Posts tagged Conferences
Ebooks: Landscape & Implications
Apr 14th
Bobbi Newman, Brian Hulsey, Jason Griffey
Brian Hulsey
hulsey.brain@gmail.com
“We change whether we like it or not” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why is this change important to us? We have to be there for our patrons. Back of Wall Street journals. Airports had eReaders all over the place during Brian’s travels. Library conference is being held online.
Relevance: photo of old Apple computer. Have to examine your area and determine what will work for you. Have to figure out how the patron base and what they are wanting. Many are wanting
Cost: replacing physical books costs lots of money. Digital content can’t be lost, destroyed, ruined. Maximizing budgets for what you get for the library.
Impact: look at how it will affect the community & affect the library & its staff. Training will have to take place. Don’t just implement something just because you read about it. Thought has to go into it.
Implementation: eservices get implemented because its cool; be careful. Kindle loaning — tied to library’s credit card. Patrons started buying more books, using library’s credit card. Be careful — know what you’re getting into.
Policies: what type of service will you use at your library; policies on the loaning of the devices must be created.
Cataloging: if you don’t add econtent into your catalog — how are patrons going to find it, locate it, if it’s not in your catalog and online services?
Vendor Advice: Make the vendor rep your best friend; that person knows the system in and out; find out how to best maximize the use of the e-content service you implement.
Problems: training all staff first so all questions can be answered by anyone at any time, not call back later; helping patrons when questions come up; when you don’t help the patron, library isn’t relevant to the patron any longer.
Constantly changing: vendor situation constantly changing & devices constantly changing; Ebrary; Kindle; Sony Reader; iPad. Story time with Cat in the Hat on the iPad. These services aren’t just going to fall into your lap and you can use them. Must learn & constantly change with the services to stay relevant.
Bobbi Newman
Will be talking about devices.
“Everything I say will be outdated by the time you leave this room.”
iPad – didn’t get it when it was announced, then saw one and her mind was changed.
Kindle: easy to use; most popular device right now, still; buy the book, download it to the device.
Lending Library eBooks, complicated process.
Sony eReader
Nook: can loan books to 1 friend and only one time.
Who owns electronic content, from eBooks? Severe restrictions on these files. Physical books can be given to others; eBooks, not so much.
iPhone/iPod Touch: people are reading on these devices; not made for it.
iPad: its brand new; but going to greatly change the future of devices.
Watching video from Jason Griffey now, who couldn’t be at the conference. If it’s online, will post a link to it later.
His Predictions
- eBooks will stop being tied to specific devices
- iPad: Kindle, iBooks;
- Amazon: has a Kindle app for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch, has desktop software for all platforms, and for the Kindle, of course, trying to be there for all devices.
- Software platforms for eBooks up & coming: Copia, http://thecopia.com/ & Blio, http://blioreader.com/
- Black & White eInk readers, will be commodity devices by the end of 2010. Prices will drop considerably, maybe even as low as $50. What will libraries do at that point?
- eBook DRM: initially goal with music was to tie it up with DRM; eventually the publishers will realize that it’s not in the best interest of the consumer to have DRM. DRM keeps honest people honest.
- jasongriffey.net/wp is his blog.
Comments at the end
- ease of use matters most to patrons
- iPod/iPhone took off because it was the easiest to use.
- people aren’t going to use those devices that are difficult to use.
- these devices can be hacked; but that isn’t easy.
- Database eBrary can’t be used on eReader devices.
From Podcasts to Blogs and Beyond! Session
Apr 14th
Scherelene Schatz, New Jersey State Library
JerseyCat ILL training online. What is it? It’s the statewide virtual catalog and ILL system. 700 multi-type libraries (school, special, academic, public; 95% of public libraries use JerseyCat).
Target audience? 2,000 people trained on the system. Webinars are really good way to quickly update & reach more people, because they can’t leave the library to go to training. Training reference librarians who deal with customers. Training of catalogers — who want to download the MARC records from the system.
In the past what was used? Went to hands-on lab in the state in person, and went through the particular lesson that day.
Now, using webinars. JerseyCat listserv.
Also, using Blog for the project. Slides shared there for presentations. Archiving webinars to view webinar later. Registration links provided there.
Why are webinars a viable option? Started with searching; workflow; tweaking search screen’s default settings; attaching journal articles to the ILL requests; vendor upgrades.
How do you set up, prepare, and conduct a webinar?
- choose a vendor & platform — Scherlene used GoToWebinar
- schedule the webinar: title, description, date, start & end time
- how to provide audio? conference call on phone — provide a 1-800 number; OR VOIP
- set up registration form that participants’ will fill out
- evaluation form setup as well, to pop up on the screen at the end of the webinar or emailed to participants to ask for feedback for the session.
- after setting up registration form, email & link generated for participants; also sends out reminders about the session, so no one forgets
How are the webinars going?
- compared hands-on training to webinar training: very comparable; not much difference.
Performance reports, post-webinar?
- shows participant info
- polling questions answered
- post-session survey responses
Final Tips
- mark your calendar for the sessions that you as the trainer set up; you need to be at those sessions.
- nothing substitutes for good preparation
- have session participants mute their phones, etc.
- send handouts to participants ahead of time; some people need pieces of paper in front of them.
- use your polling questions (if you notice people wandering away, esp)
Jason Puckett & Rachel Borchardt Section
Podcasting for instruction librarians
Adventures in Library Instruction podcast
What’s a podcast? RSS + MP3
Like a radio show; it’s free to produce, create, and share, through the Internet.
Blog that has attached media files, almost always MP3s (but also PDFs, video files)
Don’t need a portable media player to listen to podcasts. Many podcast listeners view through a computer; more starting to listen on their smartphones or other devices.
RSS feed: if you just put the file up on a blog without RSS it’s like a monograph, no subscriptions. If you have RSS, it becomes like a serial and you can subscribe. People get this analogy.
Gearing up. A lot of money can be put into the equipment. If your campus has a media production lab already, take a look at those labs–you might be able to use those labs. But there’s also much cheapers way to do this.
Blue Snowball microphone (about $100) — records in 360 degrees + laptop + audacity. Great for portable podcasts. If you have a Mac, use GarageBand to record & edit; software comes with Macs. For music, use creative commons-licensed music to not spend much money.
Once you record and edit the file, you post the file.
WordPress has a plugin called PodPress. Other ways to get the files online.
Jason & Rachel’s first podcast: Library Survival Guide Podcast (original one; Jason & Rachel no longer at Emory; at different universities now). Did short episodes. Best practices: short episodes (5-10mins); never read from a script — sounds like you’re reading from a script; one person talking is a lot less interesting than 2 people talking; conversation instead of lecture; kept re-iterating why important.
Instructional Design & Marketing
Students not necessarily going to subscribe to the podcasts. Supplemental material during in-class instruction sessions. Put on library website; libguides.
How a podcast can succeed or fail is in the marketing. Let the students know about it, but also let the instructors know about it. Partner with the marketing department. Podcasts can be used for teaching and also for advertising what’s going on at the library.
Evidence of success
iTunesU shot the podcast into success, getting it to a broader audience. Podcasts can be difficult to assess. Can get the number of times the files have been downloaded, but don’t know who downloads. Always ask for feedback, but don’t get any.
Moving onto other jobs
Jason: “Library Insider” @GSU — learned you have to do this with others. Hasn’t been able to do one since August 2009. Hoping to revive it again.
Podcasts are free like kittens, not like beer. Have to feed podcasts, and take care of them.
Third podcast effort: ALI: Adventures in Library Instruction. Kept informal. Conversational style. Anna is the third person in the podcast. The podcast was started because Jason wanted to listen to an instruction librarian podcast — none out there, so that’s why the podcast started. T is for Training is another library podcast out there.
Tools to collaborate produce — no budget; all tools free
- Skype
- SkypeCall Recorder — or supposedly Audacity will record Skype calls (not sure if this true — heard this)
- Audacity
- Blogspot (publish)
- FeedBurner
- DropBox — to share files — ESSENTIAL — music shared there; interviews
- Archive.org (file put there)
- iTunes
Statistics
- 300 subscribers to the podcast
- Facebook presence
- Never get enough feedback
- No one isn’t necessarily responding
Other libraries out there using podcasts
- Arizona State has great podcasts (video included); model podcast
- Public Libraries doing this, as well, on various topics
- University of Toronto used to archive events that occurred at the university; not doing this any more.
- DeKalb County Public Library archives events.
- Hopkinton HIgh School, Isinglass Teen Read Award BookTalks
- Tours at Ohio University Libraries
The 24th Thing: What’s Next?
Apr 14th
Helene Blowers was unable to be at this session, so a panel will be taking her place.
Sean Robinson (Allen County Public Library)
43 Things — Stephen Abrams idea originally
23 Things — Helene Blowers idea originally
What is your vision with these tools that have been learned in 23 Things programs?
- engage
- enrich
- empower
Enrichment: message to resonate. Blogging, want people to read it that isn’t your relatives.
Empower: fight for what you love.
What is your strategy, then, to use all of these tools? Why are blogging? Using social media?
3 Questions
- How are people finding us? Crack dealers go out and find customers; where are people coming to your library’s website? Looking at Google Analytics statistics. Piggyback on other events or situations. Other way to connect? Visitors Center; Schools/Media Centers; City Government; Convention Bureau;
- What are their interests?
- What are they saying?
- you have to be useful to people in new and interesting ways.
- Columbus Public Library collaborating with convention bureau.
- Chattanooga collaborating with the City on Facebook.
- Look at what other libraries are doing and make the connection; don’t reinvent the wheel.
- Engagement is not an idea it is a practice.
- Grow some bigger ears. Twitter Search; Google Alerts.
Slides on Slideshare (link coming later)
Michael Sauers & Christa Burns
Learning 2.0 @ the nebraska library commission
Nebraska learns 2.0 (statewide program)
50 % completion rate (due to 15 ce credits at the state level, they think)
What’s next for Nebraska? Participants asked for more learning after the program ended.
Nebraska is now doing an ongoing 23 Things program. New thing posted every month. Been doing this for a year now.
What not to do…
- Didn’t promote the program, except for when they first started the “next thing”
- Must continue to promote the program
- Don’t drop the ball.
- The participants want to continue to learn, but need continual reminders.
- Leaders have to also participate AND weren’t participating.
Sidenote: Google Wave dropped the ball initially — no reminders.
23 Things program originally was going to be 43 Things.
How are libraries supposed to innovate in a time of “change”, of budget cuts? Charlotte’s situation and many other libraries’ budgets situations.
Charlotte’s closings & budget cuts & staff layoffs. Horrible to watch it happen. Go through the stages of grief. Anger. Denial. Acceptance.
“In calm weather, all ships have good captains.” –Swedish proverb, often attributed to Adam Smith.
Personally, to get through this, SaveLibraries.org created the next day.
- Innovation is more than technology. Are meetings necessary? “Death by Meeting” book recommended. Business model. Services reviewed.
- Be willing to do what’s right for the organization and profession, even if it means losing your job. Can’t have libraries for just libraries’ sake. Be what our users need and want. We can’t fight for services that people don’t want.
- You can’t communicate too much. Twitter has become the new communication tool for staff during meetings, posting to online news sites. Staff have projector with live twitter stream during board meetings.
- Accept the fact that libraries are going to look very different in the future. The medium of a paper book is on its way out. Kids want to be a part of the story — have a computer, an iPod, an iPhone, an iPad.
- This is an opportunity. To learn. To grow. To adapt. To improve. Let go of what’s not working. We must do so to show why we’re relevant. We should never have to say why libraries are important.
Rebecca Jones — what are other libraries doing/further conversation…
- Comment: Many people think that they aren’t going to close. But it happens.
- Comment: CiL & Internet Librarian are only conferences where libraries of all types get together and learn from one another.
- Nebraska’s program, were the new things a review of those covered in 23 Things? Right now, all the things have been new. But there has been discussion to revisit the old things.
Virtual Learning and Training
Apr 13th
Teaching and Learning with Drupal
Meredith Farkas, Norwich University
Transferring face-to-face classes straight to online classes doesn’t work. They are boring. Something is lost in translation?
What gets lost is the before- & after-class interaction; the in-class interaction; this hasn’t always been transferred to online learning.
Web 2.0 ideas for the classroom.
- age of participation
- the wisdom of crowds
- social constructivism
- instructor is facilitator; everyone learns, even the instructor
Meredith used Drupal, an OS CMS, in her instruction, instead of the school’s current learning management system.
- multiple blogs
- wikis
- forums
- static html
- lots of options available in Drupal
She has taught three semesters of classes online so far. The important part has been the class participation, and the commenting that has gone on in the class.
Why blogs?
- faculty communication with students — “housekeeping” category posts
- familiar medium
- builds student sense of ownership over the medium (with forums, you don’t own the space; you just post there; with own blog, it’s your space)
- community-building: students interacted and connected online, much more human medium where they be themselves, informal.
- “this was probably the most engaging class i’ve taken because were were required to interact with each other every week…” –comment from student
- Reflective learning: reflect on the experience of reading, process it, and write about how it affects you. Reflect on other discussions.
- Discussion and debate: when you have to critique or justify your ideas, you are able to start to clarify your own ideas better and own them.
- Writing in public: gain experience writing for an outside audience, while in school, not just your class reading your stuff; professional blogging beginning already
- Everyone is teacher and learner: reading and teaching not as important as the conversations that went on in the class, so everyone learns and teaches.
Blogs can:
- promote critical and reflective thinking
- enable collaboration and knowledge-saharing
- create an informal environment for student discussion and community-building
- encourage dialogue and debate
- encourage students to teach as well as learn and co-construct their learning experience
Using blogs for teaching brings in much more real-world experience.
Blogging at the American University in Cairo
Joan Petit, Portland State University
Worked at the American University in Cairo for two years.
It’s a US-accredited institution; has a required info lit class; mostly Egyptians; English as 2nd or 3rd language; no libraries there; no critical thinking taught in high school; no research papers in class before college. This situation presents challenges for the information literacy course that’s required.
OLD LALT 101 class
- research project
- Quizzes — graded automatically
- WebCT
- PowerPoints — instructor would read through the slides
- 20% increase from pre- to post-test
- Light workload for librarians; not much prepwork
New LALT 101: class wiki
- Strict attendence — if you came to class & did the assignments, you’d pass.
- Easier to pass
- All students had to blog
- weekly posts
- assigned topics
- political blogging in Egypt
- Final project in blog — just a blog entry
- Student Blog #1
- Student Blog #2
WordPress blogs resulted in for staff:
- near-disaster
- platform is not-so-simple
- technology issues
- instructors thought the students hated it
Student feedback
- they loved the blogging.
- the instructors couldn’t back off the blogging approach because the students hated taking the rest of the class. Since they bought into the blogging portion of the class, it had to remain.
The Lessons
- Looking good on paper isn’t enough
- Take advantage of key moments
- Own your disasters
- Define success
- The most exciting technology isn’t always the best for users
- Ill-considered hastily implemented can be a great success: if this had gone before a committee, it wouldn’t have happened.
Comments at the End
Meredith: students felt ownership of their classroom through the online structure of the class.
Joan: you find the technology that works for the students, play around with it, even with engineering students.
Meredith: so many different ways to engage your students in learning; you just have to find ways to engage the students so that they learn.
Joan: hear what the students are saying in response to what’s being used.
Meredith: how to get students to comment on each other’s stuff? not sure if an environment caused this or if it was the students themselves.
Digital Managers Sound Off
Apr 12th
Bobbi Newman, David King, Sarah Houghton-Jan, Matt Hamilton
#dbsoundoff — session hashtag on Twitter
Panel Job Titles
David King: Digital Branch Manager, Topeka-Shawnee County Public Library
Sarah Houghton-Jan: Digital Futures Manager, San Jose Public Library. IT at Sarah’s library doesn’t want to support software on the machines, so she’s started doing that and making the decisions.
Bobbi Newman: Digital Branch Manager, Chatahoochee Valley Libraries. No staff, no funding. Liaison between IT and the rest of the library staff. Translates between tech & non-techie. Does the technical training for the staff.
Matt Hamilton: missed his title, Boulder Public Library.
The panel arranged itself in gadget order: iPad–> Full-size laptop.
What do you really do in your job daily (not job title/description) ?
Matt Hamilton: lots of meetings; tries not to get too hands-on, tries to avoid micro-managing, but spends lots of time on server administration.
Bobbi Newman: library looking for ILS — asks hard questions about how system will look to patrons — what she care about; staff & patron training; OverDrive; goes to manager meetings; teen service & children services meetings — what they need in the digital branch; web site redesign moving forward. Bobbi spends a lot of time explaining things.
Sarah Houghton-Jan: Spends more than half her time in meetings. Group wants a tech expert on hand, but isn’t doing much. Serves on 16 teams/formal committees & chairs 4 of those. As a result, doesn’t do a good job managing her own staff. Balancing needs of public library uses vs. merged entity. Wishes she could do more project management.
David King: goes to a bunch of meetings; types & talks a lot. Managers meetings, department meetings. Lots of emails, since he works in the basement. Project management — starts out heavily involved with it, and then hands it off (like Facebook page). Techs good at the tech stuff, not the people stuff. David deals with much of the people stuff as a result.
Educational background
David King: started touching computers in high school; college — found out you could get 10% extra credit by typing papers on computers. Went to library school. First job as electronic services librarian (involved putting ProQuest CDs in every month). Put in charge of that library’s website. And everything just developed and took off from there. No formal IT background, except for not being afraid to tinker & break things.
Sarah Houghton-Jan: English/math background. Got interested in libraries. Took HTML class, Dialog class during MLS studying. Nothing else available at the time. Got told one day that she was the webmaster because she took an HTML class & “good luck!”.
Bobbi Newman: wouldn’t take no for an answer. Has history degree, then got MLS. Worked with engineers for awhile. Then switched to public library sector. Saw something on a listserv about newer technologies. Fought with IT staff to implement some of those things, and implemented it anyway. No formal training. Always been technogeek.
Matt Hamilton: Interest in computers for a long time. He went into it backwards from the others. Technology wasn’t interesting to him; wanted to help people. Libraries were a good fit. Tendency to ask for forgiveness, rather than permission on doing technology tasks at his library.
“r u designing virtual or digital spaces for service delivery using the same approach that physical spaces have been designed?” –rebeccajones
Sarah: library wanted digital branch to match the physical space. Fonts, colors, spaces.
David: keep 3 things in mind: we have two libraries: physical & digital ones; some stuff we can do digitally different from physical (and some stuff we can’t or can only do digitally); for some the digital branch will be our only library. Physical collections being divided into neighborhoods, zones. Example: Travel physical neighborhood. Digital branch has a travel blog. Customers are still customers regardless of the branch they enter.
Bobbi: 4-county library. some areas are the poorest, old buildings. but very new buildings also exist in her library system. How to make an approachable website for that drastic of a different community/library?
Matt: current websites of the library don’t necessarily reflect, refer back to the library itself. Spending current time, getting the sites under the Boulder Library banner. Currently moving library’s web presence into Drupal.
Do you let others post content to the websites?
Matt: allows others to post, tries to find those with expertise in certain areas to post. Lots spend time encouraging people to post. Helping people realize they can add content to the site.
Bobbi: Old site still up since she arrived a year ago. Marketing department only one that posts content to the site. Teens/Children/Senior Citizens/New Materials/Genealogy areas would have sections on the section. Bobbi’s job is to facilitate the content, not create it.
Sarah: marketing department of 1 and that person had most of the control of the site at the time; that control has mostly been taken away. She thought she could moderate social media presence and comments. Sarah tries to encourage people to post and create. About 70 people are content creators are on the site.
David: marketing person didn’t want to manage all the content after all. Also, inherited a job where a lot of stuff was locked down on staff and patron computers throughout the library. Took awhile to get rid of that locked down stuff. Content creation? He doesn’t do much of this. He encourages, mentors people on their own content creation. He does write a bit for the site, and creates videos weekly for the site about technology. Staff then say “that if he’s doing that, I can write a blog post.”
Archiving Issues
David: doesn’t have to do this at his library.
Sarah: state law requires archiving — including Facebook. Utter waste of staff time.
Matt: discussion has gone on, but city record manager so far has said the library doesn’t need to.
Question: lots of time spent on building communities. How much time do you spend on looking at technology trends and how to leverage those?
Matt: attends local community tech groups, Drupal groups. Brings people from the community into some of the libraries’ discussion.
Bobbi: her library is moving slow — part of a school district. Wishes she’d be able to do more community engagement and content creation.
Sarah: does all of that on her own time. Research & trend-spotting has to be done at home. Gets into trouble looking at her PDA at work. Wishes she had more time.
David: doesn’t have a lot of time to do it. Keeps up shallowly (email, twitter running in the background at all time). Takes a look at RSS feeds at home. It’s a hobby, looks at it at home. Enjoys looking at this stuff at all times.
Recent Comments