Blogging Section of SLA-IT

Facebook and Blackboard

Inside Higher Ed published yesterday an article about a new Facebook application to link the social network with Blackboard, the course management software used in multiple academic institution. The application is called Blackboard Sync and will bring course information and updates to a student's Facebook account:

"Some of Sync’s other features include integration with Blackboard’s message boards, access to grades and a page with announcements and recent course updates — viewable only to the student who’s both logged on to Facebook and enrolled in the given courses"

There is already a Facebook group on the general topic of CMS, Course Management Systems in Facebook, created by librarian Gerry McKiernan.

To note, I looked for the application in Facebook but haven't found it yet. Forthcoming?

Meme: Passion Quilt

We have been tagged in the Passion Quilt Meme.  I chose the picture above for my bit of the quilt because:

The thing I'd like kids to know is that you can teach an old dog new tricks.  If you have a love of learning, you can experience the comfort that comes with lifelong learning. If you go forward in life believing that you're going to reach an age where you can't learn anymore then you're going to find yourself in uncomfortable situations.  Instead, go forward in life with the goal of always learning something new!

3 Simple Meme Rules:

 

• Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry. (Known origin of the meme is here)
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

Tag! You Are It: I know that the SLA IT Division Bloggers have been tagged already, but there are many of us - and I'd love to hear from other members so you're all first on my list:

• SLA IT Division bloggers
• NJSLA Blog Members
• Christine Schwartz
• Tom Ipri
• John Blyberg

Internet Archive & the FBI

I wrote about the Internet Archive back in February after returning from the Code4Lib conference.  Since then I have been checking out the site to see all of the awesome information it had available.  Yesterday I found out that the FBI was targeting the Internet Archive for information about one or more of its visitors. 

This from LISNews:

On November 26, 2007, the FBI served a National Security Letter (.pdf) on the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle, asking for records about one of the library's registered users, asking for the user's name, address and activity on the site.

Like many libraries, the Internet Archive was unable to provide the information requested because it keeps all browsing information anonymous.

This from DownloadSquad:

Seeing that the Internet Archive archives public information, that anonymous browsing is allowed, and all that's required to sign up for an account is an email address, username and password (Kahle says IP addresses aren't logged) it doesn't seem as though the FBI will really find much helpful information. They will find a whole lot of Grateful Dead recordings, if that's any consolation.

The original report from Wired can be found here.

This just brings home the issues of privacy we're facing in the library and digital world.  If we continue to digitize our content - new laws are bound to pop up trying to make libraries keep more personal information ... this is just the beginning.

Reality 2.0: Transforming Ourselves & Our Association

Last night I got to hear Stephen Abram talk about the future of SLA & librarianship.  First (and most important) I have uploaded my pictures to Flickr.

Stephen started with a mini rant (a good rant) about the fact that there is no proof that the book is at risk.  Reading stats are going up and book sales are going up.  That said, do we hear that librarians are at risk? Ever hear this one, “Everything’s on the Internet.”  The fact is that librarians are at risk even if books aren’t.  In short, there are some serious issues we have to get stronger about talking about. 

Stephen mentioned that we’re about to experience some huge changes.  If you think about it, we haven’t had any major changes in a long while.  Our grandparents had a bunch of huge changes all hit them at once (phones, tv, 2 world wars, etc) and it’s time for that to happen again.  North America is way behind the rest of the world when it comes to technology.  In Europe, people are using their phones for everything.  They have free TV delivered through their phone and text messages for everything.  I’m not a fan of this movement - maybe it’s just because of the costs associated with it here - but - I just want a phone - I don’t need it to double as a TV.

When it comes to digitization, China is only 5 years from digitizing everything written in Chinese.  It’s not going to be long before everything is available in digital format.  We’re going to need the tools to take advantage of this content.

So, what does this have to do with SLA?  Everything! The world is changing and librarians have to change with it and SLA wants to help librarians make that change as smooth as possible.  One interesting point that Stephen brought up was the fact that when someone leaves an organization one of the first things they do is clear off their computer - bookmarks and all.  This means that all the great resources that long time librarians have collected are lost.  We have to start storing our data in collaborative spaces so that we can all benefit from each other’s knowledge. I love this! And this is why I took so much pride in working on improving the Jenkins Law Library research links (a pre-del.icio.us project) - I wanted to make sure we were sharing our resources with any one who might need them.

Stephen asks that instead of sharing the myth amongst ourselves that we’re collaborative, why not be collaborative?  I love this!  The fact is that the nature of associations is changing - something I wrote about in library school.  The main selling point for associations used to be networking - but now with tools like Ning, Facebook and LinkedIn - why do I need an association to find fellow peers?  With these tools threatening library associations as we know them, what can SLA do to continue to be important for librarians?  The answer is learning and innovation. 

One way that SLA is setting itself apart (in my opinion) is their Click-U.  Educational events for SLA members.  What I didn’t know is that they have a regular presentation by Gary Price where he shares the newest tools he’s found for researching and they have a monthly free course available.  Being a recently graduated student, I’m a bit too poor to pay for too many classes - so I love to find things for cheap or free!

SLA also offers members access to over 1000 e-books on leadership and management topics (apparently we were told about this - but I missed it somehow - after writing this I’m heading to the SLA site to check out my member profile).  They also offer what they call ExecuBooks Summaries - they are 4 page summaries of new releases.

The thing I’m most excited about hasn’t been released yet, but I’m keeping my eyes open for it, the Innovation Labs.  This area of the SLA site will be a testing bed for members to try out all kinds of free and proprietary software without having to install it or pay for it.  Some of the big names will include Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Blogger, Survey Monkey and Confluence.  It’s basically a place for everyone to play!!  This area of the site will also have over 25000 software training videos from atomic learning.  How great is that???

While this isn’t everything that Stephen talked about, these were the bits that I was able to write down as he sped through his awesome talk.  He certainly made me pay even more attention to what the association is doing for us - I hope he did the same for some of the rest of you.

Technorati Tags: njsla, sla

Fax via the web

When I started working at home I realized how inconvenient it was to not have a fax machine (we don't have a land line - but our printer can fax...).  I spent ages searching for a fax tool that would let me do everything with PDFs online.  Today I find a link to Drop.io fax on Lifehacker.

Drop.io itself is a pretty neat service:

Drop.io enables you to create simple private exchange points called "drops."

The service has no email signup and no "accounts." Each drop is private, and only as accessible as you choose to deliberately make it. Create multiple drops, add any type of media, and share or subscribe as you want. To make a drop just click the big red button that says 'drop it'

Adding fax, just makes it that much cooler!

You can now fax documents directly into and directly out of your drop, for free.

No more fax machines, or expensive online fax services. Faxing just shouldn’t be that hard - and it should be free. With drop.io it is both easy and free.

New LISNews Site

New from Blake Carver the man behind LISNews & LISHost:

I started a new site, LISWire - The Librarian's News Wire (http://liswire.com), and I'm doing my best to spread the word. You can probably guess what the site is all about from the name, but there's also 2 mailing lists, and a bunch of RSS feeds. Robin Blum and I are running the show and are looking for press releases and other news items of interest to librarians to get things going. You can sign up for an account and submit things you'd like to announce to the library world. I'll be cross posting most announcements to LISNews for a little while until we see how much traffic we get at LISWire.

I wonder if this means LISNews won't have press releases anymore - or if this is going to be in addition to that?  Either way - I'm subscribed - are you?

The Hollywood Librarian's financial predicament

Via LISNews:

Lynne writes: “Greetings to all librarians. I am Lynne Martin Erickson. I have been the fiscal agent for The Hollywood Librarian documentary film since 2004. I post this in the hope that librarians will respond immediately and repost widely.

As many of you know, this wonderful film is the result of the tireless efforts of one person: Ann Seidl. She single-handedly raised $200,000 to make and distribute this movie, worked on it for over 8 years and she is still working to get it seen by as many members of our public as possible. She is traveling throughout the US and the world to promote the film. Thanks to the librarian network, the film is being seen in dozens of locations by hundreds and even thousands of people.

While Ann has devoted her full-time work to this cause, she has been paid very little. She insists she is not in it for the money. I can guarantee that is the case. She wouldn’t say this to you, but I can assure you that Ann is broke.

During the Banned Book Week release, when tickets sold for $8, we took in about $10,000, but less than $400 was profit. These days, she is asking for a small fee to screen the film but that money is to fund the editing and authoring process for the DVD which she wants to make available this fall. But she must have some financial support to go on working on the film. We can’t let her stop working on the film to take other employment when she is so close to finishing.

If you are a fan of The Hollywood Librarian or of Ann, I am asking you to send her your financial encouragement.

Go here now http://www.hollywoodlibrarian.com/involved.html and click on the Paypal link.”

I never got to see the movie and have been looking for the DVD - I’m happy to hear that it’s in production and hope that we can help this movie make it to the masses!!

Meebo

Many people are using instant messenger (IM) services, often to communicate with other professionals.  Having an IM account on Yahoo and AIM, for example, is nice, but who wants to have to remember to sign into every IM account that you own?  Many people are using services that allow you to use several IM services at once. I use Meebo.  Meebo allows me to use my AIM and Yahoo accounts at the same time (as well as others), and communicate with other people who are using Meebo. 

You can also setup and use Meebo chat rooms.  An informal group called "Library Society of the World" has a Meebo chat room, where information professionals from around the world gather to exchange information about libraries and so problem-solving.

Do you want people to be able to IM you without having an IM account anywhere?  Meebo Me is a widget that you can put on any web page that allows people to communicate with you through Meebo.  Some libraries are using this for IM reference.  I used it this past semester with my students, giving them one more way to communicate with me.  Now I've putting Meebo Me widgets on my web site contact page, giving people a quick way of talking to me.  I've already had two out-of-the-blue professional conversations with people I didn't know previously using Meebo Me.

If you are using several IMs, check out the tools that will allow you to do several at once.  If you don't like Meebo, there are other IM clients that you can check out.

CIL2008: Avatars to Advocacy

This year at CIL I got to attend my first ever pre-conference.  My session was taught by Helene Blowers and Michael Porter and covered the new paradigm of marketing in libraries.

Helene started the afternoon off by talking about the title of the presentation “From Avatars to Advocacy: Innovation Through Un-Marketing.”  The term “Un-marketing” is in the title because we were covering a different view than the traditional view of marketing.

Library Brand

When marketing people think about the library brand, they focus on the logo - but it’s a lot more!  If you believe the OCLC Perceptions report, the library brand is all about books, but in reality the library brand is all about community!  This is a theme I’ve written about a lot recently. So, as we look forward at where we’re going with marketing we want to focus on that part of our brand.

Marketing

The old paradigm of marketing focuses on controlling the look and feel of the brand - our fliers all look consistent - our websites match our print materials, etc. In 1957 it was very easy to reach your market because 45% of the audience were watching Lucille Ball … today we have so many mediums and niche markets to reach. For this reason, mass marketing is going away - and it’s being replaced with niche marketing.

The new paradigm is to influence the character and portability of your brand - allow people to take your brand with them and embed it into their own space allow them to contribute and participate.  Helene showed us an example from Gmail that I missed.  Google allowed people to make their own Gmail videos and then they merged them into one ad for Gmail.

The question for libraries is how you can enable customers to participate in your branding.  Helene recommends reading The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual and checking out the website. These talk about how markets are about conversations and brands are about getting people to talk about what you’re doing.

What strategic elements do we need to focus on in order to move our libraries into this model of marketing?

• Engage - to enable customers to connect with library staff its services with each other in meaningful ways (the switch is to allow them to connect with each other)
• Enrich - to provide our customers with a rich online experience that enhances their local branch experience and daily lives (let them find communities everywhere - in the library and out of it - and of course those who come and visit the web)
• Empower - to enable our customers to personalize their library experience allow our community to celebrate themselves (Gmail video celebrates the people using Gmail - not just Gmail itself) - we want our customers to feel good about themselves

Helene shared a great quote with us: “Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation….We need to learn to begin to let go” - A. G Lafley, CEO and Chairman of P&G, October 2006.  Another book to read on this topic is Rengen: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer - and What It Means to Your Business by Patricia Martin in which the author says “cultural consumers thrive on information and ideas to fuel to their creative self-expression.”

Real Libraries

Next Michael took over to show us a bunch of great examples.  He pointed out that we’re seeing a lot of these communication tools being used by institutions - so the institutions start the process and they do more than the user - but this is going to shift more to the users.

I agree with Michael when he says that people will give money to things they love - make them love you and they will participate. Look at what Gmail did - it’s cool to be associated with Gmail and so everyone wanted to participate.  Another example of this is the model LibraryThing uses to have people pay for their membership.  They give you choices as to what you can pay.  So if you really like them you can pay more than they’re asking (which I did).  If you put your library out there then they will send it to their friends - the spread of the word of mouth is much more now that we have blogs, social networking and email.

Michael sounds like an evil marketer when he says “get them when they’re kids and teens - never lose a hold on our market” but the truth is that we can do that with a clean conscience because we’re just trying to build up our market.  Libraries tend to had a culture of “no” and we have to get out of that or we’re going to go down. This includes allowing kids and teens to participate in marketing our libraries.

Examples of neat marketing tricks:

• Flickr groups like 365 Library Days Project and libraries and librarians - no one is making money off of it - it’s information so you can use tools like this to repurpose information for your community
• Meebo-rooms - created 365 Library Days Project room - everyone came to the room and asked what it was about
• Second Life Library 2.0 - example from libraryland that can be repurposed

One library that is doing neat things is the Santa Clara County Library. Another is Palo Alto City Library which has a good blog and a presence on other social networking sites such as Flickr and Facebook. Others includes Kankakee Public Library and San Mateo County Library - both are using these tools and twisting them to their purposes. Brooklyn College Library has shown real results by using MySpace.

Michael says “I could give a hoot about the brand name - I care about the functionality - the community and content - and if those tools help our users access content through us then they are successful - we just have to use these things to be better at our missions. “It’s not about us!” - it’s about our community.  How true and awesome to hear someone else saying this!

Engaging Our Community

“Brands are built on what people are saying about you, not what you’re saying about yourself” - Guy Kawasaki

Helene showed us a bunch of other examples:

• Hennipin County Library site where they had pictures of people reading Harry Potter when the latest book was released.  They used the Flickr API to upload images via their site and featured them on the homepage.
• Columbus Metro library has a teen gallery - allowing teens to feature their art on the homepage- it’s about letting them use our space to celebrate themselves
• YouTube & we love our NJ libraries - search for “3 reasons library” - why should libraries be telling you three reasons you should love us? why not have them showcase it for us??
• The Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County used Big Huge Labs to create inspirational posters - used during National Library Week - no “read” posters of celebrities - encouraged patrons to upload their own images and showcase real patrons
• Denver Public Library last summer encouraged teens to create videos on how they had fun in the library - took a risk by allowing teens to spread the word - winner did a book angel (like snow angel) on a table

• Louisville Free Public Library - last summer - after the summer reading challenge they gave them winners a sign to take pictures on their lawn - and put the pictures on their homepage

Helene then gave us 8 steps to take back to our libraries in order to better market them:

• educate - learn about social media
• experience - participate and join the conversation (can’t just learn from reading books - have to participate in order to understand)
• envision - develop a 2.0 marketing plan (tie into your mission/vision)
• engage - create social celebrations (social situations - things that tie into community events)
• enable - help your library brand and content travel (allow customers to share and repurpose content - widgets)
• expand - play with multimedia (libraries are very text heavy - move away from it)
• explore - learn as your go and track success (as you play you’re going to find things that aren’t relevant - but if you don’t try there is no way you’re going to learn)
• Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

Conclusion

Last note: always remember - the best way to get customer to market our brand is to allow them to promote us (the library) by marketing themselves.

Slides are online and we took photos of our brainstorming session and tagged them cil2008aa and cil2008unmarketing.

Technorati Tags: cil2008, cil2008unmarketing, marketing, cil08

Super Searcher Tips @ CIL2008

This week I'm at CIL.  Yesterday I got to hear an awesome presentation by Mary Ellen Bates in which she listed the following search tips:

• Altsearchengines.com - blog of alternative and niche search engines - click the top 100 tab - subscribe to rss feed
• Keotag - search across web 2.0 sites (technorati, delicious twitter and more)
• MSN product reviews - search for a specific brand
• Google’s new n improved timelines - creates a readable page easy to scan and identify trends (find when there was a buzz about a particular topics) - yellow line at the top shows where there was a buzz
• Watch for blended search results - lower precision results, but more long-tail content, esp. for obscure topics - seeing a lot more other search results (products, directions - what for what else appears at the top of the screen) - look at search results with new eyes
• searchCrystal - touchy feeling
• Carrot2.org - clustering on demand with a choice of search engines - let’s your determine how the search results are organized - uses different algorithms
• Loki toolbar - find location-dependent content - based on IP address or nearby wifi signals - tells you where you are not and locates on map - search locally
• Customizegoogle.com - Firefox fix for Google - nice customization - removes ads - infinite scroll results
• Google has experimental search - new way to see results - add view:timeline or view:info to your search query and you see things like dates or images or measurements on the pages - more efficient way to find images on a page
• Searchmash - unbranded Google site - cool interface - why do i care? it’s extremely cool - that’s why!  free of ads - lets you see other search indexes on the top right
• google date-limiting - advanced search screen (remember a date search on the web is never a reliable thing) can also roll your own - add +&as_qdr=dn to the SERP (search results page) URL - where n is the number of days (d15 = 15 days) - items spidered in the last n days
• Doubletrust.net - a tool for comparing search results - i prefer more results from Google or Yahoo - trust-o-meter
• I’d prefer this… search.live.com - add prefer:word to query - ranks these search results higher - test search “hybrid car prefer:convertible”
• MSN’s misspelling-suggestion engine - lets you find ways to misspell things since things on the web are not always spelled right
• Ask’s maps - both driving and walking directions - maps.ask.com - takes local topography (san fran - hills=bad) into account (i always use this tool when at conferences - to find out how to walk somewhere)
• Exalead.com - use Exalead’s NEAR/n operator — (solar OR sun) NEAR/3 power
• use search engines’ quick answer features - Ask.com Smart Answers - Google’s OneBox - Yahoo’s Shortcuts - MSN’s Instant Answers (at the top of the search results)
• Gigablast - limit to multiple sites - has all kinds of advanced search features
• SnapSearch - visual search results - lets you preview the page and lets you interact with the page on the search results screen - based on the Gigablast search engine
• Pagebull - metasearch tool - entirely visual - no words - all pictures - good if you remember what the page looked liked and can’t remember name
• Factbites.com - search results deliver small fact-bites - max 30 results - pull factual sentence from the search results
• TextRunner “information mining” looks for statements like factbites
• nationmaster.com - source for national stats - cool tool for presenting graphical info (also a statemaster)
• TouchGraph - find relationship among URLs - finds related books in amazon (uses subject terms) - graphical results
• just a reminder here - check out podcast lectures from yale, princeton, uc berkley, stanford, johns hopkins - all providing lectures online for free
• Kosmix - a vertical search engine on steroids - more than just websites - trusted sources - other concepts/related concepts - videos - yahoo questions and answers
• LOUIS - library of unified information sources - searchable documents from congressional reports
• public.resource.org for the full text of us supreme court cases - incomplete now - but keep an eye on this one - bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/US/
• librarianoffortune.com

I know this is a very note-like post - but this presentation lended itself to this style.  See Mary Ellen’s list of links.

Technorati Tags: cil2008