a platform or two
the right platform depends on your goals
Then - start!
start blogging/leaving comments, etc
Assessing social media success
quantitatively and qualitatively - both are needed
what you are measuring - the “trinity approach” - behavior, outcome, experience
the what (behavior)
quantitative
number of blog posts
- Boyd’s Conversation Index: posts/comments + trackbacks, should be greater than 1
number of facebook friends/fans
views/visits
Outcome: the tangible benefit of your social media activity
- higher satisfaction
- fewer help desk calls
- more searches
- increase in funding
Example - are your flickr imsages viewed? Monitor the number of users. Also monitor referrals from flickr to your website, then you can say collection use has increased by 2.1%… coolness.
Experience
put on your listening ears!
listen/engage/converse - take action
be authentic - admit problems and engage that way
Experience metric - experience CAN be measured and evaluated
stars, scars, or neutral? (positive, negative, neutral comments)
5 things to get started:
1. monitor general search engine results
- focus on google (they do the best in including social media stuff in search results)
2. monitor social media search engine results
- why?
- used by high-value, highly connected, highly influencial users
- pays great divedends if they are fans of the library
choose the specific social media search engines that match your media efforts
- delicious - see how many people bookmarked it (quant) and something else…
- twitter - do you show up? How often?
- advanced search has a local search option
3. create alerts
- check standard web logs for refers from search engines. What terms do people use?
- use quotes
- choose “comprehensive” to get results from news, globs, web, video, and groups
4. analytics
- create a conversion funnel to measure a social media action chain. It measures follow-through. IE if they go to a signup page, did they finish the process? If they did, that’s a conversion.
5. assess the nature and sentiment of activity
- what’s the stregth and tone of the social media activity?
- is it deep, is it a drive by, one-off comment?
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At the beginning of my Video on the Web presentation, I made a quick video to show how easy it is to create video content. I asked for one takeaway from Internet Librarian, and quickly interviewed three session attendees.
Here’s the final video!
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danah boyd gave this morning’s keynote session. An aside - Howard Rheingold AND danah boyd - way to go, Information Today!
Title: Social Media & Networked Technologies: Research & Insights
Web 2.0 means different things to different people.
- user-generated content
- techies - always beta
- business crowd - it was a glimmer of hope (an “after the first crash” thing)
Early days of the web - very topic driven.
Now instead of information organized around topics, it’s arranged around people - around friends.
What make it a social network site?
Profile:
physical world - clothes, hair styles, etc define us
digital world
- we’re an IP address…
- we repurpose stuff to reflect us (ie., lying about age in myspace).
- younger people’s profile pages are similar to their bedroom walls (and probably horrify their parents in the same way)
Friending (not sure that was the word she used):
- it’s still awkward to us
- some have 30-50 friends (it reflects their real life friends)
- some have 1-200 friends, trying to collect a whole school
- 3rd category - people who collect as many friends as possible
- MySpace lets you arrange friends “in order” Top Friends is a very tricky thing. Bands are safe, put them in your family list (that’s safe), put your girlfriend in the top 10, etc.
Comments/Wall:
- not much meaning in those - I’m bored, what’s up type conversation
- it’s a type of social grooming - very similar to the “how are you” greeting in the physical space
- it’s a way of validating each other
Status Updates:
- facebook status, twitter
- lots of different purposes
- creating a sense of peripheral awareness
- this will still evolve for the next several years
Why are we using these tools and services?
one reason - parents don’t let their kids out of the house - so they chat on myspace, txt, and talk on the phone
Quote by a 16-year old: “if you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.”
Properties of public spaces:
Persistence:
- what you say sticks around.
- every ephemeral act is stored
Replicability
- you can copy/paste
- take stuff from one context to another
- I’d probably put mashups here, too
- she mentioned modification of content/context
- it’s also a way young people bully each other
Scalability:
- “It’s public”
- It’s a global medium… but the average blog is read by a whopping 6 people
- you have the option of reaching a million people, and the reality of reaching no one
Searchability:
- currently, you’re not searchable as you walk around
- your boss doesn’t always know where you are
- with the internet, you become searchable - even by people you don’t want to find you
plays out in 3 different dynamics:
there are invisible audiences
- we’re a visible audience, and she’s adjusting the presentation based on our reactions… with the web, we don’t know our audience
- so we have to deal with the possibility of invisible audiences
- friends - an invisible audience
collapsed contexts:
- a wedding is a highly scripted event
- online, we might be socializing with our boss AND our kids
- it’s challenging to deal with both contexts
public = private
- about control
Tagging - the skills librarians learned in grad school are now becoming skills everyone needs to learn. Wow.
wikipedia - collorative knowledge. The most transparent gathering of knowledge the world has ever seen.
young people learn about it by means of grafiti - they erase everything on a wikipedia page and put their name on it. In the process, they learn.
we should teach kids how to interact with it and add to it and be critical thinkers, rather than to avoid it …
And my battery ont he mac died - go search “danah boyd” il2008 for the rest of the talk 
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Here are my slides from my Designing the Digital Experience presentation… enjoy!
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Zeth Lietzau - He did a study on public libraries and web 2.0 tools…
What is Library 2.0? - They defined it via the Wikipedia definition.
Looked at:
- online catalog
- personalized library account
- blogs/rss
- virtual reference
- wikis
- social networking
- podcasting
in large libraries (ones that serve over 500,000 people), only 45% have an online library card signup! Libraries that serve 100,000 - 499,999 only 15% have an online signup form. Yikes! Uhm… this is not hard, people - it’s a simple signup form!
Other numbers were quite dismal…
estimated percentage of US libraries using various 2.0 technologies:
- catalog tags - 1%
- facebook - 2%
- flickr - 5%
- online card signup - 5%
- MySpace - 6%
- RSS Feeds - 14%
- Chat Reference - 22%
- Email reference - 31%
- Blogs - 31%
- Online account access - 56%
- online catalog - 62%
- web presence - 82%
Some good examples for libraries (from 2005 stats):
- Hennepin County Library
- Lincoln City Liberaries
- Benicia Public Library
- Rocky River Public Library
- Lena Public Library
What do these innovators have that other libraries don’t?
- they have more staffing
- more money per capita
- bigger audio/visual collections
- they have more circ/more use of the library
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Geert van den Boogaard, Lauren Stokes
Lauren went first…
She discussed the different blogs her library has and how well they’re doing, a bit about promotion and website stats, and talked about a game they made.
Geert went next: His presentation title is: Connect to people in a library
DOK Agora - putting a big multimedia room in the library. Patrons can put up a multimedia presentation/display … in the library. Their goal is to get patrons making and sharing videos they make.
Digital Art: They’re digitizing and uploading artwork that is seen on a screen in a classroom. hen after a month or so, the kids come to the art gallery in the library and see the real artwork.
Narrowcasting: show stuff over a screen about the library. They’re using a Nintendo Wii for signage.
Bluetooth: when you enter the library, your bluetooth-enabled device goes off - it’s a welcome message from the library
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I’m at Internet Librarian 2008, and waiting to listen to Howard Rheingold, who’s giving the first keynote session this year - cool! Here’s what he said:
Cool - Jane Dysart (conference organizer) actually knows Howard.
In Tokyo in 2000, he noticed people looking at the screens of their cell phones rather than holding them up to their ears.
Somewhere else, he saw a teen look at the screen of his phone, and smiled … then shared it with a friend.
Kids today flock like birds - they show up at the same place at the same time - because of txting
Philippines - riots organized by txting
He wrote the book Smart Mobs
Smart mobs emerge when media amplifies cooperation
… are where the PC was in 1980 and the Internet was in 1990
There have been alot of sms-organized protests, not all of them peaceful
He’s going back through history, explaining how communities organized
[aside - I love how Howard uses himself as a prop in his slides - it's hilarious!]
Luther’s success again the catholic church was helped in part by the printing press - change was helped along by the new technology of the day
Now he’s talking about companies that work together in new ways, either internally or via an outside community
Open source works because of community
Google and Amazon as examples of companies that opened up their money-making services to others
Ebay and Wikipedia - communities of trust, new forms of community-driven production
Now, we’re seeing a cultural shift - 50% of teenagers have created content on the web
successful companies have created platforms for participation - wikipedia and google are great examples of this
technologies of cooperation and sharing economies
- easy to use
- enable connections
- open - no license needed to publish
- group forming
- self-instructing
- leverage self-interest
He mentioned videoblogs (and flashed Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodgson on the screen, too - cool)
If you want to keep up, don’t try to keep up with the technologies - instead, keep up with the literacies (not quite sure what he meant there)
socialmediaclassroom.com - his experimental online, collaborative classroom. He invited librarians to join.
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Sarah Houghton-Jan and Aaron Schmidt presented
Outreach - connecting users with librarians - important to highlight the librarians!
Make your library website two-way.
- can people register for library cards?
- can they share their opinion?
- can they have an identity?
Make sure you rlibrary is listed correctly in all the library directories (like LibDex, publiclibraries.com, etc)
submit your RSS feeds to blog search engines (Feed Submitter is great)
- look at Robin Good’s list of where to submit your blog/feed
- RSS Specifications list of where to submit, too…
make sure you’re listed on maps (wikimapia, etc)
search engine findability: search for different variations of your library’s name, make sure you’re there.
- also buy adwords from google, hire an SEO to help
wifi:
- list yourself in wifi directories (check the presentation for a list later on)
Community website presence
- list in places like upcoming.org, eventful, etc.
LibraryThing Local - they have a subsite called Local - book events are listed
- they have a “do you work here” link and you can take ownership of the info
presence on local websites, see who’s linking to you
Social Review Websites - yelp (you can claim your business in yelp, too)
- when someone says good stuff about you, USE IT
phone numbers - make sure you’re listed correctly (google maps, askcity, yahoo local, etc)
make a/v content findable - make sure it’s listed in blinkx, singingfish, etc
social networking sites - in ning, flickr, etc
find local blogs - blogs by city, blogdigger local, metroblogging, feedmap
… and interact with these people!
local forums and boards, too
facebook flyer ($10 or so for 5000 ads/flyers)
list your staff in expert sites (yahoo answers, ziki, yadda, etc)
push info out via email/rss
- newsletter software
- use those email addresses
wikipedia - make an entry, update an entry
text a librarian - combines sms, im, email, etc - this is cool!!!
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