LibraryTechtonics

Innovation starts with fresh voices, fresh thinking, paradigm shifts, and other fun things like that. If you want to start innovating, you need to get out of your element, and look at things from new perspectives.

I have Nate Hill to thank for the link to Steven Bell’s post on how 2008 might actually be the Year of Innovation for libraries, and not, as Nate says, “not just the year of ‘innovation’ being the buzzword for business as usual.” I love that Steven points to articles in this post that aren’t in library journals or on library/librarian blogs, it’s out there in the nether-ether, that place from whence actually new things come. I spend at least half of my time playing out there, so it’s refreshing to see that stuff in here, inside the all-to-closed environtment of the library sphere.

Nate Hill (I have Linda Braun to thank for pointing me to Nate, he’s wicked smart, you should read him) puts forth a sort of charge to YALSA librarians in his post reflecting on ALA, but I believe there are other bits and pieces in his post that can serve as an Innovation Year charge to librarians everywhere, such as:

• “The patrons define public library services, not the librarians.” Remember that when you’re developing services, technology or otherwise. I add, “Get over yourselves, it’s not about you,” for emphasis
• “[O]rganizational structure must be consistent with policy for an institution to remain lean, agile, and adaptable to new ideas and change. ” Those of you who attended the RI continuing education event know that Linda, Casey, and I all emphasized being nimble and agile in many ways, and this is one of them.
• “[O]ffer the materials these patrons are interested in, in the format they prefer, and we will make our libraries convenient for them to access.” Stay in touch with your patrons, the way a small business would stay in touch with loyal customers, and bring new customers into the fold. It’s getting out there and really interacting with your patrons, and it isn’t waiting behind the desk for them to come to you.
• “[O]ffer programs, exhibitions, lectures, and concerts relevant to their interests.”

He summarizes brilliantly with:

Put as simply as possible: a 15 year old, a 27 year old and a 52 year old have strikingly different interests and needs, libraries need to recognize that and respond.

How is this innovative? How is this different from the Library 2.0 of 2007? Essentially, there needs to be less “playing at” it, talking about it, and faking it, and *way* more actually doing it. It also means that if you know how to do it, you get out there and help those who don’t know how, and diversifying your methods.

This year should be about getting outside the way we’ve always done it, for n00bs and seasoned techies alike, no one is exempt. Don’t just blog or go to conferences, make lunch dates, present (for free, even!) to local library organization committees or even just nearby colleagues, make the effort at face-to-face interaction and/or online audio/visual interaction that applications like Skype, TalkShoe, and Mogulus have to offer. Reach those people who don’t read “The Blogs,” and get to know them so that you can help them get to know the patrons.

If nothing else, bring in new players from other industries. I learned, and continue to learn, so much from my Boston Media Makers, Social Media Club Boston, Social Media Breakfast, and Twitter peeps. Imagine what can you learn from your local non-librarian groups! Heck, if you don’t have one, start one, because, well, it’s innovative.

Last, but not least, pay attention to those who play, especially if they’re new at it, and they’re not just there for the job. Isabelle Fetherston recently started a new blog called Play 2.0, on the cusp of the new year. Her professional focus is on providing services to older adults, but she’s also in it for the play factor, and from my experiences communicating with her, she’s really coming at it from the perspective of the user *first*, then from the library perspective, which is a super thing to observe. Keep an eye on her, I think it’ll be a fun learning experience to watch and share in via the blog.

Innovators are like sharks, they’re always hungry and they just keep going. There is no getting comfortable and talking the same thing over and over. No more second-hand knockoffs or bad implementations. Get out there and build something new and relevent: Innovate in 2008!

Reflecting on my ALA Midwinter 2008 experiences, I find that I’m running up against the same issues I’ve seen before, but haven’t quite been able to articulate, about new technologies and libraries. I had a really good time talking out these issues with the likes of John Klima and Heidi Dolamore at conference, as well as with my helpful husband, and I think I’ve narrowed it down to a specific seed problem: context.

I find that, when I talk about technology and social software with new media peeps (because, you know, general technology and social software can be the same, but can also be separate topics), there is a deep level of reasonably assumed and understood cultural context, especially since many of these people are helping to build and grow the social software and technology of today and tomorrow.

However, when I discuss the same topics with librarians, there are only a handful who really have the proper knowledge context to discuss the issues without having to backtrack and explain. I find that even librarians who get the idea of social networking sites, social media creation, mashups, sharing, gadgetry, don’t quite have the cultural understanding behind the technologies in discussion. However, it’s very difficult to add the context to a blog post of ideally front-loaded content without making it super long and cumbersome. Thus, my writer’s block on the subject.

This is why, whenever I speak on the topic of social software, I emphasize culture. How and why a specific audience uses something is more important than how you want to apply it, essentially. Case in point is the session I blogged from Saturday morning for PLA on social networking and reference. In their efforts to perform “outreach,” librarians thought it was a good idea to try to figure out how to get around Facebook’s built-in messaging system… which was trying to prevent them from essentially spamming Facebook users. People who understand Facebook’s user culture know that this is *bad* and it shouldn’t be done, but these librarians thought they were doing a good, clever thing by trying to circumvent the system.

Beth Evans also presented in the same program, and mentioned that she was encouraging all users to “friend” the library. I know that there are other librarians who are encouraging users to “friend” them as individuals, and who “friend” everyone back. I don’t think that all librarians have considered the social networking and relationship ramifications of doing this (I’ve touched on this topic before): is their account just for work, or are they using it for work and personal sharing? Are they sharing the same information with all of their “friends”? Do they only log in from work? When they log in from home, do they really want to be at “work” on their profile as well? Are librarians contributing to the decline in value of the real-world meaning of friend by encouraging everyone to just add them indiscriminantly, or adding people back just to be nice? What does nice mean for the future of social networking?

I was in the middle of drafting this post when I saw Kate Sheehan’s post float up as a tweet on Twitter. I commented that her paraphrase of me is spot on, as this post reflects, and further eggs me on to say that librarians need to study the fine art of anthropology when it comes to social networking. That’s the true key to user-centered design in the library world: it doesn’t start with us and our wants and needs, it starts with them. As I paraphrased David Lankes from the Saturday presentation:

As librarians, you shouldn’t “define your mission by cool features, do it by core principles,” thinking carefully about how and why people use these online spaces. We need to stop chasing all of the innovators and making second-hand copies of everything, and really create something innovative to meet our patrons needs.

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!

Here’s an MSN article on a few of the other social networking sites out there that aren’t Facebook and MySpace.  This article doesn’t cover the full gamut — you’d be amazed just how many there are! — but it’s a nice, light, Saturday post with a nice, light article.

I’ve heard of (and heard good things about) Eons.com before, and we might actually do a program on that service at my library in the spring.

So Jessamyn, Lichen, and I presented to a group of New Hampshire librarians about Web 2.0 technologies, and I think it was a wicked good time.

As promised during my presentation yesterday, the simple Technology Planning Timeline document that supplements is now available for download (.doc file). (photo c/o Jessamyn West)

Some bits worth sharing:

• Jessamyn reminds us: Don’t forget that you can search Flickr (scroll to the bottom for options) for images with Creative Commons licenses for, say, kids working on class projects at the library, craft projects, whatever makes you happy. You don’t even need an account or anything. Just make sure you abide by the license, to accrue happy internet karma.
• Lichen says, “A library badge, wouldn’t that be rad?!” Seriously, like a badge of titles or recent borrowings, straight from the catalog. Or, imagine a list of your 5 favorite books in the catalog, and then the ability to instantly blog those titles to a blog, a la Flickr “Blog This.” You know it.
• Did you know you can integrate LibraryThing fun into your existing catalog (for a fee after 60 days) using Library Thing for Libraries. Only issue is that your mileage may vary (YMMV) if you’re in a consortium. I do that that Innovative is planning significant updates, and if there are others, I’d be interested in hearing about them.
• I got to show off Miro, a free, open source video aggregator I’ve been playing with for about a month now. I’ll do a separate post on that, with a list of the techie shows I watch that help me stay current. I also got to show off my new Blackberry 8830, who I’ve affectionately named Piper, but that’s a whole other post, too.

When we were setting up the workshop many months ago, I mentioned the speed geeking idea to Andrea Thorpe, and she loved the concept. She tweaked it a bit to just be a timed session where people could just wander around to the different speakers and ask questions, instead of the time-then-move model, and it worked out really well. It was a really nice alternative to the endless end of session nightmare when you have the one person who monopolizes the Q&A with their very specific comment/question/kvetch about their very specialized situation, keeping other people from asking questions.

This was probably the best presenting gig I’ve done so far. It was relatively small, which was cool because there was the ability to have contact with all attendees, it was interactive, and had a nice, open feel to it. Everyone was so open to learning, and it was super keen. And, well, any event where I can give a presentation on technology planning and actually keep people engaged while making them laugh is a win in my book.

A final testament to the coolness Andrea Thorpe and NHLA: *right after* our presentations were over, she blogged the locations of our presentations right away on the NHLA blog.

Rock. Star.