Tech Chick Tips

Podcasts are a great way to expand learning beyond the classroom or library. Here are more recommendations from Tech Chicks Anna Adam and Helen Mowers, following up their Dec. 2007 article Listen Up!

Test Drive: Zonbu

Jeffrey Hastings, our gearhead, considers the Zonbu, a $99 open-source desktop computer.

Test Drive: Public Web Browser 2.10

SLJ columnist Jeffrey Hastings reviews the search utility Public Web Browser.

I Heard it from Alice Zucchini: Poems about the Garden by Juanita Havill

I Heard it from Alice Zucchini: Poems about the Garden, written by Juanita Havill, illustrated by Christine Davenier (Chronicle Books, 2006).

Halloween Poetry podcast series: Bobbi Katz

‘Because of Winn-Dixie’ Heads to Broadway

DC School District Restores Gay-Themed Titles to Summer Reading Lists

Three New York Schools Win ISTE Media Specialist Technology Innovation Award

Volunteers to Support Chicago School Libraries During ALA Annual

Ohio’s Library Cuts to Devastate Children's/YA Services

TechSource Forum: Annual is Coming!

Annual is just around the corner. Our bloggers discuss what they're most looking forward to this year in the Windy City:

Jason Griffey: ALA Annual is always a blur of activity, and it's sad to say that while I tend to overplan like crazy, it usually takes me days after I get back before I really know what the most valuable part of the whole Annual experience was. There's a whole lot to look forward to this year, from the first ALA Annual Unconference to some great speakers (I'm looking forward to Junot Diaz, for example). But what I may be looking forward to the most is seeing what the effect of the LITA Electronic Participation Task Force Recommendations on virtual participation have on the conference. I'm hoping that a myriad of groups uses the suggestions to increase the number of people that benefit from the ALA Annual 2009 content, even if they can't make it to Chicago in person. I'm also looking forward to, of course, the 3rd Annual BIGWIG Social Software Showcase, on Monday July 13th in McCormick Place West room w-184! If you haven't experienced a Social Software Showcase, I can guarantee that they are unlike any other program at ALA. Come join us and see what I'm talking about.

Tom Peters:  I'm really looking forward to the unconference preconference on Friday.  Meredith Farkas and Michelle Boule are "unorganizing" this day-long event, which is yet another great presidential initiative from Jim Rettig and his band of merry pranksters.  At the risk of revealing my overall nerdiness, I have to admit that I'm also looking forward to visiting the exhibits and speaking with vendors this year.  Quite a few innovative resources and services are launching.  It will be interesting to discuss them with vendor reps and other librarians.  In general, even if Paddy Bauler, the ebullient Alderman of Chicago's 43rd Ward, was prescient in the 1950's when he noted, "Chicago ain't ready for reform," I think this ALA Annual Conference, 32 years after Paddy quaffed his last, will be remembered for the general mainstreaming and diffusion of technological twists that have been recently tried and tested:  unconferences, online events, events in virtual worlds, blogs, wikis, tweets, videos, etc.  ALA Annual Conference 2009 in the Windy City may be remembered years hence as the first major instance of a "reformed" new-style professional conference.  It promises to be an exciting, high-energy conference.   

Kate Sheehan: This is only my second ALA Annual, so in many ways I’m still figuring ALA out. My calendar is filled with conflicting sessions that all sound wonderful – I still don’t know how I’ll decide between Nora Rawlinson and Top Tech Trends! I’m thrilled by the idea of an ALA unconference, which seems like the perfect way to capitalize on the power  of the friendly hallway conference at libraryland’s largest gathering. Last year, I found that walking the exhibit hall with other librarians was a great way to get ideas and spark interesting conversation about both the vision for and the day-to-day practicalities of our libraries and I already have an exhibit hall date with Cindi Trainor. Of course, I’m always happy to see my fellow TechSource bloggers and I can’t wait to see Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me (one of my favorite NPR shows!) live. 

Michael Stephens: Chicago in July will be beautiful: the lake, the cityscape, the hustle/bustle. The location this year is perfect for Dominican GSLIS students to attend - with exhibit passes or for the conference itself. I'm most excited about our students getting to see what a full-blown Annual is like because in class, when we talk about associations and memberships it doesn't have the same impact as being there. I'd urge LIS students who are near Chicago to take advantage of this opportunity to see the throngs of library folk. I'm doing a little bit of speaking as well, but I'm very excited to hear some of the folks I'm speaking with: Alan Gray from Darien Library, Bob Fox from Georgia Tech and Erik Boekesteijn from DOK Delft Public Library, all talking about their innovative services and spaces. I am also really excited about reconnecting with colleagues I only get to see at conferences. 

Creating Zones with Heart

Greetings from Northern Michigan! The days of summer are flying by and I’m splitting my time between trying to wear out our new Labrador Retriever Cooper and prepping for upcoming talks at ALA Annual. I’ll be presenting for LLAMA BES (that’s the Library Leadership & Management Association Buildings and Equipment Section if you’re spinning the wheel of ALA acronyms) in a program called  “Library 2.0 Buildings: Creating Zones with Heart.” 

I’m excited about the topic because sometimes we get so caught up in talking about technology, the spaces and places of our libraries take a backseat. Libraries need to encourage the heart in the physical realm as well as the online. 

I agree with folks like John Beck that the library can offer many spaces and opportunities to varied groups. We should constantly be looking for creative ways to create zones in the library for our different user groups. I also think it should be okay to have fun at the library - gaming, DDR, creation of stuff, etc - as well as make it comfortable and useful for others. I’m not just writing about public libraries but about academic libraries too. 

For my part of the program, I’ve been batting around these “zones” in my head on long walks with Cooper at the “Quiet Area” pond nearby. I’d be very interested in feedback from our readers about these zones and any others they may have in their libraries.

Community Zone

A space for the community to gather encourages people to use the library not only as a place to get “stuff,” but as a central, integral part of people’s lives. Think public libraries and meeting space or think academic libraries and the campus community the library serves: students, faculty and staff.

One goal for a library might be to re-establish the idea of the commons - that shared space that can become many things to many people and everyone feels ownership.  I want our constituents to feel strong ownership of our buildings and services.

Creativity Zone

This zone encourages people to express themselves via technology or other media. Podcasting stations, video production areas, image manipulation setups, space set aside for writing activities, and any other creative endeavour may find its way into the library.

Curiosity Zone

What do you want to know today? That could be the motto for this zone - where any and all questions are answered via online and (gasp!) print resources by knowledgeable and engaged staff. I’m reminded of John Blyberg’s “Let’s Be Curious with our Users” post riffing on Seth Godin’s points about curiosity.

Collaboration Zone

This zone encourages people to come together to work on projects or complete a task. It might be teen-centered, or an “office on the go” type set up, or a craft/art type space or a technology rich environment, but my guess is it will be a mash up of all of these things.

Caring Zone

This zone should encompass the entire space. The wonderful thing - and the thing that brings this post to TechSource is through all of these zones there are two very important threads that tie them together and make them work -technology and people. We need technology - all shapes, sizes, and cost factors - to create some of these spaces, but we also need dedicated encouragers/facillitators to help people learn, experience, and utilize the space. The most important one is the people of course - a caring mindset trumps spiffy expensive technology everyday. The mindset should also be humanistic, kind, and in all ways encouraging. 

Sometimes it seems we get so hung up on control and workflow, that we miss opportunities to involve users with the library and library staff. A recent example is this one, from a photo by Kathryn Greenhill :

“They have added a half wall so that staff and patrons cannot make eye contact or see each other,” she writes. “It felt really dehumanizing to stand on one side of the barrier, centimetres from someone in a building built on service and not be able to smile or say hello.”

The library should be human. The library should be there for users. The library should be built by involving users every step of the way. And spaces and places within our walls should reflect that. At the LLAMA BES program we’ll hear two notable library innovators who have achieved these goals, sharing and talking about their spaces: 

Case Study 1:  Darien Library, Darien, Connecticut, Alan Kirk Gray, Assistant Director - Operations

Case Study 2:  The Commons, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA, Robert E. Fox, Jr., Associate Director, Libraries

Until then, please share your “Zone Stories” here and read more about the case study locations:

http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2008/08/keeping-the-library-relevant-a-tour-of-the-georgia-tech-library-learning-commons.html

http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2008/06/on-the-information-experience-an-ala-techsource-conversation-with-john-blyberg.html

http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2009/05/plugging-in-with-kindness.html

Planning technology for the next 30 years

I don't often post specifically about things I'm involved in at my real job (Head of Library IT at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga), and try instead to examine general technology useful to libraries of all types. But this month, I'd like to talk about something that I've been involved in for almost 2 years that has recently come to a head (especially as it concernstechnology). I've spent the better part of the last month hip-deep in planning the technology for UTC's brand new academic library.
 

We had some scares over the last couple of week regarding the funding for the new library, but it's officially part of the budget now. We've locked down the floorplans, are about to lock down the exterior look of the building, and I'm working on pulling together the technology infrastructure plan. This new building is being designed to have a lifetime of 30 years, so some of the decisions we're making will resonate for decades, in the same way that decisions made over 30 years ago are still affecting us in our current building. So how do you plan for technology 30 years out? What are we trying to do with the technology for the new building, both for the infrastructure and the front-line tech? Over the next year, I'm going to try and cover at least some of the decisions we've made about the technology in the new building.
 
We decided very early on in the process that we believed that technology use in the library is never going to lessen in importance. We are going to try and embed technology in as transparent a way as possible for the end user, with the exception of a few showpiece objects. However, as many of you know, transparent for the end user is far, far from transparent for the library staff.
 
One of the challenging parts of the planning is that because of the rules on spending the capital funds set aside by the State, none of the building budget can actually be spent on PCs or other non-infrastructure technology. We are going to have to find another funding source for computers, but we are trying to ensure that the infrastructure that we can spend money on is top tier.
 
We are currently planning on having about 2000 Cat-6 ethernet jacks in the building, in addition to wireless coverage on all 5 floors extending outside the building onto the patio and seating areas. The network is being designed to be redundant to failure of individual hubs, as well as to limit any double failures to only half of any floor in question. More fail-safes are being added on floors with the heaviest patron usage.
 
We are planning gigabit connections throughout the building, with the potential to run fiber in the future if it becomes needed. In addition to the pipes that we need to be able to do really anything in the building, there are a ton of pieces that we still have to plan for. Signage systems, webservers, fileservers, RAID systems, cameras, card swipes for doors...just a ton of technology.
 
What technology do YOU wish had been planned for when your library was built?

Getting Virtual: ALA Works to Increase Electronic Member Participation

Hot on the heels of the latest issue of Library Technology Reports, Collaboration 2.0, is a toolkit designed to help ALA members who want to bring remote participants into a meeting or who want to stream a session’s audio or video out to a remote audience.   A group of ten LITA members has been working together for the last few months via email and on the LITA wiki to create the EParticipation Task Force Recommendations.

 
What’s in a Name?

The ALA Council voted to adopt several recommendations made by its Task Force on Electronic Member Participation, which, after the 2007 Annual Conference, was assigned to “examine existing documents and develop recommendations to adapt ALA policies to help
the Association move forward with effective e-participation practices.”  LITA volunteered to assist in this effort, and division President Andrew Pace appointed the LITA Electronic Participation Implementation Task Force.  The Task Force was asked to answer this question:  “if ALA provides Internet connectivity in hotels as well as the convention center for Annual Conferences and Midwinters, what can we do to help regular committees use it to connect with absent members at no additional cost?”  The provision of wireless at the hotels is proving to be cost-prohibitive, but meeting coveners in the convention center have an array of free tools to choose from.

What Do You Need?

One of the decisions that must be made by members wanting to provide e-participation opportunities is to decide whether two-way communication is necessary.  Is feedback or input required from remote participants?  In what form will that input be gathered?  Is it important to capture that feedback for later reading or replay?  If so, should the remote content be integrated with what is said and shared face-to-face?  The Task Force put together a visual decision tree that should help meeting planners make an informed choice about which tool(s) to use.

Want to share meeting happenings in real-time?  Try using Twitter or live blogging.

Have a committee member who can’t make it to Chicago?  Bring her into the room via Skype.

Want to solicit audience input at your program? Use Twitter or create a chat room with Meebo.

Want to show off your panel’s slides or workshop’s handouts?  Upload them to Slideshare.

See the entire Toolkit, which also includes options for recording audio and streaming video, on the LITA wiki.

Other Benefits

Providing members the ability to listen, watch, or chat remotely will help them immensely in these tough economic times.  Conference attendees with conflicting engagements can return to an archived meeting or program and listen in after the fact.  Presentation slide shows and workshop handouts can be provided online before or after a presentation, saving paper and the time that it takes to print and organize materials.  By putting our association’s business and conference materials online, we are creating an archive of its history and the work that we do to create it.

The LITA Electronic Participation Implementation Task Force is David Lee King (chair), Lauren Pressley, Derik Badman, Andreas Orphanides, Michele Mizejewski, Barbara Blummer, Jason Puckett, Cindi Trainor and Beth Hoffman.  Jonathan Blackburn, Aaron Dobbs, Kenley Neufeld and Jason Griffey also contributed.

Absent at the eBook Revolution

Conference program topics tend to be lagging indicators of the hot topics in a given field.  The lag time develops because it takes time to plan for a professional conference, even an online or in-world conference.  In fact, by the time a molten topic spews forth many conference programs, sometimes even entire conferences, that’s a signal that the magma has started to cool and harden. 

The eBook movement is heating up worldwide, with many major corporations launching eBook services and significant chunks of the worldwide reading public – the Chinese and romance readers come to mind – giving ereading a sustained try.  The paucity of programs about eBooks at next month’s ALA Annual Conference in Chicago could be seen as a case-in-point of this general truth about conference program topics as lagging behind hot topics. Nonethless, I think a different, more troubling dynamic is developing between eBooks, libraries, and librarianship.  I worry about the role that libraries and librarianship will have in the real eBook revolution. 

A colleague recently brought to my attention that his search of the program titles and descriptions for ALA Annual in Chicago turned up only two programs about eBooks.  One is a RUSA STARS program about resource sharing in the 21st century, and the other is an ALCTS preconference about Streaming Media and Proliferating E-Books. 

My search didn’t find much more.  Of the dozens of topics proposed to be discussed during the ALA unconference preconference (or is it a conference unpreconference?) scheduled for Friday, July 10th, only one proposed topic --  “Audiobooks, e-books, and online reading” – specifically mentions eBooks.  Jessica Moyer at the U. of Minnesota(Go Gophers!) suggested that topic.   Registrants for the unconference are still voting on which of the proposed topics the group actually wants to discuss, so eBooks may get voted off the island. 

The problem with the eBook movement is that it is no longer perceived as a newly emerging hot topic, but as a stale, old, previously overhyped topic.  eBooks have been in the radar of librarianship for over a decade now.  In the late 1990s, the launch of the Rocket eBook device, the buzz created by the then standalone start-up company called netLibrary and other innovative efforts created a lot of excitement and interest.  The prognostications and preferences of eBook pundits have become petrified.  When the eBook revolution is mentioned, many librarians may think to themselves, “Been there, done that.  Fooled once, shame on you.  Fooled twice, shame on me. “

And much has happened vis-à-vis libraries and eBooks since then.  Many publishers and eBook aggregators (OverDrive, ebrary, etc.) have developed and delivered lots of eBooks to library users.  Nevertheless, the really big social revolution in reading hasn’t happened yet, but we may be on the verge.

Many major corporations like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Sony, are really pushing eBook services directly to end-users.  The Kindle family of portable dedicated ereading appliances seems to be selling well, although Jeff Bezos won’t share sales figures, even with Amazon’s shareholders.  Another wave of dedicated reading devices is beginning to hit the beach, and startup companies like Pixel Qi are developing low-cost screens, better batteries, and other improved components that will drive down the hardware costs.   Although ereading still seemsprimarily to be a domain  for the gadgetista and affluent readers, that’s a typical phase through which most technological developments pass. 

The real problem with eBooks, IMHO, is that, while that overhyped dud in the late 1990s didn’t result in paperless offices and parlors around the world, we may be on the verge of the real eBook revolution now.  I write this guardedly and sheepishly, because I don’t want to overhype eBooks yet again.   After suffering through a decade of hype, many false starts, and only modest successes, librarians may be lulled into a sense of complacency about eBooks just as the real revolution begins.

An interesting professional conundrum may be developing here, because, while recent developments in the eBook marketplace may be generally good for readers (a debatable assumption, I admit), most librarians seem to agree that most of the recent eBook developments may result, intentionally or unintentionally, in locking libraries out of the process.  Most of these emerging eBook systems are designed to move content directly from publishers, aggregators, or even authors to the end-readers.  What’s good for readers may not be good for libraries.

This may be a fundamental professional challenge:  To put the needs and interests of your clients before your needs and interests as a professional.  We all know that lawyers, educators, and healthcare professionals have to confront this conundrum occasionally, and librarians do, too.  If push comes to shove, we need to remember that the goal of serving readers trumps the goal of saving libraries, even if we are frustratingly saddened that these two noble professional goals may suddenly become out of sync. 

I just re-read Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science in light of this possible conflict between libraries and readers.  Those laws emphasize books, reading, and readers/users.  I assume Ranganathan would have accepted eBooks as a type of book.  Only the enigmatic 5th law (the library is a growing organism) specifically mentions libraries.