joy at moll projects dot com
After lunch, we got a presentation from Brad Whetzel of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and a current library school student, about library toolbars. He's just past the playing with the idea phase, which is one step farther along the path than we've achieved in our library, so it should help speed us through that.
For playing around with things, he used Conduit. BizBar looks quite similar. Best Tool Bars has more complicated offerings including a deskbar that shows up at the bottom of the desktop instead of the top of the browser window.
A related but different sort of beast is the LibX extension for Firefox. It offers a customizable toolbar, OpenURL support, and library logos that indicate in Amazon or other on-line bookstores that the library owns that book.
It doesn't look like these are customizable, but I imagine some patrons would be interested in the Ebscohost toolbar and the OCLC toolbar.
Labels: conferences, toolbars
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Our second session was "A Few Seconds a Day Keeps the Tech Guys Away," given by Tom Bell of John A. Logan College.
He shared an idea that has proven very successful at his institution--emailing a 30-second tutorial to faculty each Friday morning. Each one has four or five screen shots and a little text. It covers one small thing like how to get a signature in your Outlook email or how to burn a CD. Each tutorial takes an hour or so to prepare, but only thirty seconds (or maybe a minute or two) to understand. Tom designed a nice graphic logo banner so that the Friday tutorial is easily recognized from the branding.
He says that he gets a remarkable amount of positive feedback--more than a dozen thank-yous for the first couple and two or three from different people each week even after several months of sending them.
He uses SnagIt for the screen captures, Photoshop to optimize the size of the graphics and add arrows and text, and Microsoft Word to put it all together.
I don't believe that sending tutorials out to faculty from the library would be possible in our environment, but we could do something similar that goes to library staff.
Labels: conferences, instruction, screen capture
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Session 1 at the SILRC (pronounced Silrock and standing for Southern Illinois Learning Resources Cooperative) Retreat was mine: Social Networking Software in Libraries. I doubt that anyone blogged it....But I talked from a wiki that is publicly viewable. There's also a handout with definitions that I should probably throw up on the web sometime.
This is the third time I've given this talk as a 90-minute overview of web-based social technologies--wikis, blogs, instant messaging, sharing sites, and community sites (although the last two seem to be blending). People seem to get a lot out of seeing lots of library examples in conjunction with short definitions--it helps them understand the similarities and differences.
I'm giving it again on Friday for the Kirkwood Public Library's In Service Day. I'll probably change quite a few of the links to focus on public library examples. Suggestions welcome: joy at moll projects dot com. Also, I think I only get to talk an hour, so if anyone has ideas on what to cut, I'd love to hear it.
The difference between a retreat and a conference seems to be that there are fewer people (about 30) and only one track of sessions. With no choices to make, no room changes, and a reasonable number of people to meet, I found a retreat to be a much more relaxed atmosphere than a conference. I stayed for a couple of more sessions (and lunch) so I'll blog those in the next two blog posts.
Labels: conferences, presentations, social software
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Thin Clients: The Spin on Thin
Helene E. Gold, Eckerd College
This was a fun presentation that I went to mostly because I had a good time hanging out with Helene earlier in the conference. I don't anticipate that we'll be seeing thin clients anytime soon in our library, but one of the points Helene made was that generally librarians are told that this is going to happen, not brought into the decision-making process. It was nice to hear the experience of someone who was distressed, at first, but was able to ultimately see the advantages.
Thin clients are what those of us who are old enough to remember the pre-PC days would call dumb terminals. The public side is a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The computing side is a shared server on a computer in a secure location. Modern thin clients support USB flash drives so a user can access his or her own material.
The primary advantage to a thin client system is cost. There is a high initial cost, but a savings in the long run. More than equipment cost, there is a substantial savings in maintenance cost, particular the labor. With fewer moving parts and a lot fewer holes for students to try sticking food into, the thin clients are very robust, making them ideal for recreational and dining areas. There is also a nice bonus in savings on energy usage and costs--thin clients use about one-sixth the power of a PC.
It was something of a comfort to realize that Eckerd College is teaching their students one at a time about the system, just as we are about printing. It seems like there ought to be a better way, but just because we put out signs and put up websites, doesn't mean that anyone is going to read them. And why should they? They don't need to know until they encounter a problem, so it's a good thing that I get paid to solve problems.
Helene has a nice site up with links to her handouts and her slides. An advantage of actually being there is that I got to see the fun video clips.
Labels: conferences
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Libraries and Public Interest Entertainment
Thom Gillespie, Indiana University
Gillespie is a very entertaining speaker with lots of stories to tell—an experience that is completely impossible to re-create in a blog entry. His main interest is creativity and he thinks that libraries can be the place where people can create stuff. The model is Community Access television. In a number of communities, the public library has the lab where people can create the content for Community Access TV. Why not for You Tube? Or, easier, why not have libraries teach Photoshop and Flash instead of just Microsoft Word? If the librarians don’t have those skills, find someone else who does.
He mentioned Orange Blender—a site with open source software for creative pursuits.
He says that the real learning is not in playing games, it is in making games. Can the library support that?
Libraries have Book Clubs—why not a Game Club where participants discuss a different Game each month?
Labels: conferences
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Multimedia Tutorials for Remote Users
Christina L. Biles, Oklahoma State University
This was mostly about Camtasia-created tutorials, although she thinks Captivate is just fine, too. She also mentioned cheaper options that would also do the trick: My ScreenRecorder and InstantDemo. Someone from the audience also mentioned Wink on Linux, which is Open Source.
She can make a Camtasia tutorial so quickly that she uses it to answer reference questions. When a telephone exchange hasn’t been fully satisfactory since the patron can’t see the librarian’s screen, she makes a quick tutorial to show the process and emails it off to the patron.
Of course, one of the advantages of tutorials is that they are repeatable, so rather than explain over and over again how to set up the proxy, record the instructions as a tutorial. Then future users can learn from the same material.
A quiet physical space is required. Although if you don’t get too good of a microphone (that picks up every single sound), it doesn’t have to be completely silent.
She suggests writing a script and reading it over until it sounds natural. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with annoying “umms” and “errrs” in the recording. She often uses someone else to move the mouse while she talks. It’s also possible to record the screen movements separately from the voice and put them together at the end.
Recording things in small chunks has a number of advantages. It’s easier in the software to string small things together into a larger piece than it is to go the other way around. Small pieces can be mixed and matched. People seem to prefer smaller videos that only take a few minutes to watch. At OSU, they have found that the video tutorials are accessed more frequently than the HTML and PDF tutorials that are available on the same page.
Labels: conferences, instruction, screencasting
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It’s About Time, It’s About Place: Designing Interoperable Modular Web Applications for Delivering Online Library Instruction
I made a blog post about this session at the LITA blog.
Labels: conferences, instruction
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Improving Library Services with AJAX and RSS Feed
Hongbin Liu, Yale University
I sat next to Genny while she wrote a live blog post of this session for LITA. Mostly, this was a Web 2.0 awareness session. And, in particular, awareness of AJAX and what a site looks like that uses it.
Hongbin Liu showed us Google/IG, the home page personalization service launched in May 2005. I think I managed to miss it when it first came out but it appears to be an AJAX version of MyYahoo. Yale has built a MyLibrary site that works like Google/IG rather than the older library portals, which were always underutilized. He admitted, when asked, that Yale is not going ahead with this project. The audience seemed to agree that it probably makes more sense for libraries to teach their users about services like Google/IG and then make sure that our content is reachable through that.
He wasn’t able to get LCSH Live from OCLC to work live, but apparently it works like Google Suggest, where when you are typing in a search term, the software suggests possibilities, other words that begin with the same letters as the ones you’ve typed. This is an AJAX application.
Written tonight: I just tried LCSH Live and it's pretty cool, getting deeper into a subject the more I type. L gets me a bunch of topics that begin with l--and I guess it's giving me the ones with the most items in it. So I see "large type" and "literature" in the top ten results--not just an alphabetic sort. Also, when I type in a subject like "moonshining" it gives me the item "Distilling, illicit"--the correct subject heading. Nice. Clicking through on links gets you authority records, which would be pretty scary to a patron, but it's a nice tool for figuring out the correct subject heading.
Labels: conferences, reviews
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Archiving the Digital Frontier: Saving Today’s Information for Tomorrow’s Use
Kristine Hanna, Internet Archive
The Internet Archive (IA) takes a snapshot of the web every two months, saving two billion pages per month. In 2002, it added the ability to save audio and moving images—these are generally contributed rather than crawled. It holds 55 billion pages from 55 million sites. Sixty-thousand unique visitors visit www.archive.org each day.
They aim to save everything because we don’t know what will be valuable in the future and because internet items are at risk; they disappear. IA did a study of the Nigerian election, collecting as many sites as they could find on it. When they checked 6 months later, 75 – 80 percent of those sites were gone, so that only the Internet Archive had copies.
The Internet Archive does topical collections, asking partners and users to contribute URLs to sites they believe should be archived. For example, there’s a special collection on Hurricane Katrina and one on the upcoming 2006 election. Sometimes, these special collections are made at the request and with the support of large institutional partners like the Library of Congress or the National Library of Australia.
For smaller institutions, the Internet Archive offers the web-based application, Archive It. For an annual subscription fee of $10,000 (a negotiable amount since IA is non-profit and just needs to recover costs), Archive It will collect and archive particular sites or groups of sites as requested by the institution, up to 10 million pages. The University of Texas used this service to create the Latin American Government Documents Archives.
Another project of the Internet Archive is its involvement in Open Content Alliance, a digital books project. Taking a different approach than Google, they are starting with public domain material.
Labels: conferences
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The Internet and the Experience Effect: A Closer Look
I made a blog post on this session at the LITA blog.
Labels: conferences
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Save America’s Treasures: Preservation of Rare Acetate and Vinyl Recording Transcriptions
Dr. John Rumble, Alan Stoker, and Steve Maer of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
What better way to open a conference (the Library and Information Technology Association's National Forum) in Nashville than a presentation by people from the Country Music Hall of Fame. We learned about the challenges of migrating and preserving acetate disc recordings. These were instantaneous recordings, cut directly to disc (not pressed for wide distribution) that were designed to be played only a few times, usually for radio broadcast. Even under the best environmental conditions, these deteriorate much faster than vinyl and most have not been kept in the best environments. Most are metal-based discs. During World War II, when metals were scarce, they were made from glass--those are even more fragile.
Using an NEA grant, they have been preserving some of the acetate discs in their collection, transferring the data to a digital format and analog tape, adding appropriate metadata, and storing the originals in acid-free sleeves. The disc cleaning and the data entry have proven to be more time-consuming than estimated. The greatest expenses are the labor involved in the audio transfer and compiling the metadata.
Possibly the most exciting acetate disc in the collection is the first network broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry from October 14, 1939. They played selections from the show for us and the sound quality is quite amazing—more like listening to an old record than an old radio broadcast.
Labels: conferences
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This program on hosting library school practicum students was presented by Karen Robinson, our St. Louis-based person for the library school in Columbia, and Julie Anne Portman of Fontbonne University, an organization that has hosted practicum students from Mizzou but also interns from other library schools.
The ideal experience, from Mizzou's point of view, seems to be a multi-faceted round robin where the student spends time working in every section of the library combined with a special project of some kind. One of the questions at the end pointed out that this seemed a bit contradictory. One way to address the contradiction is to not provide an ideal experience--there have been plenty of successful practicums that lean much more in the direction of special projects or much more in the direction of a round robin. Another way is to let the practicum student work it out. Karen pointed out that librarians deal with that kind of juggling in their time management all the time. There's no reason it can't be part of the practicum experience as well.
Benefits from hosting practicum students:
Fontbonne has a more structured program than Mizzou's general practicum requirements. The interns go though an interview process, low-key but formal enough to be good interview experience. The program requires interns to read and write short summaries of nine articles, to keep a log, and to work in a variety of sections of the libraries and a variety of times and days of the week. The interns are more integrated into the employment structure at Fontbonne than I suspect is even possible at my institution--they meet with HR, have a log on for the intranet and email, and receive a small stipend. Fontbonne gives each intern a midpoint evaluation and a good-bye party.
Labels: conferences, library school
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I hosted a Table Talk on blogs while Joshua Lambert of Missouri State hosted one on wikis. Neither one of us got enough participants to fill a table, so we joined forces to create one table talking about blogs and wikis. It worked really well, I think. We had a range of people from at least one person who was in the "what's this blog and wiki thing all about, anyway?" phase to one person who knows how to syndicate an RSS feed on to her library's web pages--a skill that makes me jealous. We also had librarians from every type of library except K-12.
I believe this is the first time MLA held Table Talks. Our table was in a kind of annex, so I can't judge the turn out very well, but the whole area seemed pretty busy. Table Talks are a delightful way to encourage more interaction among conference participants who don't necessarily know each other by allowing them to engage in conversation about interesting topics. MLA's Table Talks covered pornography, genealogy, rural librarianship, and many more subjects.
Labels: blogs, conferences, wikis
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The public speaking session may have been too basic for me, but this one was over my head. I'm pretty sure there are people in my library serving on the Assessment Task Force who have the background to understand all of this. Fortunately, the handouts are marvelous, so I have something to take back to them.
I may not understand this, but it seems to me that the heart of assessment is setting goals and checking to make sure that you have met them. Goal-setting is an endlessly fascinating process to me. I don't understand why it so often gets wrapped up into things that seem dry and lifeless.
Setting goals is a spiritual act. It's divination--I'm predicting the future and summoning all the powers at hand to aid in producing that future. Why suck the fun out of something that can have all the delicious thrill of crossing an old woman's palm with silver for a reading of the cards? Assessment tools and processes can help us predict the future with more accuracy than a crystal ball, but they don't have to do it at a cost of stripping the soul out of planning.
I've seen a couple of talks on assessment now and read several articles, but I'm waiting for a true assessment evangelist. Someone who can tell us not just that we must do this but that it can be a process that affirms our lives as librarians and infuses our libraries with the kinds of services that make meaningful connections for people. Because if goal setting is at the heart of this, I think that's possible.
Labels: assessment, conferences
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This second session on public speaking was too basic for me after yesterday's acting techniques. I'm a little surprised that we're still getting the "no more than 3 to 5 bullet points per slide" kind of advice when a lot of presentation professionals are telling us not to use Power Point at all. Edward Tufte makes a case that PP leads to sloppy thinking and contributes to big disasters at NASA.
I'm never going to be as dynamic as Stephen Abram, but I'm ready to have slides like his that are simply visuals to punctuate his talk. Lately, my talks have been wiki-based because I wanted to demonstrate live websites while giving my audience one web site to go to later to play some more with the tools. I have a hard time imagine giving a talk with no visuals at all, as Dr. Martin did yesterday, but maybe that's a goal to shoot for.
Labels: conferences, presentations
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Presenter: Jennifer K. Martin, Ph.D., Hall Family Foundation Professor of Theater, University of Missouri-Kansas City
I went to this because I got some tips from a teaching workshop that our library did about moving around a classroom that I've found really helpful. This session was that idea on steroids. Think about explaining a "on the one hand and on the other hand" concept--it's so much clearer if you use your hands, right? Now, think about making points in a lecture by starting off at home plate for the introduction, standing on first base for the first point, moving over to third base for a different point, and moving into the audience (second base) to tell them something a bit more intimate.
According to Dr. Martin, or rather some research, people take in information through hearing, through facial expression, and through body movement--and it's actually that last that is the favorite method for most Americans.
Some things I'm going to try at the Reference Desk:
Labels: conferences, instruction, presentations
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Stephen Abram, VP of Innovation at SirsiDynix and blogger at Stephen's Lighthouse, was our keynote speaker. Don't miss the chance to hear him--and he speaks so much that it's hard to imagine not getting the chance. He makes an audience laugh out loud, he uses great visuals, and he makes you feel good about being a librarian. Pretty much exactly what a conference planning committee wants in a keynote speaker.
Here are some quotes I liked:
This is one of his slides:
What do libraries do best?
- we create an experience
- we improve the quality of the question
- we support community and learning
He mentioned librarian / staff recommendations. That's not normally the kind of thing that academic librarians do, since we don't do reader's advisory. But I could see it working if the format was fun enough. Content for a podcast perhaps? Have library staff share some resource they find particularly useful.
He mentioned an idea of letting patrons record a book review of a book they've just returned for Library Radio, the library's podcast. Abram was pretty sure that kids would do that, I wonder if college students would.
Some sites to check out when I get back:
Labels: conferences
# (0) commentsI'm at the Missouri Library Association conference. I love this conference. It's cheap. It's easy to get to (in Columbia, this year, just about the center of the state) and I can't walk into a room without knowing someone--and this is only my third conference, my first as a librarian.
Labels: conferences
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