PLA pix

Photos from the PLA conference in Minneapolis, including many pictures of the Minneapolis Public Library.

Creative Journey

For some years now, we've held a weekly adult program called "Creative Journey." The series grew out of a book discussion of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: a Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Our adult program staff facilitates the series, which is open to the public but has a dedicated group of regular attendees.

Creative Journey participants explore their own creativity through discussions, sharing stories and writings, presentations by speakers, and on occasion, through hands-on art. Yesterday the group did some painting and sent me a few scans of the results. Project costs are fairly low, but purchased with grants from our Library Foundation.

I know that for many participants, Creative Journey fills an important place. It's a chance to meet weekly, be part of a learning community, and explore the ways in we interact with our own creativity and the creations of others. This may not be traditional library service, but it's a good example of how public libraries enrich lives and encourage the heart.

80 Online Resources for Book Lovers

This has been kind of blogged to death elsewhere, but it's still worth noting. This is a list from Kevin Bondelli of 80 sites worth a look for those who love books and reading. With our Fox Cities Book Festival coming up soon, this is timely!

The sites are divided into categories:

• Social networking for book lovers
• E-books
• Online bookstores
• Find the best prices for books
• Audiobooks
• Study guides and summaries
• Library resources
• Bibliography and research
• Book exchanges / swapping
• Online documents
• What to read
• Miscellaneous

Useful & fun!

PLA: "If you're not comfortable with experimenting, get over it!"

I really enjoyed the Public Library Association conference in Minneapolis last week. Six days away from home, but it was worth the time. There were many highlights for me, and I'll write about some of the sessions in detail. Things I liked:

• excellent program -- too many good choices for sessions
• a fine reception at the very cool Open Book in Minneapolis -- "Minnesota's enter for reading, writing and the book arts"
  
• online resources -- downloadable handouts and PowerPoints make a lot of information accessible even for non-attendees
  
• talking with many vendors
• meeting people and comparing notes on the programs, vendors and our jobs -- including face-to-face meetings with people I've only known online
• spending time with my daughter, Gillian, as professional colleagues; color me proud
  

One of the most inspirational and empowering programs was "The Cutting Edge: the latest on Web 2.0." Speakers included Jen Maney (Pima County Public Library), Michael Stephens (Tame the Web & the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University) and John Blyberg (formerly AADL, now the Darien Library). The entire presentation is online as an .MP3 file; I recommend listening while reading along on the handouts.

Jen Maney noted that 2.0 levels the playing field and is not a technological phenomenon, but a sociological one. She said "if you're not comfortable with experimenting, get over it!" She encouraged us to play, to know that we can't do it all and to pick and choose -- her motto is "Designing for Uncertainty".

Michael Stephens had a lengthy and detailed PowerPoint (large .pdf version) with lots of good examples and reminded us that though we talk about and use technology, it's not about technology. 2.0 is "not a shiny new toy, but a carefully planned response to a changing world."

John Blyberg humorously and beautifully deconstructed Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur and defended the virtues of Web 2.0 with this PowerPoint. He noted we need to "encourage the heart." Thanks for lifting those lingering twopointopian guilt trips.

Nobody was lifting up 2.0 or any technology as a panacea or bandwagon, but talking about interesting new ways to implement our enduring values.

Library as Place

Michael Stephens recommended this video in his PLA presentation -- an interesting viewpoint on the intersection of "Library 2.0" and "Library as Place."

Project Play: monkeys with typewriters

Our final assignment in our Library 2.0 curriculum is to watch and comment on a video of Seth Godin discussing curiosity. This one is easy, because I watched the video and posted it in this blog two months ago. But this assignment calls for a few more comments.

Godin lifts up: "a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope you're interested in" and this is very much to the point of Project Play, to the point of why we need to keep pushing our own envelopes, and being curious about our users and ways to deliver our services.

The final point of the videographer is that curiosity is not something we can do, but something that comes from beyond our cleverness. I'd agree, curiosity is inherent: cats have it and so do us apes. Those of us who work in public libraries rely on curiosity to bring people into our doors. I think most children tend to have a natural curiosity -- if it's not trained out of them -- and that's part of the joy of working in library children's services.

Some people come to us merely for comfort and entertainment; there's nothing wrong with that. But some walk in the door wanting to learn, to understand, with a desire to make something better. We try to give them tools, such as literacy and access to information and ideas. We want to encourage curiosity; it behooves us to be curious as well, to keep trying to understand our users' changing needs and our own options to meet those needs.

What I love about Project Play is that it encourages us to develop our own natural curiosity and mess around with some technological toys and tools to think up -- and discuss -- new ways to deliver services. The world keeps changing: we need all our curiosity to keep learning and all the worthwhile tools we can find to keep our libraries changing with community needs.

Or in the words of Bob Dylan:

He not busy being born is busy dying

Even monkeys using typewriters might write the works of Shakespeare . . . library folk with 2.0 tools ought to be able to do some worthwhile things.

Hmong Elders -- Wii bowling

I would not have predicted this one. I know that Wii bowling has been popular with seniors, but our programming staff has not found much interests among the group that comes to the library for adult game days. But somehow we wound up with a visiting group of Hmong elders who came to try Wii bowling. Staff reports those attending enjoyed themselves greatly, and then adjourned upstairs to see our new Hmong Resource Center, currently in development.

Facility study presentation

Here's a PowerPoint I gave to our library staff at our monthly meeting March 21, 2008. It covers the background and process for the facility study underway. Yes, it's one of those boring non-dynamic PowerPoints (mostly written on my Palm Treo during the Four Shillings Short concert at the library the night before), but it conveys the basic info.

Project Play: mash-ups

There is a lot of good potential for libraries here, and I loved some of the examples our instructors gave us. I thought the Hot Titles Carousel and the Barns of Winnebago County particularly good. To really shine at implementing these would seem to take a mixture of creativity and savvy a bit beyond me, nonetheless, I was able to use Mapbuilder to create a Fox Cities Movie Map.

It's not real slick, but it was fun to do and learn a bit. Once I started looking at getting a Google map API to really make it nice, I thought "well, I could do this, but do I really have the time and motivation? Is it worth it?" But if I were really trying to do it for the library web site, it would be.

Project Play: YouTube

I love YouTube. It took me awhile to "get it", and I'm still kind of regretful that I showed my wife how to find Johnny Depp clips. Once she gets to the Springsteen and Leonard Cohen music videos, I may never see her again.

So, is it coincidental that all the Internet access in our library network slows down in later afternoons? That our library system needs to devote ever greater resources to buying bandwidth? Apparently, it's true: if you build it, they will come. And they'll download streaming media.

The New York Times reported last week:

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

What does this mean for libraries? Continued investment in bandwidth for one thing, and paying attention to how our electronically-delivered services are impacted. OTOH, YouTube-hosted videos are off-site for a library: we put library instruction on YouTube's servers, a patron watches it in the office or at home -- it's no bandwidth off our nose.

I like the creative uses of YouTube by libraries, including library instruction, marketing contests (like the recent InfoSoup video contest), etc. I've found it easy to embed YouTube videos in blog posts here, as witness these examples.

Finally, here's a YouTube video embarassing for all concerned , shot at a meeting of our system's library directors: it's a bit of Lucie's farewell party, with video shot on my phone. Prime stuff.