Tame The Web

Via Brett Kochendorfer

Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. This means means more people engaging more deeply with your website — and with each other. In this video, Google Product Marketing Manager Mendel Chuang gives a short introduction to Google Friend Connect.

Very interesting -especially the bit about ease of sign on via any number of services and adding the Friend Connect to your site takes no programming skills whatsoever. Looks like ratings, friends and comments can easily be integrated. Ways it might affect libraries:

• Folks will come to expect this type of functionality more and more. Sites that aren’t “friendly” might not be the most popular.
• Some libraries will experiment with this as an easy to configure “buy it now” (for free) social option for their sites.
• This could become a popular add on for many Biblioblogs.
• It certainly positions Google to have even more integration into what we do on the Web.

Take a look at the video. What other uses do you see? What misuses do you see?

Don’t miss this article from Sarah Houghton-Jan and Aaron Schmidt:

http://www.infotoday.com/mls/nov08/Schmidt_Houghton-Jan.shtml

While there are many quick, one-time things you can do to make your content findable, we’ll address those later. First, we have to make sure that there’s a reason to promote your library and its website. If you’re not offering relevant services or interesting content on your site, there’s really nothing to promote.

The most important and effective thing you can do to make your content findable and to draw people back is the most difficult: Make a good website. Creating a website is ridiculously easy, and it takes about 5 minutes to start a blog. Filling such sites with interesting content, however, takes skill, effort, and inspiration. Anyone can hit the “publish” button, but to learn about the interests of your community and to systematically present relevant content takes time. This is what you must do.

One way to approach the issue of content is to use the strengths of your library’s staff. Perhaps you have employees who are passionate about romance novels or get wired about fixing computers. This excitement will show through if you have them talk about their interests online. One great thing about public libraries is that almost anything in the world is within their scope of interest. Highlighting the expertise of individuals in your library not only can produce interesting content, but it can also illuminate the humans in your facility. This helps build relationships, one of the most important things librarians can do to promote themselves. Good content makes your website more findable because the better your content is, the more people will talk about it and link to it. These links are the lifeblood of Google’s PageRank. And you want links. Badly.

I’ll be adding this to course readings!

Kathryn Greenhill reports on Liz Wilkinson, University of Auckland, presenting at the LIANZA 2008 conference:

 I was very impressed with an information literacy package she had helped to design. Te Punga uses online graphic novels and simulations to introduce students to the library catalogue.

I was even more impressed with her philosophy behind the design - and I have tried to capture this in this movie, Information Literacy: Seven ways to think outside the box. She was very gracious about being filmed with no rehearsal time, and I’m very grateful to her and the University Of Auckland for allowing me to use her words and screenshots from Te Punga in the movie.

Here are her main points:

1. Literacy beyond text
2. Student centred, not library centred
3. Outside experts
4. Involve students
5. Use students’ environments
6. Learning by doing
7. Make students feel at home

How are we addressing these important points in our university libraries? I can identify good examples for all 7 above from some of my travels and visits to various university libraries this year. Which ones have you tapped into?

The kind folks at SLA IT Bulletin Digital Focus have given me permission to reprint the interview they did with me last summer here at TTW as part of my digital portfolio. I really appreciate it.

Interview with Michael Stephens – Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Dominican University

For those who may be unfamiliar with you or your work, could you provide a professional description of yourself?

I’ve worked in libraries and LIS education for 18 years. My public library career spanned 15 years, and included positions in Audio Visual, Reference,  and Networked Resources. Throughout that time I was using technology and teaching staff and our public to do the same. I saw the advent of our public library’s first Internet connection and jam-packed lecture-style “What is the Internet?” sessions all the way through launching the SJCPL blog in 2003. The opportunity to teach as an adjunct in the Indiana University SLIS program also put me on the path toward the PhD: in 2004, I was awarded an IMLS-funded fellowship to the doctoral program at the University of North Texas’ Interdisciplinary Information Science program. I joined the Dominican GSLIS faculty in the Fall of 2006a and just completed my second year of full time teaching. I love it! 

Running parallel to the professional timeline above is the fact I started my blog Tame the Web on    April 1, 2003. Since then, my blogging life has grown as well. TTW just turned 5 and I’ve been blogging for ALA TechSource since 2005. I also found my way to Flickr, my favorite social site of all, and to LastFM, Facebook, and YouTube. I still use Flickr the most and enjoy the engagement with others in the professions as well as others who share my interests outside of libraries.

I also do a lot of speaking around the US and internationally. It does my heart good to get to present some of my thinking to others and hopefully inspire them. I usually end my talks with something like: “Go forth! Make libraries better!”

I did seven presentations in five Australian cities this spring, sponsored by the library consortium there. It was truly life-changing to travel that far and get to interact with library folk. I learned a lot and also realized we all face many of the same challenges, no matter where we are.

As someone who is involved in library education, how are you helping to develop the next generation of librarians?  What do you believe the future of library education will look like?

One thing that brought me to Dominican was the emphasis on truth and service in the university’s mission and philosophy. I think it fits well with my personal philosophy of teaching. Preparing new graduates to deal with constant change, use emerging technologies to further the mission of their institutions, and meet the needs of library users while never losing sight of our foundational values and principles is very important to me as an LIS educator.

I wrote about this at TTW as part of a meme that asked educators to share what they want for their students. I want my students at Dominican and any of librarians I talk to to realize what great opportunities there are for libraries and librarians in this ever-changing world if we pay attention to these skills:

If we learn to learn, it doesn’t matter that this week’s hot technology is Twitter and next week’s even shinier tool is something else. We can still figure it out, use our foundational knowledge to make sense of it and decide if it works in our situation. I teach blogging in many of my classes but the real skill I want my students to get is that they can master any technology/system I put in front of them or their new employers may put in front of them and make it work. Blogging is just the vehicle, like using any of the tools we cover in tech-based classes. If we look at current job descriptions right now, some employers are asking for experience with  social tools, open source software, and “emerging trends.” If I can give students a learning laboratory or sand box to try some technologies in the context of meeting a library’s mission or designing a new service (complete with planning, implementation and evaluation), then I’m preparing them for what they will encounter in practice.

If we adapt to change, we aren’t thrown every time the world shifts. That’s one of the most important things I think we could do for students in LIS education - show them that everything will change. What we’re doing in now in libraries is similar but still very different than what folks did 50 years ago. Think about the next 50 years. What’s going to happen when models like the Maricopa County “Deweyless” library or user-based tagging in the catalog really go mainstream. Should we still be teaching curriculum from the 80s? The 90s? I think not. So this  one goes double for LIS educators. I need to stay on the curve (hopefully ahead of it) to keep changing course specifics to adapt to each shift we go through.

If we scan the horizon, we’re trendspotting for the future. I am so inspired by the librarians who try new things, who look outside the field and bring things back.  If we become trendspotters, we have a good chance of creating the next big thing.  We might simply ponder, for example, what the popularity of a certain technology might do to library service.  Or what bigger trends will mean to libraries in the next 10-20 years. I watch Apple, Starbucks and Borders right now amongst many others. Couldn’t we have a genius bar in our libraries (I know the library in Delft does!)? Couldn’t we tap into marketing the “third place” the way Starbucks does so well. And isn’t there a place for the new concepts Borders will be offering: digital downloads, media creation, etc.

If we make sure to be curious about the world, it makes all of the above super easy. Ask questions. What are things going the way they are?

If my students leave my classes as curious librarians ready to figure out the next big thing and make it work in their libraries, then I am doing my job.

The future of LIS education? Great question that I often wonder about myself. We go in cycles: an ALA president or two will make it a focus for their year in office and then the next president is on to something else. A library school will make great inroads into a new area of tech (like San Jose State University’s SLIS Island in Second Life) or improved distance education. And along the way we’ll have lots of conversations about the impact of technology on education in general. What does this mean for LIS education in 10 years? Library school needs a shake-up. Let’s do a complete review of curriculum. If we’re starting to rely more on outsourcing, do we need a full semester of AACR2? We should integrate ever-evolving technology into our courses and teach the students how to manage that change

Much of your work is dedicated to the use of technology in libraries.  What influenced your decision to focus on this subject?   Why did you decide to become active in the field?

I’ve always been drawn to technology — all the way back to my first Apple IIc. It excites me to see how technology can help us extend ourselves creatively and socially. I used my first computer to write up my papers at IU and to participate in the not yet online fan communities I belonged to. I mailed things to people then!

The online services and the Internet made this oh so much easier. I vividly remember those early days of discovering what people put up on their first web page. My learning was framed by popular culture: X-Files fan sites, lyrics servers, movie pages, and the more personal pages of those early Web citizens. 

Look at how far we’ve come in a little over 15 years. The opportunity to participate and extend yourself online into a community based on your interests is there for the taking.

What does Library 2.0 mean to you?  In your opinion, will there be a Library 3.0 to follow?

Library 2.0 is a philosophy of library service discussed, dissected and diluted throughout the profession for almost three years. It’s a way of describing a conversation - a very important one that addresses how the physical and virtual space of the library is presented, how policies are created, and how services will be be evaluated and changed according to user participation. The name spoke to me - it worked. I’ve written about it. But it was also just a way to describe the conversation. We’ve come a long way in the discussions. I think the term will describe a moment in time when we realized how quickly the world was changing and libraries needed to repsond. It’s happened before. It will happen again.

I taught a seminar on Library 2.0 this last semester with three components: an exploration of emerging technologies in libraries, a focus on the physical space and library policy, and readings from LIS theorists and Web 2.0 experts. I was pleased to see my students discover Michael Buckland’s manifesto on redesigning library services, the way I did when I was writing my dissertation. What I wanted them to take away was a that “bigger picture” view: it’s not just a blog on the library Web site but capability for collaboration and participation behind it.

I’m sure we’ll see someone somewhere attempt to use Library 3.0 as a means to sell something, get people to a conference or some such. I don’t think it will stick like L2 has. I do agree, however, with Dr. Wendy Schultz, who also wrote a piece for OCLC NextSpace magazine where I wrote about Librarian 2.0 — it will be a progression to a more evolved space fully grounded in the library tradition - “the knowledge spa.”

Some libraries are slow to adopt technological solutions like Web 2.0 software because they question the value its use can contribute to an organization.  What are your thoughts on this? 

I would tell them to look at the library mission and vision statements. Is there a statement about promoting access or offering technologies to meet the changing needs of the user? If so, that’s a perfect reason to explore what 2.0 tool might work well for fulfilling that mission. Blogs work well - and you don’t even have to call them a blog. A blog can become an easy to configure content management system that hosts all of your content. To me, it’s a good fit for many libraries that want to save time with their Web presence. 

Another reason that libraries should be participating is because of the importance of content. In NextSpace, I urged library folk to understand content. “This librarian understands that the future of libraries will be guided by how users access, consume and create content. Content is a conversation as well and librarians should participate. Users will create their own mash ups, remixes and original expressions and should be able to do so at the library or via the library’s resources. This librarian will help users become their own programming director for all of the content available to them.”

Seattle Public Library has a list of  aims to fulfill the library’s mission on the web site. One of them states that the library will provide:

Appropriate technology to extend, expand and enhance services in every neighborhood and ensure that all users have equitable access to information.

That says to me that the library should be striving to offer access to social software as well as use the same tools to put services where the users are working and living online. Some folks may be curious and want to explore YouTube or Facebook, others may want guidance in the form of a library program about the benefits and dangers of the new online world, while some may want to create something new and send it out into the social networks. All of these things should be an option at the library. It pains me to see the other side of the coin: libraries blocking access to social sites for various reasons: perceived lack of bandwidth, inappropriate use of resources, or because it was making teenaged users rowdy/aggressive. See my discussion of such a ban on teenagers in my hometown of Mishawaka, IN at Tame the Web.

 

How do you keep yourself informed about changes in technology and in the information profession?  What resources do you rely on most?

I rely on the web and my RSS feeds for a lot of my keeping up. I monitor a lot of librarian’s blogs because the conversation is so rich and deep as well as many blogs outside our field. Since coming to Dominican I’ve added feeds from higher ed resources as well. I read but not as much as I’d like. Summer 2008 is mine to get caught up with the stack of books I’ve been collecting. 

I also listen to as many folks as I can when I’m travelling to speak or attend a conference. Those conversations - voices from the field - are very important to me because each year the goes by I am another step away from practice. I can’t effectively teach if I don’t understand what it’s like in the trenches. 

I was sad to see Business 2.0 go out as a monthly magazine, but I religiously subscribe to Wired, Fast Company, MIT Tech Review and Entertainment Weekly. Each one of these keeps me informed in different ways.

Will technology ever replace the librarian?  If not, what influence will technology have on the future role of the information professional?

Librarians will never be replaced. The job titles, duties and locales may evolve, but the foundational values and ethics of the profession will stay the same. 

The most wonderful think about emerging technologies is many of them bring the librarian to wherever the user is online. So our humanity can come through - it’s not just a box on the library Web site - it’s a person you are talking to. The library is human is one of my favorite points about the evolving, hyperlinked library. Human conversations and the human touch are valuable assets to libraries.

Just as other professions evolve, so will ours. I’m excited to see libraries in 10-20 years. 

In your opinion, how can today’s librarian contribute to the innovation of the field?  What suggestions would you have for those who are interested in making an impact on the profession?

Today’s librarian in any library setting can contribute in many ways: exploring emerging trends and applying them to libraries is just a beginning. I’d advocate for librarians interested in creating change to find a social network - the Biblioblogosphere, Facebook, etc — and participate. Comment on others work, create posts or content, etc. I’d urge new grads and LIS students to find a mentor who’ll help and encourage. I’d urge librarians and LIS educators to be a mentor in every possible way.

To make this work I’ll address library administrators for just a moment: PLEASE create a climate of innovation, trust and forward-thinking in your libraries so your staff can innovate and try new things. Support and radical trust must come from the top for these things to be successful. You don’t have to know every little thing about technology just let your staff report out as needed, let them prototype and just say “yes.”

Personally, I would suggest to anyone wanting to make an impact on the profession that they do good work, learn from mistakes, play well with others, and report on their successes and failures. Library bloggers are alive and well and there will always be room for another reasoned and pragmatic voice. As for this interview, if it inspires librarians to share their ideas and “pay it forward”, I will be deeply satisfied.

Links:

Michael Buckland: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Library/Redesigning/html.html

Wendy Schultz: http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/6.htm

Stephens on Librarian 2.0: http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/3.htm

Stephens on Mishawaka Library Ban: http://tametheweb.com/?s=Mishawaka

Seattle PL: http://www.spl.org/default.asp?pageID=about_mission

I am particularly enjoying this slide this morning.

Here are the slides as PDF from the original keynote file.

Links for the presentation today:

Technoplans Vs Technolust at Library Journal 2004

Taming Technolust article at RUSQ: http://www.rusq.org/2008/08/18/taming-technolust/

Links:

ACRL Changing Roles

“Let Go of Control” Cell Phone Sign: http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelinlibrarian/1924719853

Brian Herzog’s Signs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/herzogbr/2437165908

The Cluetrain Manifesto: http://www.cluetrain.com

Emerging Technology Committee @ TTW

Michelle Boule on Beta

Prototyping from Brian Mathews

Transparency: The Open Door Director

Trend Map: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/1082392674/

Open Source Software:

• Casey Bisson’s LTR
• Karen Schenider on OSS in SLJ “Free for All”

Learning 2.0 & Learn & Play @CML

Be Curious

http://library.sbcc.edu/2008/09/academic_search_premier.html

I caught note of this via Twitter. Thanks Kenley!

Take a look at this post at the Luria Library’s blog. They’ve turned on video comments as well as sharing an embedded slide show that details basic searching of Ebscohost. 

This so ties into my takeaways from spending a day at IDEA2008. So much of what we do in the library world and design world comes down to interaction, extension of human feeling, offering something useful and ease of use. This is a perfect example of those things coming together perfectly.

WOW I am enjoying JenWaller’s set of photos from her tour of DOK. So good to see my Shanachie friends in their library showing things off. Jenn writes:

Erik and Jaap explain and demonstrate how the DOK library cards (and their system) operate. Again, similar to CDR, privacy is a little different here. DOK gathers lots of information about their users, and they use that data to make all kinds of decisions about services, programming, marketing, etc. They said they could tell how much cream a user puts in his/her coffee

I later asked about the Dutch laws as they regard police seizure of this kind of information. The laws are similar to U.S. laws — the police need to present a warrant before private data is handed over. DOK thinks about privacy a lot and tries to balance issues of user privacy with issues of how to best serve their users. In this vein, they periodically do “data dumps” of some of the user information. But some of the staff receive daily reports on what their users are doing.

This is a perfect “field trip” for use in classes. Thanks Jen!

http://flickr.com/photos/jenwaller/sets/72157607216582893/

I can tell a lot of work and thought went into this series of workshops:

http://becoming20.pbwiki.com/

Well done Bobbi & Robin!

by: Robin Hastings

Information Technology Manager at the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City, Missouri

 

This all started because the employees at the library at which I work, the Missouri River Regional Library, were complaining about all the spam in their email. As the Information Technology Manager, part of my job is managing the email server we had - which used to be a server in our server room running Exchange 2003 with Outlook Web Access enabled, so people could use both Outlook and web-based email, whichever they chose. Trying to keep spam out of an Exchange server is difficult and/or expensive - this was something we were really struggling with! As an option, I began looking at Google Apps For Domains, a service I use for one of my personal domains. Google’s spam controls are impressive, to say the least, and the service level has always been pretty impressive. The more I poked around in Google Apps, the more I liked it!

I started looking at the details of Google Apps and began working up a case to sell it to my director. I pretty quickly discovered that the library, since it is not an actual 501(c)3 entity, wasn’t eligible for the educational version of the service. Google offers 3 different versions, the free version (250 accounts, 6GB of email space, no service level guarantees, ads with your emails), the educational version (free, some ads on emails, 25GB of space, 99% uptime guarantee for email) and the premier version ($50/account/year, no ads, 25GB of space, 99% uptime guarantee, conference room/resource scheduling, postini email policy management and recovery, etc). The education edition is basically the same as the premier, except that it’s free and doesn’t include the Postini email stuff.

Google provides a handy chart (http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions.html) detailing the differences between free and premier editions, one that I consulted frequently as I was working up my financial case to go to Google Apps. Once I realized we were going to have to pay for our version of Google Apps, I really hit that chart hard to make my business case for switching.

Since we were in a year that included a new email server and server software in the budget, I could show that Google would be just a few dollars ($80 or so) a year more expensive over a 3-year life span than Exchange 2007/Outlook with spam control software added on. After I made the budget/feature/begging case to my director, and he approved it, I started playing. I began by uploading all of our accounts to Google via a spreadsheet in CSV format. That was fun and got me started - until I realized that I couldn’t pay for all of our accounts at once because all they take are credit cards and all of our cards that are given to each manager have a $2000 limit. Our total bill was $3250. This meant that I had to delete about half of the accounts, pay for the ones I had still in the system and wait 5 days to pay for the rest of the accounts with another manager’s card and reupload them (after you delete an account name it can’t be recreated for at least 5 days). Big “oops” #1!

By July 24th all the accounts were paid for and all of the accounts were in place. I took a couple of days to get myself familiar with the system, create FAQs on our staff wiki and start working out the timeline for deployment. On July 25th, I invited staff to log into the system and start to “poke around” to get familiar as well. On July 28th I started face-to-face training sessions for staff to explain the system and answer questions - at least one every day. I scheduled 7 for the week of the 28th and one on Aug. 4th - the day we went live.

The staff were very receptive to the training - they showed up, they asked questions and they seemed to be very willing to change. I had one staff member who informed me that she didn’t like Outlook, but she didn’t like change, either. After the training session, however, she felt far more comfortable with the change and far more positive about it. Wiki-based FAQs and frequent emails updating staff on what is going on “behind the scenes” are critical - but nothing beats real-time, real-live training! In each session, I covered each of the Google services we’d be getting access to (Sites, Docs, Calendar, Email, Start Page and Chat) with a very quick tour of each of them. This took about a half-hour. After that, I opened the floor for questions about Google Apps, the process of the changeover or whatever else came up. Some of my sessions were 1/2 hour long - and that was it. One lasted for an hour and 15 minutes. Everyone had a chance to voice their objections and get answers to their concerns, though!

The actual changeover was fairly smooth - I used the feature that allowed me to use an administrator account that I sat up and then gave it read access to all the mailboxes. With that, I started the migration at 5:15pm on Saturday night, doing all of the full time folks first. When that finished (at 1am Sunday morning), I set the part time employee’s emails to go and went to bed. When I woke up in the morning, it was done. All of the email from all of the staff at MRRL was there… except for 3 staff members who were at the very end of the migration and hit up against the backup that I forgot to turn off for the night. This pretty much hosed the Exchange server and kept those 3 people from getting their emails immediately.

Monday morning, when I got to work, I sent my Computer Support guru, Nikki, over to the administration offices building to help folks who might need it and I started on a round of checking on staff in the main building. The changeover was pretty smooth. Most people chose to use the web-based email interface - very few required the Outlook program any more. Everyone logged on successfully and most people were very positive about the change. Since that first morning, I’ve spent some time sending out daily “tips & tricks” emails to the staff, uploading contacts and calendar data from Outlook to Google Apps and helping with contact management and other little issues that cropped up because of the differences between Gmail and Outlook. The responses from staff, however, have been very positive. I’ve had a couple of people tell me this was the smoothest technological change they’ve experienced (didn’t seem that smooth to me - 3 emails left off the migration and a few niggling issues with getting Outlook and Gmail to play nicely - but I suppose those were isolated incidents…) and almost everyone has mentioned how much easier Gmail is than Outlook to use and understand. The staff are enjoying the ability to chat with each other and are helping each other find new features and capabilities that are now available. And, of course, we are all enjoying the lack of spam in our inboxes!