Project Play @ WLA

I'm missing the state library conference -- durn it. But I'm glad to be able to follow some things on the WLA Blog. One presentation I would've enjoyed was the one about Project Play. Not surprisingly, however, Beth Carpenter has nicely blogged the presentation. The whole thing's worth reading as a nice summary of the program, but the slideshow and video are great for a quick overview.


Check out the full post -- lots of great links. Thanks again to Beth, Joy and Stef!

Library staff "play more, learn more, fear less."

Project Play has come to its planned end. Even as I heard library leaders at the PLA conference encouraging more places to emulate the "23 things" library curriculum, a big chunk of Wisconsin was doing it and wrapping up this eight month effort. Part of what I learned is a model for an effective online training program for staff -- one that works even for part-time people who have trouble fitting regular classes into their schedules. Two groups I want to thank and acknowledge:

• Project Play leaders from three library systems, OWLS, South Central, & Winnefox. All three of these systems devoted a lot of time and effort to helping member library staff learn. A special thanks to our fearless leaders: Beth Carpenter, Jean Anderson, Stef Morrill & Joy Schwarz. They seriously rock!
  
• All the staff hare at Appleton Public Library who got involved. Most finished both semesters, though some, like me, did only part -- due to limited enrollments and other time commitments. I loved it that people from all parts of the library, and at all pay grades, participated. Big kudos to everyone who worked at it, including:
• Judy Abitz
• Kathy Beck
• Kathy Berholtz
• Carole DeJardin
• Kathy Dreyer
• Elizabeth Eisen
• Melody Hanson
• Sharon Harp
  
• Ellen Jepson
• Barbara Kelly
  
• Brian Kopetsky
• Sue Kempf
  
• Vicki Lenz
• Katie Scullion
• Kay Shearier
  
• Meg Shriver
• Lisa Smith
  
• Maureen Ward
• Julie Weyenberg
  
• Kristie Wilson

I know it's not always easy to take time out of our way-too-busy schedules to learn, especially new and intimidating things. But the Project Play leaders broke it up into bite-size pieces and offered hand-holding -- and the many participants explored fearlessly and learned. Way to go!

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.

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.

Project Play: screencasting

For sure, screencasting is spiffy; I can envision many library uses -- the ones listed in the Project Play posting are good examples. As we spend a lot of time showing people how to use the catalog and other services on the computer, screencasting could help a lot. I know that folks on our staff are already playing with Camtasia, and doing rather more sophisticated things than one can do with the freeware.

Alas that I didn't think of anything worthwhile I would screencast. I played with Screencast-O-Matic just to try it, but thought the result was pretty dull. Were I a practicing reference librarian, OTOH, I might have more readily thought of some useful instructional demos. In order to be worthwhile, a screencast should be done for a good reason, and thoughtfully prepared with good planning and at least of smidge of creativity.

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!

Project Play: Remember the Milk & Jott

These tools are cool, cute, well done and flexible. I may never use them again. I already have this mostly covered with my palm Treo, a phone which shares my calendar contacts, data files and to do list with web-accessible desktop Outlook and others at the library. Do I need more lists and reminders?

My phone already lets me blog or send messages. Still, it's kind of cool to blog via speech to text phone call. This entry was sent through Jott. listen

Powered by Jott

[Afterword: Jott is phone based reminders and speech conversion to text for messaging. Remember the Milk is a web-based to do list, which can be used collaboratively. The above posting required drastic simplification and editing to fit into Jott's 30 seconds per message maximum.

Both these services are easy to use. Both are in Beta, which makes one wonder if they will graduate to requiring some fees down the road. One thing I really liked about Remember the Milk was its slick integration with Google calendar. It would also be good for collaborative project to do lists with a disparate group of folks. For my current purposes, they're marginal, but worth knowing about.]

Project Play: Google Docs

Google is dangerously seductive. It's just too darn useful. It could be the next Microsoft: They mean to rule the world! Or at least control all information. But we can trust them -- their motto is "Don't be evil!" Their staff plays a lot of frisbee.

Of course, this blog is published with Blogger, from Google. I get my home email via Gmail, from Google. I use iGoogle as one of my regular home pages, with nicely customized newsfeeds and aps. Lest we forget -- as if we could -- Google is the search engine of choice. Google translator absolutely rocks! Google calendar is currently the product of choice on our library website. Oh yeah, and they own YouTube -- you gotta love these guys! Google books and the Google Library Project? A little controversy there -- let's not get started... and we won't talk about all the people who are deluded into believing that Google has made libraries obsolete.

Okay, then there's Google docs, the subject of this week's Project Play lesson. I love Google docs. My regular use is sharing files between home and work, but sometimes they're shared with other folks I'm working with. I've published some to the web and linked them from this blog. Barb Kelly, our Assistant Director, devised a way for people using catalog terminals in the library to take notes and save them in Google docs.

For my Project Play lesson, I logged into a shared Google docs account and messed around with a few documents. I read the Google docs blog and was truly impressed with some of the recent changes, particularly to presentations. This is really sophisticated stuff in creating external applications that provide most of the function of the basic "office" productivity, then host it remotely, allow customized publishing and sharing, making it easy to use with bells and whistles.

What's not to love? I just hate to put all my eggs into any one basket, so it's Flickr, not Picasa for me, and Bloglines, not Google Reader. Google Finance is pretty cool for tracking investments, though.

For more on Google, see:

• Google Watch
• IsGoogleEvil?com - obsolete site, but I love the name
• just google "google evil" or "google controversy" -- there's lots!
  

Here's a presentation I whipped up from part of Joy's Google Docs post on the Project Play Blog. Reformatting it and putting it here took me about 15 minutes.

i.m. uncertain

Maybe it's an age thing. Maybe it's a style thing. I don't see where Instant Messaging holds a lot of interest for me in my own work. For my own personal workflow, it seems distinctly inferior to email and telephone. I was able to install the Meebo widget here and use it without too much trouble, thanks to a bit of help from colleagues at APL and OWLS. But the why of it isn't apparent to me.

I can see where it would have some good applicability for library service, such as on the library website. Service desks can be in touch with staff workrooms, colleagues at different libraries can collaborate and share info. People could ask reference questions real time. Except that's why we do AskAway -- at some cost. We could use IM during times when we're open and rely on AskAway when we're not around, if that would be clear enough to patrons.

A further complication is that our City policies generally ban the use of IM services, although we were able to convince the folks at City Hall that there were legitimate work-related reasons (such as AskAway) for IM use at our library. Part of our Electronic Communications Policy reads:

Employees are prohibited from knowingly visiting inappropriate Internet sites, unauthorized chat rooms or using instant messaging services through the City systems. ... Designated staff at the Library may use instant messaging services for work related purposes on Library systems at the discretion of the Library Director. These services may only be used with log files enabled and will be subject to regular review by the Library Director or designee.

Thus all employee use of Meebo, etc. has to be logged and I am required to review those logfiles. It's a regressive policy but it was the best compromise we could achieve at the time. This puts a chill on instant messaging. Although the policy is regressive, there's a basis. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure define electronic records as discoverable. Just like email, everything one does with IM is a public record -- and should be available not only to your supervisor but the local newspaper.

You wouldn't hang on the phone at work with friends for non-work reasons. Neither should we be IMing members of our "buddy list" for non-work reasons. Yet "radical trust" is not enough in areas of potential liability, thus management is required (however reluctantly) to take on a watch-dog role.

Symantec's CIO Digest notes:

Given the tumultuous, impulsive state of adoption, it's not surprising that many organizations lack consistent messaging policies encompassing all electronic communications, along with the systems to enforce them. In light of increasingly stringent regulatory and legal requirements, however, organizations would be well served to review their policies and assess their ability to discover, capture, review, and archive IM traffic.

I was skeptical about our overly cautious approach, but googling Instant messaging liability" produces 243,000 hits. Further reading:

• Websense "Instant Messaging: an Instant Threat"
• National Law Journal "New Liability Frontier: Instant Messaging"