Custom Flip Mino HD, originally uploaded by jblyberg.

Hotter than hot. Did you know you could do a custom skin on a Mino? Very nice example of Darien Library doing just that with the library logo.

Save our Small Libraries!

http://sospl.blogspot.com/

Dear Michael:

I want to tell you about my new blog. Aside from the standard issues that Librarians face here in Indiana we have a new one that has the potential for disastrous consequences for small public libraries here in Indiana.

Stephen Boggs

Looks like Stephen ran out of steam on his blog but the issue continues to be a concern and the proposed consolidation of Indiana libraries is getting more discussion here and there. LJ reports on the issue and quotes the director of my former library:

Don Napoli, director of the St. Joseph County Public Library and one of the few library directors to publicly support consolidation, told LJ, “Nobody wants to lose their boards, nobody wants to lose control of their own library.” Though his is a county library in name, only about 11 of 32 current county libraries cover the full county; one community with a separate library in St. Joseph County directly borders the central city of South Bend.

As for Swanson’s concerns, Napoli suggested, “They might get a better library… It’s more likely that we could build a new branch for them before they’re going to afford it.” He acknowledged that, statewide, there probably wouldn’t be much cost savings from consolidation, but “I think it’ll result in better libraries.”

He said it was natural for library leaders to want to keep local control. “But if they’re thinking the status quo is going to stay the way it is, they’re wrong,” he said. Also, said Napoli, library leaders should come up with an alternative that the governor and state legislature would accept—and that would have the support of all libraries.

Beyond consolidiation, unelected library boards will have trouble maintaining fiscal autonomy, as the commission has recommended that all library budgets be approved by local governments. “They may be able to retain their boards, but they’re not going to have taxing authority,” Napoli predicted.

Meg writes:

What is a Community Manager? My friend, Connie Bensen introduced me to the concept at my first social media gathering. I know she has collaborated on the wikipedia definition, and as a librarian herself, and I hope she agrees with my assertion. Community managers help shape online spaces by representing organizations through starting and/or contributing to discussions. They are social media mavens and power users. Community managers solve problems, offer the best customer service, and give organizations a human face.

I’ll be adding this to the list of emerging LIS jobs. How are we training new librarians to be Community Managers? Did you ever think that might be a role you’d play?

Later she tape into that important bit about the ongoing conversation:

Not enough of us tweet outside our community or seek out our users in other social media. Some success with MySpace and Facebook is promising, but we can’t just friend and fan eachother. We need to connect with our patrons, customers and users in online communities. Historically we may not be known for savvy communication skills, but here’s another opportunity.

Gathering community input is also a key role of librarians. As we plan services, build new facilities, and evolve into our 21st century selves, libraries have to listen to what our community needs. Let’s face it Gen x and y aren’t attending community meetings at the library. The meetings are happening online. Do you Google alerts point to blogs, microblogs, or comments that reflect how patrons feel about the library? Are you listening and responding?

This so ties in to what Cliff Landis and I discussed over on ALA TechSource this summer:

MS: That brings up something that has been on my mind for the past few months as I watch more libraries diving into creating Facebook pages and other sites. What do you think about the Facebook pages for libraries that have a bunch of other librarians as fans? Frankly, it disappoints me. I’ve actually curtailed some of my “fan-ing” of pages lately. I’d rather leave the fandom to the users and watch to see how it goes from outside. How do the users find and adopt the page. What are the patterns of use and what types of outreach builds the community. Tapping into that is most important for understanding user needs.

CL: This is another symptom of librarians talking to each other, saying “Hey! Look at this neat thing I did!” and never involving the users. What do you suppose would happen if the person managing the library page wasn’t a librarian, but a student? (I can already hear the gasps of thousands of librarians.) Let’s face it–we’re control freaks.

And what David Lee King blogged about here.

Wouldn’t you rather be a community manager instead of a control freak?

Dear Michael -  I sat down with a bunch of my middle school students as they came into the library today and we talked about how we could transform our little public school library into a fabulous space for them. They had great ideas, and I shared some of YOUR ideas with them. I think we will begin changing things next week (I’ll ask permission from the boss after it’s done!).

Do you or your readers know of any “safe” photo sharing sites like FlickR that we might be able to access in schools. My District still blocks FLickR, Google images, iTunes, any social networking sites, etc. I have only been successful so far in getting edublogs.org unblocked… working on podcasting next… Again - one step at a time. …and I’d love to help create such a site if there is a way to do it!

Readers?

Really - I’m hooked on HBO’s True Blood!

But in Libraryland, the excitement is also building via this new blog “Bella’s Book Club,” a blog celebrating all things Twilight and counting down to the premiere of the film.

Created by Deb Noggle, the blog offers video clips, reviews, and engagement with the mebers of the book club. The good folks at ACPL sent this story along about the blog from Deb herself:

One group developed a Ning for librarians: The Library Lounge. They also gave a presentation of background info and their findings from theexperience.

Another group developed a library liaison portal for a fictional economics department using Pageflakes. Their presentation details the background of the prototype.

The next group learned Drupal to develop a Website for a small library in Minnesota in a project called “Extreme Library Makeover: Web Site Edition.” They started with this very small site hosted at the library system and proposed a complete redo with Drupal. The results of their learning is here (hosted at TTW).

Finally, two soon to be library media specialists proposed a revamped curriculum for 4th to 8th grade that tied using social tools to current learning goals. The presentation, with links to examples and prototypes, is here.

I am grading their final papers today - papers on academic law libraries and social technologies, the Cluetrain and reputation online, to name a few. Good stuff! If you want to check in on their class blogging, all of the LIS768 CSC bloggers are listed here.

http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2008/11/a-commons-experience.html

The Commons puts students at the center. The idea of student-centered innovation was a theme woven throughout the commons field trips. The commons did not make it any easier for the librarians or to enforce library policies. In fact, Stacy Greenwell of the University was happy to tell me that they made it easier for students to use their cell phones in “the Hub.” “Yes, that’s right—at the Hub we actually installed infrastructure to make it easier for students to use cell phones. We actually encourage cell phone use. Truly the Hub is a No Shushing Zone.”

The Commons is built with student involvement. Stacy Greenwell of “the Hub” told me that along with the innovations the librarians wanted at UK,  “we sought student input throughout the planning process”.  Bob Seal highlighted the ways his librarians discovered students needed: space, access to technology, and ease of use.

The Commons is a welcoming, useful gathering place. The folks at Indiana University South Bend started with a specific goal: to be a welcoming center on campus. Michele Russo detailed this idea when it came to the desk: “The new service desk was also designed to send a welcoming message.  It allows space for librarians, IT consultants, and multimedia specialists to work at one of two levels.” The Zones at Georgia Tech included flexible “anything and everything” spaces. Faculty might give a lecture in the morning, folowed by a DDR tournament in the afternoon and video creation in the evening.

The Commons makes connections. These connections might be between students, betweeen students and library staff, or between students and the various faculty and staff that may use the space as well. Dean of Library Services Michele Russo at IUSB said: “We envisioned making the Library a true teaching-learning-research center by creating an Information Commons where content, technology, and services provided by reference librarians, technology assistants, and multimedia specialists were available to students and faculty in one place.”

The Commons is a relevant, required space on campus. At Georgia Tech, we ooh’ed and ahh’ed all over Zones 1, 2 and 3 as though on a tour at Disneyland, but Associate Director Bob Fox’s message was loud and clear: “We don’t build walls here.” The spaces, created by innovative library staff and student focus groups, are that central, all purpose place (with access to needed resources and technology) that Rose addressed in her article. The larger the investment of planning, input and participants, the higher the return on use and support. How could spaces like those in my 2008 Information/Learning Commons Field trips not be considered required and relevant spaces for the university setting?

Read the whole post at ALA TS.

http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/OCLC_Policy_Change

I need to catch up on all of these posts. Jessamyn suggested this one as 

http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/220/

So, OCLC decides to update its data licensing policy after 21 years because, quote: “The Guidelineshave also been frequently faulted for their ambiguity about WorldCat data sharing rights and conditions.”

Having had to deal with such ambiguity myself when discussing about releasing the Barton Library data from the MIT Libraries, I have to say that I very much welcomed any sort of update in clarification and a more modern and up-to-date licensing agreement between OCLC and its members libraries, if only to focus more precisely what is wrong with it.

Some people believe that OCLC is a thing of the past, created in an era where data interchange and inter-librarian communication was hard, more expensive and much harder to coordinate and destined to succumb to some cheaper and higher quality grass-root approach that will emerge spontaneously on the internet.

I personally don’t subscribe to that vision: I’ve witnessed with my own eyes the Apache Group turning into the Apache Software Foundation and growing from a few tens of people to thousands, from a relatively unknown bunch of geeks to a pillar of the web ecosystem, a business-school subject and a poster child for modern bottom-up self-organization.

My point being that any grass-root approach that will get big enough to take on OCLC on the metadata collection and redistribution service that libraries need will have to incorporate under the pressure of its users (if only for legal liability protection) and will have to find an answer to the same set of problems (policy, governance, financial sustainability) that OCLC has.

So, OCLC, or another non-profit entity, is necessary to exist in this space, no matter how the data is generated and what license regulates its sharing.

Unfortunately, OCLC itself seems to be believe they are a thing of the past, that they are going to fall victim of the drop of data distribution and coordination costs, much like the record industry, and that they have to fight with their teeth to avoid to succumb to the web-powered winter of data monopolies.

I don’t see any other explanation for a policy that prevents people from competing with them, with data they don’t own and that others contributed to them: if they thought their existence was not in danger, and their membership loyal, why would they want to prevent others from competing with them?

Last time somebody tried a similar anti-competitive move, BitKeeper comes to mind, it unleashed a tremendous amount of frustration-generated creative effort that not only displaced and totally evaporated BitKeeper’s position in that market overnight, but also reshaped the entire market because of some of the innovation that was created in the process.

It is true that OCLC’s monopoly position in this market is eroding: it is only a matter of time geek techy librarians catalyze enough coordination to eventually re-route even just a tiny fraction of the cataloging effort of librarians around the world to another data pool, one that feels more like an open Library of Congress and less like a librarian version of Microsoft.

That last line is wonderful. I am aching for the time when the “geek techy librarians” coordinate enough to make some really big changes in library land: with OCLC, with vendors, with the ILS providers. Indeed.

Read the whole post. it’s a good one.

Give everyone an avenue to talk. 
Play nice and be constructive. 
Grow and develop your support community. 
Be willing to accept anonymity. 
Tell the truth. Lies don’t work. 
Focus on user-driven policy, not driving users away. 

Read the whole column here.

Don’t miss Jen Waller’s Flickr sets of her travels to various libraries in The Netherlands. I’ll be using these in future classes for sure!