Since taking the job with LibLime I’ve been using Twitter a lot more - it’s just another buddy on my already open IM client. Today, I thought I’d play with Tweet Clouds. Check out the cloud of terms I use in my tweets.
Technorati Tags: twitter
Glen Horton talked to us about how libraries can give back to open source.
Libraries and open source are fundamentally related - both …
One of the ways libraries can give back is to create open source software. In a lot of the cases of open source projects they could have been kept in the libraries that developed them but instead they opened them up to share with others.
If you’re asking, “but Glen .. what if we don’t have a developer?” - you can give back in many other ways.
Teach open source software like this video on edubuntu for libraries.
You could document open source - like I’ve been doing for the last few months. Don’t assume that you’re the only one that can benefit from it - share what you write just in case there are others like you out there.
You can debug open source by reporting bugs to authors and on support forums. You can identify usability issues or if something isn’t working quite right - instead of dealing with these things (which we’re all used to doing) you can share it with the community to make the product that much better.
“But glen - what if we don’t use open source software?”
You can promote open source - just because you’re not using it internally, doesn’t mean your patrons won’t benefit from it - add links to it from your site. Or pass out CDs or sell flash drives with open source on it. Check out portableapps.com.
Open source or die
It’s a strong statement - but it goes back to open source and libraries being linked at the core. Glen points us to the number of sessions on this track (a pretty high number if you look at all of the speakers sharing time slots) and he bets that it’s going to be more next year.
Open Source Desktop
Next up, Julian Clark who uses open source for nearly application on his computer.
Why?
When is the best time to change?
To do this…
Assess the hardware
Assess the software
Assess the organizations
Where should you start?
Options for support
Third party support
In-house
Selling it
Technorati Tags: cil2008, cil08, open source
I love listening to Marshall Breeding present - it always makes me feel better to know that someone can talk faster than me 
Marshall started his talk by showing us the lib-web-cats advanced search which allows you to search for libraries running specific systems. He did remind us to keep in mind that the systems shown are the ones that have made a commitment to a system (may not be live yet).
Broad Trends
Open source is highly used in the general IT arena with examples like Linux and Apache. If you believe the blogosphere, open source is going up up up - but it’s not necessarily true - Microsoft is also gaining a footing - showing that they are all good options. You need to make your decisions with all the facts in hand.
Open Source
Did you know that your general library infrastructure is open source? z39.50 is open source! And Index Data has been making tools based on this protocol for a long time (the Yaz toolkit is the main z39.50 tool being used).
Other open source options:
Next Marshall listed some open source discovery products - AKA - next gen catalogs:
Open Source in the ILS Arena - Products and Trends
It used to be bold and risky to move to an open source ILS. This move however led to a bunch of projects that are now products. That said, Marshall wants to make sure that people have the best information available to them when they make these decisions - he’s not an open source evangelist he’s a technology evangelist.
3 of the 4 open source ILS that were around in 2002 are now defunct so when Marshall wrote that the open source ILS it was still a distant future - it was true.
… then the world changed
In March 2007 the world had changed, but open source is a minority player. In March 2008 open source is a real option out there, but you need to use the same criteria you use when choosing a closed source system.
Now, April 2008 the open source ILS has launched into the mainstream - there is a lot of room for optimism and there is going to more and more of this over time.
The ILS market is an industry in turmoil with mergers and acquisitions left and right causing disruptions and business decisions to narrow options. This has fueled the open source movement by providing libraries with additional options.
Open Source v. Traditional Licensing
So what side is Marshal on? He says both sides! He wouldn’t want to see a world where one or the other is the only option and thinks they complement the each other. Each library has it’s own personality and can use that in choosing their systems.
Recommendations for making a choice:
Specifics
There is also lot of commercial involvement these days:
Issues
Explosive interest in open source is being driven by the disillusionment with current vendors. Given this, Marshall makes the point that the open source ILS would be where it is if it wasn’t for what was happening on the other end of things. Open source allows for more flexible systems and lower costs (however, Marshall still feels that total cost of ownership is the same between the two over the long haul). With open source libraries are less vulnerable to the mergers and acquisitions that are happening in the proprietary world.
Cost Issues
Open source risk factors
Marshall still thinks that open source is a risky alternative because of a dependency on community organizations and commercial companies to provide development and support services. I’d argue that this is a reason that open source is less risky - with a community of developers and support services you’re more likely to find someone to help you out if your vendor goes under. That said, Marshall admits that the other side is risky too!
All that said the interest in open source (and the market share) is relatively low.
Conclusions
What he’s looking for is a new system (aren’t we all) - built for how libraries are today. This is not an open source system that does what our systems already do today. In short, we have a long way to go on both fronts - both open and closed source.
Technorati Tags: cil2008, cil08, open source
Karen Schneider moderated this very interesting two part session on WoePac to WowPac - a look at OPACs as we know them and would like them to be. As a librarian who has often torn her hair out over the sad state - “or should I say sucky state” of our OPACs she’s the perfect person to be introducing the speakers for this session.
First off, Roy Tennant. Roy started off by saying “I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to kill off the the word OPAC - you can see how successful I’ve been.”
Roy wanted to clarify for us that when he talked about the “OPAC” he’s just talking about the discovery part of our systems - the public interface - not the entire ILS. He introduced us to a few tools that add a new discovery level to our systems that harvests data out of the ILS.
When you’re ready for a change in your library you have a few questions to consider before looking at today’s tools.
Some examples of options available to today’s libraries are:
Koha (example from Athens County Public Library)
Evergreen (example from Georgia Pines)
LibraryFind (example from Oregon State University Library)
WorldCat Local (example from University of Washington)
Next up Kate Sheehan who was part of the first library to use LibraryThing for Libraries. I like Kate’s definition as a bibliophile/social networking mashup (hope the credit for that doesn’t belong with someone else - if so - I’m sorry).
LibraryThing has a ton of data about books and readers and the readers are not afraid to use it. While LibraryThing is all about users (they want to search and catalog their own way) - LibraryThing for Libraries is all about the masses of data.
Kate showed us the search results for “OPAC sucks” in Google and there were 3 pages of results (I got 10 pages).
To improve a woepac, LibraryThing for Libraries takes all the neat stuff that LibraryThing knows and dumps it into your OPAC - any OPAC because this tool is platform agnostic.
Kate gave us a preview of what this tool does:
So how hard is it to implement? Kate says it’s so easy a monkey could do it - really! It’s just a simple javascript that you copy and paste into your template and you’re done.
LibraryThing bases this stuff on what people have actually read (not what they’ve bought - like Amazon). If there is anything wrong with LibraryThing for Libraries, it’s that it doesn’t work as well with non-isbn books - all of these features are based on comparing ISBNs.
So why do libraries want LibraryThing? Basically, data doesn’t grow on trees and LibraryThing has this wealth of information to share with libraries. This is a pretty simple concept.
This is a great tool - especially for libraries with a lot of ISBN materials.
Next up was, Cindy Trainor with a talk titled: “Are we there yet? Next generation library catalog enhancements: an assessment.” Cindi agree with Marshall Breeding (a summary I haven’t written yet) when he says that these next gene systems aren’t really there yet - there is still a long way to go. For that reason Cindi introduced us to her 4 very best websites using her own totally arbitrary system of rating.
Great websites need to have a combination of these 4 characteristics:
The more of these elements a site has the better it is - in Cindi’s opinion. Of her four best websites, Cindi went into detail about Flickr which scored a 26 on her scale (which had a max of 32 points). Flickr made it onto her top 4 because it met all of the criteria:
The other top sites were Amazon scoring 26, Pandora scoring 20 and Wikipedia scoring 21.
So, where are the next gen catalog enhancements on this scale?
When you think about what a legacy OPAC looks like we have come a long way - but we still have a long way to go! Cindi showed us a Voyager OPAC and replaced most of the words with blah blah blah - because this is what our patrons see and Voyager scored a 2 using her fake rating system.
Last up was John Blyberg. John didn’t talk to us about our OPACs per say, but the system redressed.
John started with a quote from Robert Pirsig in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”:
“The overall name of these interrelated structures is system. The motorcycle is a system. A real system …There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. That’s all a motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel … the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.”
He feels that we sort of fetishize our OPACs - the WowPac doesn’t exist - the fact that we can’t put it together is not that it’s hard to do - it has more to do with what sits behind the system. Like the motorcycle our systems are a mental phenomenon.
Consider the library work flow as container versus content - the OPAC is container - the content is then the information in the OPAC.
“I really wish we could get rid of the concept of OPAC - because of the system behind them our OPACs seem to get put into these little boxes - what happens to a plant if you put it in a pot that’s too small for it? It withers and dies and this is what’s going on with our OPACs - they’re being impaired by not getting to the content in our systems.” While I may not have gotten the quote exactly right - this is a really good image from John of what our OPACs are doing to our precious data.
John makes another great point that the OPAC really should be spilling out onto our websites and beyond - Facebook and Flickr and such - not just search boxes - but applications that can trigger based on page content. So if you’re on Facebook viewing something about Harry Potter you get a pop up or a column with library data related to the page you’re on.
We need an understanding of how information flows from point a-b - the term systems librarian is going to be obsolete because we’re all going to be systems librarians (in fact at Drexel, systems is a required course - so in their eyes, we already area). Systems does not have to do with technology only - but the system of our library (the processes we follow day to day).
John also reminds us that in today’s information ecology there is no destination = most people are online to experience information.
A great combination of viewpoints all in one place! I’m glad that I stayed in the room all day 
This year at CIL I got to attend my first ever pre-conference. My session was taught by Helene Blowers and Michael Porter and covered the new paradigm of marketing in libraries.
Helene started the afternoon off by talking about the title of the presentation “From Avatars to Advocacy: Innovation Through Un-Marketing.” The term “Un-marketing” is in the title because we were covering a different view than the traditional view of marketing.
Library Brand
When marketing people think about the library brand, they focus on the logo - but it’s a lot more! If you believe the OCLC Perceptions report, the library brand is all about books, but in reality the library brand is all about community! This is a theme I’ve written about a lot recently. So, as we look forward at where we’re going with marketing we want to focus on that part of our brand.
Marketing
The old paradigm of marketing focuses on controlling the look and feel of the brand - our fliers all look consistent - our websites match our print materials, etc. In 1957 it was very easy to reach your market because 45% of the audience were watching Lucille Ball … today we have so many mediums and niche markets to reach. For this reason, mass marketing is going away - and it’s being replaced with niche marketing.
The new paradigm is to influence the character and portability of your brand - allow people to take your brand with them and embed it into their own space allow them to contribute and participate. Helene showed us an example from Gmail that I missed. Google allowed people to make their own Gmail videos and then they merged them into one ad for Gmail.
The question for libraries is how you can enable customers to participate in your branding. Helene recommends reading The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual and checking out the website. These talk about how markets are about conversations and brands are about getting people to talk about what you’re doing.
What strategic elements do we need to focus on in order to move our libraries into this model of marketing?
Helene shared a great quote with us: “Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation….We need to learn to begin to let go” - A. G Lafley, CEO and Chairman of P&G, October 2006. Another book to read on this topic is Rengen: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer - and What It Means to Your Business by Patricia Martin in which the author says “cultural consumers thrive on information and ideas to fuel to their creative self-expression.”
Real Libraries
Next Michael took over to show us a bunch of great examples. He pointed out that we’re seeing a lot of these communication tools being used by institutions - so the institutions start the process and they do more than the user - but this is going to shift more to the users.
I agree with Michael when he says that people will give money to things they love - make them love you and they will participate. Look at what Gmail did - it’s cool to be associated with Gmail and so everyone wanted to participate. Another example of this is the model LibraryThing uses to have people pay for their membership. They give you choices as to what you can pay. So if you really like them you can pay more than they’re asking (which I did). If you put your library out there then they will send it to their friends - the spread of the word of mouth is much more now that we have blogs, social networking and email.
Michael sounds like an evil marketer when he says “get them when they’re kids and teens - never lose a hold on our market” but the truth is that we can do that with a clean conscience because we’re just trying to build up our market. Libraries tend to had a culture of “no” and we have to get out of that or we’re going to go down. This includes allowing kids and teens to participate in marketing our libraries.
Examples of neat marketing tricks:
One library that is doing neat things is the Santa Clara County Library. Another is Palo Alto City Library which has a good blog and a presence on other social networking sites such as Flickr and Facebook. Others includes Kankakee Public Library and San Mateo County Library - both are using these tools and twisting them to their purposes. Brooklyn College Library has shown real results by using MySpace.
Michael says “I could give a hoot about the brand name - I care about the functionality - the community and content - and if those tools help our users access content through us then they are successful - we just have to use these things to be better at our missions. “It’s not about us!” - it’s about our community. How true and awesome to hear someone else saying this!
Engaging Our Community
“Brands are built on what people are saying about you, not what you’re saying about yourself” - Guy Kawasaki
Helene showed us a bunch of other examples:
Helene then gave us 8 steps to take back to our libraries in order to better market them:
Conclusion
Last note: always remember - the best way to get customer to market our brand is to allow them to promote us (the library) by marketing themselves.
Slides are online and we took photos of our brainstorming session and tagged them cil2008aa and cil2008unmarketing.
Technorati Tags: cil2008, cil2008unmarketing, marketing, cil08
Well, maybe it’s not the best way to celebrate National Library Week, but it’s always fun to look at pictures of libraries. In the features titled: 18 Sexy Trips to the Stacks Entertainment Weekly shows pictures of scenes in libraries from 18 movies.
First off Darlene Fichter and Frank Cervone are like a stand up comedy act with really neat tools to make our lives easier! I just love attending their presentations each year. So let’s get to the meat (excuse my lack of capitalization):
Firefox Tools:
Other web tools:
For web development:
Nifty utilities:
More:
In true Darlene and Frank fashion they ended by telling us that they didn’t want their talk to be all work and no play. They introduced us to a gag site that we can use to scare our colleagues and friends - lolinator.com.
Technorati Tags: cil2008
An awesome list of tools from Mary Ellen Bates:
I know this is a very note-like post - but this presentation lended itself to this style. See Mary Ellen’s list of links.
Technorati Tags: cil2008
Our first keynote was by Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet and American Life Project. As usual, he asked us who’s blogging? He also showed us blog posts about him - from previous years - maybe next year something I’ve said here will be on his presentation
Why does he ask this? Because blogging is about community building and communication - this is what makes the internet so different and so wonderful - and this is what the era of user generated content is all about - which is a great intro into what followed.
Stats Review
2008
2000
Wireless connectivity has actually brought back the interest in email - the reports of death of email are premature. Wireless also changes people’s ideas about news - people are much more interested in using the internet to connect to news because it’s quick and up-to-date.
In addition to wireless, pictures are now are as important for communication and community as text is - everyone taking pictures (see Flickr for cil2008). In fact, 33% of online adults have profiles on MySpace and Facebook which is amazing - and means they’re sharing information graphically as well as textually.
Which brings us to the fact that blogging is getting hard to talk about because people aren’t seeing what they’re doing as blogging - like if you post on MySpace and Facebook - they don’t realize that that this is actually a way of blogging
Today’s issues
The question this keynote was addressing was how people get information to help them solve problems, this is not a look at general interest information searches. The audience of this study consisted of approximately 169 million adults that have said that they had to find information related to health issues, government, immigration and education.
In the results, 53% of Americans said that they had been to their local library in the last year. But it’s only once you unpack this information that you get to the really interesting part:
Younger people are using the library more!!! You know - those kids we keep saying can’t read and that we have to get in the door - they’re already there!! In fact, 60% of online teens use the internet at libraries…
Who turns to libraries for problem solving?
And the most popular problem-solving searches done at libraries:
Of these people:
Shows that both technology and computers matter - patrons are using both almost equally!! How awesome is that??
When asked what their future intentions for visiting the library were, 29% said they likely would go to libraries - once again it’s the break down that’s interesting:
So what are the young people the most likely to come in and come back? Why do they have an affinity for libraries? Lee’s hypothesis is that young people have had the most recent experience with libraries - they’ve done homework there - they’ve been forced to go in - and so they are more aware of how libraries have changed than any other age group - they’ve witnessed the change and they know that we can help - they have had good experiences and they are likely to repeat then.
Lee reminds us that the people who are likely to go to libraries are those who know you and love you best! We just need to educate people on how we’ve changed - put more effort into public education on what you do and how you do it - this could really pay off.
It’s also important to keep in mind that your patrons are happy (and some are zealous) advocates. This being the era of consumer evangelists - some of whom might be influential in your community. Give them the tools necessary (blogs, etc) to share the good news about your library.
Even your “un-patrons” are primed to seek you out. The people who might be more dependent on libraries for help are awake of what you offer and your special skills. Keys for their patronage include awareness of your work, comfort in your environment (embarrassed to look stupid - nervous to ask questions), and mentoring skills (provide tech support and hand holding and get people up to speed).
Conclusions
This is the era of social networks - people rely on these networks more now than they ever have. Libraries should aspire to be a node in people’s social networks - social networks are for learning - social networks are for news and navigation - social networks are for support and problem-solving.
I have to be honest, I was a bit worried that Lee’s talk would be the same one I’ve heard for years here at CIL - but I’m glad I gave it a chance! This was new content and it’s more interesting listening to him talking about it instead of reading the report alone
Technorati Tags: cil2008
A request for help posted to the Web4Lib List that I think might be of interest to you:
This is an appeal to the readers of Web4Lib to help me collect information regarding automation products used in libraries. I maintain the lib-web-cats database and use it as a tool for analysis of what automation products that libraries choose to purchase or implement. Lib-web-cats currently includes over 32,000 libraries worldwide. I believe that it’s important for libraries to have data regarding the adoption and migration patterns of these software products as they make decisions regarding their automation strategies. You can help in this effort by reviewing and updating the entry for your library in lib-web-cats, or submitting your library if it’s not already included.
While I try to carefully track ILS deployments, in this round of updates I’m especially interested in gathering data about the other genres of products such as link resolvers, federated search, electronic resource management, digital library tools, and next-gen interfaces. I’m interested in open source as well as traditionally licensed products. Current data regarding the population served by the library, number of items in the collection, and annual circulation helps in the analysis.
Please go to:
http://www.librarytechnology.org/libwebcatslib-web-cats is a component of Library Technology Guides:
http://www.librarytechnology.orgI would also like to mention that the annual “Automation System Marketplace” article published by Library Journal is now available in the April 1, 2008 issue and online, this year subtitled “Opportunity out of Turmoil.” The data that I have in lib-web-cats is indispensable in writing this article to corroborate and expand upon what the vendors provide.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6542440.html
I appreciate the assistance of Web4Lib.
-marshall
Last night (after uploading files to the wrong directory - duh!) I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and I have to say this is going to take some getting used to! I know that there are a new features and tools and such - but the new layout is confusing me! I can’t find my tools! Most importantly, I want my categories to be on the right hand side of my post - why should I have to scroll down for them (now they’re below the post and tags).
Anyway, this will take some getting used to.
Technorati Tags: wordpress
