CIL 2012 Day 3 - Ideas to Steal: 11 Free Marketing Strategies

 My final session for Computers in Libraries 2012 was co-presented by three different people from different libraries (and different kinds of libraries):

• Lindsay Sarin, E-Reference Librarian, University of the District of Columbia
• Julie Strange, Statewide Coordinator, Maryland AskUsNow
• Andrea Snyder, Job & Career Center Manager, Enoch Pratt Free Library

The presentation provided fun and informative tips on marketing libraries. The presenters started by covering why marketing is important (“Marketing is like showering – it's to present a clean, prepared image.”) and then divided up 11 tips into categories using a house building analogy (the first steps are for putting down a foundation, the next steps were for renovation, and the last steps were upkeep).

The tips they presented were: 

1. Assess: Know where you stand
   How? Start with the staff. Look at the numbers. And ask the user.
   Some library put a whiteboard up in the lobby with questions and got great feedback.
   Sometimes the truth hurts.
   Figure out what you need to assess.

2. Create a Blueprint
   Know your Goals: Where you want to end up? Use what you know. Think big; start small.
   Visualize where you want to end up. What do your goals look like.
   
3. Clear the Decks
   Don't dilute your message by advertising too much in one place.
   Choose the essential and eliminate everything else
   Examine the things you like from others' and figure out the elements of success. Repeat.
   
4. Create your message
   Keep your message simple (e.g. “Spread the words”, “You belong @ the library”, Turn to us. The choices will surprise you”)
   Do something fun to get people to be creative and submit their ideas.
   Right person. Right place. Right time.
   Cut 60% of the words.
   
5. Reduce Pain
   This makes current customers happy, and they will advertise for you.
   Ask them what they'd change.
   Use your library like a customer and pay attention to the little ways you can make a big difference.
   
6. Be Brave
   Stuffed animal sleepovers / order groceries at the library / ask us now (made people familiar with the service with a contest)
   (At this point in the presentation everyone was supposted to brainstorm with their neighbor to come up with an interesting program idea. Mentioned ideas included encouraging users to take a book on vacation and take a picture of the book in an exotic location and a Kindles, cookies and cocoa Overdrive promotion).
   
7. Give people something to do
   Instead of “you can now text message the library” say “add your number to your phone and then you can contact us at any time.”
   Rewrite an old message in active language.
   
8. Steal ideas
   Steal from other libraries but also steal from outside of libraries
   Immerse yourself in something outside your comfort zone. Pay attention while you're there.
   
9. Get into the Community
   Create elevator speeches / Keep your librarian brain on at all times
   They suggested using http://ifttt.com – recipes or tasks for different services to talk to one another
   
10. Assess the results
    Debrief after everything. Learn.
    
11. Build a toolkit
    

It was a nicely presented session with some good tips.  It was a good finish for CIL 2012.

CIL 2012 Day 3 - Target Marketing Using GIS

In this session Diana Friend, Communications and Marketing Director for Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library (also David Lee King's home library) talked about how they used GIS (Geographic Information System) data to do some targeted marketing in their rather large service area.

Serving a rather large geographical area with a population of 178,000 with 90,000 cardholders, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library wanted to be able improve its services and market its services to targeted under-served populations. To get the greater detail about its service area, they provided anonymized patron data to a GIS expert, who told them that there were 31 different market segments in Shawnee County and gave them a lot of detail about how those market segments lined up with their users. In her presentation, Diana described several examples about how they used this data.

In one case they had figured that an inner-city population was under-served. However when the GIS data and the patron data was lined up, they found that this area actually had a high percentage of cardholders (77%) and had one of the highest average checkouts per customer.

They had been offering a free mailing service which was costing them a lot of money. It was designed for people living on the outskirts of the service area (20 some miles away). They found that the majority of people using the service lived less than 5 miles away, so they stopped offering the service for free.

By dividing using a point system they tried to develop an equitable distribution of off-site resources such as bookmobile routes, lock boxes and dispensers. The GIS data helped them put these in places that made sense and served their population best.

Finally they used the GIS data to send out a bulk mailing to people living in an area where they found they had a lower than expected number of cardholders. Offering a Nook color as a prize for people who signed up for a card in that area, they got well over their desired 1% return (57 new cards for a population of 3600) on the mailing (a high percentage of response for a bulk mailing where a lot of people may not be interested or will just throw it away) which they considered to be a success.

This was an interesting session, but I wonder if my library's service area and population are just too small and homogeneous for this kind of research to be particularly useful.

CIL 2012 Day 3 - The Future of eBooks

 I started my final post-lunch round of sessions with this presentation made by four different ebook vendors:

• Andromeda Yelton from Gluejar
• Ken Breed from EBSCOhost
• Alison Griffin of Ingram Coutts Library Services
• Mike Shontz of Overdrive

With the exception of Andromeda Yelton's presentation, I was generally underwhelmed. I was not previously familiar with Gluejar or their related website http://unglue.it/. The goal of the company is to negotiate open, permissive licenses from publishers for books. Andromeda described this mission in an indirect way by first listing all of the ways that publishers and libraries currently do not agree on the issue of ebook purchasing and distribution, and then presented Gluejar as an approach that might end this strife, at least in some cases. Gluejar currently hasn't worked out any deals and has not books, so it's in an early stage of its development.

Ken Breed's presentation for EBSCOhost was energetic and kind of interesting, but also at times a little confusing as I got overwhelmed by his drawn-out analogy of ebook distribution models to roller coasters. His big point about EBSCO and it's current ebook options is that it's simplified the pricing model by getting rid of extra fees so when you buy the book you pay a simple price. As a library with EBSCO ebooks, this hasn't necessarily been all that great since one of the fees seemed to be the one to allow users to download books and use them on a device, a feature which disappeared a few months ago, from what we've been able to tell.

I wasn't particularly interested in Alison Griffin's presentation as Ingram deals pretty exclusively with academic libraries and the issues were mainly of interest to academic libraries.

Finally Mike Shonz from Overdrive gave his presentation, which was mainly interesting for his mentioning some kind of purchase on demand system they are working on as well as an API which can make it integrate tighter into existing library systems.

The session, overall, felt like it was 75% sales pitch, which wasn't exactly what I was hoping for when I selected it.

CIL 2012 Day 3 - No More Excuses

This was an inspiring presentation largely made by Janie Hermann, Public Programming Librarian at Princeton Public Library, with some bookend presentation bits by Nancy Dowd of EBSCO. Janie related a series of successes that the Princeton Public Library has had, largely by being open-minded and listening to their customers.

The first story she told was of a Python programming group that had tweeted about wanting to meet in a space in the library but being bummed that it would cost $25 a month to do so. Janie saw the tweet and contacted the club offering them six months of meetings in their small meeting room. She figured this might pay off since the demographic in a Python programming club was likely to be quite different from their regular demographic. After 5 months the programming club was very happy with the arrangement and wanted to know if it could continue. Janie offered them the large meeting room in exchange for teaching beginner programming classes at the library. The club enthusiastically agreed and it has grown and the classes that it teaches are very popular. A win-win situation.

Likewise she told a story of a self-proclaimed quirky individual who came in and asked if the library would be willing to host events and promote a Pi day celebration to mark Einstein's birthday (Einstein's birthday being March 14, or 3.14 and Einstein having been a famous resident of Princeton). Several other agencies in the community had been asked by this person but had declined as they thought the idea was strange. The library embraced it and through promotion, the selling of Einstein dolls and programs it has become a big success, drawing in tourists and getting the attention of the New York Times.

The lessons of these stories is to listen to your community and then meet them where they are.

Other interesting things that Princeton has done have been:

• host speed networking events for local business people
• open the library at 5:00 A.M. so residents could communally watch the royal wedding
• post all of their flyers on a page on Flickr
• host a “talk-like-a-pirate” day to promote Mango, which had just released a “pirate” module and through humor brought awareness to the real features of Mango

Janie mentioned some other best practices as well. A neighboring, much larger library just posts its events to Facebook and has about 300 followers on Facebook. Princeton interacts with their users in an active fashion on Facebook, doing much more than promoting their own events, and has 2200 followers.

Other suggestions were:

• Connect and be authentic but still maintain your brand.
• Know your audience interact with them in a variety of locations.
• Keep it local
• Keep it Quirky .. and relevant (Pi day reading list)
• Do #FF and RT local agencies on Twitter

After Janie's presentation, Nancy Dowd demonstrated a new Novelist related product called LibraryAware. It looks like a promising tool for easily developing, printing, and sending consistently designed and professional looking promotional materials. It looks like something that would definitely be worth a look once it's live.

CIL 2012 Day 3 - Leveraging Your Social Media to Gain Friends and Influence People

My first session on day three was a presentation by Julie Theado, Social Media Manager at Columbus Metropolitan Library on how that library effectively used social media as part of an effort to get a levy increase passed to address financial difficulties caused by severe cuts on the state level. This effort was a multi-pronged comprehensive effort and seems to be a good model of how to get support.

When the library started out in 2010 they knew that they needed to communicate their story to their residents, through as many channels as possible and they realized that their social media presence was not focused. They figured that social media would be a good way to promote relationships with their users and the media as well as manage their brand and monitor what was being said about their library.

They realized before they did anything that they needed an overarching strategy. In the strategy there was a social media plan that worked in concert with their marketing and strategic plans. It was the plan that they developed that established guidelines for what was posted to social networks, who they followed, and with whom they communicated. Established processes allowed them to answer questions and see what was being said.

They focused on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, with some additional focus on local bloggers, as those networks were the networks their customers frequented. Using the guideline that “the life of a Facebook post is 3 hours” they posted to Facebook several times a day. The also had chat events on Facebook, posted “Who Knew” items on Wednesday (which were cultivated from questions they'd get on the phone during the week) and they bought Facebook ads.

Julie provided an interesting story demonstrating how they used Twitter. On one occasion a Twitter user indicated that he was a new father and expressed interest in finding books to read to his newborn son. Using some suggestions from the youth services department they turned to Facebook and asked from their Facebook community suggestions for books for the father to read. When they had curated a decent list they tweeted the address of the list back to the father.

On another occasion they had a TweetUp that they got going using Twtvite and then discussed the levy at the TweetUp. This was a successful endeavor for spreading their message

By reaching out to area bloggers and getting the bloggers to come out in support of the levy increase, they were able to get some strong voices saying “vote for the levy increase” which they would never have been able to get from the media and which they could not do by law for themselves.

The levy wound up passing by 66% in a down economy, which was a great success. In the end they had these lessons which they had learned from the process:

• Think about your audience – LinkedIn didn't work for them as a customer outreach tool
• Watch being too self-promotional in social media – 70-20-10 rule
• Write punchy and conversational – too much copy can be difficult.
• Watch the frequency of your posts.
• Approach staff involvement with a strategy
• Don't be afraid to try something new.

Julie also had the following tips:

1. Quality vs. quantity. Creating quality experiences with your customers in social media is more important than the number
2. Measure your success by your measurable objectives
3. Monitor what is being said about you online. Facebook Insights, Google Alerts, NetVibes.com, Twilert.com, Issuu.

I found it to be an informative case study in how to successfully use social networking for issues like referenda and was definitely worth the time spent.

CIL 2012 Day 3 - Keynote

This morning's keynote, Creating Inspiring Services: Going Boldly into the Present, was presented by the always inspiring and thought provoking Michael Edson, Director, Web Strategy & New Media, Office of the CIO, Smithsonian Institution. Edson focused on the fact that the change of cultural and technological change has become so fast, that anticipating the future is hardly possible, as in many cases we haven't even completely absorbed the realities of the present.

To build up to this point, Edson started in the distant past, mentioning that people who lived in stone age Europe had a period lasting 25,000 years in which they had cultural continuity. He mentioned that William Gibson has said that in the 1950's science fiction authors had a 3-5 year period that could be considered “now” which could be used as a relatively stable point from which authors could anticipate the future. Edson mentioned technology that we were looking forward to future versions of in 1997 like dial-up modems, limited digital cameras, Geocities and Windows 95. We've now reached the state that we were imagining in 1997 with largely ubiquitous high-speed internet connections, cheap digital cameras that have made film cameras obsolete, a sophisticated and varied World Wide Web, and mature and (generally) stable operating systems.

Edson mentioned some landmark books and articles from 6 to 10 years ago that anticipated the exact conditions that we have now, namely:

• Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs from 2002
• Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas from 2002
• Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams' Wikinomics from 2006
• Tim O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0 from 2005

We now also have some well established concepts which define many aspects of todays world:

• The Long Tail
• Joy's Law
• Cognitive Surplus
• Network Effects
• Moore's Law & Mobile
• Every user a hero...

All of this adds up to a situation where “the present is far more interesting than most people have noticed” and that the “tangible value of the present moment remains to be exploited.”

The problem lies largely in our perceptions of the present and Edson relayed some concepts to help people develop ways to grapple with our changed world:

• The extraterrestrial space auditor – When your organization says that they stand for something, imagine yourself as a complete outsider and compare the stated mission with collaborative actions.
  
  
• On Ramps and Loading Docks – If you believe that your goal is to help our users be the heros in their own epic journeys we need to think expansively about platforms.
  
  
• Edge to core – The best work happens where we have subject matter experts, data, public together in the same place.
  
  
• Focus on the mission – Everything should focus on the mission, and everything else should go away. Organizations that can articulate what they need to do aren't struggling with how to react to constant change
  
  
• Place the bet – What world am I living in, what impact does my country, my city, my organization want to have in that world, What should I do today?

It was a great keynote and an inspiring one. Now to try to put its ideas into practice.

CIL 2012 Day 2 - Integrating Tablets & Apps Into the Library

This was a fun interesting session with three presentations. The first two presentations were by children's librarians at Darien Library and Norwalk Library respectively.

Keira Parrott presented Apps, iPads & Tech for Kids @ Darien Library in which she discussed the process her library followed as they looked to find a way to integrate iPads into their programming. Initially they had a wall mounted iPad where they put an “app of the day” that patrons could play with. After that had been a modest success, they decided to try circulating iPads in a kit with different apps installed. They decided what apps to put onto the iPads and developed a process by which the iPads are cleaned (physically and digitally) upon being returned. Some favorite apps Keira mentioned were:

• Don't Let the Pigeon Run this App
• eliasMatch
• PopOut! Peter Rabbit
• Pocket Phonics ABC
• There's a Monster at the end of this Book

She also mentioned that they have programs called “app chats” where parents can come in with their iPads and they discuss apps (for children) that they enjoy. They've also developed a whole suite of technology children's programs:

• Little Clickers (2-5)
• Techsplorers (6-8)
• iKids (9-12)
• Storytubes (reeldirector – make a movie using the iPad)
• CoderDojo

Vicki Oatis provided a different story in her presentation titled Check Out an iPad. Norwalk Public Library is less affluent than Darien, and they couldn't afford to circulate iPads. In fact, they bought iPads as an alternative to buying a new computer since they could get more of them with the money.

At Norwalk theycheck out iPads for an hour for in-house use. After the iPads are returned they get their contents restored (to remove bank logins and anything else people put on them).

Norwalk also has had success using iPads with small storytime groups where they allow children to touch and interact with the device.

To choose what apps go on the iPads they have been relying on Kirkus reviews as well as patron requests and recommendations from blogs, magazines and professionals. Their list of favorite apps includes:

• Storytime (project them on the wall)
  • Sandra Boynton Books
  • Go Away Big Green Monster
  • The Sun Goes to Bed
    
• School Visits:
  • Bartleby's book of Buttons
  • Happy Birthday Sue
  • Spot the Dot
    
• Kids at the table:
  • Real Racing
  • Cookie Doodle

Finally Earl Givens and Art Gutierrez of Emporia State University described their efforts with using Android tablets for teaching an Information Literacy and Technology course. They learned a lot in the process and came up with some innovative methods to get a limited budget stretch as far as it could. They felt that there were a lot of things they could do differently to improve the student experience, but largely it seems that their program was a success that can be built upon.

CIL 2012 Day 2 - Matching Books & Communities

This session was, without a doubt, my favorite session of the day, and may wind up being my favorite session of the conference, if for no other reason then the incredibly impressive technology that was described.

The session began unassumingly enough with Chad Mairn, CTO of Novare Library Services and librarian for West St. Petersburg Community Library providing a brief overview of how libraries are in the business of helping people discover new books. He pointed how West St. Petersburg has a poster with some new books and a QR code that directs a user to the complete list. He then talked about good sources for DRM-free ebooks like drmfree.calibre-ebook.com, Project Gutenberg, OpenLibrary.org, and Overdrive (which has both DRMed and DRM free books). He mentioned an interesting idea about putting up a sign in BestBuy to direct people who had just purchased ereaders to the library for books and offering free workshops for the public to help people with their devices. He also talked about how libraries are in a position to work with authors who want to self-publish their materials.

Then Chad discussed some of the book discovery services out there like Library Thing, Good Reads, BookLamp (which I wasn't familiar with), and Small Demons (which I also was not familiar with) and capped that off with the genres page at WorldCat (www.worldcat.org/genres/) which was interesting.

After covering this in probably about 10 minutes, Chad invited Aaron Stanton from BookLamp to come up and talk about his website, which is about when the session became really interesting.

Aaron mentioned that most of the services that Chad had just mentioned are social book discovery tools. They have limitations because certain books are more widely read and more favored, so they float to the top of the services. This isn't necessarily because they are better, but just because they are more popular. There are many books below that may be of great interest to readers but are just not noticeable because they haven't had enough readers and they are kind of doomed to that state in a social discovery service.

This is where BookLamp differs from those.

Rather than working on a social recommendation service, Aaron (who from his presentation is clearly an avid reader) decided to develop a way of analyzing the content of a book with computer algorithms. Using some apparently incredibly sophisticated code, Aaron and his team have analyzed the content of books and can identify features that one would think would be nearly impossible for a computer to identify such as pacing, writing style, action, characters, and themes. This information can then be put into a two or three dimensional graph to give the book any number of unique, identifying fingerprints. This whole initiative is called the Book Genome Project, and of the 90 some thousand books the Book Genome Project has processed, 20 thousand are on BookLamp, with more to come.

It sounds like a really interesting project and something that should be a useful readers advisory tool and book finding aid well into the future.

CIL 2012 Day 2 - Open Source Trends & Migration

This session consisted of two different presentations. The first presentation was presented by long-time Computers in Libraries veteran Marshall Breeding, Director of Innovative Technologies and Research at Vanderbilt University. Mr. Breeding provided a good, balanced overview of the library automation system scene looking at the differences between the proprietary and the open source offerings and looking at the satisfaction that different libraries have with the different systems.

First, Mr. Breeding provided some context pointing out the move (at least among academic libraries) away from conventional Integrated Library Systems (ILS) to broader Library Services Platforms as well as several of the reasons and consequences of this kind of move.

Next he showed some of the results of the most recent survey he has done of libraries and pointed out several trends. First of these was that although open source systems are trending in popularity, it has been a gradual trend, and is not any kind of huge rush away from proprietary systems.

Interestingly of the libraries surveyed, only the ones that are currently running open source systems are really enthusiastic as a whole about open source solutions. The users of the proprietary systems, by and large, are not expressing much excitement about the promise of open source solutions.

Of all of those using systems of any kind, it's the quality of support that makes the libraries satisfied or dissatisfied with the systems. The libraries that are happiest with an open source solution are those that installed it themselves, and consequently have considerable internal knowledge of the system as a result. However libraries running the exact same system that are getting support from a company that they find inadequate to the task are unhappy with the system.

Mr. Breeding then looked at the profit models for both open source and proprietary systems pointing out that generally open source is not a nonprofit endeavor, but a commercial endeavor. The open source support companies mainly use a different revenue model, charging for data conversion, installation, configuration, training, support and hosting. A proprietary system might cover many of these costs in a license fee and not break them out as much. Proprietary systems do seem to have a much larger cohort of full-time developers than open source vendors, although most open source vendors have a respectable 15 or so full time developers on staff.

Finally Mr. Breeding pointed out that from a flexibility and usefulness standpoint, an open API was much more powerful than just having the system written in open code. If the system was not written with hooks that can be taken advantage of and it's open source, for many library purposes it will not be as open and useful as a proprietary system that does have an open and available API that can be used for more advanced projects.

Mr. Breeding was followed by Irene McDermott of Crowel Public Library in San Marino, California. In Ms. McDermott's presentation she described their rapid transition from a proprietary system to an open source system (in this case from Dynix Horizon to Koha).

Her library (a municipal library) bought Dynix Horizon in 2006 a few months before Sirsi bought Dynix, and then killed off Horizon. This did not please the library (which had decided against Sirsi Unicorn) and when, in early 2011 the city of Crowel decided it really needed to cut the budget, the library was charged with finding a cheaper alternative before August of that year. The library decided initially on the more expensive of a couple options (Polaris), but the city, wanting to save as much money as possible, told the library to go with the cheapest option, Koha as supported by LibLime.

Ms. McDermott described the rather breakneck pace at which they made the transition and then pointed out several features of the system that she and her staff have found frustrating or annoying. Overall, however, she seemed satisfied with how everything turned out in that the library was able to the transition and keep functioning without having to suffer staff cuts.

In her presentation Ms. McDermott mentioned that Koha as supported by LibLime had some proprietary portions that had been developed by LibLime. This was countered as inaccurate by a representative from LibLime who stated that they were opening that code. An open source advocate in the audience argued that this really wasn't open until it was out, starting a brief argument about what makes something open source, an argument that for better or worse didn't really reflect well on the open source community (I say this as someone typing this in an open source application running an open source operating system).

Although this session wasn't immediately useful to me, it did provide some insight into the state of library automation systems at the present time and was definitely worth my while.

CIL 2012 Day 2 - IT Security for Libraries

My second session of the day was a presentation from Blake Carver, the owner and maintainer of LISHost, on good security practices. I listen regularly to Steve Gibson'sSecurity Now! podcast, which is effectively an ongoing course in good security practice. I didn't really expect to learn a whole lot here, and I didn't. However there were several things I did pick up which I think made it worth my while and that I think I'll be able to use in future presentations.

First, Blake used several quotes that were quite good and explain some computer security issues succinctly. Some examples are:

• “Security is two different things: It's a feeling. It's a reality.” - meaning that you can feel secure and safe when you are not, and once you've learned lots about security problems and how to deal with them, you can feel rather at risk when in fact you are pretty locked down and secure.
• “Antivirus / a firewall is a seatbelt, not a force field” - meaning that these things help you out when something goes horribly wrong and can keep things from getting too bad, but they don't in themselves keep you secure.
• “Carry a safe, not a suitcase.” - in reference to laptops and cell phones meaning that it should be configured in such a way that someone picking it up who doesn't have the proper credentials will have a very hard time using it, if they can use it at all.

Blake also provided some handy statistics that catch your eye:

• 600,000 times a day someone tries to login to a stolen Facebook account
• A Verizon data breach report in the Fall of 2011 found that of those hacked:
  • 83% were targets of opportunity (they had not been targeted themselves for hacking)
  • 92% of the attacks were easy
  • 85% of the hacks were discovered by a third party (i.e. not by the person who had been hacked)
  • 96% of the hacks were avoidable

And finally Blake provided some additional resources that I think I'll find useful:

• Firefox Collusion – a plugin that lets you see who's been tracking your movements on the web and how they are related to one another.
• SANS 20 Critical Security Controls 
• Securing Library Technology: A How-To-Do-It Manual by Earp & Wright 

CIL 2012 Day 2 - Ebook Publishers & Libraries: Win-Win Solutions

Ken Roberts & Michael Ciccone of Hamilton Public Library presented this intriguing presentation called Tales from the North describing efforts in Canada to resolve the current crisis/stalemate that exists between publishers and libraries over the issues surrounding ebooks.

To start Roberts and Ciccone described the publishing situation in Canada and the differences between the situation in Canada and the U.S. As Canada only has about 25 million people who prefer to read in English (not counting the ~7 million French speakers there, and compared to the 300+ million in the U.S.) and has a variety of government protections for publishers, the starting position was a little different for the Canadians.

There are two major publishing trade organizations in Canada: The Canadian Publishers' Council and the Association of Canadian Publishers. The Canadian Publishers' Council consists of the larger, more recognized publishers like HarperCollins and Random House. The Association of Canadian Publishers is made up of 135 small publishers. Under Canadian law it was required that print titles be acquired for libraries directly from publishers as a way to support the Canadian publishing industry. With the introduction of electronic versions of books, however, the old law no longer applied and publishers were starting to be bypassed by services like Overdrive.

So the libraries and the publishers went to the negotiating table and in January worked out the elements of a deal that make both sides happy. Libraries will license, not own, titles from the publishers at a cost of the average of the last three years of sales of midlist and backlist titles for the area the library serves, and will get broad access to these titles. It seems that they will be available in ePub only, as the Kindle presence is not great in Canada and is not worth making things more complicated. It's an interesting and promising resolution to some of the problems. The exact same solution will probably not develop in the U.S., but it does perhaps point a way that can make both sides happy.

As Hamilton Public Library uses Bibliocommons, a Canadian company, for its catalog discovery tool, they even worked out a brief test of integrating the ebook reservation and checkout directly into the catalog (one of the things libraries really wanted when they went to the negotiating table) which was cool to see in the screenshots they showed.

Following Hamilton's presentation, Matt Barnes from Ebrary discussed the history of Ebrary's ebook projects (so far largely with academics) and the problems they've worked out between publishers and libraries in a presentation titled E-Books Aren't Print Books.

Ebrary has been primarily academic, but is starting to shift to public. When Ebrary started working with publishers, they began by selling subscriptions to 2-5 year old titles that the publishers figure they won't sell many more of but libraries still want and would find relevant.

From this point Ebrary started to move to a perpetual archive (ownership) model for some titles.

The next step was a patron driven access model which would provide previews of titles and if a patron uses enough of the book the library pays for the use. This took more negotiation to work out and make the publishers happy. A pilot program proved that this could work and be a profitable venture.

Finally they discussed short term loans (rentals). This was something that could displace or supplement ILL.

These four models have worked well for Ebrary and its ebook services for libraries so far and have kept publishers happy. However, Ebrary keeps ebook access restricted to websites.

CIL 2012 Day 2 - Keynote - Creating Innovative Libraries

Susan Hildreth, Institute of Museum and Library Services gave this interesting keynote to kick off the second day of Computers in Libraries 2012. Ms. Hildreth started by describing the origin, role and programs of the Institute of Museum of Library Services, its vision and mission. Basically, the Institute of Museum and Library Services is a legislatively created federal agency that supports libraries and museums in their missions by providing grants and other kinds of support.

She described the five goals that IMLS has in its support for libraries and museums. These goals were:

• Goal 1: Learning
  
  IMLS places the learner at the center and supports engaging experiences in libraries and museums that prepare people to be full participants in their local communities and our global society.
  
  They want to move libraries from a “nice to have” to a “need to have” institution. Informal learning is the way people learn most things (website on this initiative at www.imls21stcenturyskills.org). In this vein they see supporting the DIY and Maker Culture as an important way forward. They also have put an emphasis on early learning for which they provide grants for summer reading programs. They have also established a partnership with the MacArthur Foundation for the creation of digital media labs based on Chicago Public Library's YOUmedia Center.
  
  
• Goal 2 : Community
  
  IMLS promotes museums and libraries as strong community anchors that enhance civic engagement, cultural opportunities, and economic vitality.
  
  They have been focusing on the role of libraries in the workforce. In this role they have a partnership with the department of labor and have worked with Webjunction on Project Compass.
  
  
• Goal 3 : Content
  
  IMLS supports exemplary stewardship of museum and library collections and promotes the use of technology to facilitate discovery of knowledge and cultural heritage.
  
  They are promoting a “Digging into Data” challenge to create a new infrastructure for 21^st century research.
  
  Expanding public access with the Digital Public Library of America is also a major initiative for this goal.
  
  
• Goal 4 : Equitable Access to Knowledge
  
  IMLS advices the President and Congress on plans, policies, and activities to sustain and increase public access to information and ideas.
  
  
• Goal 5 : Public Management Excellence
  
  IMLS achieves excellence in public management and performs as a model organization through strategic alignment of its resources and prioritization of programmatic activities, maximizing value for the American public.
  
  She expressed concern with the history of libraries being overly cautious in implementing new technologies. You have to be prudent when spending public money, but it is also necessary to take some risks lest you be left behind.

After describing all of this, Ms. Hildreth briefly discussed something that sounds quite interesting (that she had mentioned briefly earlier in her talk) called the Digital Public Library of America. The rationale for this project is to provide:

• Broad public access to information on a “free to all” basis in a digital age
• A future for libraries in a cloud computing world.
• Responsive to changing modes of accessing information
• Need for libraries to incorporate many types of materials beyond texts in analog formats
• A “Clean slate” project on what a digital library could offer
• Already developed in many other countries

The project is managed by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard with support from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation. It is a collaborative effort of librarians, technologists, educators, creators, students, and others to build a Digital Public Library of America. Anyone can sign up for any activity. It is an open process. It is modeled on a European initiative called Europeana and was formally launched in October of 2011.

More information on the Digital Public Library of America can be found at http://dp.la/. It sounds interesting and I look forward to learning more about it after the conference and in years to come.

CIL 2012 Day 1 - Free & Cheap Tools & Apps

Like other sessions today, this session was divided into two presentations.  Also like other sessions today I found the first presentation more interesting and valuable than the second.  The session was an odd one for the track theme of "web presence" as it was largely a review of free tools which may or may not be important for ones web presence, but there were some useful tidbits nonetheless.

Nicole C. Engard, Vice President of Education at ByWater Solutions gave the first presentation focusing on open source software.  She covered several tools that I've used many times and am quite familiar with like Scribus, CamStudio, PortableApps, and Pidgin.  She covered a few tools that I have no interest in or use for at the moment like Omeka (a digital collection manager) and the catalog discovery interfaces VuFind, Blacklight, SOPAC & Scriblio.

However she also covered some projects I'd heard of, forgotten, and are probably worth a second look.  Notably LibKi, Zotero, Spark and LibX.

And most importantly she brought to my attention several tools, that if I have heard of them in the past I've completely forgotten them, so they are new to me: LimeSurvey (a survey tool you can host yourself), LibStats (a reference statistics collection tool) and SubjectsPlus (a subject management tool of some sort) that all sound interesting and worth a look.

The second half of this session was a presentation by Louise Alcorn of West Des Moines Public Library and Christa Burns of the Nebraska Library Commission.  They seem to be mostly concerned with small libraries with very few resources that aren't familiar with some pretty common free tools which are well known to me.  Being at the end of the day, it wasn't too exciting, and they were rushed to finish their presentation so everyone could leave an go to the vendor reception.  For the record the five free resources they mentioned were: Pinterest (the hot social networking site this year), MeeboMe, xtranormal, Skype, QR Codes, and Wordpress (the hosted site version, not so much the open source software).

CIL 2012 Day 1 - HTML5 and CSS3: New Markup & Styles for the Emerging Web

Jason Clark, head of digital access and web services at Montana State University gave this good round-up of changes in HTML5, which includes HTML itself as well as the way it integrates with changes in Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets.  I've been studying up on HTML5 lately so a lot of what was covered here was material that wasn't particularly new to me, but the presentation was well done and covered some Javascript features I was not particularly aware of previously.

This was a good session, although pretty technical, so it doesn't seem to be worthwhile to post a bunch of tag and feature changes here.  If you're interested in HTML5, Clark has a nice bunch of resources on his Pinboard page.

CIL 2012 Day 1 - Content Management Challenges for Websites

For quite some time we've been in need of a new content management system for our primary website, and although several years ago after our last redesign I had for a variety of reasons largely discarded the idea of using Drupal, I am slowly being drawn in that direction as we look to another round of professional redesign of the website, hopefully in the coming year.

As a result I decided to go to this session on content management systems for libraries.  It was divided into two presentations.  The first presentation was presented by Stephen Sanzo, the Director of Marketing and Business Development at Isovera, a web consulting firm specializing in Drupal and libraries.

Mr. Sanzo presented a balanced overview of the open source content management scene with a library focus covering the top three content management systems - Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla.  His observations for these systems were the following:

Wordpress

Pros:

• Installs easy – up and running quickly
• Polished interface – easy for novice to add text and images
• Site administration (installing upgrades, add features) fairly easy
• Library community includes OpenLibrary and faceted search features

Cons:

• Very limited structural flexibility for core system
• Limited support for user roles
• Fewer library features than Drupal

Summary – a good choice for smaller and structurally simple sites.

Joomla

Pros:

• Good “all around” system
• Strong insfrastructure to support sites of different sizes

Cons:

• Limited flexibility in structuring content types
• Cumbersome to update
• Limited features for libraries

Summary – strong but not very flexible when thinking outside the box

Drupal

Pros:

• Flexible and powerful – it's a development platform
• Robust capabilities for Web 2.0 and community functionality
• Easy to update content
• Strong library community with many library-related features

Cons:

• Confuguring site is complex – may need outside help (easier with Drupal 7 and also Drupal Gardens from Acquia)
• Flexibility – many ways to skin a cat. Need to think through what is best.

Summary – robust and flexible, provides most upside. Often need assistance to realize full poetential. Custom-built to be enterprise-scale: flexible, powerful and responsive to most needs.

Mr. Sanzo also provided these questions that everyone should ask when deciding on a CMS:

 

• Determine level of customization
• What are your workflow needs
• Talk to others
• Read, research, and try them out
• Know your own “must-have's” and “like-to-have's”

In the end Mr. Sanzo expressed a clear preference for Drupal, although this is certainly not unusual in the field (see the list of libraries that use Drupal) and is certainly defensible.  Although I was familiar to some level or another with all three products I got value from this overview and got me thinking a bit about our redesign process and ways that we might be able to address not only problems with the main website, but also problems with the intranet website using a Drupal solution.

Following Mr. Sanzo was a presentation from Jennifer Heise from Drew University titled "Blended Content Management for an Academic Library Website."

This talk largely covered how an academic library managed to get a lot of the things they needed out of a Wordpress installation. Not being in the same situation this portion wasn't as interesting to me, but I was intrigued by the mention of an open-source web-based chat widget called LibraryH3lp. This seems to work with Spark and Openfire and could be useful in reworking our chat system to make it more effective, so for that this half of the session was worthwhile.

CIL 2012 Day 1 - Teaching the Machine : Using Search Log Data to Create a Smarter Search Tool

J Michael DeMars of California State University presented this talk on a project that the library there did to improve search results for users on its federated search interface, called Xerxes, an open source "library portal application."  This software will search a number of different products including Ebsco, Metalib and Worldcat.

The project that launched the improvements that the library made to its search was a survey asking students about how often they used this search interface and how happy they were with it.  The staff quickly determined that they had students who would click around the interface until they found something, "clickers", and people would would cut to the chase and just type whatever they wanted into the search box, called "searchers."  The focus of the survey was on the searchers.

The survey found that 81 percent of the students generally found what they were looking for.  This sounds pretty good, but Mr. DeMars was unhappy that 19 percent couldn't find what they were looking for.  He didn't have any further information from the survey that would indicate where the problems were, so they started looking through search logs for problems, as this was the only place they could look.

From this research they found that although librarians tend to carefully craft searches, the student users tend to ask complete questions, use abbreviations, type a database name (sometimes misspelled), search for a URL, or even search for a complet citation copied from the bibliography of an item.

The users have learned to throw bad searches at Google and get good results, so they try and perform the same searches at the University.  Unfortunately, the University's search engine wasn't being clever enough to provide any useful feedback from these searches.

They decided to try and fix broken searches. All searches go through a script that analyzes the search looking for common problems and redirects appropriately.

This seems like a good approach to the problem and is almost certainly something that can be used to improve our little search box.  I look forward to coming back and seeing if I can implement some of the kinds of things they did.

Originally there was supposed to be a second talk alongside Mr. Demars, but the second speaker was unable to make it.  The track's host, Diane Fichter of the University of Saskatchewan, extemporaneously discussed issues in usability with the University of Saskatchewan website until it was time for lunch.

CIL 2012 Day 1 - 7 Essential Elements for an Awesome Website

My first session of this conference was a presentation by David Lee King of the Topeka & Shawnee Public Library.  Mr. King is well respected and has published books on library topics and I've seen him speak before, so I was interested in what he'd have to say about the essential elements of an "awesome" website.

Here are the 7 essential elements King presented:

1. Customers want something to read, watch, & listen to when they visit the library. The real goals of users isn't to read about services, but to use them. Give your users something to do: provide ebooks, engage in social media, blogs, social book reviews, podcasts, videos.
   
   
2. Customers have questions and ask at the library. Spark (open source) instant message/chat messaging. Add Facebook & Twitter to the contact us section.
   
3. Customers need to know the normal stuff too. Address, contact, hours, phone.  Put these on every page in a consistent location.
   
4. Websites need actual staff. We wouldn't get volunteers to do a building addition, so we shouldn't use them to maintain or develop the website.
   
5. Have goals! (Here King provided a Venn diagram showing happiness at the intersection of Library Goals and Geek Goals). Develop goals for the digital branch/website. Measure success.
   
6. Reach beyond your webbish boundaries. Go where people gather (social media sites your users frequent). Find out if people are using Pinterest and establish a pilot project and see if there is interest. If no one is using it in 6 months, kill it. If it's getting use, expand it. Meet up with people in person as well. Topeka has an unconference where they invite people from the community.
   
7. Be mobile friendly. (Topeka is using Boopsie, although King also suggested designmodo.com/responsive-design-examples/) Brainstorm first before attacking mobile. Consider what people will want to do. “What's missing? Send a suggestion”

To wrap up King showed a sign that he saw at a Disney store saying (something to the effect of) “For an additional selection of [products we sell] visit our website.”  King mentioned that what this really means is "you can't see everything we sell by coming to the store, our website needs to be used if you want to see it all", or in short “the reality of our business is the website.”  I thought that this was a powerful realization and sentiment.  Excellent talk.

Blekko

I typically don't post about vendor experiences I have at Computers in Libraries.  They generally aren't interesting or notable to post in a public forum, even if the vendor has something that I find personally of interest.  However an unusual vendor at this year's conference was not selling a subscription library product at all and was promoting a free website, and it was quite intriguing, so I'm posting on it.

The company in this case is Blekko, a search engine company in competition with Google (the hosting company for this blog) and Bing.  I don't think that Google and Bing have anything to worry about in the short term from Blekko, but I think it's a search engine I will likely be using and it's a really interesting concept.

Blekko starts off from a point of having a curated list of websites, sort of like Yahoo! was famous for in the mid-90's.  Unlike Yahoo!, Blekko doesn't really put them into a categorized directory nor do they make descriptions for the sites.  Instead they index the sites, like any other search engine.  So in this basic form, Blekko searches a reviewed subset of the Internet, avoiding content farms and other undesirable sites.  This in itself is interesting, but it's not the most interesting thing about Blekko.

That comes in where Blekko takes a card from social networking and allows users to make they own custom tagged searches.  These tags are indicated by leading slashes, so Blekko uses as one of its advertising pitches "slash the web."  A user can create an account with Blekko and from sites that are in Blekko's database create a list of sites that are associated with one of these slash tags.  Then by adding that slash tag into a search, a user can search that set of sites.  These tags can be private or they can be public.

As an example I've created a Blekko slash tag of /ccs that consists of websites for all of the libraries in the CCS consortium to which Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District belongs, as well as the CCS consortium website itself.  Any user can type my username followed by CCS, "/herrmoody/ccs", as well as any other relevant terms into a Blekko search and get results that consist of pages from those websites.  Here's a sample search that looks for the word "kindle" in those websites.

This is an innovative development in the land of searching and I'm interested to see where it's going to go.

Computers in Libraries 2012 - Keynote Day 1

After an enjoyable weeklong vacation in Virginia and Maryland I returned to D.C., where my vacation started, to attend Computers in Libraries once again.  CIL 2012 kicked off with a keynote from Jeffery Phillips of OVO Innovation Services.

I enjoyed this keynote. His keynote looked at the problem of innovating in organizations that have focused more and more on efficiency since the 1970s. Phillips argued (as he has also argued in books that he has written) that a focus on efficiency is harmful toward innovation, which is needed more than ever as the pace of change continues to accelerate. People have a tendency to focus on “business as usual” and reward compliance with existing standards while not rewarding innovation, even if it is ostensibly encouraged. What is needed is a transition to “Innovation Business as Usual,” an approach used at companies like Apple, which have continued to innovate at a frenetic pace. In this approach innovation is respected and has a place in a “business as usual” framework. As middle management tends to be the biggest stumbling block for innovation (upper management wants innovation and the workers in a company normally want to innovate and improve things, while middle management wants everything to continue workings as efficiently as possible), changes need to occur in middle management to make this happen. This boils down to these four principles:

1. Create clear innovation goals – Link innovation activities to strategic goals and define innovation outcomes.
2. Define and sustain and innovation process – Create a process and methodology around how you try to innovate.
3. Rebalance tools and skills – Improve innovation skills while maintaining efficiency
4. Rework culture, incentives, rewards – Pavlov told us that people will do what they expect they'll be rewarded to do.