23 Things Kansas
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.
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.
Site under beta and coding challenge
Jan 13th
I’m currently working on tweaking this blog’s appearance and organization. 23 Things Kansas has definitely challenged me to work on developing my coding skills. That link was this week’s challenge: to find a way to quickly and easily deploy a list of links to all the participants’ blogs, a sortable, filterable, searchable solution. I think it worked! We’ll see.
In the process of tweaking this blog (in its perpetual beta), I’ve managed to briefly completely break it three or four times in the last 24 hours! Thankfully, due to great Wordpress documentation and Google searching, I’ve resolved most of the issues each time. If things look weird, or bizarre, or nothing is displayed, please bear with me. Blogs are sometimes a work in progress.
One thing I’ve partially accomplished, but not completely yet, is I’ve removed my Twitter Digest posts from appearing on the homepage everyday. I hope that helps clean this up. I set that up, so the people that are interested in what I have to say on Twitter each day, but aren’t Twitter users, might be able to follow the stream. You can still see those posts under the Twitter category. I hope that helps! More changes to come.
23 Things Kansas Week 1: Blogging
Jan 11th
I’m Heather Braum, and I’m the Technology Librarian at the Northeast Kansas Library System. I’m one of the mentors for the 23 Things Kansas program, but I’m also going to be participating right alongside all of you and learning. The more I dig into the library technology world, the more I realize how little I know. You never can stop learning!
A little bit about me personally (read my professional bio at the 23 Things Kansas mentors page):
I’m a lifelong Kansan, and grew up near Holton in Jackson County on my family’s fourth-generation farm. Dad decided to change careers and became the Valley Falls funeral director as I entered high school, so our family moved to Valley Falls into the town funeral home. That experience always makes for interesting discussions as I meet people. 
I have an adorable nephew and sweet niece, as well as
two cats that are my kids. White Sox and Storm are lovable, and yet their first choice to sit when I’m home is right in my lap, whenever I’ve working on my laptop; it’s ever so convenient! Oh yes, and I’m a diehard KU basketball fan and loathe the colors black, yellow, and purple (you do the color sorting)! Rock Chalk Jayhawks!
Mom (who’s participating in 23 Things Kansas (will link to her blog when she starts it)) is the Holton High School librarian, and she told me for years I’d be a librarian. I ignored her, studied political science in college, and started graduate school in political science. I quickly realized it was the wrong field, and returned back to librarianship. After my first semester of library school and focusing on law librarianship, I realized that technology+librarianship=Win! and applied/started at NEKLS, and the rest is history. I finished my MLS at Emporia State a year ago; was so glad to be done with Capstone!!
When it comes to technology, I’m a social media addict (especially Twitter — I’ll be the lead Mentor for the microblogging lesson). I love Macs, especially my iPhone, and enjoy teaching others about technology. It’s scary and frustrating, but it really can make lives easier!
I’m taking part in 23 Things, because the best way to learn is to learn from those around you. I also am excited to be learning alongside so many Kansas library colleagues. It’s a very diverse bunch, and I’m looking forward to “meeting” and “learning” from all of you.
I’ve had this blog for a long time, but it has been mainly serving as a place where I digest my Tweets each day. I hope to get back in the habit of blogging regularly thanks to the schedule of 23 Things Kansas. This weekends’ discussion in response to Seth Godin’s post about the future of libraries was enough to want to get back to writing. I hope to be able to respond to that here later tonight.
Update: I realized tonight, after an adventure of managing to break my blog for fifteen minutes, that I never did say what this blog runs on. I run this blog on the Wordpress software. Many 23 Things Kansas participants are using Wordpress.com, which also runs the Wordpress software. The My Kansas Library on the Web project also uses the Wordpress software. I set up a domain that hosts my blog, which gives me a greater ability to customize and gives control over my site. However, the domain hosting is not free, and like I found out tonight, sometimes too much freedom means you break stuff. I always learn from breaking things, though. It’s the way I’ve always learned about technology. You break it, and 99.9999999999999% of the time it can be fixed. So don’t be scared to try something new or be worried you might break something or do it “the wrong way.” There is typically no wrong way with technology. That’s the beauty and the frustration of it!
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