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!