Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 3 - Best Free Software for Broke Libraries

I closed out my sessions at Computers in Libraries 2010 by attending this third session involving Sarah Houghton-Jan (librarianinblack.net), whom I also saw at the Dead & Emerging Technologies Session the night before and earlier in the day at the Mobile Tips & Practices session.

Despite the title of this session, my library isn't exactly "broke" but I'm always interested in money saving ideas, particularly given the economic environment and pressures from the community and the board to keep costs flat.

In this presentation Sarah whipped through dozens of products and services which filled pages of notes, and duplicating that whole list here would serve little purpose. She had lots of great tips and mentioned lots of interesting services and software solutions, several of which I'd never heard of. It was a good session and a good way to close out this year's conference.

Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 3 - Ebooks : Lanscape & Implications

This penultimate session for me at Computers in Libraries 2010 was ok, but I didn't get a whole lot of new information from it. It largely summarized the world of ebooks. For me, the best part of the presentation was done by someone who wasn't there, Jason Griffey from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who had to be somewhere else and recorded a brief talk in advance which was played on the screen. The main thing I found interesting from that was his assertion that eBook devices are headed towards a state as mass-produced commodities that will be cheap and that the platforms will be important. He suggested two platforms in particular of which I was not particularly familiar: thecopia.com a social platform for books and www.blioreader.com, a software solution for ebooks from Ray Kurzweil.

Griffey also predicted that a time was coming when publishers would abandon DRM as has been largely done in the world of digital music sales. I can only hope that he is correct in that matter.

Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 3 - Mobile Tips & Practices

Over the second two days of Computers in Libraries 2010 I have developed the opinion that we need to adopt a strong mobile-web strategy for our website, and this session went a long way towards cementing that opinion.

The presentation was divided into four mini-presentations, although in essence it was in three parts. First, Sarah Houghton-Jan from San Jose Public Library (a.k.a. The Librarian in Black) gave 10 steps to establish a mobile presence on the cheap. Then Jason Clark from Montana State University from Montana State University Libraries described their adaptation of a major site they run (which is not at all mobile friendly) into one that was mobile friendly. Finally, Laurie Bridges and Kim Griggs from Oregon State University described their mobile efforts and the various options they found available to them.

Combined, these presentations presented a good grounding in how one can go about making a mobile version of your site and why (despite the iPhone's decent ability to present a website largely as it appears elsewhere) it is a wise thing to do. Yet something else to put on the stack of stuff that really needs to be done.

Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 3 - Productivity Tools

This session, following the excellent free & open source tools, was a mild disappointment, but interesting nonetheless. Linda Kellem and Beth Filar Williams described, in an unusually democratic fashion several, generally free, tools which can be used for task management, scheduling and note taking. It was democratic because, lacking time to describe all of the tools they had considered to the extent they would have liked, instead they had an online vote to select which tools were discussed. I wasn't overly fond of this method as

1. it was hard for me to get a reliable, useful wireless signal and
   
2. I had never used and had no opinion about any of the tools so voting for any of them over the other would have been completely arbitrary.
   

That said, the discussion of the tools that were selected was quite interesting.

The selected ones, with a little information about them were:

In the category of "Task Tools":

• Things (Mac/iPhone based). Application. Not cloud-based.

• Todoist. Cloud-based. easy. Integrates with Google somewhat. Good with sub-tasks

• Remember the Milk. Many things you can do with it. You create tabs. Supports tagging. Save search lists. Can share lists. Doesn't excel at adding notes and context.

In the category of "Scheduling Tools":

• Jiffle - Pulls in Google calendar data. displays times you are available

• Cozi - for a "busy family" calendars/photos/widgets/tasks. Does groceries. Good for a small group.

• ScheduleOnce - Might be good for scheduling a reference desk.

Finally, in the category of "Note taking":

• Evernote - copy and paste from the web. Nice management features. Tagging.
  

Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 3 - New & Open Source Tools

This was one of the great little sessions at Computers in Libraries where some people who have been closely watching and testing what's been coming out for the past year run down their list of favorite items.

The first of the two presenters was Darlene Fichter of the University of Saskatchewan. Her presentation on free tools included the following gems that sound like they may be quite useful for my purposes worth:

• Image editing with Aviary (aviary.com)

• HTMLIPSUM html-ipsum.com (use to test a style sheet)
  

• Are My Sites Up (aremysitesup.com). Monitor up to 5 sites 25 times per day for free.
  

• Checking out the Buzz (socialmention.com)

• Xmarks (www.xmarks.com) (formerly foxmarks) Bookmark sync for IE, Firefox, Chrome & Safari. Lets you tap into the hive mind of what other people have thought about it.

The second half of the presentation was done by Nicole C. Engard (whose book Library Mashups : Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data I had just purchased) investigated the world of open source software. Being rather familiar with open source software (the computer I brought to the conference and on which I am typing this is running Linux, and I follow various RSS feeds discussing new releases in open source software constantly) I quickly began to wonder if there was anything new she would have. But I needn't have feared as she mentioned the following interesting projects of which I'd previously heard nothing but sound quite useful:

• Siwapp (www.siwapp.org) invoicing. Track payments and due dates. Generate invoices in PDF

• Limesurvey (www.limesurvey.org). Hosted on your servers. Unlimited questions/surveys. Multilanguage surveys.

• Libki (www.libki.org) Kiosk management system. Web-based admin area. Manage library computer users. Manage library patron's time on computers.

• Zotero (www.zotero.org) Citation Management. Citations stored in Firefox & on the web. Shared libraries. Online groups. Generate bibliographies with a couple clicks. Online PDF storage for full text.

• Libstats (code.google.com/p/libstats/) Reference Statistics. Simple screen on a browser. Track reference questions. Data on server

• Omeka (www.omeka.org) Professional-looking online exhibits for your digital collections. Tagging and RSS

If one or more of these tools turns out to be useful, I think this session will have been well worth it.

Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 3 - Keynote

This morning's keynote speech was presented by Ken Haycock of San Jose State University. His keynote was a well presented and thought provoking analysis of what libraries traditionally have done and what they need to do to get things accomplished in their communities. Ironically, much of the point that Haycock made in his speech completely discounted the efforts, traditionally done by the Illinois Library Association during National Library Week (coincidentally the week of Computers in Libraries this year), to have a legislative day where board members, library staff, and concerned patrons visit the state capitol and request increased library funding.

Haycock instead sought to better define the terms of influence and advocacy and made a cogent point that libraries need to have active involvement at the local level in order to get the kind of political change and recognition that they need. At the core of Haycock's speech was this statement, repeated several times: "Advocacy is a planned, deliberate sustained effort to develop understanding and support incrementally over time." Additionally Haycock quoted someone (whose name I unfortunately did not write down) saying, "Advocacy is like banking: you can't make a withdrawal until you've made a deposit." The combined point of this being that libraries need to do things for people in government and people in our communities and build up political capital in order to then spend it. It is not enough to say (true or not) that "libraries exist for the public good and so you should make sure they continue to thrive." Without a clear understanding of the value that libraries provide, and that understanding having been imparted through explicit demonstrations of that value, libraries will continue to struggle, particularly in the current economic and political climate.

Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 2 - Dead & Emerging Technologies Session

This evening session is always entertaining and informative, if a little rowdy, and this evening was no exception. My one surprise is, given the amount of loathing expressed for the iPad, no one included in the comments and criticism the news of the past few days that Apple is 1). adding multitasking to the iPad in the Fall (a good thing) and 2). has added some really objectionable clauses to the license agreement for developers for the iPhoneOS which restricts them from using anything that would make it easy to develop something simultaneously for (say) Android and iPhoneOS simultaneously (clearly a very bad thing). I'm sure the loathing of the device wouldn't have been lessened much by the promise of multitasking, but the latter point certainly would have provided a few more things to hate.

In addition to the iPad, Adobe's products (particularly Flash) were generally declared dead.

Android, HTML 5, Android tablets and the mobile/geolocating/social web were clearly hot and lively. There was some disagreement on the future of the mobile app, with Amanda Etches-Johnson of McMaster University declaring it dead (in favor of mobile web-based services) and David Lee King of Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library considering the app still quite alive.

Stephen Abram's typical dense and opinionated (but very funny) presentation closed the affair as is typically the case when he's available to fill that role.

Computers in Libraries Day 2 - Library Scorecard

This final main session for day 2 which I attended was another double presentation. The first of the two presentations was from Erin Thoms from the Biodiversity Heritage Library at the Smithsonian Institution and covered their use of bug-tracking software to let users identify problems in their database of digitized materials. It seemed to me an innovative use of bug-tracking software. The presentation was quite short and to the point.

The second presentation was on the subject of assessing library performance by Ger de Bruyn from Rotterdam. In this presentation Ger described the long process that led him to develop a system for libraries in the Netherlands to upload their statistical data to a central service on a monthly basis. This service fills a hole which Ger perceived in the world of libraries where there are no packaged solutions for tracking the performance of different library services. As a hosted service used by many libraries this system can also be used to compare different libraries' performance, something which has been mentioned as an issue of concern at the Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District Strategic Planning Committee meetings, but which is very hard to do without having data from other libraries to compare. It is an interesting concept and it will be interesting to see what happens with it in the library world. It seems to me that something like this could certainly be more useful and easier to prepare than the next best thing we have to it at the moment, the state-mandated annual IPLAR reports.

Computers in Libraries Day 2 - Planning & Partnerships: Strategic Initiatives

Dianna Magnoni from Olin College of Engineering gave this straight-forward presentation on how the library for this very small college near Boston managed to improve its situation by creating partnerships with vendors, local individuals with expertise, and other colleges. The presenter's repeated advice is that for any library doing a strategic plan should include explicitly at best, or allow for at worst, the partnering with other agencies as part of the strategic plan.

Computers in Libraries Day 2 - Drupal Applications & Practices

This timeslot didn't have anything that really jumped out to me as a must see, so I decided to sit in on this presentation on Drupal by Blake Carver (of LisNews and LisHost fame). I enjoyed Blake's presentation and found it to be a solid description of Drupal's merits as a CMS and to be balanced indicating some of its flaws. For me the presentation mainly served a purpose in further indicating that trying to implement Drupal as a CMS on our extant website(s) would be a lot of trouble, and probably more trouble than it's worth. Blake also provided some interesting information about website server load which might be useful to us going forward.

Following Blake's presentation was a presentation by James King of the National Institutes of Health describing how Drupal was able to do amazing things for them. As I got the information I needed out of the first presentation I wasn't nearly so excited about this second half and wound up leaving early, although from what I saw it did seem that Drupal fit their needs nicely.

Computers in Libraries Day 2 - Library Engagement through Open Data

This presentation, by Oleg Kremer and Dan Lipcan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art library was a great overview of the kinds of things you can do with a good dataset and some free tools from Google and IBM as well as an open source package developed by the Indianapolis Museum of Art specifically for visualizing museum data (which I think could be adapted for other nonprofits). It was great to see some of the great ways trends could be made to pop out by using these tools and I look forward to seeing what I might be able to do with them with some library data. Sometimes the same old Excel charts get a little old.

Computers in Libraries Day 2 - Prototyping the Smithsonian Commons

My first session of the day was my favorite of day 2. I wasn't quite sure that would be the case going in, but I quickly came to see the value and applicability of the subject matter. Michael Edson, who gave last year's day three keynote, provided an update of the Smithsonian Institution's process towards reshaping its website. The improvements which were demonstrated at the beginning of the presentation haven't really been implemented yet. They are just assembled into a mockup demonstrating a scenario and how everything should work (in this case a scenario involving someone planning a trip to the Smithsonian). However, the meat of the presentation wasn't the specifics of what the Smithsonian is planning to do with its website, but rather the well thought-out and open process by which they have arrived at the point where they are today.

Michael's presentation slides, which give a taste of everything that he covered, are available in the show "Prototyping the Smithsonian Commons" on his page on SlideShare.

Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 2 - Keynote

This morning's keynote was what is becoming a great annual tradition at Computers in Libraries: an interview of someone interesting by the energetic Paul Holdengraber of the New York Public Library. This year's interviewee was David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. Mr. Ferriero discussed his experience over the past 5 months as he as adjusted from being Mr. Holdengraber's boss at the New York Public Library, to taking on two of the most ambitious projects the National Archives and Records Administration has tackled in its history: the declassification of an estimated 400 million records dating back to World War II and the attempt to streamline, simplify, and regularize the record keeping of all of U.S. government agencies under the Open Government Initiative. He also described the mess facing NARA as they try to prevent the continuing loss of electronic records which he described as an issue which has the potential of keeping him up at night.

Ferriero also mentioned that he was currently reading Abraham Lincoln : Vampire Hunter (a guilty pleasure) and had just finished reading Now the Drum of War : Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, which had been written using the letters of Whitman's wife which are housed at Duke University.

Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 1 - Well-Organized Sites & Portals

My last session of the day, presented by Chris Jasek from Elsevier and Emily Shem-Tov from Adobe was well done but the least useful to me.  Chris' section where he outlined points of good website design and implementation was good and may be of some future use as a kind of checklist of good design points.  They can be boiled down into this 5 basic steps:

1. Research your users
2. Survey Similar Sites
3. Follow best practice design
4. Test your design with users
5. Address issues and repeat

For me the best takeaway from here was the quote: "People don't come to a website to admire it, they come to get work done."

Emily's portion of the presentation demonstrated an implementation of these steps with all of the features available for the users of the example site (an intranet site for Adobe employees). It looked like a fabulous intranet site but not particularly useful to me in my situation.

Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 1 - Analyzing, Evaluating & Communicating the Value of Web Presence

Michael Porter (Libraryman) of WebJunction and Amanda Clay Powers of Mississippi State University presented this great little session on what to care about (or for that matter what not to care about) statistics from web 2.0 sources.

Michael's portion of the presentation was, in part, to deemphasize the importance of actual hard data for web 2.0 usage.  On his way to pointing out that the popular concept of ROI often used to consider to worth of doing something doesn't really apply when you can't make any money from doing it (as libraries wouldn't), Michael showed a snazzy little video Social Media ROI: Socialnomics.  While pointing out the Social Media is in fact critically important to future survival using a quote from Oliver Blanchard ("Having a Social media presence nowadays is merely the equivalent of what being listed in the yellow pages meant ten years ago.  It simply isn't enough to be there.  And if you believe it is, you have seriously underestimated the situation."), he also pointed out that some of the best statistics you'll get for its importance are anecdotal.

Amanda then demonstrated how, at least in part, she has been able to get some nice numbers for web 2.0 utilization, particularly from Facebook Insight.  It was also mentioned that it's possible to somehow run Facebook fan page data through Google Analytics and a nice sounding 3rd party application called Twapperkeeper that lets you track tag usage on Twitter was mentioned.  An informal survey of the attendees indicated that about 18 (out of probably at least 200 people) were currently maintaining web 2.0 resource statistics and reporting them in monthly reports.

Computers in Libraries 2010 Day 1 - New & Hot : The Best of the Resource Shelf

I missed the first few minutes of this one getting back a few minutes late after a nice lunch with Allen Bettig from Glenview Public Library.  I don't think I missed too much in those minutes, though, except the introduction of the speaker, Gary Price, maintainer of ResourceShelf.com and DocuTicker.

The presentation was a great post-lunch program that didn't require too much intense thought and comprehension, but just listed a lot of great resources worth checking out.  Several of them I think are well worth teaching library staff about.  Gary nicely provided a lovely page listing all of the resources so it's not necessary to reprint them all here.  I thought the NDDB and the NDDB mapper for looking up people and then finding out how they relate to other people and to organizations was particularly useful/fun looking.

Computers in Libraries Day 1 - Achieving Org 2.0

This was a good session led by Meredith Farkas from Norwich University.  The sentiment expressed early in this session which somehow provides the message of the session in a nutshell is: "Web 2.0 technologies are often seen as free as in beer, when more likely they are free as in kittens."

The first part of the presentation expressed a variety of caveats about web 2.0 implementations such as having one person do all of your blogging/twittering with involvement from no one else (the so-called "Lone Ranger syndrome") so when they decide to move on to greener pastures your excellent blog/twittering dries up and dies like a plant moved from the Amazon rainforest to the Sahara desert.

Instead web 2.0 needs to become a part of a library's culture and for the technologies to work libraries need to understand them, understand the users, and trust the technologies.  The greater the comprehension and buy-in from everyone, the greater the success of web 2.0 implementations will be.

A challenging presentation with many good points.

Computers in Libraries Day 1 - Black Ops Ninja Style Tech Projects

This session (led by a team of 3: John Blyberg from Darien Library, Amanda Etches-Johnson from McMaster University, and Sarah Houghton-Jan from San Jose Public Library) was a good first session delving into the matters of technology implementation, which can often be a risky business.

The program had a loose format as the three presenters took turns with their tips.  In an unusual, but in many ways welcome and appropriate move, rather than a PowerPoint presentation the three presenters would have had to share, a stream of Twitter posts that were being posted on the session topic throughout (with hashtag #cilninjas) was displayed.

Some of the noteworthy tips provided were:

• If experience has taught you what is best and you know something should be implemented even though you figure you will hit resistance for suggesting that it be implemented, go ahead and implement it.  Most likely no will will notice for months, by which time you can point out that it's been running for months and none of the anticipated disasters have occurred.
• If you do something and you're wrong, apologize and learn from what went wrong.
• If there's something you want to get done and you can find a way that it supports your strategic plan, unashamedly use that fact to your advantage.
• Know who is key to getting a project done and get the support of those individuals early
• Avoid committees (who will debate endlessly the color of a button on a submit form) in favor of limited scope project teams that have a goal and a timeframe.
• Make sure the infrastructure is sound before adding on any new ambitious projects.  This should move you from a state of reacting to a state of innovating

All-in-all a good session with some nice takeaway points.

Computers in Libraries 2010 - Day 1 Keynote

I'm back in Washington for Computers In Libraries and have made it through the first day.  I didn't have time to blog each of the sessions I went to during the day, so I'm going to make entries for them all separately now as I rest up from a busy day.

The conference opened with the requisite count of the people signed up (this year just under 2,000) as well as the states and nations represented (no one from Idaho, Alaska & Hawaii).  The most memorable quote from the opening statements was one which the attendees were asked to consider for comments on the conference evaluation, "Technology is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other." -- C.P. Snow

The first day's keynote was provided by the always entertaining and thought provoking Lee Rainie from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.  Rainie's keynote focused on categories of communities that make the Internet what it is.  Starting with Manuel Castell's four communities which have shaped the Internet (techno-elites, hackers (of the Linux coding variety, not malicious lawbreakers), entrepreneurs, and "network creators") and proceeding to describe four particular kinds of communities that have developed with their own agendas (social climbers, posse/vigilante groups, specialized support groups, and alternative news source groups), Rainie provided a vision of libraries filling a role to educate their constituencies of Internet communities and how to navigate them.

In particular he emphasized the new kinds of literacies which we can teach: screen literacy (graphics & symbols), navigation literacy, connections & context literacy.  The library also offers a forum to express healthy skepticism towards information found on the Internet and a place where the value of contemplative time is understood and encouraged.  His vision of a place for libraries in a world where print is declining in importance as it is supplanted (in part) by digital was encouraging.