LISNewster extraordinare Blake asked me to take part in a conversation for LISTen, the LISNews podcast. The topic was the flap caused by downsizing at the Wausau Public Library in Wisconsin and the convo participants included Andrea Mercado and Nate Hill. Here’s a link to episode #12 of LISTen which was a good discussion, if I do say so myself.

I was already familiar with Andrea’s work but hadn’t yet seen Nate’s blog which is titled Catch and Release. After taking a look I subscribed straightaway. He reports on a Brooklyn Public Library fundraiser filled with 20-30somethings and booze, and also shows us his neat looking org chart displaying where a library website could fit:

More, please!

I <3 full text and free! My latest article for “Multimedia & Internet @ Schools” is available online for everyone to read. Titled Widgets and Widgetry: Copy, Paste, and Relax, the art department gave the cover and article the Hogwarts treatment. Dare I tell them I haven’t read a single word of any HP books?

Here’s the first bit:

Students can easily overlook websites that aren’t filled with often changing content. Do you think you’re too busy to devote time and effort to attract users to the great resources available on your library website? If you can simply copy and paste, think again! With no coding skills you can set up your websites to continually display fresh content.

This is no scam. The web is getting easier to use. Once upon a time, Google laid out a framework for displaying custom Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) on private webpages. Pioneering web workers had to register for a Google Maps API and hand code XML to make the map display as they wanted. Now, however, that struggle is long over, because they’ve made the process much easier. All you need to do is copy, paste, and relax. In this article you’ll learn how to embed Google Maps on your website, along with a few other widgets.

Do you have a list of people you wish would blog about what they’re doing in their libraries? Sue Polenka, Head of Reference at Wright State University’s Paul Laurence Dunbar Library was on my such list. She emailed to tell me I can erase her name. She’s started a blog called No Shelf Required. She calls it a “moderated discussion of the issues surrounding eBooks, for librarians and publishers.”

I hope that Sue fills us in on the eBook scene at her library because I understand that she’s transformed their reference collection and increased library usage. I also wouldn’t mind if she got a bit off topic and told us about how the library has been called a “hero” by students because of their gaming events. And they’re way into IM. Yay.

Thanks, Sue!

This article first appeared in the Sept/Oct issue of “Multimedia & Internet @ Schools.” They put it online full text (yay) but I’m going to reprint it here now in case you didin’t click through, and because I can. While it is focused on Library Media Centers in schools, it is could be useful for public librarians too.

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On Dec. 13, 2006, TIME named us all Person of the Year. The cover read, “You Control the Information Age. Welcome to Your World.” It should come as no surprise that this declaration set the Web atwitter. Some people saw TIME’s choice as a validating instance of mainstream media recognizing the shift occurring in the production of information and online content. For younger people, the people we’re teaching in our school libraries, there was no shift to recognize. Many of them have never known an information landscape without things such as blogs, YouTube, MySpace, and instant messaging. They’ve always known the Web to be not just for reading content but for writing content as well.

Let’s not mistake their acquaintance with Web 2.0 for expertise. While our students might be able to click through Web sites with ease and change the layouts of their MySpace profiles in the blink of an eye, there are still many things we can teach them about the read/write Web. There are also many ways we can teach our students using the read/write Web. Underlying these opportunities is the possibility to use the read/write Web to discuss the issues of authorship, authenticity, and the production of information—all topics for rich discussions of information literacy.

This article will provide a cursory review of some of the best online tools you can use to excite teachers and to prepare students to be active agents in today’s participatory culture.

Start a Conversation

Don’t think of Weblogs as a certain type of Web site. Certainly there are plenty of blogs that fill the “online diary” stereotype, but we’re not necessarily concerned with these here. Think of Weblogs from the back end. Blog systems are powerful pieces of software that allow nontechies to publish things on the Web. That highlights their potential a bit more, doesn’t it?

Ease of use isn’t the only reason you should employ blogs. An important reason is the availability of interactivity. Usually blog posts are enabled to receive responses through comments. Blog posts and comments are a great way to get students talking about books online, and this is already taking place in commercial venues. See the Readz section of the tween blogs site AllyKatzz, for example. The blog Student Reflections on Night by Elie Wiesel is an example of students responding to posts about a book through comments. Students can also use blogs for creative writing purposes. They might really enjoy writing a blog from the perspective of a book’s character or historical figure. Whatever content they are putting online, they are sure to be engaged with the process of blogging more than the process of turning in a document to a teacher.

Google’s Web-based Weblog system, Blogger, is a good place to start because you can have a free blog up and running in less than 10 minutes. If you’re at a loss for what to put online, use content that you’re already preparing for use on paper. Better yet, put your book talks into text and post them online. Like most online tools, there are a variety of privacy settings you can explore to best suit your needs. If you want to go beyond blogger, check out Edublogs, which is a free Weblog hosting service for educators and students. The software it uses is the current darling of the blog world: WordPress. If you get serious about integrating Weblogs into your curriculum, you (or your school’s IT department) can download your own version of WordPress and host it on your school’s server. This is the most technically difficult solution, but it will afford you the most control over your blogs.

No More FrontPage!

School librarians often make Web pages for teachers who want some of their units to be online. Skill and time restraints have often forced school librarians to use the now-discontinued Microsoft FrontPage to accomplish this task. The increased usability of wikis—Web pages that can be quickly and easily edited—have pushed FrontPage further into obsolescence.

Wikis are one of the best tools to increase collaboration among school librarians, teachers, and students. School librarians can hold instructional sessions and show teachers and students how to edit wikis. Thus, the task of making a Web page for a teacher’s project becomes an opportunity to empower teachers and provides an information literacy lesson for students. Other uses for wikis include using them as a Web notebook with which to collect links and information, as a brainstorming space, and as a way to make easy to update pathfinders.

There are different levels of protection and security you can give your new wiki. The popular and free wiki site PBwiki.com allows users make their wikis private by password protecting them. Only people with the wiki’s password can see and make changes to the wiki.

Pretty as a Picture

At first glance, Flickr is a photo-sharing Web site through which people can easily upload photos to the Web. Looking further, you’ll notice that Flickr is a large pool of user-generated content and an interesting example of everyday people cataloging information and working with metadata … for fun! Users can tag the photos they upload, creating a searchable keyword index to the photos on the site. Flickr aggregates all of these tags and assembles them into a tag cloud, which is a visual representation of the tags used on the site. While students might be bored to tears if you lecture them about formal taxonomies versus folksonomies, there are still a number of ways you can use Flickr in the LMC. Flickr can be searched by tags, or full text, including photo titles and annotations. A Flickr scavenger hunt might be a good way to talk about search strategies and the reliability of user-generated content. Photos can be organized into sets on Flickr. Having students upload images to Flickr, group them into sets, and provide text annotation is a way to get them more interested in presenting their book reports. Use Pictobrowser and your Flickr account to easily create an online slide show of photos. There are many tools available at fd’s Flickr toys that you and students can use to make magazine covers, motivational posters, and more out of Flickr photos.

Buddying Up to IMers

In schools, instant messaging (IM) is often maligned as a social distraction. It is indeed a channel for powerful social interaction, a fact that has secured a place for IM in young people’s life toolkit. For many of them, IM is the preferred mode of communication; it is as important as—or even more important than—phone and email correspondence. Some libraries are responding to this by being available to communicate with their users via IM. This meets IMers where they are and removes a barrier to service.

People who IM the library often add the library’s screen name to their buddy lists, which are lists of online contacts. Libraries become the “buddies” of IMers. What a great relationship to cultivate! When libraries are on a student’s buddy list, the library has a near-permanent presence in his or her online experience. Along with friends and family, the library is there as a trusted source of information.

One of the best things about starting IM in your library is that the software is free. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is the most popular IM service for young people, so be sure to register for an account on their Web site. You can download the AIM software, but if you don’t want to bother (or it isn’t allowed in your institution!), try using a no-download Web-based service such as meebo. If all forms of IM are blocked in your school, you’ll have to have a conversation with the IT department and school administration.

Be the Change

School librarians wanting to start new, interactive Web projects often face resistance from school administration. Is there an effective way to convince risk-averse administration to green light your project? Tim Lauer, principal of Lewis Elementary in Portland, Ore., highlights the fact that “school librarians are in a unique position to help students, teachers, and administrators understand the challenges and opportunities that present themselves as technology and communication tools change and take on a more social nature. Ignoring these changes will not make them go away, so it is imperative that we help our students learn the responsible use of these technologies.” It is this urgency that needs to be expressed to resistant colleagues. If we continue to let other librarians, teachers, and administrators stick their heads in the sand, we’re not successfully filling our roles of information professionals.

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Choices, Choices! Do I Wiki or Blog?

Blogs and wikis are both tools that enable people to get content online. Once you play with both tools, you’ll soon discover that blogs are good for displaying content in order and archiving that content. Wikis don’t automatically archive content like blogs, and it is easier to keep certain content
in one place. When using blogs, new content pushes older content off the page into the archives. Generally speaking, blogs are good for always having current, different information on a page. Wikis are more Web-like and are good for having multiple, linked pages that hold specific content. Looking at the Wikipedia page for a certain topic and then a blog that covers the same topic will highlight the differences.

Resources for Keeping Up With Teen and Tech Trends

“2007 Horizon Report” by The New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE
“Highlights six technologies that the underlying research suggests will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years.” Includes discussions of social software, virtual worlds, and user-created content.

“Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” by Henry Jenkins

“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” by Marc Prensky
A classic essay on the learning habits of young people.

Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online, by Anastasia Goodstein
This book cuts through hype and details how young people are using the Web.

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, by Henry Jenkins
Not only valuable for its content about the tech side of participatory culture, this book examines fandom, a realm in which many teens enter.

Ypulse: Media for the Next Generation
News and information about teens and tweens geared toward “media and marketing professionals” is very useful for librarians wanting to gain insight into the preferences of people that age.

Pew Internet Studies
These reports are useful for gauging what teens are doing online. The statistics provided can help you make the case for interactive and engaging Web projects.

-Social Networking Websites and Teens

-Teen Content Creators and Consumers

-Teens and Technology: Youth are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation

My love affair with wordpress is still pretty much in full bloom because it is the right tool for so many blogging jobs. Do you like wordpress too but need a theme different from one of the many nice ones available? You could always hack one up to your liking, but if you aren’t up for that, take a look at the wordpress theme generator. By choosing items from simple drop down boxes you can create a custom theme. The generator will give you a zip file which you can unzip and upload to /wp-admin/wp-content/themes/.

My Friend Flickr is an article from Edutopia about using Flickr in a school setting. The ideas presented relate to school and public library use of as well. What I like most are the good tips about exploiting Flickr’s fairly rich privacy options to customize how walled you might want the garden to be. What’s more, Portland tech-principal Tim Lauer gets a quote.

Trendy is a dirty word in libraries, isn’t it? It conjures up thoughts of sinking resources into flash in the pan ideas, harebrained schemes and jumping off of the bridge just because the cool kids are doing it. Even though many librarians would have us be above all of that, libraries still contain all sorts of fad-driven content: The DaVinci Code, CrazyNew Miracle Diet, Oprah’s Sad Book of the Month and so forth all take up valuable shelf space. The greater world of publishing has an effect on people’s tastes and libraries respond. That’s not so radical, is it? And if not, can’t we be just as trendy in our other services and things we do?

All of that for a simple link and some images. Via del.icio.us somewhere, here’s the Web 2.0 Badge Photoshop Tutorial. In just a few minutes I made these:

If you like any of these, please, use them! To put it at the upper-right of a webpage, use something like this:
<div style="position:absolute;top:0;right:0;float:right">link to image here</div>. Here’s the image as a photoshop document if you want to make it say something else or change the color.

Librarians live in between realizing that libraries are a growing organism and embracing every next new hotness. But a simple image can spruce up your website and is a lot easier to remove than 16 copies of Tuesdays with Morrie.

Happy Friday!

This weekend at the conference I got to spend some quality time with Jessamyn. Not only did we share one of the best wifi experiences I’ve ever had, but she also turned me on to a Firefox extension I’m wild about: CustomizeGoogle. If you haven’t explored the world of extensions for Firefox (you *are* using Firefox, right?), they are little add-ons that can make the browser even more functional. Here’s a list of “The Firefox Hacks You Must Have” from Wired.

Back to CustomizeGoogle. This little guy removes Google ads from search results, gmail, gcal, and other apps in the Google suite. We’ve all become good at ignoring these ads, but the pages are much easier to look at without the extra clutter. One other nifty thing it can do (among a bunch of other stuff) is add links to other search tools to the top of a Google search.

CustomizeGoogle might be useful for school librarians and teachers that want to get students using these tools (because they are free, or to expose them to the latest and greatest) but don’t necessarily care for making those ads part of the curriculum. Then again, is preventing students from seeing real world ads not preparing them for real world web surfing? Is taking the google ads off of a public access computer in a public library censorship?

I don’t have the answers to those questions, but CustomizeGoogle is still a great way to filter your own internet experience!

Kathleen from University of Illinois at Urbana-Chamapaign left a comment about a paper she recently published. I like the UIUC doesn’t see IM and web-based chat as an either/or proposition and look forward to reading the paper.

The UIUC (Univ. Illinois @ Urbana-Chamapaign) Library has been operating IM reference alongside its chat service since Feb 2005. The Undergraduate and Main Reference libraries assisted over 900 IM users in Oct. 2006. It has been phenomenal, in many good ways and one or two stressful ways. (More staff, please?)

We’ve recently published a paper which provides details on the “other, larger audience” that Aaron mentions as well as the characterisitics of the other, smaller, population which still prefers chat over IM.

Ward, David and Kern, M. Kathleen. “Combining IM and Vendor-based Chat: A Report from the Frontlines of an Integrated Service.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 6.4 (2006) 417-429. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v006/6.4ward.html (If you have a subscription at your library.)[emphasis mine].

I wonder how many people they helped through web-based chat. With those figures, I’d like to take the cost of implementing IM, and the cost of buying web-based chat software and take a look at the ROI. Maybe I should read the article! Kathleen?

Some days are rather busy.

Here are some notes I put together for my talk with some Canadian librarians this afternoon. The talk was through the Education Institute and titled “Socialize Your Library”.

I just got back from a local library and gave a talk about spyware. No link yet because I just used an old powerpoint for that.

In a few hours (2am for me!! - ha!), Sarah and I get to use Skype and Jybe to communicate with a bunch of folks in the Netherlands. Like some other IM talks I’ve done (including one to an enthusiastic audience last Friday in Edwardsville, IL) this one is called “Having A Phone”. Since we joined forced for this one, there are all sorts of good bits from Sarah in the notes, as well as a distillation of her thoughts on the new Question Point (on which I’m getting trained later this month).

I hope these get some use!