LibraryTechtonics

What is NewBCamp? It’s a one day conference to introduce people from all professions and walks of life to emerging technologies, as well as provide primers for how to get started in those technologies. Everything from web design to blogging, podcasting, video on the Internet, and social networks will be discussed and shared. Unlike a regular conference, everyone is encouraged to participate and speak!

From the makers of PodCamp comes NewBCamp, the unconference where people who “don’t speak geek” can go to steep themselves in basic technology context, from the actually technology to the culture behind it. This is the first NewBCamp ever, and I’m very excited about its existence, and it’s a total bummer that I can’t attend (I’m working a Saturday shift that day). But, if you can be in Providence, RI on Saturday, February 23, 2008, and you can spare the fabulously bargain price of $10 for registration, you can have all the fun in the world for me, and definitely report back!

This makes me think of what Katherine Gould, Director of the Palos Verdes Library District in California wrote in her blog post:

We can develop and nurture a deep sense of what is unique about what we offer and what we do. We can immerse ourselves in new concepts, ideas and technologies so that we understand them at a gut level – to paraphrase Andrea we can “become Roman”. Those of us who weren’t born into the world of online communities and networks will never be natives, but we can be fully integrated immigrants.

Librarians need educational events like NewBCamp to aid in becoming “fully integrated immigrants.” Barcamps like NewBCamp are open, hands-on, full of helpful people who know a lot of different things and who understand thinking from the user’s perspective, because that’s really the focus when it comes to developing and understanding successful technology. It’s not about us or how we do or could do things, it’s about grokking where the user is coming from.

I have been inspired by NewBCamp, Kathleen Gould, and the Social Media Breakfast on Wednesday morning (I’ll write that up soon, it was too good to let go too long), to commit to a series of “Me: The User” posts. I will write about how I use different services as a user (not a librarian), my experience with Joe and Jane Users in those services, and hopefully I’ll be able to get non-librarians to add their thoughts and experiences in the comments. Hopefully this will help bring some insight into how the Romans do what they do…

About a week and change ago, I gave a presentation (many thanks to Jessamyn for referring me) at the day-long continuing education workshop “21st Century Libraries: Making Technology Work for Library Users,” which also featured Linda Braun and Casey Bisson.

I retooled my presentation from NH, adding the fabulousness of William Shatner as Your Beta Hero (many thanks to Neil Gorman of Comicology for that), as well as a neato interactive Human Bingo game that helped illustrate social networking through actual play. However, the true thrust of the presentation remained that knowing the culture of sites is knowing the tool: having an account isn’t enough, and playing with the other kids (not just the librarians!) in the different Web 2.0 playgrounds is totally key. I also, once again, pimped the idea of 23 Library 2.0 Things, because my instructor brain loves bite-sized, self-paced stuff, and I think librarians do, too.

I think overall the presentation went really well, and I think it’s my best presentation to date. At some point, I’ll record the audio and make a slidecast out of it, since it really makes more sense with the audio. In the meantime, I’ve had at least one request to do the recording live streamed, so if there’s anyone out there who wants to sponsor that, I’d be game (alternately, I may set up a WebEx trial just to do it, we’ll see).

It’s a bit spooky how well all 4 presentations dovetailed together (Linda spoke twice, the keynote and an afternoon presentation, Casey and I spoke once each), it was almost like we all sat in the same room and figured out how to make them relevant to and flow cohesively into each other. If I had to tag the day, I’d use: social, community, beta, culture, literacy, fun, new, different.

In the course of the other presentations, Linda showed off a whole lot of awesome sites, Casey talked about serving users online and how community is beneficial to the library, I was recorded singing [link added 4:11p] Jingle Bell Rock care of Linda’s computer and The Sims On Stage (see pic left care of Casey Bisson; great for karaoke night or afternoon at the library for teens and up!), and people asked a whole lot of questions. Judging by some of the things I heard at this session, librarians are still looking for some level of control in a community controlled environment, which will make for rough waters in the online Library 2.0 future, but librarians very much want to learn. I’m hoping our presentations offered a place to start in reconciling these bits.

Many thanks to Karen Mellor and her team for setting up such an excellent day!

I must thank Allen Hong over at AdPuppet for the incredibly kind words about our meeting in Second Life on Thursday. Apparently, our conversation caused “a total stereotype shattering and paradigm shift about librarians” for him, which is awesome. He’s super keen, and hopefully we’ll meet again this week at Coffee with Crayon (here’s a SLURL, if you’re already a SL resident), which is an excellent meet up of tech-savvy folks in Second Life every Thursday morning from 9-10am ET.

Simple answer to “why should librarians bother with Second Life?”: just getting into Second Life and *talking to people* can change people’s minds about libraries and librarians. It’s like that old-school, Library 1.0 concept of “outreach.”

And, well, it’s fun. And you guys know I like fun.

I was able to finish training the Netguides back in February and March, which included an overview of the program, customer service training, and an overview of our database and web site resources that the Reading Public Library. I’ve uploaded the customer service training slides to SlideShare, to try out the service. I might continue to upload stuff there from my other presentations (on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license). However, if you don’t have the bandwith to use SlideShare, send me email, and I can send you a file format that would work for you.

So far, everything is super for a first time run of the program. I experimented with the on-call shift hours by moving them around a bit for the first month, and with some help from my boss, we’ve decided that on-call shifts should always happen on specific days (we picked Wednesday nights and Saturday afternoons), so that if someone doesn’t want to make an appointment, they can just come back later.

Having the Netguides in the computer classes has been *excellent*. In the Geek Out, Don’t Freak Out class, almost everyone has a helper (or a helper they share), which moves the class along nicely, but still keeps it chatty and social between patrons. In the computer classes, which only seat 6, I have 3 Netguides, one between each two seats. It’s a bit noisier (I need to work on training them on being a bit quieter so that I can continue talking when they are helping someone), but overall, it’s been great for the patrons, and again, it moves the class along better instead of having Marie and myself running up and down the class to help different people.

When I first put out the appointment request bookmarks (an idea I borrowed from the Russell Library in Middletown, CT), I hadn’t done an advertising push, I just put them out to see what would happen. I got 4 requests. After I introduced the Netguides in my first class, and mentioned they would be available by appointment, I had 12 appointment requests to place, and the requests keep coming. I’ve also created a Netguides page on the library web site, complete with an appointment request form, so that librarians and patrons can use the form to email appointment requests directly to me.

It’s been challenging, but in a good way. I’m:

• Managing 12 student volunteers
• Scheduling appointments, shifts, and class assignments
• Keeping track of Netguide availability
• Getting feedback from patrons and the Netguides in the form of evaluations
• Wishing I had more time to do it all, between desk shifts, teaching classes and class prep, computer troubleshooting madness, and continuing education

More later!

PLA Blog - "after" screenshot

Originally uploaded by Andrea Mercado.

As you all know, I’ve been spending lots of time moving the PLA Blog from Blogger to WordPress. I’m pleased to say that phase 1 is complete, and the new blog configuration went live yesterday, so check it out. I’d have posted about it yesterday, but as I’ve been saying all weekend, “My little hands are a bit tired of talking with the servers…” ;D

I created a little set of screen shots to show some of the visual changes in the front-end blog, complete with notes showing what toys are created using which plugins.

I do still have some work to do. I’ll be adding image credits to the about page, as per the CC licenses of the photos I used in the rotating header, I need to add some redirects for the static URLs of the old blog setup, there are a few plugins I’d like to add. My plan is to revisit the configuration quarterly, to see if we can/should add functionality through coding changes and plugins, while checking in weekly on plugin updates. I’ve also got a few little PLA Blog-related projects in the works that I’m hoping will be done before ALA.

Speaking of, if you’re interested for blogging for PLA at ALA, drop me a line at PLA and let me know, because I’m recruiting.

I’ll also be posting a more detailed post to the PLA Blog on what’s new and hip sometime today (hopefully), to update our regular readers on the the niftiness. Also, I can’t reiterate enough, if you’re subscribed to the PLA Blog feed, please change your URL to point to http://www.plablog.org/feed/. I hand-coded the old Blogger feed file with a permanent message that reminds everyone of the switch, but there are 385 subscribers through Bloglines alone on the old feed, so I figured I’d mantra the message until I see the numbers changing.

I feel accomplished. Go me.