June 2005
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Month June 2005

Literacy Information Round Table Presentation

My presentation for the LIRT program at ALA is up. It is titled Of Horses and Water and is about what public libraries can do to help kids prepare for college.

I didn’t talk about formal Bibliographic Instruction methods, but rather talked about gitting kids in the library and turning them into library users by making personal connections. The idea of connecting to users was echoed by all of the speakers. This made me happy.

One other neat thing in the presentation was James Krusling’s idea of presenting a number of things at one when students are in front of computers. This mimics their information/entertainment gathering habits and doesn’t leave them so bored that they start checking their email and IMming each other. Has basic computer work ceased to be a hot media and needs to be to hold some people’s attention?

IM vs. Web-based Chat

UPDATE: Hmm, my comments seem to have been moderated off the blog. I guess it is a staff-type internal blog, but it isn’t password protected and the comments appeared posted without being approved. Oh well, maybe someone there saved my thoughts and will email me so I can paste them in here.

Steven M. Cohen pointed me to a blog post discussing an article that Sarah and I wrote for “Online.” The article isn’t up on the “Online” website yet (and I don’t know for certain if it’ll be available there for free) but I did find a pdf of it in EBSCO’s MasterFILE Elite. (They have a thing for capitalization).

The author of the post agrees with “almost everything” we wrote, but has some (constructive) criticism about the depth of the article, and the balance of it.* After his post (which has some great ideas about starting a cooperative VR service using IM) I address what he saw as the article’s shortcomings. I hope the conversation continues over there or here.

Now of only the article was available…

*In a sentence: If they would have given us the whole magazine, we would have filled it. 😉

testing, 1, 2, 3, testing…?

When someone IMs, asks a ready reference question, and then uses language/spelling/sentence structure like, “What are the hours of this service?” I get suspicious. I have a hunch this was a librarian or LIS student seeing what kind of service they would recieve. If it wasn’t one of the above, it had to be an adult. Either way, they seemed happy and I counted it as an IM reference transaction.

trillian and wikipedia

The questions keep on coming, folks. I’ve done more Readers’ Advisory this summer than I’ve done in quite some time. I wanted to point out a neat feature in the latest version of Trillian (which has been out for quite some time now). The program checks IMs for words found in wikipedia.* So when this patrons asked me about Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Honky by Dalton Conley and Romeo and Juliet, the words were underlined with dots. Mousing over popped-up a box contaning part of the wikipedia entry. Click the image to see what was going on.

Now, in a perfect world, the IMs from me to the user would be annotated by the information of my choice in this way. But for now I guess I’ll get to enjoy the added info. Maybe someone will IM me about the heavy metal umlaut and I’ll get to mouse over.

Oh, and an aside, can anyone guess what kind of bike that is on my desktop?

*I feel silly linking to wikipedia. Do you think it is a pointless as linking to google?

HOWTO Get Kids in the Library

We dont’ feel like sitting on our hands while we’re waiting for the gaming grant to be approved. I’ve been working with our Teen Services Librarian to get a gaming night going. Like many great things, this event will be cheap and easy. Since we don’t own any gaming consoles, we asked if people could bring some in. This turned out to not be a problem.

We have a projector which will display the game, DDR is the last I heard, and some A/V equipment for good sound. So besides a bit of staff time talking about this, and the staff time of running the event, this program will cost about $25. For food. Not too shabby for getting kids into the library on a Friday night.

He’s had an extremely high (and fast) response rate to the email he sent out telling kids about the program, and I’ll be sure to report back after the fact.

What’s so special about video games? It is where kids are at. Think you might have some sci-fi or romance readers passionate about what they like? Kids are even more crazy for video games. We’re happy to provide them with a social, community based outlet in which to enjoy themselves.

great white north (canadian library association presentations)

I’m in Canada. Calgary, Alberta, to be specific.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that I dislike library conferences, but
from my hotel room I have a nice view, past the few skyscrapers, to the Canadian Rockies. They look like they need me to go play on them for a while.

Anywho, here are links to the presentations of which I was a part this morning.

Keeping Current: Gadgets & Tools highlights some things which may make your information gathering/processing life easier, or more fun.
(side note: high bandwidth PDF)

Nine Reasons to go Blog is a quick persuasive number which explores reasons why libraries should play around with blogging software.
(side note: this is a low impact format of 10 (sparse) HTML pages. I liked the way it turned out, minus the fact it might be difficult to print, if you’re into that.)

im keeps on

School is out, so I surmised that the number of IMs we receive from kids would drop off. They have to a certain extent, but we pushed IMing as a Readers’ Advisory tool (though of course we didn’t call it that) when promoting the teen summer reading program. It seemed to have some impact, because I received a number of questions. Most asked if we had a certain title on shelf, and a few wanted recommendations. The point is that I guess kids and IM is not a school year only thing.

I was really impressed that some young people were thinking about reading already, because, I’m not going to lie to you, the summer after 6th grade I was thinking about riding my bike to get a slurpee. Some things don’t change, eh?

Perhaps I’ll treat myself when I’m done working for the day on the super-awesome-mega-gaming grant

useful ‘criminality’

In my recent talks on gadgets I’ve been mentioning the Sony Librie, which is the latest incarnation of eBook readers. The Librie is interesting because it solves some of the problems that plagued previous eBook readers, but it ignores, to its detriment, other important issues.

The neat features of the device come from the electronic ink (developed by Sony and Phillips) it uses. The resolution is quite high because the display is 170 dpi vs the ~72 dpi we’re used to on computer monitors. Supposedly, 200 dpi is indistinguishable from paper. Isn’t it great that a $600 device can’t match the quality of a less than $0.01 technology?

The other great thing about electronic/ink paper, is that the device doesn’t use battery life to display the text. It only sucks up valuable battery juice when “pages are turned,” by pressing a button. The expected life of one set of batteries is 10,000 page turns.

While this is all peachy, the story of the content is more like sour grapes. The device was designed to use only Sony’s proprietary eBook format (BroadBand eBook). Strike one. There are only some 400 titles (Japanese language only, presently) available. Strike two. Once an eBook is purchased, it stays on the Librie for only 60 days. Strike three. The Digital Rights Management (DRM) on these books takes away one of the most useful (potential) things about eBook readers: storing thousands of eBooks on one small device to be recalled (and searched) at a moment’s notice.

All of the above is a long winded intro to an article titled Sony Librie English GUI Firmware Patch which fulfills my prediction that someone would make it easy for people to hack the Librie for use with their own files. For now it is only TXT files, perhaps soon PDFs.

DRM: Turning people who have reasonable expectations from their devices/files into criminals.

DRM: Not really stopping the stubborn.

DRM: BOO!

For more on the Sony Librie in relation to libraries, see the next Product Pipeline in Fall 2005 “Library Journal NetConnect” where I write about it a bit more.

useful ‘criminality’

In my recent talks on gadgets I’ve been mentioning the Sony Librie, which is the latest incarnation of eBook readers. The Librie is interesting because it solves some of the problems that plagued previous eBook readers, but it ignores, to its detriment, other important issues.

The neat features of the device come from the electronic ink (developed by Sony and Phillips) it uses. The resolution is quite high because the display is 170 dpi vs the ~72 dpi we’re used to on computer monitors. Supposedly, 200 dpi is indistinguishable from paper. Isn’t it great that a $600 device can’t match the quality of a less than $0.01 technology?

The other great thing about electronic/ink paper, is that the device doesn’t use battery life to display the text. It only sucks up valuable battery juice when “pages are turned,” by pressing a button. The expected life of one set of batteries is 10,000 page turns.

While this is all peachy, the story of the content is more like sour grapes. The device was designed to use only Sony’s proprietary eBook format (BroadBand eBook). Strike one. There are only some 400 titles (Japanese language only, presently) available. Strike two. Once an eBook is purchased, it stays on the Librie for only 60 days. Strike three. The Digital Rights Management (DRM) on these books takes away one of the most useful (potential) things about eBook readers: storing thousands of eBooks on one small device to be recalled (and searched) at a moment’s notice.

All of the above is a long winded intro to an article titled Sony Librie English GUI Firmware Patch which fulfills my prediction that someone would make it easy for people to hack the Librie for use with their own files. For now it is only TXT files, perhaps soon PDFs.

DRM: Turning people who have reasonable expectations from their devices/files into criminals.

DRM: Not really stopping the stubborn.

DRM: BOO!

For more on the Sony Librie in relation to libraries, see the next Product Pipeline in Fall 2005 “Library Journal NetConnect” where I write about it a bit more.

letting go

It seems to me that we all need to just let go. No, read on.

One of the ways in which we can help our libraries succeed is turning them into user-centered institutions. This means really thinking about our users, and examining the rules and policies that might benefit us, but also might be preventing our patrons’ successful use and continued enjoyment of our libraries.

One of the reasons librarians might not fully embrace this concept is because it takes away some of the control we have over our institutions. And if there are a few things that many librarians like, I think control and organization (a form of control) are up there. I can sympathize with this. When I first started working in libraries at the age of 21, I think I unknowingly entered into an antagonistic dynamic between librarians and patrons. Not that I wasn’t helpful or pleasant, but rather I thought that patrons were to be helped on the Library’s (capital L) terms. Perhaps I thought that being serious about libraries meant upholding library rules and defending the library from rule breakers.

Six years later, I must have mellowed out.

All of this stems from an event that occurred a few nights ago. A patron had a nonstandard file that she wanted to print, and we had no way of reading the file. I noticed that she had a CD-ROM in her hand, and inquired whether that’s what she used to write the file. It was. I installed the program, we printed the file, and the computer was rebooted (and the program erased) in about 5 minutes. She was extremely thankful for that act, and had a great library experience. I realized that not every library (including us) can give that kind of individual attention 100% of the time, but there’s nothing prevent libraries from having a few (protected) workstations on which users can load their own programs. I can hear the groans.

MAYBE if libraries were immensely influential cultural institutions we could think about influencing people to do things Our Way (even though that wouldn’t necessarily be the right thing to do) but sadly, we’re not. So we can either choose to alienate users by making things difficult for them, or we can embrace the big picture and our users by making our institutions convenient, usable, and relevant.

Other misc related thoughts

Being user-centered vs. being library-centered reminds me of how grammarians and linguists like to argue about descriptivism vs. prescriptivism. Perhaps librarians that are user-centered tend to be descriptivists and vice versa.

I think user-driven taxonomies (folksonomies), and getting their content (such as ratings) into our catalog is a important and exciting aspect of being user-centered that we’re just starting to explore. What a great way to engage them with our content and form a relationship.