Guardienne of the Tomes

Ontario libraries' AskOn online research help. Skype as successful voip reference chat. VR no face to face means no vernal or physical chat. Does adding voice to. Chat make communication efficient, improve ability to staff, help demo searching. Chat software live person thought could use call me button, but it didn't work. They needed one voip client, chose Skype. Canned messages for convenience. Roadblocks to data collection, staff forgot operator survey, visitors didn't fill out exit survey, others filled out surveys when they weren't supposed to. Sixty percent initiated in public, seventeen percent in uni. Top reasons for not using ask on were that visitor didn't want Skype, were at a Place where install was blocked, or Simply ignored it. Visitors liked ability to talk and search at same time. Biggest reason for unsuccessful was not meeting technical requirements, places blocked skype, shifts too busy to devote to one question, and staff were too shy to initiate ...

bobbi Newman, Matt Hamilton, Bobbi: be aware of who your stakeholders are, know biases strengths and weaknesses. When starting a project, identify stakeholders, they will help you learn from failure. Admitting that you failed can be hard. Bobbi was to create a new site for a digital branch. Had to admit that it wasn't going to work to her boss. Admitting failure is hard work when you've put in the time and effort on project. Immediately folks want. To know what you learned, but you need distance. Some things take time. Plan for fallout for when stakeholders are unhappy. Be prepared to talk about what didn't work and how you will go forward. Then you need to move on, cant keep beating dead horse. Put a timeline in place for the process. Then you have to start over again. matt Hamilton: anythink's greatest failures. There a some cynics in the library field, heh heh. Matt has encountered that they think this is smoke and mirrors and marketing. Will talk about culture of an...

Sarah houghton-Jan, Kim Silk, Beth Gallaway, Andrew Shuping, Margaret Hazel, Jeff Scott, 6 presenters, 1 winner of suckitude. panel discussing library initiative failures. Beth Galloway. Failed at game design. Cartoon nNetwork has game creation area online. Required fast connection and lots of computer memory. Week two is game design called scratch. Correspondence to highlight stringent systerequirements, scratch needed to be downloaded. Computers reset with deep freeze, new it person on vacation, deep freeze ran right before game design program. Offered low-tech icebreakers and a powerpoint presentation. Talk to IT person directly was lesson learned, as well as having laptops available in case desktops fail. Flexibility and stretching low-tech and no tech elements like game design via index cards. Week two on scratch, teenagers like to make shooting games. Librarian didn't know how to make a shooting game, only collecting. Jumping and shooting involves animation and gravity. Had t...

By Louise Alcorn, Christa Burns, and Jennifer koebern. Louise: lessons learned from trying to produce such a program. Preview to failures track, heh heh. Original 23 things was Charlotte mecklenberg county libraries was a self directed learning experiential program for staff on web 2.0 stuff. Ther have been undress of iterations in several languages in all TypEs and sizes of libraries. Why? Encourage staff to explore web 2.0 to provide staff with tools and help support patron needs in ann experiential way, with rewards. Scale is important for places with large geo area and small clusters of populations sheer you cant get everyone tougher. Need to scale it and make it virtual for training for small libraries. Staff time; for training and webinar need to shut down library, so you need buy in from admin. No statewide program in Iowa, but Weezy has been teaching across the state, training trainers. But difficulty is finding out if it was of Ny real use to anyone, there's no good feedb...

By Megan Fox ( no not that one) Data access surpasses voice on mobile phones. People want access more than talk. Mobile access bound to surpass pc in next 5 years. Games, followed by news, maps, weather, sports, movies are the content people are using. Hundreds of li braries have made mobile apps or mobile websites. Not everything needs to be mobile. Hours, locations, maps, catalog, track checked out items, etc. Place holds, renew. NCSU mobile site in addition to standard, can see rooms and computer availability and have a web am on the coffee line, blackboard university apps. Boopsie is what many library mobile sites used. Description of what libraries are using them for, more listing school by school. III allows mobile, among other vendors, sirsidynix, world cat, etc. Librarians also developing own interfaces for catalog - tricolleges for iii catalog, library thing's library anywhere. Federated mobile web search tools, you can include your catalog as one of the sources that gets ...

Bobbi Newman. Transliteracy ability to read write and interact across a range of platforms. A word encompassing what we talk about, focus away from the tools and putting it back on our patrons, which is what we need. There is a LITA interest group, a website, etc for learning more after the session. 2400 bc, papyrus scrolls, 1440, gutenberg press, 1986, encyc of america available on cd rom. 2001 ebooks. Kindle and iPhone in 2007. Changing how our users access information. Information overload mentioned about printing press in 1555. People now sent online for info, health. Care, job apps, unemployment forms, taxes, etc. Fastest growing use of Facebook is seniors and women over 55. Basic life skill is now creating An unhackable password.basic instructions for new life not available anywhere. Unless you are connected to. Lifelong learning after school, how would you know. Access is becoming easier, while price is high, is decreasing, and wifi. Access needs to comma with skills and ability...

With Amy Buckland (McGill University) and Doris Small Helfer (Cal State Northridge), and Rebecca Jones moderating (blogging via iPad, which means my clumsy fingers will inevitably typo, so i know I'll have to come back and clean this up - forgive some clumsy typing as i get accustomed to the onscreen keyboard. Setting up about 15 minutes prior. Lots of cardigans in the audience - it's freezing in here! Also, lots of new faces - I felt like I knew everyone at IL08, it's great to see so many new faces interested in the intersection of libraries and tech. Glad to see the projector is very viewable, bodes well for my own slides, I hope. Sauers is poised and ready with his camera, as ever. Lots of glowing apples in the audience from matchbooks, and a few matte PC laptops, but the macs are definitely outweighing pcs by a decent margin here. Also, this is a great room, the comfy and wide chairs with flip desks, very handy. Exhibits not open for lunch, FYI, will open later. Origina...

I came to Internet Librarian 2010 without. My laptop. The un-internet librarian, if you will. But I do have my iPad, which i brought as an experiment to see if I could do without packing a suitcase of paperbacks. As internet signal permits, I'm going to try to blog the sessions I attend this year.

Plans are, of course, subject to change, but this is my anticipated attendance schedule for Internet Librarian 2010 in Monterey. Looking forward to running into a lot of friends and colleagues, and learning a lot to bring back to Lupton Library! Monday October 25, 2010 Opening Keynote: Adding Value to Your Community (Patricia Martin) 8:45am-9:45am D101 – Faculty & Library Partnership for Learning 10:15 AM – 11:00 AM Amy Buckland, eScholarship, ePublishing & Digitization Coordinator, McGill University Library Doris Small Helfer, Chair, Technical Services, Oviatt Library, California State University Northridge Rebecca Jones interview two practitioners about their approaches in working with faculty to support curriculum and deliver "learning". Hear how McGill liaison librarians (the bulk of our librarian staff) do instruction, how some liaise exclusively with faculty and grad students through scholarly communication and publishing initiatives, and how they partner on gr...

I had my first research consultation in awhile today. My former Bosslady of Reference and Instruction sent a wayward English major wrestling with an advanced-level political science paper my way. The student's paper was a comparison of rhetorical techniques used by women candidates during campaigns. An interesting topic, and my old polisci-nerd self was excited. In the course of helping the student wrestle her topic into a shape she wanted, while keeping to the recommended direction given by the course professor, I recommended that she try to stick to female candidates who ran at the same level, with similar stakes. The student noted that out of her initial list of female politicians, Condoleeza Rice hadn't had to run for anything, and so didn't have similar speeches as Palin and Clinton, and that O'Donnell was running at a completely different level. Older librarians may well laugh, but I prodded the student. "You know, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were not the...

Finally healthy, I'm elbows-deep in e-reserves planning for next semester, planning to help my ILL librarian really hit the turbo button on ILLiad, and counting the days until WMS implementation. In addition to that, if you're on the late-fall conference circuit, I do hope you'll stop by and see me as I travel to Monterey, CA, Maryville, MO, and Atlanta, GA in these next few weeks. For those of you going to Internet Librarian in Monterey, on Monday, October 25th, I'll be splitting the time with fantabulous librarian Bobbi L. Newman and talking about "Libraries in a Transliterate, Technology Fluent World." We're on at 11:00am, which should give you all time to recover from your hangovers. Um, I mean, from all that hard thinking you did on Sunday night. Ahem. On Friday November 5, I'll be presenting at Brick and Click: An Academic Library Symposium . From 9:10 to 10:00am I'll be speaking about "Leveraging Technology, Improving Service: Streaml...

University and college adjuncts - and the professoriate at large - should brace themselves for the next blow, and the next round of layoffs. According to the Chronicle, BlackBoard is teaming up with a for-profit to sell pre-designed online college courses . Once online courses became all the rage to cut costs (you can pay an adjunct less, and then distribute the course shell unto infinity even once they leave, decreasing the need for actual faculty, if the organization is more interested in their pocketbook than educational outcomes), this was bound to happen eventually. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised, but I do reserve the right to be disappointed. For now, it looks like it's directed at students who need remediation. (Who, I would think, could actually use real faculty contact instead of pre-fabbed e-learning.) We'll see how long that lasts once Blackboard sees what they can make off of it. A number of universities have already moved their gen-eds online to deal with ...

Close friends and FriendFeeders know that I recently had my gallbladder out in early August, and was nagged by unrelnting shoulder pain afterward. My surgeon and my primary care doc bounced me back and forth, trading me out for MRIs and bloodwork until (six weeks later) I asked my PCD to feel my shoulder. He rapped on my trapezius. "Rock hard!" he declared. "It's muscular! Off to physical therapy with you." The physical therapist took the time to talk to me, ask about my symptoms, and then actually touched me , palpating the area where I said I was feeling all that pain. After I winced under her having me do various motions, and as she pressed various spots, she finally said, "This is not the ghost of your gallbladder. And yes, your muscles are tense, but that is not the source of your pain. You have," *tap* *poke* *prod* "four dislocated ribs." I was baffled. My surgeon is a great guy, and very smart. My primary care doc is a pretty bright g...

Reading Leonard Cassuto's recent "Do Your Job Better" column titled Advising the Dissertation Student Who Won't Finish , I felt a familiar pang. I'm an ABD. Ask around enough (not that it's considered polite), and you'll find a gaggle of librarians who are also ABDs. While most of us address it with a grin and a shrug, I'll admit - this has been one of my greatest shames. It tastes like failure, and failure of the most epic sort. There were a number of reasons I left my doctoral program back in 2003. One of them was my health. Another was that I was quickly realizing that while I very much enjoyed the coursework, I did not want to spend years writing a book on the subject I was studying. As older students were on the job hunt, I was surprised to note that you had to be completely geographically flexible if you wanted a tenure-track job as a professor in political science; it was not as easy as "Oh, I'd like to live in City X; I'll just app...

Change has been on my mind a lot lately. The calls for change that come out of every corner of librarianship, the calls for change we hear our library users making, and the change that occurs whether we want it or not that we have little control over - those changes caused by sharply declining budgets, natural disasters, and various other calamities. I don't know that our profession is more or less prone to change than any others - I'm inclined to say more, for the simple fact that as technology providers and material distributors regardless of format, we probably see more than average, and also have to plan for three jumps ahead. Here at the UTC Library, we are full up on change. We're still in-process with implementing WMS as our new library system. We are also awaiting word on what the WMS course reserves module will look like. We're planning for a new building, including the nitty gritty details of what speakers go where, where we want wiring, how we'll be handl...