I’ve got my office torn apart for remodeling, and I haven’t had my computer hooked up for about 48 hours. I can hardly believe I haven’t started frothing at the mouth. We don’t have television or cable either, so we’ve been nicely disconnected for the past few days.

At any rate, it is a beautiful day here in Western Springs, so I’ve been riding my bike around to various places, getting errands done and working on an article. I’m sitting outside of the library now, slurping up some wifi. Yum!

Speaking of Western Springs, getting a signal is going to be a heck of a lot easier in this town soon. We’re going to be one of the first suburbs to have free wifi in our downtown area (and adjacent park). While this makes me happy as a citizen, as a librarian I’m perhaps slightly disappointed that the library won’t be the only provider of free wifi in town. I once considered starting a library initiated wifi project in town, but I felt that there were more important things to be doing with our time and money. It is just too bad we’re not involved in some way.

On the bright side, many more people will be using wireless devices, so I’m sure our network will get more use. Good timing that I have my “What is Wireless?” class scheduled soon.

Now I just have to figure how to install a signal amplifier on the access point (pringles, anyone?) closest to my house to I can stop paying the telco for a landline I never use.

In the post leading communities through info technologies I mentioned that I’d report back on the results of some advanced type classes at the library. Last week I held a class titled “Weblogs and Really Simple Sundication (RSS)” at the library.

Only 4 people attended. This, however, was a good size. Noone was familiar with blogs or rss.

One of the best moments at Computers in Libraries 2005 for me was when I was completely stumped by a question from the audience during our IM presentation. I was talking about the shortened version of English that can make up the majority of an IM conversation. I had the image of a (staged) conversation with Jenny displayed, chock full of abbreviations. Someone in the audience asked what a particular group of letters meant (aaf) and I hadn’t the faintest clue.

Not wanting my point (that communication via IM is very viable) to be washed away, I mentioned to the audience that even though we didn’t know what the letters exactly meant, we still could understand through the context of the message, what Jenny was trying to say.

Anywho, experts agree that `Netspeak’ [is] doing more good than harm to English language and there might not be as many misspellings and abbreviations as we think.

There isn’t a full report, but PEW Internet /American Life has a ‘PIP Comment’ out titled The Rise of Cell Phone Text Messaging. It is short and worth a read, but here are some numbers I found to be interesting:

Percentage of cell phone owners that are texters
Gen Y (18-27) – 63
Gen X (28-39) – 31
Young Boomers (40-49) – 18
Older Boomers (50-58) – 13
Over 60 types – 7

Percentage of age group that use cell phones
Gen X – 76
Young Boomers – 68
Gen Y – 68
Older Boomers – 62
Over 60 types – 60

According to the ‘Comment,’ ”[t]he findings come from a nationwide phone survey of 1,460 cell phone users…” Make of that what you will.

These figures above look very high, but perhaps not as much when you really consider what they’re looking at. One thing that they didn’t include is the percentage of the total population (not just cell phone users) that are texters. With some mathematical wizardry I deduced the following:

Percentage of age group that are texters
Gen Y – 43
Gen X – 24
Young Boomers – 12
Older Boomers – 8
Over 60 types – 4

These figures are lower, yes, but they’re not small enough that we should be ignoring them, especially with what we know about how phone trends move East to West. Bigger numbers are coming. Remember of course that statistics are statistics, but I think this is good for looking at general trends. We need to be reaching out to the Gen Yers (18-27), not only because we have a mandate to serve them (and they don’t deserve to be ignored) but also because they are going to be the people voting on our referenda in the not so distant future. What have you done recently to make them feel warm and fuzzy about the library?

[update: rochelle get’s it all right in her post Cult of Ranganathan Busted by SonicWALL. p.s. i wonder anyone know off the top of their head how i get this site unlisted? if not, i’ll look back and report.]

Good morning all.

I visited Panera* earlier today to get some coffee and wireless. Attempting to put something up on this site, I was greeted with a friendly notice from their SonicWall:

This was funny and sad.

So what do you think this site could be a cult of? Perhaps IM in libraries. I’m reminded of one of the funniest things said to me at the conference. Marydee Ojala quipped one morning, “Aaron, sooner or later, those two letters just come out of your mouth!”

*It broke my streak of not going to chain establishments, but my usual cafe haunt isn’t open on Monday mornings. I don’t blame them. ;)

I’ve updated the ‘presentations’ section with, in part, a link to our IM presentation from last Thursday. No need to click through if you are interested, here it is. It is slightly bare bones because we just used it as talking points, so if you have any questions, be sure to IM (or email).

Collaboration & IM: Breaking Down Boundaries [2.3 MB pdf]

After dinner the other night*, Michael, David, Greg and I visited a nice cafe called Tryst. Our time there and the “Delighting the User” keynote of 3/18 make for some interesting thinking. As we enjoyed our beverages we noted all of the people using the (free) wireless network and how different their preferred information gathering techniques are from what libraries are providing. Many of the customers were multi-tasking, balancing surfing on the web, IMing, reading books/magazines, and talking with their friends in the cafe. As if this isn’t different enough from our libraries, there was moderately loud music playing as well. The reading and information gathering that the people were doing certainly wasn’t traditional, but rather can be described by a term I heard in the keynote: “PC Literature Behavior” in which snippets of info are gathered and processed repeatedly, often, and perhaps not entirely randomly.

I mention this last bit because of an observation made the other day by a friend of mine. A number of us were hanging out and talking when a topic that needed some augmentation arose. There was a computer nearby, so we gathered ‘round. I found a relevant page, clicked, and found the info we needed. I highlighted the segment of the page we were interested and my friend remarked, “You’re good at looking at webpages.” He hadn’t yet found the needed information on the page while I somehow saw it straightaway. For someone observing us (like we were observing the people in the cafe) this info gathering session might have seemed random because of the speed with which it took place. Certainly there can be nondirected browsing, but there is tons of “specific gathering and leaving” behavior going on. The transmission of information clearly is no longer a unidirectional process. It seems to be more of a multidirectional, multifaceted, swirling process of gathering, processing, sharing, and responding that is all about people.

So. What does this mean for libraries? I don’t have many specific answers yet, but I do think all of this illustrates the framework with which libraries need to be thinking about their users. So far we’ve been trying to figure out what they need, giving them what we have (and trying to trick them to believe we’re giving them what we want. What we need to do is stop “trying to turn our patrons into little librarians” but rather really embrace them for what they are and giving them what they want. Abram suggested doing this by looking at users preferences, desires, goals, aspirations, and values. That’s an entirely new level of being user-centered.

*best meal of the conference, by the way, the Ethiopian place Fasikas in Adams Morgan.

I was pleased to see some more presentations about IM at CIL2005. In addition to my presentation with Michael, there was a 15 minute cybertour and another 45 minute session. The other session, “IM: Providing Services and Enhancing Communication” (given by two librarians from the business school at University of Michigan was great for a number of reasons. It was neat to see not only a library director at CIL, but one that was talking about the value of IM. She shared a personal story to begin. Her daughter was being aggressively recruited by a number of colleges, all of which took different tactics to get in touch with her. She ignored the mail, email, and telephone calls, but responded to the soccer coaches savvy enough to send her IMs. Wow. Another great thing about their presentation was how seriously they took their IM project. When the director, Tomalee Don, realized it was going to be an issue, she restructured her department to make room for IM. Not only did she switch around parts of her staff, she hired new staff. To cover evening hours, she hired students from the school of Information, trained them to use business reference materials, and had them work as Circulation supervisors/IM librarians. This restructuring and IM brought her better qualified Circ clerks!

The questions asked at the IM presentations were different from others I have received: they were informed. Being more advanced, they indicated that more people are experimenting with IM and spending time thinking about it. This is good. Since others out there might have similar questions, I’ve recorded them and will post them here, the first one perhaps being the most frequently asked question:

Q: What do you do if you’re doing an IM question and a patron walks up to you?
A: I’m going to summarize Tomalee Don’s response for this. She stated that she treats students entering the library virtually just as she treats those who enter physically. “Virtual patrons are as important as in-house ones,” she said. This was amazing to hear, and a very good answer.

Q: How do I promote an IM service if I start one?
A: I think IM services promote themselves. As soon as a few people start using the service, they’ll think it is so cool that they’ll share your screen name with their friends. In the presentation I mentioned Brian Smith’s strategy that worked all too well; sending flyers around to the local schools. Other things to consider are putting a page on your website with details of the program, and handing out flyers/bookmarks/business cards at your library.

Q: How many people can be signed onto an IM account at the same time?
A: Probably a near unlimited amount, but it is my experience that only the first person to have signed on will receive the initial questions when a patron IMs. Therefore, using IM for a statewide VR project only makes sense if one library/person is signed on at a time. This being said, any statewide collaborative project negates the community building aspect of IM.

Q: How many screen names should my library sign up for?
A: Chances are that having one central IM contact might be the simplest thing for your users. However, if you’re at a large library, consider having a screen name for Reference, and one for, say, the Audio-Visual department like Michael’s library is doing.

Lastly, a woman in the audience for our presentation shared an interesting use for IM in her library. They use it to communicate from floor to floor to track patrons trying to get more time on their web terminals. I never would have thought to use IM as a security type tool.

yes, i’m blogging on my treo while sitting on the dead tech panel. abram keeps poking me in the ribs.

There are a number of things I’m slightly busting at the seams to post about. I must say that it has been an inspirational day.

David King talked to a room packed with people about an excellent way to frame a library’s website: a user targeted design. It was a full and rich presentation, but I’ll try my best to sum it up in one sentence. A user targeted design has updated content (generated in house and other), directed to a specific user groups.
To make it clear, user targeted design is niche marketing, making web pages for specific audiences. The reason I like this idea so much (and plan to make my library’s site more than half-way user centered) is because a user targeted approach also seems to be user centered. A really good tidbit from his talk was about promoting user targeted websites. King’s approach is to match other (targeted) materials with URLs of the targeted page. For instance, on a ‘Romantic Reads’ bookmark, he puts the URL of the matching content on the KCPL website. He also mentioned telling local community organizations about content on your site that is relevant to them.

Earlier in the day, Clifford Lynch gave an interesting overview of the past twenty years of libraries and computers. He didn’t spend much time talking about the technical innovations, but rather what these innovations had on data.

I spent some time reflecting on how much data there is today, how long it may or may not last, and what a huge change this is from the past. We’ve moved from a “scarcity of information” in the 80s to an abundance now. As the amount of data continues to grow, so will our methods for finding it.

Then in a session this afternoon, Stephen Abram brought up his “Internet as acorn” simile and mentioned that so far we’ve been in a period of slow growth. The oak tree will be much larger, and it will shoot up much faster than the germination period of the acorn. As is the trend, the changes that Lynch spoke about, impressive in their own right, are going to pale in comparison to what we see in the next twenty years.

Another topic that both speakers covered was images on the web. Lynch noted how images are quite standard now, freeing physical objects in a way. Pictures are now a part of discourse. These visual surrogates are important for all of the visual learners in the world (i.e. the people that learn in ways different than the 20% of us that are text-based librarian-type learners). The underlying implication is that libraries should be involved with this trend and involve visualization in their repertoire. Perhaps part of virtual reference systems of the future will be a full replication of your library’s physical space and your own avatar to use to interact, communicate, and collaborate with your patrons.

Now I’m going to run through my ‘Dead Technology’ presentation. A bit of jocularity tonight is going to be a relief for everyone I’m sure!