Pivot Points for Change: Libraries and Librarians Blog Posting
Mar 4th
I thought you all might be interested in a new blog post by Bobbi Newman. Some of you might be familiar with Bobbi; she is now the digital branch manager at the Chattahoochee Valley Regional Library System. Bobbi will be speaking at the KLA Conference on Thursday, April 8, at 10am-11:30am as the Beta Phi Mu speaker, presenting on Libraries and Transliteracy.
Bobbi blogged this morning about a recent staff day at her library where Buffy Hamilton (who will be speaking at the ESU SLIM Summer Institute for School Librarians) spoke about 9 pivot points of change in libraries. I’m going to post the first five here; many of them fit in very neatly with what we’ve been covering so far in 23 Things Kansas and will be covering in the weeks to come. Check out Bobbi’s blog for the other points as well as the slides from Buffy’s presentation.
The fabulous Buffy Hamilton gave her Pivot Points of Change presentation at my library’s Staff Day last week. The points were inspired by post from Seth Godin in which he states changing everything is too difficult. Buffy applied this to libraries and librarians for the 9 pivot points of change. This is a slightly modified version of her original 9 pivot points of change for school librarians.
- Instead of thinking you can only participate in face to face conferences, consider how you can participate virtually
- Keep your traditional means of connecting with patrons and colleagues, but innovate at every possible touch point through social media and social networking
- Keep reading your print journals, but use a feed aggregator or information portal to access and organize your favorite blogs, journals, podcasts, youtube videos, and twitter rss feeds to stay on the cutting edge
- Keep networking with colleagues face to face, but cultivate a personal learning network to broaden your PLN (Personal Learning Network) to include librarians and other professionals from around the world who can inform your thinking, practice, and philosophy
- Keep your traditional productivity tools, but use cloud computing to encourage collaboration and information sharing
For those 23 Things Kansas participants who started using Twitter last week, I hope you remember to check in from time to time and keep the conversation going there, and find new resources. I try to remember to cross-post good articles and links I come across to my Delicious account, but I’m pretty forgetful. I usually just end tweeting these articles.
Please let me know if you still have questions about Twitter or about how it might work for you. The pivot point of change #4 mentioned above is a huge reason why I use Twitter so much in my daily professional life. The people I communicate with around the country (librarians and educators) shape my thinking and the tools that I use on a regular basis.
Also, coming up in April, even if you won’t be able to attend the KLA conference in Wichita, you’ll be able to follow from home, through the Twitter hashtag that will be used to track everyone’s tweets relating to the conference. I believe that hashtag will be #kla2010. I’ll post more information about how to do this in the coming weeks.
Work in Progress
Feb 10th
This blog continues to be a work in progress. One of these days I’ll get around to finishing it up, including completing my different links lists, getting caught up on 23 Things Kansas lessons, and creating pages and resources for all the presentations I’ve done in the past 18 months. (Maybe if I’d get the web sites at work redesigned, I’d have time to play with my own. Ha!) Thanks for your patience.
Photo from Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lumaxart/2365527490/.
NPR on Facebook and Social Media Cards
Jan 20th
I posted this to the 23 Things Kansas listserv tonight, but loved the resources so much, I’m going to cross-blog them here.
I was quickly skimming through several blogs today and remember someone’s blog post for this week’s lesson on online communities (posted at the 23 Things Kansas website) mentioning an NPR story on Facebook as the reason she finally joined Facebook. Intrigued, I stumbled upon a couple of NPR stories from last year and thought I’d share them with you all; I don’t know if it was what she was looking for, but maybe one of these was it:
Also, I posted a link to this third article on the 23 Things Kansas Facebook fan page, but thought it wouldn’t hurt to re-post here:
Social Media Cards: A 2.0 Type of Business Card
Here’s a couple of paragraphs from it:
“You probably know someone just like Juli, because librarians are great at establishing relationships. Talking to patrons, figuring out what they like, helping them find exactly what they need—not a problem. But when it comes to social media, librarians struggle. There should be a policy, a schedule, someone assigned to tweet/facebook/wave for the library—right?
Not quite. The online librarian-patron relationship should be an extension of interpersonal communication. After all, the whole purpose behind social media is to aid in relationships.
Am I saying your library shouldn’t have a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account? Absolutely not. In fact, if you don’t have one now, why not? Online communities are growing, and your library needs a presence on those sites.
But let me ask you this: who do you listen to? An institution or a person you know? Without even realizing it, we ask our friends where they bought their car, if they know a good babysitter, and who cut their hair. Social media serves as a place to enhance our relationships. Since we’ve already established trust-worthy relationships with our patrons inside the library, it’s only natural that we use social media enhance our relationships with patrons virtually.” (end excerpt)
I’ve really enjoyed the comments on the 23 Things Kansas Facebook fan page about how all of you are using Facebook (click on the Facebook icon on the 23 Things Kansas website up at the top or visit http://www.facebook.com/23thingskansas). If you have a Facebook fan page or even a library website with comments enabled, have any of you been able to engage your patrons online and start conversations with them?
How do I use Facebook?
Jan 17th
This post is for part of the lesson that Janelle Mercer and I co-authored for the 23 Things Kansas lesson on Online Communities. We are both blogging about how we use Facebook, to give examples to 23 Things Kansas participants.
I’m “old” in Facebook age, joining the network back in its infancy in May 2005 when my college received access to Facebook. That was back in the day when only college students (or alums with college emails) were allowed on Facebook. In the almost five years since, my use of Facebook has drastically evolved. What originally was simply a way to stay in touch with college friends has turned into a way to connect and re-connect with friends and family that are all over the world. We can quickly see what’s going on in each others lives with just a few seconds of looking at each others’ profiles. I love it when my 3-year-old nephew has a new “Logan Show” video posted.
I also use Facebook to connect with library colleagues, getting to know them better, and share resources there. I share lots of tech resources on Facebook, although some other friends think it’s Greek most of the time! I manage the NEKLS Facebook Page for NEKLS libraries, which many of our librarians love, because NEKLS news from our various websites is fed to them right through Facebook.
T is for Training Challenge Meme
Jan 14th
I met a bunch of the T is for Training crew at Computers in Libraries last year through Bobbi Newman. I finally joined the T is for TrainingGoogle Group last summer, but it’s taken me this long to pay attention to the messages. My attention was caught at the right time, apparently, because a Challenge Meme was posted, asking members to post answers to 27 Questions. Here’s my lengthy response, so I won’t mind if you just skim or skip.
- Your one sentence Bio: I’m a lifelong Kansan, diehard Kansas Jayhawks basketball fan, mom of two ornery cats, and love to teach people, especially librarians, about technology (particularly free web tools, open source, and social media).
- Do you blog? If yes, how did you come up with your blog name? Yes. What a journey to get there. I’ve been an on-again, off-again blogger on since early in 2004, beginning with Xanga in college. I then switched to Wordpress.com for awhile. Notice there’s no links to those old blogs. You don’t want to go near them: I was a political science major in undergrad days (get the picture?). Currently, I contribute to NEKLS blogs (my place of work). I jump-started this particular blog again thanks to 23 Things Kansas. The tag line, Librarian in the Cloud: Sharing Info thru the Web…One Web App @ a Time, originated from the Fall of 2008, when Liz Rea, Sharon Moreland and I submitted a presentation proposal to the 2009 KLA/MPLA conference. We needed a snazzy title, and Liz, who’s the awesome NEKLS System Administrator with an uncanny ability to create superb presentation titles on the fly, threw out, “Living in the Cloud: How Using Online Services Can Let You Soar”. The title stuck, the presentation was accepted, and we presented at the 2009 KLA/MPLA Conference to a full room (presentation info post). We had had no idea cloud computing was going to take off in the way that it did last year when we submitted the presentation proposal in the first place. Sharon and I gave an encore presentation at NEKLS Tech Day 2009. Here’s the latest version of the presentation. Also, I’ve been sharing resources through Facebook, Delicious, Twitter, and other Web apps for several years, and my friends always appreciated it. When I started this blog up a year ago, the title “Librarian in the Cloud” seemed like a perfect fit! More >
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