Best Free Software

Catching up with reading, I found this very useful list, with links, in last month's PC Magazine. A nice compendium for many Library 2.0 uses, as well as for sharing with patrons.

Buildings and future libraries

A good discussion point for libraries and architects: Slashdot reports on a slideshow on Slate addressing the question: "What sort of public library does the 'digital world' of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle require?"

The very title of the article calls us to remember that libraries live partially in a digital world, but also in a world of story hours, face-to-face discussions, Brownie troops, senior citizens, parents and children. We live in community. Slate notes:

Ross Dawson, a business consultant who tracks different customs, devices, and institutions on what he calls an Extinction Timeline, predicts that libraries will disappear in 2019. He's probably right as far as the function of the library as a civic monument, or as a public repository for books, is concerned. On the other hand, in its mutating role as urban hangout, meeting place, and arbiter of information, the public library seems far from spent. This has less to do with the digital world—or the digital word—than with the age-old need for human contact.

Ross Dawson is no relation that I would claim... I, for one, have hardly an interest in our being a monument, and not much interest in being a warehouse. I'm very interested in community development, child development, economic development, in education, information, sharing stories and propagating culture. In 2019, libraries will continue to be vital, though possibly types of libraries (public, academic and special) may become more divergent via technology adoption and relationships to their several communities. I haven't seen Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle reduce public library effectiveness in these spheres. On the contrary, we can use them to do the things we need to do.

Well, maybe not the Kindle...

Project Play: podcasting for libraries

This week was an interesting assignment. I already subscribe to a number of podcasts, getting some, such as the Onion and weekly sermons from my church, on my iPod. I have RSS feeds for newspaper stories and Chuck Tomasi's Technorama in my Bloglines feed aggregator.

I've been following library podcasts for awhile, by the simple expedient of searching "libraries"in the podcast section of the iTunes store. I can see several potentially worthwhile uses, depending on services of the library and the interests of staff to do the legwork:

• program information
• general library news
  
• book reviews
• as a technology learning opportunity for teens

Not all of these are for everyone, and podcasting is not for everyone. But it's certainly easy to do. Gabcast makes it a snap, but for this exercise I decided to try something I've been putting off: I downloaded and installed Audacity, a very nice freeware sound editing program.

Audacity made it pretty simple to add a musical intro, record a narrative, edit out a couple of "um, ah"s, and mix the whole thing to an .mp3 file. A quick Youtube search found a lot of Audacity and podcasting tutorials, but the Audacity documentation is pretty good on its own. I then signed up for a free account at Podbean and posted my podcast. Podbean also allows for making podcasts available as RSS feeds or through iTunes.

This is probably not something I will do on a regular basis, but it's nice to find out how easy it is. Thanks to Ellen Jepson for the info about Audacity and Podbean.

When a genius is an idiot

As reported in the New York Times, Apple guru Steve Jobs, asked about the Amazon Kindle at Macworld Expo, replied:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

Now, this is just silly, but at least it explains why it's so difficult to put books into my iPod. But another article in the Times reports:

Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller number — 27 percent — had not read a book lately, which means nearly three-in-four have read a book. Steve Jobs may be many things – maestro, visionary, demi-god – but he apparently isn’t a careful reader of certain market reports.

The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.

Most companies would kill for a market like that – more than one-fourth of the world’s biggest consumer market buying 15 or more of its items a year. And half the population bought nearly 6 books a year. If only Apple were so lucky.

Our library staff certainly knows people are still reading. We checked out:

• 647,000 books in 2005
• 705,000 books in 2006
• 750,000 books in 2007

"...people don’t read anymore"? Hardly! Thanks to Tasha Saecker for pointing out these stories!

The Shape of Things to Come

Over the next four months, our library will be doing a facility study. We received a $10,000 grant from the Appleton Library Foundation for this purpose, and $40,000 in our 2008 City budget. The study will look at library facility needs of the community in the short and long term.

In December, we sent out nearly fifty copies of an RFP (request for proposals) to building consultants and architects with significant library experience. We received ten proposals in response, and our evaluation team reviewed these, interviewed two firms and made a recommendation to our Library Board. On February 18, the Board resolved to go with Durrant as our partner to do the study.

Durrant, which is the firm that designed our 1996 addition, will work with Himmel & Wilson Library Consultants for library & community input and Linda Miller as technology consultant. There will be staff focus groups, community focus groups, surveys, interviews with library staff and community leaders, and lots of meetings. There should be many opportunities for a variety of input: we want lots of ideas to be included, heard and weighed.

In this process there are no foregone conclusions, except that we want to find the best way to meet the community’s future library service needs. Do we know that it's a good idea for the public library to be near the center of downtown? Do we know that it would cost more to operate additional facilities, such as branches, than it would to expand on our current site? We surely do know these things.

But that doesn't tell us what's best for the long-term library service delivery in this community. What is the added value that a different location or additional locations offer our service population? What operational economies might there be in a building designed for twenty-first century technology and use patterns? What organizations or neighboring communities might wish to partner with us in providing library spaces? What are the opportunities and needs for change in our current building, designed almost thirty years ago? We have to take an open-minded, unprejudiced look at the questions and issues. We have to consider lots of factors and ask lots of people, then present some clear choices and recommendations to the decision-makers: the Library Board, Mayor and Council.

If we knew the answers ahead of time, we wouldn't need to do a study. But we need to look at options and make some decisions about the future. We need to know we can deliver the services people want in the most effective way. And we need to understand technology options and costs, as well as how we might implement short-term solutions before long-term actions are taken.

Winston Churchill said: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” What shape do you want our library to be in over the next decades? This will be a lot of work, but worthwhile and exciting!

[podcast version of this post]

Wikiality exalted & politicized

Public libraries, among other things, are all about free access to ideas. Thus this story on Slashdot "Wikileaks under fire" is of interest:

The transparency group WikiLeaks.org currently seems to be under heavy fire. The main WikiLeaks.org DNS entry is unavailable, reportedly due to a restraining order relating to a series of articles and documents released by WikiLeaks about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands. The WikiLeaks whistle blower, allegedly former vice president of the Cayman Islands branch of swiss bank Julius Baer, states in the WikiLeaks documents that the bank supported tax evasion and money laundering by its clients from around the world. WikiLeaks alternate names remained available until Saturday, when there seems to have been a heavy DDoS attack and a fire at the ISP. The documents in question are still available on other WikiLeaks sites, such as wikileaks.be, and are also mirrored on Cryptome. Details of the court documents have also been made available.

A wiki for whistle blowing? Can it survive and be credible?

Social Networks, part 4 "Is MySpace Good for Society?"

Steven Cohen on Library Stuff links to an interesting post on the Freakonomics Blog at the New York Times. Author Steven Dubner brings together a panel of experts to discuss the impact of social networks. He asks:

Has social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?

And there's a mixed bag of responses worth reading, but they all accept the powerful force that social networks have become. Sometimes it's hard to look at change as good or bad. It just is what it is, and you work with it.

But I still don't get Twitter.

Social Networks, part 3 (Project Play assignment)

This week's assignment from Project Play:

1. Visit any 3 (suggested) library MySpace pages.
2. Note the ways libraries are “surfacing” library services.
3. Reflect on the place of libraries in social networking.
4. Post your thoughts about why or why not you would want to create a MySpace page for your library.

If your library already has a MySpace or Facebook page, also consider using your blog to share any tips & advice you might have...

OK, I looked at MySpace pages for Denver (teen page with rap music to annoy old people away), Charlotte & Mecklenburg County (garishly colored with no musc teen page), Arapahoe (funky teen page, with Paramores' "Crushcrushcrush", kinda nice emo -- this old guy liked it, so they're doing something wrong). By golly, all the ones I looked at are teen pages; or almost all: Oshkosh appears age-neutral. Facebook is more staid.

But beyond appearances, all three are "surfacing" library services. Delivering and linking to them, even. Typical offerings include library event info, teen blogs, reader's advisory, popular media info and homework resources. Mostly, this appears to be good marketing -- you build your network by establishing a point. of presence where your users are. You link from your website to your MySpace page and vice versa.

As to whether my library had a MySpace page, I'm pretty neutral. If your YA staff and Teen Board wanted to do it, fine. If they don't want to, fine. It doesn't appeal to me that much. And anything you create has to be maintained, or the value can degrade quickly.

I do have a Facebook page and created one for our library, just to try it out. I mainly created my page to stay in touch with the next younger generation of family. But I quickly found I had a lot of real friends on Facebook and a number of professional colleagues. It's a fun way to stay in touch. That being said, I have not yet found it real productive: there seems to be a lot of people asking you to play games and take quizzes. It seems like a lot of applications are marketing themselves virally on Facebook.

But there are opportunities for book & movie reviews and discussions. There are network and organization pages worth checking out. I think the potential is there. I'm networking not only with a long-lost cousin, but with my library school alumni group.

But the waste potential is there too, and the pretension. Katie Scullion notes:

... the amount of effort that goes into updating and these profiles will most likely go unnoticed after a few months ... fads move from site to site as one becomes more annoying/ad-dense than the other. ... social networking maniacs will spend much of their time compulsively checking other people's profiles, prowling through picture galleries, and updating their own. It seems more of a vanity than a communication tool ...

She makes some good points, and links to a hilarious video from Colbert, providing a good perspective.

On the other hand, the "fun extra" assignment this week encourages us to try the Simpsomaker, but I prefer Simpsonize me.

Social Networks, part 2

Coincidentally or not, Tasha Saecker in Sites & Soundbytes recently posted a link to a great article from the Readership Institute, "Build a network, not a destination."

Although the article is focussed on newspaper websites, it speaks strongly to my sense of issues we're addressing in developing our library site and electronic services. More to the point, it speaks to why we should be paying attention to social networks.

Points raised include:

• Link out -- a lot
• Link, especially, to blogs
• Link IN -- to related content of your own
• Open up the archives
• Use Web technologies intelligently
• Cultivate conversations about your content
• Distribute your content widely
• Partner with the portals
• Build your own social networks
• Encourage use of ranking/rating sites
• Build shortcuts across the Web

Tasha annotates this with some notes for library application. The reader's digest version of her summary:

• Link, link, link
• Cultivate conversations
• Build shortcuts to information
  

Both the orginal article and Tasha's take on it speak strongly to the importance of networks, social networks and how we implement library websites.

We've seen for years the concern that everybody wants to be THE portal. We can't be all things to all people, so the question becomes: how do we translate our service offerings into a valuable node in our users' network?

Social Networks, part 1 (Project Play)

Social Networking in Plain English - a video from the good folks at Common Craft -- who produce a lot of interesting instructional materials -- courtesy of Project Play. My first reaction was "no, no, we're running a library, not looking for jobs, friends, or partners." But this is limiting thinking. Libraries need friends and partners, and we not only hire people, but we help people look for jobs.

So maybe there is something to the social network thing and library service. More to follow!