Connecting Librarian

Here are my notes from the L-Plate series at VALA 2010 conference.  I am just cutting and pasting from what I took at the time, so I apologise for spelling and grammar, no time to do anything else at this stage.

Hope you get something out of it. I got plenty.

Open Source Software – Kathryn Greenhill
Imperfect analogy – spaghetti sauce – buy it in jar or make it yourself.
Flexibility and control.  Open Source requires particular skills, still has a price, but involves community effort and altruism.

Proprietary software: license, user restricted, no source code
Open Source: free redistribution, source code accessible, derived works, integrity of code, no discrimination, not specific to purpse, device, works with other software

There are checks and balances before any new code goes into the code base.

Key ideas of Open Source – release early – release often, many eyes make bugs shallow, peer review, developer-user relationship.

Koha – open source library management system.
Check http://www.ohloh.net for cot comparisons between proprietary and open source over time.

We already use open source software – linux, apache, mysql, php, firefox.
Who else uses os? Denmark using Open Office by 2011, Trove at NLA, White House uses Drupal, for their website, North  East Kansas Libraries for their LMS.

Examples of open source software: Open Office, Word Press, Drupal, Mediawiki, Gimp, Dimdim, Zimbra, Pidgin, Audacity, VLC media player.

Open source LMS – Evergreen, Koha, OLE project

Discovery layers – Scriblio, Sopac2 and more

Digital resources management – Kete, Omeka

Whats stopping us from using Open Source?  Skills. We need to know about relational databases, SML,  indexing and programming
Cost – of change
Perceived accountability
Centralised IT
Maturity of the products
Consortial impacts
Monopolies – marketing
What users have at home
Cloud computing and Software as a Service (Saas)
Closed hardware

What we can gain by using open source software?
Skills, flexibility, control, nimbleness, accountability, budgetary control.

However, software needs to fit the purpose and the organisation.

Library Mashups and APIs – Paul Hagon
RSS is a common API (application programming interface)
Can be used to interact with other services – application on iphone for eg.
API is used to put javascript showing marker on a Google map.
Don’t have to do the hard work, that is all done for you.

Can use APIs to adapt URLs to change what you are getting out of a site ie. Google calendar display on our website.
Can be used with our website – but they can be fragile, as they can break if you change your website.
Can use microformats – ie. Vcards for phones and internet.

Mashups using more than one data source to make something new – may be totally disparate. One of earliest was chicagocrime. org – Google maps and crime reports.
Libraries are using mashups involving Google maps and Flickr, Picture Australia has an open search interface – can add search to your browser options, Picture Australia with Google maps and geotagging, along with your location giving you photos of local area.

Code alert – a lot of  mashups involve XML. Jquery and YUI can help ease you into the process.

Where to start: Your library catalogue can help – check your RSS feeds – play with the XML and see what you can do.
data.australia.gov.au – data licensed for re-use under Creative Commons.

delicious.com/paulhagon/vala2010-lplate – links to all the resources and demos used.

Tools available to help – Yahoo Developer Network – YQL, use common language to extract XML. Yahoo Pipes, Firebug – plugin for Firefox.

Why? – Our community not just consumers, also producers once data is made available. Some of ours could be creating these sorts of things, if only the data is available – let our geeks loose on our data.

Semantic Web – Tom Tague

Check out stuff on semantic web on Wikipedia – good foundation.

Variety of interpretations: web 3.0, near religious standard, set of technical standards and capabilities we can use – very hard to define

Standards and Capabilities: RDF (resource description framework – form of XML – ugly but it is the standard), RDFS/OWL/Other ontology standards – great debate about these, Linked data, Automated semantic information generation.

OpenCalais – Thomas Reuters initiative to connect world’s business content, free service that brings new efficiencies and productivity to publishers and content creators, fastest easiest way to categorize your contentand tag the entities, facts and events therein; 30,000s of users, 4-8 million transactions daily.

Issues: attaching metadata to content is expensive – both in time and money.

Metadata generation – feed content into their extraction engine, categorizes the stories and returns the metadata to you, also returns links.

Linked data – standard for publishing data on the web – uses RDF -  add data as well as links to other relevant linked data (not webpages, actual data). Standard is exploding, but there is no governance – ‘geeks playing in highway’ – librarians can add a lot of value to this as well as using the data generated.

There are alternatives to Open Calais – Yahoo and more.

Use it to:  add metadata to cotent, content enhancement via linked data, build your own linked data could, but don’t just think source content (commentary, user submitted content)

Think about collections: repositories, trend analysis, harmonization across data sets, federated search.

Cloud Computing – Bart Rutherford
Geek and poke cartoons.

No standard definition of cloud computing – consistently about the internet however.

Charting –  input/processor/output, corporate computing – people with money had these systems (banking, transport).

Progress of clients – fat clients, thin clients, desktop computer as client, browser as client.

How things have changed: mobile as client, internet, cheap storage, broadband, wifi, 3G and LTE, Open source and Linux, Ipv6

Lots of different types of clouds – public eg Facebook, private – Intranet, hybrid. Joined by VPNs and virtualization (servers with sub-servers within it)

Saas, Iaas, Paas
Software as a service – vendor provides hardware and infrastructure, user interacts through PC – eg. Webmail, facebook, twitter, Apples App, Google Docs, BitTorrent, DropBox and so  much more.
Infrastructure as a service – Amazon, Microsoft Azure.
Platform as a service – software and development tools hosted on the providers infrastructure, access and delivery (API) – Google Apps, Yahoo Pipes, Google Maps, Sugar CRM, Finance eg. Paypal.

Complexity runs from low to high – moves from consumer to developer.

Services are based on buy as you use – like utility bills. Scalable – to meet your needs, cost effective – PAYG and low tech input, secure and automated, mobility.

Warnings – no network connection – no cloud, no local storage – no local data,  slow connections no good, what to do if provider is destroyed?

Global outlook – EASE – Everything as a service, everywhere!  Won’t matter where your data is, just need the power and network connection to get to it.

Discovery Layer Interfaces – Marshall Breeding
Crowded landscape of information providers on the web – lots of non-library destinations, ie. Google Search and Scholar, Amazon, Wikipedia, Ask.com.

Digital natives are more experienced than us in web stuff, so when they come to our websites and catalogues, they are way underwhelmed. Don’t want to lose relevancy to this audience who have been raised on those listed above.

Evolution of library collection discovery tools: bound handwritten catalogues, card catalogues, OPACs – many libraries have stagnated here, discovery interfaces, web-scale discovery services.

Not just about books on shelves, but about all our subscription content, digital items and more.

Don’t want a computerised card catalogue, although that is generally what we still have.  Amazon is our competition in terms of user interfaces and information presented.  They make it as transparent to the user as they can.  It has a complex layered structure, but with a simple user interface.

Have a lot of great content and services, but have too many barriers to our users accessing them.

Disjointed approach to delivery: silos prevail – catalogue, databases, website and more and each one has to be accessed individually.

Simple vision – single point of entry to all the content and services offered by the library, but wth precision, nuanced sophistication and multiple dimensions. Doesn’t preclude advanced searching options and ability to hone in on particular services or collections as alternative options.

Modernized interface – single search box, query tools (did you mean, type ahead), relevance ranked results, faceted navigation, enhanced visual displays – covers and summaries/reviews, recommendation services. Must be visually pleasing, give more than a single record and helps users find more.

Can have any front end almost regardless of what back end you use.

Deep indexing – metadata is no longer enough, increasing opportunities to search full content, commercial providers already doing so.

Current phase of discovery tools now focused on pre-populated indexes that aim to deliver Web-scale delivery eg. Summon, WorldCat  Local, EBSCO Discovery, Primo Central, Encore with Article Intergration.

Products available will index the vast majority of content that libraries have in their collections.

Beyond local discovery – eg. NCSU – Summon, Phoenix Public – Endeca (very Amazon like interface), Queens Public Library – Aquabrowser.

Need to make our search compelling, but not overwhelm our users with the guff about what and where they are searching.

Being social: apps for libraries – Kim Tairi
@haikugirloz

Social media conversion scale – image from – darmano.typepad.com

Social apps about conversations, marketing and communications with our users.

She follows High Country Public Library on Twitter – they talk about the library and things that are happening in their broader community as well.

Amongst top 10 tools for libraries – niche networks – eg, NING, built by users, focus on particular interest, UX – User experience, want to create good ones – starts at design and works through testing, evaluating and decision making.

More visual infographics – designing messages so they are clear, short, sharp. eg. The story (so far) of Twitter (image). Move to make visual communication more widespread.

Twitter can enhance your experience – back channel is interesting and adds to the experience. Librarians are sharing. Kim’s presentation was based a lot on the feedback she got from people on Twitter. It gives you a sense of community and helps to build a community. It is self-selecting, creates conversation, can be used for public note-taking and it’s interactive. Great as a personal learning network, both with workmates and colleagues at other libraries. Can get followed by bots or social media gurus, but can control it by blocking them or making your tweets private.

Mobile interfaces for catalogues and websites. Deakin Uni has done this. NYPL has an iPhone app. Can get into mobile interfaces, apps, info literacy, tours and QR codes (see Powerhouse Museu who are doing great things with these).

Technology petting zoos – letting users play with the new technology, as well as staff.

Social apps and networks have taken off since VALA2008 – need to get into it. Australia has now 7.9 million active Facebook users, there over 400 million worldwide.

eBooks – Bart Rutherford

File formats for ebooks include text, html, pdf, mobipocket, DjVu – magazine specific, EPUB – Kindle uses azw which is a modified mobipocket. Some locked in DRM, some not.

Can read ebook content on desktops, mobile phones etc – software includes Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket, Adobe Reader (pdf) and Calibre (open source read and convert).

EPUB – open publication structure – open XHTML, open packaging format – SML, OEBPS Container format – bundled ZIP file. Many readers that originally came out with proprietary formats are now opening up to EPUB. Keep watch out for EPUB and the devices that will read it.

DRM – Digital Rights Management (Bart’s boss calls it Don’t Read Me). PID Personal identification number – can restrict to one user, unlike print copy,  Access levels include print, copy, paste and now lending, depending on device and content.

Content – Amazon: Fiction to Kindle, Dymocks – using eBook library growing fiction, Gutenberg Project, Read Cloud, EBL – nonfiction, academic learning model using Adobe reader.

Should not have to worry about how the content gets on the device, it should just happen.

Publisher rights are still a problem, so a lot of content that could be available, is not because of these issues.

E-Paper technologies: Elerophoretic technology used by eInk, iRex, Sony Reader, Kindle, Plastic Logic Que. Use glass back pane, but they don’t flex so can break.

Cholesteric technology – Modified LCD, being used by Fujitsu FLEPia. Need to have a colour display which doesn’t require a backlight and doesn’t use as much power.

Combination of eInk and LCD – eg. Nook. LCD gets turned off when reading the ebook.

Electrowetting – controlled water/oil interface, then Electrofluidic technology which uses the former.  Deals with the issue of slow display and these devices will be able to show video.

Interferometric – wavelengths of light etc, uses reflective natural light, low power usage, which can also show video eg. mirasol

Growing market – lots of options and many more on the way. Be sure the one you choose does EPUB.

News Limited is launching the Skiff interface – from publishing to reading, including payment process and their own software.

Publishers will hopefully start putting material out in a wider range of formats so that multiple readers can access them.

The Dream for DRM – Desktop reading, when called away, you pick up where you left off on your e-reader, then the same again with your phone.  As you can with a book.

Today, 25th January, was Round 4 of the Library Day in the Life Project. The aim of the project is for librarian’s to document what they do in a day, for others to discover.  So here’s mine.

To give context, I am an Information Librarian working for the Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation – a public library service serving 300,000+ people in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.  We have 7 branch libraries and a mobile library.  My main area of responsibility is our online services, but I also work at our biggest branch.  I work half-time – Mondays, Thursdays and alternate Tuesdays.  Monday I work at HQ on online services – all day.

So here’s today.

8.30am – Arrived at work at our Regional HQ, which I do every Monday. Spent the next 30 minutes checking email, printing off articles for later reading, catching up on memos, bookmarking sites of interest, returning and renewing my loans and a brief moment catching up with the Finance Manager on the progress of our intranet development.

9.00am – Checked for updates to Drupal modules for our website and downloaded, then uploaded the only one required.  Also took the opportunity to delete old versions of modules that were no longer required, both locally and on our IPS’s server.

Discussed adding information about our mobile library’s forthcoming renovation to the website.

Posted a review received from one of our local teens via our website, to our teen review blog.  Added an image and a catalogue linking before publishing it and then refreshed the feed on our website so it would appear there too.

Updated a post on our Staff training blog, with information emailed me by the reviewing staff member. Made some minor additional changes to that post of my own as well.

9.30am – Posted information on our website in several places, about the Mobile Library renovations.

Being the day before a public holiday, we were very quiet at HQ as many staff took the opportunity to enjoy a long weekend. So I spent some time filling in urgent requests for stationery etc that were phoned in from the branches.

Worked on the agenda for our forthcoming Information Services team meeting that is on the week I return from leave.

10.00am – Lots more bits and pieces (did I mention that there were lots of people taking a long weekend).

Chatted briefly with my boss, who was seconded to help out at one  of our branches, which resulted in me taking on the answering of email questions for the day. Quickly cleared up a few procedural queries, started the process on a claims returned and sought further information on an inter-library loan request from a staff member at one of our local Councils.  Was quite pleased that I found the article he requested, even with minimal information and so was he when I emailed him both the full citation and a link to the full article not long afterwards.

11.00am – Morning tea done after successfully completing that information request, it was now onto a new blog post for our library news blog. Spent some time looking for inspiration and accidently came across links on our catalogue that I hadn’t noticed before. Ended up blogging about the public holiday tomorrow instead, as one of our libraries will be open to support the Book Sale that their Friends’ group is running.

11.30am – Did a backup of our email newsletter subscribers lists. Not very exciting, but very necessary. Then investigated further the new catalogue features and with the assistance of a colleague, figured out exactly how they worked and started thinking about how they could be taken advantage of by our users.  That’s another blog post in the making – but not today.

12.00noon – Received an information request from the mobile library on behalf of one of their users (via email). Rang the mobile to clarify the request and the context and within the half hour I had a emailed a list of websites and book titles to be passed onto to the user.

12.30pm – Lunchtime and I escaped the building for a short time. Normally I would go out to lunch with my HQ partners in crime, but they were either on leave or elsewhere.

1.30pm – Played with ideas and images for a new slide for our website’s events slideshow. Gave up on it afer a time – software kept crashing and I couldn’t find the inspiration to make the slide more than bland.  Will get back to it on Thursday.

2.00pm – Had a quick revisit of Event Brite. We are trialling it for online booking of library events, for a seminar we are holding in February. Chatted again with my boss to catch up on the day’s happenings and the week ahead.

Spent most of the rest of the time trying to work out how to get an imported Javascript working in Drupal. Lots of cutting, pasting, saving, trialling and repeating the process all over again. Got it working, but with lots of extraneous information, which when I remove it, kills the operation of the form. Its working for now, so will look at it again on Thursday.

4.00pm – Checked my Google alerts and Twitter searches for mentions of our libraries and service in those areas. Twitter mentions are growing slowly and we always get plenty of mentions on Google.

Began reviewing our brochures on online resources. Started considering how I could get the content of two to three brochures down into one.

Created three new book cover images and associated information to use in our books slide show on our library homepage.  Uploaded these and then deleted the three oldest ones – we have a 4 weekly cycle on these.

Filled it out with other bits and pieces (did I mention there were many people away) and then called it a day just after 5pm.

So that was my day – never realised how busy it was and how much territory I covered until I documented it.  Hope you find it interesting.

See you next Library Day in the Life Day!

I’ve been pondering again. So I’m going to inflict it on you.

We have recently added Chili Fresh reviews to our catalogue.  I like it, its easy to use, easy to add reviews, we have the weight of Chili Fresh reviews from around the world to populate our catalogue and they have some really cool social networking features coming soon.

Tagging from the Darien Catalogue

But Chili Fresh doesn’t have user tagging (at least not yet).  Which of course got me thinking about tagging.

A common problem experienced in public libraries and I’m sure in other libraries too, is when you have a user come up and say something like:

“Can you help me, I’m looking for a book that I have had before. Its about gardening, its green and its about this big (demonstration using hands).”

They can’t remember anything about the author, but sometimes they can remember more about the content.  In the above type of example, it would be something about vegetables.

Barring miraculous circumstances, (like you have read that same book), or the luck of finding said book on shelf or trolley in roughly the place you would expect it to be, the likelihood of finding it with that information alone is nigh impossible.

So my reasoning was that if users could tag our catalogue records with that sort of information, it we be of great use to both them and us in finding that same title in future.

A few problems with my reasoning as I pondered further.

First would be getting the users to tag the details in the first place. Although we have a few people (more than we expected) putting reviews on our catalogue, it is nowhere near critical mass.

Second, do you know how many green books about gardening, let alone vegetables, we have?

And finally, the piece de resistance.  You finally find that book that the user was so desperate for and the only thing they got right was that it was about gardening. As for the rest of it, the subject was hydroponics, the book was orange and it was a very different shape and size.

Now only if we could tag each item by its actual details as well as its perceived details, we might have something.  But by then, the tags will take up more than a screen of detail and would probably send the catalogue search feature into meltdown.

When we do get tagging (and we will somehow, someday), we won’t stop our users from adding this sort of information, but I guess only experience will be able to tell us if it will be of any help.

What sort of ideas have you had about new technologies, which might not work so well in a library situation?  Maybe we can help you resolve your problems around it. Would also love to hear your thoughts on this one.

We all know about the various loyalty schemes run by the big chains, whether they are supermarkets, airlines, department stories, online sellers etc.  Even small coffee shops do coffee cards to encourage repeat patronage.

However, I came across the rewarding of customer loyalty in a different way recently, which got me thinking about this topic again.

We have a local set of shops close to home, mostly food related (I know its a hardship…. lol). I regularly visit the local Charcoal Chicken shop because they have great chips and salads.  Over time, because they are great people and because I understand what its like being on their side of the counter, I have developed a relationship with the staff that work there.  You can imagine my delight when they told me recently that I was their favourite customer (and not just because I bought lots of stuff there).

This customer loyalty has not just been rewarded by their friendship and the conversations we share, but in other ways.  I have been shouted lunch as a Christmas gift and I now get a discount on anything I buy from them (and as I said, that’s often because it is so good!).

That got me thinking about customer loyalty at the local level.  They are a single shop, so don’t have have the buying power of a chain behind them, so anything they do comes directly from their end profit.  So I really appreciate the discount, because I know what it costs them.

Now translate that to the library world.  We all have great regular customers who utilise our services and borrow our items weekly if not more often. I know of library users who are on our website and catalogue almost daily.  How can we reward those customers, encourage them to make even more use of the library and to also be our unheralded ambassadors to all they know?

One problem with this concept, especially in the bigger library where I work, is being able to identify these regulars.  We have so many staff, who work at different libraries, so we don’t always realise that the people we serve each day are loyal, regular users.  Sure we recognise some, but it wouldn’t been fair to offer a customer loyalty service to some and not others.  So how do we discover these people?

The next problem is what do we offer them? We don’t charge to place holds at our library, so we can’t offer free holds for them. We do charge fines, but are hoping to remove those in future, so even if we could discount fines for our regulars, it would only be a (hopefully) short term solution. We have unlimited loans on most item types, although we still have some limits on AV, so maybe there’s  potential there.

Some may say that our services and collections, being free, are reward enough. They are a reward in their own right, but my charcoal chicken place provides good quality food at a reasonable price and still give me a discount for loyalty (and being a nice person… ).

So the only things I have been able to come up with for our loyal, regular library users, have been discounted fines and increased AV limits.  Anything else that you can think of would be appreciated. These people are the lifeblood of our public library and deserve to be rewarded.  Please help me to figure out how we could do that.

And by the way, Happy New Year!

As promised, here is the update.  Its quick.  Check out the previous blog post for the details of what happened, and for Monique (Branch Managers) update in the comments.

The cleaners did a great job and the carpet was dry and library staff were able to put all the shelving back to its normal places by late Friday afternoon.

Children's area as it was and is again

Although there was close on 100 items affected by water, only about 12 had to be withdrawn, mostly magazines and humour which were on fixed shelving.  The rest of the affected books were dried out, the minor damage noted and returned to circulation.

Eighteen interior roofing tiles will be replaced, due to the water damage.  The cause was the amount of rain – it was too much, too quickly and the gutters and drainage just couldn’t cope.  Barring another such storm, it is not expected to happen again.

As of yesterday, the Council Offices were still drying out sections of their carpet affected by the flood.  The shopping centre mostly returned to normal operations by Monday just gone, although the cinema complex, where 9 out of the 10 cinemas were flooded, only reopened yesterday.  ( the noise of many wails heard from teenage girls not able to see New Moon locally, finally abated).

We were very fortunate in terms of where the flood hit us – it was not near electronic equipment and in the only part of the library where 90% of the collection was on wheels.  So between placement and fast acting staff, we got off very lightly.  Now its as if it never happened.

Business as usual.

It could have been a lot worse, but with so many people expressing their empathy, I thought I would take the time to blog the story of my library being flooded.  I will blog later about the implications further down the track.

Yesterday in Melbourne (Thursday 26th November), a severe thunderstorm came through, causing widespread damage across Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.  I had seen the warnings via Twitter and had warned library staff, but we didn’t expect the impact that we got.

At about 3pm, the sky went so dark that our carpark lights came on automatically.  The area also went very still – trees stopped moving, as did many birds. At 3.05pm the wind started really moving and a few minutes later the rain came down. The best way I can describe it was cyclonic. I was watching from the staff room and it reminded a little of those TV reports you see live from cyclone affected areas.

The children's area at the time of recarpeting

Moments later, we heard the fuss out in the library and raced out to discover a waterfall running down from the roof, near the windows  in our children’s area – along a length of about 20 metres.  You can see the windows in the background of the picture here, this one taken at the time of recarpeting.

Fortunately, most of our children’s shelving is on wheels, so staff had quickly moved it out of harms way in just moments.  However, rain was still pouring outside and still waterfalling inside.  Every bucket and bin we could find was placed under the downpour, but it didn’t make much difference, the amount of water coming in was too great.

Fortunately, 10 minutes after the storm had begun – it stopped.  The storm front moved on and we began the process of assessing the damage and clearing up as best we could.  We dug around for equipment to help, finding a couple of mops, a stiff brush and a long armed window washer (which is great not only for windows, but only for squeezing water out of carpet tiles).

Calls were made to the Council and to our HQ for assistance and direction.  Unfortunately, due to the state of other Council buildings in the area, there was not much assistance available from Council, so we got to work ourselves.

We were concerned about the state of our roof tiles, especially after hearing the news of roof collapses in the nearby shopping centre, Council offices and swimming pool.  Ours held.

Flooding at Narre Warren Library

The clean up involved sopping up the extra water, which had spread close to our front desk, with the mops and using the brush and squeegee to push as much of it out the emergency exit as possible.  Once there was no longer a flood on top of the carpet tiles, the next job was to try and squeeze the excess water out of the sopping ones.  Fortunately, as we had only been recarpeted a year ago, the tiles were still relatively clean.  Still it meant, shoes off and pants rolled up – not the usual library staff look.

In the meantime, other staff were checking for other leaks (none fortunately) and removing stock which had been affected by the downfall.  Much of it just needed a quick wipe down, but even with the speedy response by staff, there was some stock damaged (I’d estimate up to 100 titles), so they took them out the staff area to remove the excess water and set them up to dry, in the hope of saving at least some of them.

Drying out water affected stock

The library did not close at any time during this whole affair and we were able to provide access to at least part of the childrens collections during that time.

After all that, a reassessment of the flooded area and some more judicious shelf rearranging, staff were able to reopen access to all of the children’s collections, whilst leaving the flooded areas and a good safety margin, roped off to all access.

When I left work at 6pm, the cleaners had arrived, with equipment to sop up even more water, before putting the blowers to work on drying out the tiles.

We were very lucky.  Even though it was a short storm, because of the leak’s  location and the quick action of staff, major damage was averted.

Will report more on the aftermath next week, when I know more about what we’ve lost in terms of collections and the condition of the roof.

I began the afternoon session with a presentation on Web 2.0 and Marketing in Libraries.

Unfortunately for the organising commitment, they had a second last minute cancellation, but were fortunate enough to have a couple of people step up and show what they were doing at their library.  Danny was first.

Darebin Libraries Website – Danny

Their website redevelopment began about 18 months ago. Advice for anyone who has a website – take your website content, print it out as pages, put them on the floor and see if you can navigate between them easily.

Its all about content, content, content. It needs to be coherent, accessible, and minimal.

Everything on Darebin website has been developed in HTML or XML.  No plugins required.  You need to be sure that anyone can access your site, without needing the latest software versions etc.  See W3C guidelines.

Firefox has a HTML validator plug-in which will validate your code, against the W3C guidelines. If there are HTML or CSS errors in your website, then Google will drop you down in search results.

Need HTML fonts that anyone can read and contrasting background colours.

Social networking will only work for you if you have a great, well working website.  The social networking aims to bring users back to the library website, so you have to get that right first.

They use a content management system for their website,  Convoy CMS produced by Roadhouse, customised for Darebin.  Roadhouse also developed the new PLEASED website for public libraries on disability topics.

Vision Australia has a free toolbar to validate your website.

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Fiona was the second step-in speaker.

Yarra Plenty Libraries Website Redevelopment – Fiona.

Their redevelopment is going live in March 2010. They are going with the  Biblio Commons Discovery layer to bring the catalogue into the website.  Keep the branding and the menus consistent with the website, even when it moves into the catalogue on doing a search.

You can create collections, mark for later and create lists, which can be public or private.  You are able to share and bookmark using a wide variety of Web 2.0 tools.

You can send messages to other users through Bibliocommons, follow them etc.  Can also block them.

It all looks very interesting.  The Bibliocommons website takes you to customer websites to check out.

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Pam Saunders and Elwyn Murray -  Talking about my generation – giving perspective on what their generation is interested in.

Pam Saunders  is gen X  and she has 10 library cards – a library junkie.  No one library gives her what she needs.  She lives in the city and the country.  She carries these cards in a wallet which also contains reviews, notes, recommended books, etc that she wants to get from her library.  She looks to which library can get it and which will get it to her the quickest.

Her first point of contact will be the library website.  Her impressions of library services, their reputations, will come from this. The best websites will be presented the same way that a house for sale is.  Pruned down, uncluttered.  Some libraries have other features that she is not aware of, because they havent sent them to her or she hasnt seen them on the library website.

Facebook – you can overload people with information that is not always relevant, so be careful about how much you dish out.  Don’t make her have too many user names and passwords.  Can find out interesting statistics about your Facebook users from Facebook itself.

Doesn’t like a big sign saying that you can pay your overdue fines online – not as a first thing. Put the positive things online, the not so delightful things should be tucked away – not unfindable, but not in your face.

Gen Y – Elwyn – uses the power of the Net to drive personal interest. Used Facebook to promote an event and got an unexpectedly good response.

Elwyn agreed with Leith’s earlier assertions, when you engage with people, you also engage with their networks. People attend events because they have an interest, because they know someone who is in it or because they know someone who is going.

You need to be personal in your approach, even if its in a broadcast medium like Facebook. Viral marketing plays a big role in promotion.

Things he is addicted to include: FFFFound – image bookmarking and Future Shipwreck – he also links to post things to Tumblr (microblogging tool).

Tends to shy away from institutions on the internet – wants to hear individuals’ opinions, not the company line.

Does a lot of buying online, reads a lot of blogs, doesn’t listen to the radio anymore.

Is he a library member?
Yes.

Why did they publish a hard copy of their book, rather than just online?
Easy to digitally curate things, but there is a different status level to a printed copy.  If you can buy it, it is a way of showing appreciation and a way to own the content, which is different to the online. Had a grant to do it.

So that was the day.  It finished with the LibMark Marketing awards – one of which was one by my library, for our teen blog  Quicksand. Woohoo!

Thanks to the LibMark Committee for an insightful and interesting day.  I will chasing up more than a few things for my library.

After my last post,  it seems only appropriate that this one is my notes taken from a marketing seminar.

LibMark, which is the marketing subcommittee of the Public Libraries Victoria Network, ran a full day seminar on Digital Marketing and Libraries on Friday 23rd October.  From here on in are my notes from the day, which was great – I came away with a lot of ideas and new perspectives.  Hopefully these notes can give you some too.

The keynote speaker was Darren Sharpe -  Senior Consultant at collabforge, who spoke on “Social Media, Marketing and Public Libraries”.  (His presentation is available at http://www.slideshare.net/dasharp/social-media-marketing-public-libraries)

Australians are generally early adopters of technology.  We have one of the highest rates of mobile phone ownership in the world. 3/4s of Australian online adults use soical media and 1/4 have created their own content (Forrester Research).  Our largest online demographic is the 35-44 year olds (Gen X), followed by the 25-34, then the 45-54 and then the 18-24s.

Marketing has changed, it is now pull not push, many to many not only one to many, its about conversation now not just a message, its peer to peer not organisation controlled and its generative not static. Marketing is no longer fully in our hands to control and we need to be aware of this and to learn how to make the most of it.

Social media comprises:

• connection – which enables people, data, events and issues to meet u

• community – there is a lot of power in self-organising groups, which have represent an identity, have common purpose, trust and representation (See Seth Godin’s book Tribes)

• context – where you can interpret, find, personalise and complement content that you find -

• co-creation – take existing content, change it, add to it and more, then share it again

When talking about new forms of value, He gave us a quote from jeff Jarvis (2005) in “Who wants to own content”, which in its purest form says “The value is in relationships. The value is in trust.”

The new values in today’s social media are sharing, reputation, collaboration, attention, transparency, trust, authenticity and openness.

So what is the challenge for public libraries?

1. Connect your with your community via Social Media (highlighted Boroondara’s blogs)
2. Provide access to open data, tools and APIs (he gave examples from the Gov 2.0 Workforce)
3. Build engaging user communities – our own tribes around a common purpose (WePlan Alpine and Open Austin)
4. Enable crowdsourcing – so our users can feel involved (NLA Digitisation – OCR checking)
5. Facilitate the acquisition of new literacies – help our users to learn and interact with today’s online environment

Libraries are rich with social objects – books for one, other items, that people can gather around, around which tribes can be built. We can provide the right conditions for tribes to flourish.

Libraries are only going to become more important as our communities look to use for our informational leadership.

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Matthew Hunter from Thorpe-Bowker then gave a demonstration of Library Thing for Libraries and Aqua Browser, which I had seen before.  What was news was that there is a new interface for Global Books in Print (I think this is it) on its way – something to look forward to.

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Matthew Van Hasselt from the State Library of Victoria (SLV) gave an excellent presentation on email newsletters and why they still have a place in our emarketing strategies.

SLV’s communications needs is to communicate broadly their range of offerings to geodemographically diverse audiences. They do this through traditional paid media advertising, in-house promotional materials, signage, website, editorials in media, social media and through their email newsletter. They use multiple solutions so that the message is communicated as widely as possible and so that they can ensure it is received by as many people as possible.

Email is considered by many to be old hat, a thing of the past, so why use it for marketing?  Email has many things in its favour, including: its a long standing communication tool – accepted and stable, its cheap and fast, measurable, understood, more formal than social media and more widely available – its not blocked by filters and more people have email addresses than social networking accounts.

One of the problems with social media is knowing which of the many tools out there to invest your resources in.  There is also the question of longevity, not only in the tools themselves, but in people’s dedication to them.  Whereas email has proven staying power and high use.

So how do you market via email?

• Always ask permission – NEVER spam
• Understand what your users want
• Decide how you will give them what they want
• Keep it simple, clear and to the point
• Be responsive

What to consider in design? Matthew gave us some information from Nielson’s “Surviving inbox congestion”, including:

• Average time given to an email newsletter after opening is 51 seconds
• Only 19% of content is fully read
• Content is mostly scanned
• 35% of users only skim a small part of the content

Important stuff we need to be aware of before immersing ourselves:

• Have a straightforward subscribing and unsubscribing process
• Have an easy to read privacy policy
• Offer both text and html options – for equality of access
• Strip formatting from the text option – it can much it up otherwise – use Notepad to do this
• Make sure all images have tags – for accessability
• Check all links twice, more if you can
• Have someone else proof read your work
• Use a clear sender address ie. the name of your organisation
• Create brief and relevant subject lines that will engage your reader

He recommend the Inverted pyramid of writing, where the information the reader must have for the communication to be successful is first, then the helpful but not crucial information, then lastly the bonus but not necessary content.  You want to be sure they get the important stuff if they only read for a short time.

Always give your users the option to view the enewsletter in a browser and include all the important links at the bottom of the newsletter.

For more examples, check out the Australian Writers’ Guild (awg.com), Empire Online (empireonline.co.uk), BabyCentre.com and DailyOm.com.

Software services that offer email newsletters include MailChimp, iContact, Vertical Response and Mail Out.

Last notes:

• Subscribe to your newsletter and test the experience
• Don’t build your newsletter in email software
• Get advice from someone already doing it
• Learn some basic HTML for tweaking if needed
• Keep it simple from the start
• Be happy with the limitations of the medium

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Leith Baggs stepped in on the day to replace a last minute cancellation and did a great presentation on viral marketing.   (her presentation is available on the LibMark blog at http://libmarketing.blogspot.com/)

Viral marketing is a broader form of word of mouth – as new internet tools give us a way to spread the marketing message indirectly as well as directly through our users.  Each person online has on average a network of 8-12 people in their close network – people who they would pass important messages onto.

Using such networks, a message’s exposure could grow exponentially, whilst being sustainable as well as cheap to distribute once the product has been created – after all its your users doing all the work of spreading the message!

Tips for great viral marketing:

• Stand out from the crowd
• Make it emotionally charged enough that people will send it on
• Include something unexpected, weird or naughty to gain attention
• Tell a story that people will want to share

YouTube is a great place to load your viral marketing product.

• Creating a video is easy and YouTube is free for posting.
• Homemade videos are fine and should be no longer than 3 minutes (shorter is better)
• Descriptions should be clear and specific (shouldn’t be hard for librarians )
• Don’t use fake customer insertions – product placement is OK though
• Invite your communities to submit videos
• Tell everyone about it
• Make sure bloggers know about it
• But most of all, have fun and experiment.

Viral marketing can also be about a simple email that meets the tips above. Make sure you personalise it so that it comes from a familiar source (ie. your library name).  However, beware of being a spammer and respect the privacy of your users – you must get their contact details from them directly.

Some great examples of viral marketing:

• Dove Evolution – http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com.au/dove-self-esteem-fund/default.asp
• Hotmail (link at the bottom of each email inviting you to get your own account)
• Burger King Subservient Chicken - http://www.bk.com/en/us/campaigns/subservient-chicken.html
• Fruit Burst – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZlhHsMXl6Y

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The next session was Katie Dawson on Accessible Online Places for your Events.  Unfortunately I lost my notes on this session, but I can advise you to check EventBrite as a potential event booking tool for your library.  I know I will be.

I will post the rest of my notes from the afternoon in Part 2, coming soon.

Been thinking a lot lately about the dreaded M word – one that often makes librarians apprehensive and quickly pointing it out as someone else’s job.   I used to believe it myself, but can honestly say that it is no longer true.

Maspalomas, Canary Islands

The M word is marketing.  Libraries have called it many other things, including outreach, community engagement and more.  Why is it dreaded?  I can think of several reasons including that it reminds people of shonky salespeople (who would want that sort of reputation?), because cold calling people is awkward and uncomfortable and because often librarians are introverted.  Not that these are bad things necessarily.  Can you think of other reasons why it affects library staff so negatively?

Anyway, I have been thinking about this for a while. I have been try to look at my job from an object point of view , looking at why and how I am doing things, not just what. Then this morning I read a blog post Outreach is (un)Dead at In the library with the leadpipe.  It expressed some of what I had been thinking about and is worth a read.

I am responsible for my library’s website and in the whole my daily work includes updating blogs, slideshows and other elements of virtual services.  We have several blogs and the ones I post to either review titles in our collection and/or share news about the library and its services or things happening in our community. The slideshows do the same. So I spend a proportion of my work day directly marketing.

It goes further than that though. In my interactions with customers, I find myself marketing.  Do you know about the library website?  I love that author, have you tried this one?  (on noting what they are borrowing) Did you know that we have this event coming?

And it goes further again.  I said on Facebook (via Twitter) the other day, that I was taking my kids to the library.  A Facebook friend replied that they didn’t think that was too exciting.  The conversation went back and forth for a bit and by the end of it, she was asking me for the details of our storytimes and which would be best for her child.

Marketing is becoming second nature now and its great that it is. We have so much great stuff at the library, collections, services and events and we should be talking them up every chance we get, whether its in person, in print, display or online.  It never ceases to amaze me that even well established library members are not always aware of the breadth of things that we offer – so we should continually be raising their awareness as well as reaching out to others not yet making use of their local library.

Why that is needed, is not necessarily our fault alone.  We can do more to promote  our libraries to our users and to potential users – but we are restricted by limited space, time and budgets, so we can’t do as much as could be done. On the otherhand, our users can have tunnel vision when they visit the library and not see beyond what they are focused on.

So I guess the next thing is for us to get serious about marketing as part of every library staff member’s job description and find ways within our work and our libraries, to promote everything we do and offer.  Its awesome stuff, its free and its relevant.  And it doesn’t have to be an uncomfortable process, it can be as simple as having a friendly conversation.

Marketing for me is no longer the M word – its a key part of my work and I am looking forward to doing a better job of  it.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Marketing and Libraries – check out the M-Word blog, Marketing at the Library Success wiki and of course your local library associations and organisations.

Through all my years as a librarian and the different roles I have had, I have always worked with reference collections, usually pretty closely.  Until recently, where my role has been working with the virtual more than print of any type.

But as part of my appraisal this year, one of my goals was to weed the reference collection at our biggest branch.  This collection has filled 17 bays of 5 shelves each.

It has been quite a few years since it has been weeded well, beyond replacing superseded editions.  And it shows.  I went in expecting to weed maybe up to 40% of the collection.  So far, I have weeded just over half of the collection and the proportion of the collection that had been weeded out is over 60%.

It may have been much higher, but that included our motor manual collection – which coincidentally is the best used part of reference and which, therefore,  will not be hitting the lending shelves or withdrawals anytime soon. And there are other classic titles too, which are much too precious for their unique content, that likewise will not make that journey.

Fair price on the scales by purplbutrfly

The weeding hasn’t been hard to do either.  I’m a chucker rather than a hoarder, but I think that even a hoarder would be hard pressed to keep more than 50% of the collection.  The amount of dust accumulated on each title shows how little the majority of the collection is used in these days of online information domination.

Fortunately, a lot of what I have weeded has gone straight to our lending collection.  It is good quality information, if just a bit dated now, but I’m sure that most of it will do well there, much better than it has done in reference in recent times.

Which brings me back to the hybrid idea.  Print reference is not dead in my library, not yet, but it is no longer the force that it was.  Now it seems that print reference is a backstop to our online resources and the internet, whereas it was always the other way around.  Now its where you go, when its too hard or really to obscure to find something online. And even that’s changing.

For a long time, when talking collection development, we talked about the hybrid library – finding the balance between print and electronic resources. When it comes to reference type material, the scales are now definitely tipped in favour of the electronic.

Its funny though. Even though I work on the library’s virtual spaces and spend a lot of my time online and love it, it has been surprising in a way to see the stalwart of information services – the reference collection, whittled away so, in importance as well as in collection size.  I have long appreciated going to the reference shelves and being virtually guaranteed of finding a book that would help with that immediate user need. I think that I still have some of the romance of the book attached to the librarian in me.

So as our print reference collections dwindle, alongside their corresponding budgets, I say goodbye to the hybrid library.  Online is now dominant in the world of reference, both in the eyes of staff and users.  This is not a bad thing, as there are things online that people seek which we would likely never had in a print reference resource.  But as they go, I cant help but feel a tiny bit wistful for what was.

Maybe because it was the bastion of librarian’s assistance to our users – where we could take them to discover the world of information – something that is not so easy or so common in the online world? Maybe its as I said before that there is romance in books and reference books are  a category all of their own. Maybe its because reference books were always something special, a unique type of book not appropriate for any other location.  Maybe its because each reference book was a treasure just waiting to be discovered.

I’m not sure why it is, I just know that the end of this era is coming fast and its one I will miss.

How about you?