Category Archives: technology

Chris Tonjes (IT Director/CIO) and William McClendon (Enterprise Architect) of the District of Columbia Public Library were the presenters of this session. They have a good team that have been doing some very innovative things. They even blog about some of the stuff they do and other interesting information at the DCPL Labs Amino site. I’ve been following it for a while and have found it very informative. They were the first library in the country with an iPhone app and it is pretty slick. The theme of their presentation was about developing that app and the strategies involved. I was impressed by their knowledge and skills. Parts of their presentation were a bit too technical for me so I’ll try to write what I understand.

On with the notes:

It is not the time to retrench and not offer new things because of budget cuts. It is time to experiment with new tech and try the things that may make our services better. (amen!)

They are allowed to experiment and fail. A lot of the things they try don’t see the light of day but they get to try. Their boss encourages it. Their experiments are small and not publicized. I really like the “labs” idea and really would like to have something similar.

Goals for their mobile/iPhone app

• Wanted to integrate their content with the iPhone interface and iTunes app store
• Leverage their code with many other new things

The platform will become more agnostic soon as they develop new versions. They used the lessons they learned building their iPhone app to expand their mobile offerings and will begin applying those lessons as they move forward. A new version of the app will have a library barcode in it for scanning. It will also take payments via iTunes. Make and change holds, update account. They are working on BlackBerry and Android versions too.

They chose to design the iPhone app instead of a general mobile site because an app is:

• WebServices driven
  • Built once, usable for all implementations
  • ILS system, version, platform, and patch agnostic
    • no need to need to update whenever there is a change in the ILS
    • it doesn’t matter what ILS they use (they can change and it won’t affect the app)
  • Implementation did not disrupt ILS, staff, patrons, or IT!
• Apps are platform OS specific, utilize unique features
  • you get all the cool features of the platform
• App store based delivery, 100% smartphone OS vendor support
• Webservices are ILS specific, but Apps are NOT
  • port Webservices to alternate ILS, transparent to ALL consumers •
• Insulates back-office changes from end-user
• Full library branding and marketability
• SOA enabled to other entities
  • govt., university, schools, parks and rec.

There was a lot to this session that I missed. I’m hoping someone took some very good notes. I feel that this is an area worthy of significant investigation.

This was my last session of CIL2010 and I have to admit that I was exhausted and looking forward to going home and seeing my family. I apologize for my shallow notes. Luckily one of our web developers was in attendance and was able to take good notes.

Steven Cohen is the senior librarian at Law Library Management but I am more familiar with him through the site he runs called Library Stuff. I’ve been subscribing to his RSS feed for a few years and find it very helpful in helping me keep current in library trends. I was really torn between attending this session and attending the session on Mobile Tips and Practices. I’m glad I attended this one because I was able to learn some new things. He was a very entertaining speaker and if it weren’t for some technological difficulties I think his presentations would have been one of my favorites. He spent the bulk of this session going over some of the RSS tips and tricks he uses. He has created quite an arsenal of RSS tricks. Luckily, he posted most of his links and things he mentioned in his presentation on his site. I’m glad he did. I’ll be referring to it for a while to see what I can use. I highly encourage you to take a look at it.

So, on to some notes:

Is RSS dead because of Twitter or Facebook? He thinks not. RSS is still a very useful tool and it can really help us stay up-to-date with lots of different fields of interest.

He loves Google and Google reader. I use Google reader and like it a lot also. I don’t subscribe to nearly as many feeds as he does but I’m ok with that.

• Google reader will check for updates for sites that doesn’t have an rss feed.
  • You can put anything in there now.
• Check the ‘send to’ button-can send to many different platforms like twitter.

He showed a way to get the iPhone view to show up as a side bar in Firefox. I have adopted this to work in Opera. I think this will come in handy.

Fliptop looks like something I may be interested in. I’ll check it out soon.

The YouTube custom feed he demonstrated works pretty well. I have adjusted it to look for anything Henrico. It’s mostly real estate listings but there are some other things also. This could be very entertaining.

I also set up a custom feed for mentions of Henrico County in the New York Times he mentioned. We will see what happens with that.

I have to admit that I did cut out a bit early so I could see some of the other session…apologies Steven…please forgive me. I didn’t take notes on that other session because I had to stand out in the hall…oh well. Luckily one of our web designers attended the entire session!

Joe Murphy – Yale

This session was about the need for librarians to develop a deeper knowledge of mobile technologies. I enjoyed Murphy’s take on the issue and I agree with home on just about everything he discussed. I only wish he had more time to explain things better. A forty five minute session is just long enough to get to the very basics. He has posted his presentation for viewing later.

Holly Hibner has posted her notes.

He is proposing a set of skills for our community. Mobile skills.

Mobile literate librarian is fluent with mobile technology and its impacts on libraries.

He published a paper last year on the evolving framework of social networking competencies for librarians.

Mobile literacy is quickly becoming a life literacy. It is a skill our patrons and staff are learning and we should be able to help lead them in best practices. Some of those literacies are:

• Familiarity with mobile technologies (as trends/tools)
• Aware of the impact of mobile tech (impacts expectations culture)
• Know what and how: applications for the library (adapt librarian skills, learn for the future)

Mobile literacy

• Being aware of the impact of mobile tech
  • more important than simply using gadgets
• Gaining familiraty with mobile techs (is important)
• Service application and skills

Knowing the technologies

• creating a baseline of technology terminology
• aware of trend: including scope and stats
• familiar with major techs (current techs)

This years top techs

• Location based (foursquare, gowalla etc)
• QR codes (there are brief description here if you are interested in downloading a QR reader click here)
• Augmented reality (ReadWriteWeb has a good description of what it is)

Be willing to try and learn

• Have to learn how to manage our privacy with technology
• That’s a life skill we all need to learn and be able to teach others

Impact

• Info literacy
• Info engagement
• Expectations
• Physical library
• Roles of librarians

We need to try to understand new norms

• Privacy vs Sharing
• Interpersonal relations – such as using phone to take notes in meetings or bringing information to the reference desk via phone instead of paper
• Revisit policies about mobile technologies in the library
  • Police the behavior not the technology

Applying the services/skills

• How to make others (administration) comfortable with new techs and the methods involved with them?
• Flexibity
  • How do we plan for the new tech?
  • What aspects do we investigate and pursue?
  • Time is limited
• Who is going to do this?
  • We need not just resources
  • Need to prioritize
• Let people learn the new tech in a comfortable environment.

Let’s make sure we do grow and grow together.

It’s hard and takes time to learn but there is no replacement for experience.

One of my fellow conference attendees was able to sit down with Murphy after this session. He put the quick interview up on YouTube. Enjoy.

Ken Haycock director of the School of Library and Information Science at San José State University was the speaker for Wednesday’s keynote. He is very knowledgeable and has had a long and productive career. There is a lot I can learn from him. I really enjoyed his presentation and am glad that it is posted online for everyone to view. It is broken into two halves. The first half had some audio problems. The second half seems ok.

Here are other’s notes:

• Joanna’s Conference Reports
• Meredith Farkas
• Holli Henslee
• Marydee Ojala (official CIL blog)
• Sarah Houghton-Jan

My notes are below. They really are very brief. I recommend you take an hour and watch the videos.

If you don’t promote yourself you’re doomed to defend yourself. What to promote?

Public libraries suffer from the curse of high satisfaction. People don’t complain – we’re doing a good job but we don’t get more money because no one complains. Brute force promotion doesn’t work so doubling our efforts won’t work.

As long as the library employee smiles people are happy with bad service.

Death by opportunity. We can go in so many directions that it’s hard to decide which opportunities to take. What are the payoffs for the different opportunities?

Leadership is a process of social influence no matter your position in an organization. Influence is confused with power but they are different. There are different kinds of power. We are interested in the kind of power that attracts.

Trust is important. Trust is related to consistency.

Self confidence is a key factor in leadership.

Informal mentoring is way more efficient than formal ones. Create a ‘board of directors’ of your life. They don’t have to know.

Trust

• Character
• Competence
• Confidence
• Credibility
• Congruence/Consistency

Advocacy defined

• Public relations is not advocacy. It is important but it’s is all about us.
• Marketing is getting closer to advocacy. Learning about the public etc.

His definition of advocacy: Planned deliberate sustained effort to develop and support incrementally over time.

We need to create relationships with decision makers. Takes time.

Advocacy rules

• Respect
• Connecting agendas
• Recognizing that people do things for their reasons not ours
  • Advocacy is like banking. You can’t make a withdrawl without making some deposits. How do we contribute to the organization’s agenda?

Universal principles

• Reciprocation (feel obliged to return favors)
• Authority (look to experts)
• Commitment/consistency (with commitments of value)
• Scarcity (less available more we want it)
• Liking (more we like more we want to say yes)
• Social proof (what others are doing)

What is the percentage of the organization’s budget? Not the dollar ammount the percentage.

It’s good to have sponsers in the organization that will help and support us.

Pillars

• Relationship – have to develop even if we don’t like the person
• Intended approach
• Desired results
• Context-for the issue, individual and organization

Return On Time Invested (ROTI)

• Need to really think about how we are spending our time.
• We can’t afford to be perfectionists
• What do we spend our time on?
• Is it important?
• Are we locating our time wisely?

Focus

• Flexible
• Observable
• Courageous
• Useful
• Supportive

In God we trust. Everyone else , give us data.

Focus on the plan

• On the relationship
• On the approach
• On the context

A mediocre plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

Lack of faith in ourselves is the biggest obstacle.

Inhibitons

• Not my job
• Lack of competence
• Talking is not influencing
• Missed the last two

NO WHINING! We are prone to vicitimization. There is no energy to it. We are prone conflict avoidance. The issues remain and fester.

Create resources on a few key areas

• Connectors
• Mavens
• Salespeople
• Do not do what you think is right
• Missed the last two

Bringing it all together

• Building influence
• Using evidence
• Connecting agendas
• Assessing time
• Assessing costs
• Leveraging resources
• Measuring results

I really enjoyed this evening session. I did not take notes because I was having fun just listening. So I’ll link to some other people who did take notes.

The presenters were:

• Stephen Abram, VP, Strategic Partnerships and Markets, Gale Cengage Learning & Past President, SLA
• Marshall Breeding, Director for Innovative Technologies and Research, Vanderbilt University Library Technology Guides
• Amanda Etches-Johnson, User Experience Librarian, McMaster University
• Sarah Houghton-Jan, Digital Futures Manager, San Jose Public Library
• David Lee King, Digital Branch & Services Manager, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library
• Bill Spence, VP, Information Technology, Information Today, Inc.

The moderator was Scott Brandt, Associate Dean for Research, Purdue University.

I’ll post the notes here as I find them:

• Sarah Houghton-Jan
• David Lee King – He also posted his presentation on slideshare (with notes!)
• Don Hawkins (an official CIL blogger)

This was an interesting session by Joe Murphy (Yale) and Jan Dawson (Knowledge Ontario). They discussed some different methods for digital reference. Dawson used the example of her service trying VoIP for virtual reference and Murphy gave us some things to consider as we move toward a more robust digital reference service.

Jan Dawson worked on a pilot project with Ask Ontario to add VoIP technologies to it’s virtual reference offerings. Ask Ontario seems like a really neat service so check out the link. Why move to VoIP? It is a step toward face to face virtual ref – not just chat. The possibilities for virtual reference are really exciting and this is a great way to help people meet their information needs.

They used Skype as their platform for virtual reference because it works in more places and is free for them and the public to install and use. They didn’t use the video option. When people went to Ask Ontario they were given the option to use Skype or simple chat. For a variety of reasons not a lot of people used Skype. The biggest reason being people didn’t have Skype installed and didn’t want to install it. It was also a little tricky because they use one platform for their chat feature and had to get people to switch to Skype in order to use the new service. It wasn’t a smashing success but it was a learning experience and something she and her colleagues can build on.

While listening to her presentation I kept thinking that this sounds a lot like plain old phone reference until I realized the difference is that the people are contacting the library via their computer. By contacting them this way they were opening themselves up to a new method of reference service and taking advantage of Ask Ontario’s unique collaboration among public and academic libraries. It is different than just picking up the phone and calling the local library. The Ask Ontario libraries have a created another channel to help their public and I assume the public’s response is positive.

Something she mentioned that struck me as was that the older librarians were more comfortable with Skype reference than the younger ones. The reason is because they had more experience with traditional phone reference. Phone reference really is a skill that you have to do to get better.

Joe Murphy was next. I’ve been following him on twitter for a while and was looking forward to hearing him speak. He has posted his presentation so I’ve linked to it. He has been a strong proponent of text messaging reference service for a long time so he discussed text reference. A point he made strongly is that text messaging is not a novel technology for some people. It is the dominant technology for communication. I have to agree with that point. I use text messaging a lot and some days it is my primary means of communication with my wife and my mother.

Why should libraries use text messaging?
Some people prefer texting for communication. He has even said that “libraries that don’t offer texting are basically invisible to me.” Libraries will lose people like him who do a lot of their work via their phone.

The technologies and tech considerations:

• Cost – first time cost and support costs. Time (as always) is a huge cost.
• Staff impact – comfort and willingness to adopt
• Ability to meet patron expectations – we should learn to use the technology personally so we will know how it works from a patron viewpoint
• Flexibility – interoperability with future platforms and developments

Tech options

• Phones – smartphones
• Instant Messaging
• Products - libguides, text-a-librarian
• Google Voice – can text via web and phone
• My InfoQuest – great potential

Policies and people

• Changes to our spaces – may have to change the cell phone policy at the library
• Affect on people – we need to work toward a change in attitude toward mobile technology and the philosophy of avoidance some of us have when it comes to new technology
• Create an exit strategy – it’s ok to have sussessful failures but try not to get stuck with a three year contract
• Learn skills and mobile literacy – we need to encourage our staff to learn mobile skills and experiment with new devices

A final statement he left us with is that we need to foster and encourage ongoing learning to match ongoing change.

Dee Magnoni of the Olin College of Engineering was the speaker for this session. I was interested in this session because it has become very clear to me that in order to thrive we need to establish partnerships with many groups. While it’s not in my job description, I believe that part of my job will be to help establish and maintain different partnerships as my role evolves. I was looking for some pointers and general information about partnerships from this session. This was a good session but I missed a lot because I was busy taking notes. I wish I could have gotten everything she said down. I think I’ve got the main points below. I’ll fill it in as I find more. (Here are some notes by Julian)

Olin sounds like a pretty nice school. I think I heard her say that all the kids get a scholarship…maybe I should look into that. My girls would make good engineers

She posed a question early in the presentation that I don’t know the answer to so I’ll have to ask my boss. The question was “Are partnerships written into our strategic plan?” (I have not seen our strategic plan – we do have one right?)

She outlined four different types of partnerships for libraries:

• Other libraries
• Vendors
• Customers
• Internal partners

Why partner?

• To help us obtain a more global mindset
• To encourage us to think strategically
• Innovate
• Efficiencies

Her partnership
She wanted to create an external library advisory board. The goal was to keep the library new and innovative. She was able to get a good cross section of people (vendors, alumni, other librarians etc.) Some things she learned to keep in mind when considering who to ask to be part of the board were:

• geography
• diversity
• existing relationships
• new relationships
• balance of expertise
• win-win relationships

They have meetings twice a year (I think) where they update library initiatives and discuss events that impact the library. During their meetings they also discuss different partnerships and the library’s strategic plan. They are encouraged to think beyond the budget and look for future directions for the library. She has found the advisory board to be be a great experience for everyone. The library has been able to benefit from a network of experts they didn’t have before and has gained new wisdom from this group of people.

Vendor partnering

• Think win-win
• Training
• Prizes and materials
• Snacks during finals
• Industry advice and mentoring

She had a vendor fair (coincided with talk like a pirate day) where different vendors came to the library to help educate the students about their databases. She planned for it 6 months in advance and put a lot of time into it. It was a very successful event. This was a win for the students because they learned more about the library’s databases and how to better use them. It was a win for the vendors because more students will use their databases and the library will be more likely to keep them when the subscription runs out.

Corprate-Academic

The library at Olin and Analog Devices have created a productive partnership. I’m not sure how it got stated but she mentioned that Analog provided the library with some equipment when they were getting started. As a result the library gives Analog employees a library card and lets them use the library just lie the students. This has opened up many opportunities for mentoring and internships which benefit the students and the company.

She discussed some of her local partnerships and how she has been able to travel around looking at examples of different partnerships. I couldn’t get much of that down because I was too busy listening. One of the points I remember is that vendors are more than willing to work with you to create goals they will help you with. Another was that collection development is a type of low hanging fruit when it comes to local partnerships. It may be beneficial to work with a local library to coordinate different collections so the libraries complement each other. Each library can save money and focus on a specific area of collection. That creates a better collection of resources for the community.

What is success?

• Must be tied to your strategic plan/goals
• Must make all parties stronger/better
• As fun as possible

Lessons learned

• Should have a lot of voices involved – from all sides
• Get as many people in the tent as possible
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
• Time – some things can be quick some not
• Outside organizations can be useful

I enjoyed this session and wish I could have gotten everything. She obviously has worked hard at creating and maintaining partnerships the benefit her library.

I was interested in this session because critical thinking is something I need to be better at as I move forward with my career. It was a good session and I was able to take some good lessons away.

Here are some good notes taken by Holli Henslee.

Rebecca Jones from Dysart & Jones and Deb Wallace of the Harvard Business School Library led the discussion.

I’ve included the slides here for reference but I encourage you to visit them on slideshare because the notes are very helpful.

My takeaways from this session:

Critical thinking isn’t about criticism. Critical means it’s important. It’s about thinking productively and effectively. When being critical it’s important to be fair and open minded. Being open minded is very important to having a productive dialog because you need to be open to new ideas you may not have thought about.

In a collaborative and connected world we can’t make decisions alone. They affect others. Our interactions have implications on other things we may not realize. We should try to think about those implications but it is definitely not easy. That’s why we should involve others and be open to their ideas.

When thinking critically it is important to:

• Raise the right questions
• Focus on real problems
• Gather and assess relevant information
• Develop well-reasoned conclusions and solutions
  • testing along the way
• Look at the issue/problem differently
• Don’t criticize
• Realize that tendencies and assumptions drive our decisions
• Challenge our usual practice
  • we cant get to where we want to go by doing what we’re doing now
• Frame the problem
  • what is your view of the issue?
  • how to re-frame?
• Define the status-quo
  • what is it?
  • what is it not?
  • breaking from it means action and opening ourselves up to criticism
  • evaluate other alternatives
  • ask outsiders
• Keep your goals consistent
  • don’t change your goals like you change your clothes

Definitely a good session. There is a lot here that I can use as I progress in my career. I sure do have a lot to learn.