Connecting Librarian

Lighting the FUSE: innovation and partnerships by Rita Ellul and Indra Kurzeme

SLV and Department of Childhood Learning had an agreement to deliver 25 unified projects over 2010-11 financial year.

SLV was involved in this project to extend its reach. They were already good at information management, but project management externally was a new area for them. They had past collaborations and had good relationships with external agencies and they are in the learning business. They have a strong focus on preofessional development and research is a major part of their business.

How do they take their information management skills outside the library? Took the same principles of right information with the right people at the right time. This project met all these requirements.

They set up a Ning page to faciliate collaboration and utilised other people networks to get the assistance needed, when it was required. SLV faciliated a range of groups in getting them resourced and able to get their projects completed in the set time. It was a weekly update and prompt. They also provided a lot of professional development, which was totally funded.

Essentially what they built was a library of digital education resources.

 Had to determine what digital content needed to look like for the kids. the projects are housed in the FUSE repository. It incorporates 27,000 digital resources, is content and quality assured, is searchable by teachers and students.

FUSE provided Web 2.0 functionality, integrated active collaboration for students, was linked to VELS and open-ended.

Sample projects: Act Wild (Zoos Victoria) -information and events, but also a range of activities that can be undertaken offline – making a difference on an issue. Also has an iPhone app. Also has a blog where the kids can ask questions of library staff.

Travelbugs (Asian Education Foundation) – information about Asian countries, through visiting countries, go on to blogs, ask questions and more. It is still being used in the Sister School program.

Vidfest (SYN Media) – information about how to host a film festival at their school, has teacher support and resources, guidelines for filmmakers and hosting space for uploaded films.

Virtual History Centre (History Teachers Association) – kids create an avatar and enter a virtual world to do a tour of the Quarantine Station, both the virtual museum and a virtual copy of the station. Includes in world activities and teacher resources.

They work done has created resources that will truly support the work of the teacher and the learning of students.

Online learning: eMpowering eFutures through developing staff capability at Monash University Libraries – Lisa Smith and Steven Yates

Monash University Libraries has 6 libraries in Australia and 2 overseas, with 260+ FTE staff, including casuals. They work in partnerships with faculties and other areas of the university. They offer increasingly interactive and engaging resources, services, tools and spaces.

Program was founded on both the unversity’s and the library’s Digital Education strategies, which has a blended learning approach.

The library’s strategy is underpinned by a research approach, which consists of four areas – methods and approaches to development of self, develop staff capability, identifying content and exploration of tools and learning environments.

Capability: training, providing tools and standards, consultation.

The aims of the course were toe develop the knowledge and skills of Library staff to create e-learning tutorials using Adobe Captivate and to create several useful online tutorials (some of which are created by staff).

Course was run in Moodle, using a constructivist learning approach and involved 12 task based activities and 3 workshops, with real life outcomes which matched up to important milestones and was a blended learning course. Most took place online, but also involved face to face.

Mostly doing stuff, but also evaluation. Involved higher order thinking from creation to assessment. Used multiple methods and design experiments for the learning experience, with the emphasis on qualitative feedback and tasks artifacts.

There were 12 course participants, 2 expert reviewers and 1 participant observer.

Course was developed using mindmapping, then was storyboarded, from which it was developed.

Course commenced in June 2011 and was designed to run for two months, but ran to 6 months due to work commitments. Three projects were completed.

Evaluation determined that the course was effective as they all produced effective e-learning resources, with minimal technical expertise. Participants gave a good rating, but there were areas to improve, including improving clarity, reduced workload, software practice, negotiating time to complete tasks.

Next steps: consider next and ongoing interactions, improve submission process and documentation, confirm staff development process and time allocation, improve evaluation, increase collaboration, include staged reporting and enhance the staff e-learning development process.

Playing at professional development? – Ellen Forsyth

How much do you play how much do you work.

92% of Australian homes have electronic games devices. 59% play for an about an hour a day. (only 3% for five hours or more).

Ellen joined up to World of Warcraft a few years ago and is now involved in training in the library in that space. The library is in a public space, but the interaction between participants is restricted to the particular guild. Transcripts are saved to a wiki. Ellen has been running these professional development talks in this space for 12 months.

Even though presenters kept presenting and people kept attending, it was still hard to know whether it was working. She went back to the participants to find out how it went.

Speakers are speed typists. Questions from attendees are best as YELLED out. And it is up to the speaker to acknowledge and respond.

Talks have been about using games in the library, reflections on play – pedagogy and World of Warcraft, WOW in schools, how children learn from computer games.

Presenter feedback – thought it was good, but they have to be a fast typist and fast reader. All presenters were game players, but not all had been WOW players, but they adapted well. It was more relaxing and they enjoyed it more. It also involved trust – on the Internet, no-one knows you’re a dog. They found it easier to engage with the attendees.

Results are skewed because it only involved participants. They came from the US and Australia – from ages 20 to 50 and from across library sectors  etc. You could participate even if you couldn’t play. They came because they thought it was the right environment in which to learn about this. The cost entry was low, allowing them to tap into international knowledge for the cost of a WOW subscription. Transcripts were useful for picking up on things they missed.

Series of talks is just the start of exploring the use of games into libraries and for players to be involved in professional development in the games environment. Implications for bringing in reluctant potential participants are still being explored.

Alison Delitt and Sarah Schindeler – NLA – Trove – the terrors and triumphs of service-based social media

Trove – free online search tool that brings together bibliographic records from libraries and archives. Best known for OCR, human corrected digitised newspapers.

Trove already has an interactive base – including lists, tagging, comments and more. Social media channel attached to it 18 months ago.

NLA has a Facebook page, Twitter channel and YouTube channel. NLA posts all of the content – using the corporate brand as the online identity. Use your brand to attract attention and followers – fits with a business model.

Difficulty in serving all our users in any depth, due to their diversity. Its both good and interesting, but can make it difficult for us to deliver content online which is appropriate for a large proportion of our users.

Social media is a free puppy – there is a cost – in generating content, monitoring and responding to users, archiving content, exploring new tools. NLA is investigating tools such as HootSuite to monitor their online social engagement.

More specialist channels, like British Library’s Magnificent Maps blog, Reel Culture, Dinosaur Tracking, From the Catbird Seat, Children’s Literature @ NYPL. Advantage of these is that you can focus in and users are more likely to tune in and engage with their content.

Unfortunately, we are not able to engage with all of our users, regardless of what we do. Our users and their interests are just too varied.

Results of their 12 month trial with social media. Had no resources to invest in social media, so there was no publicity or marketing of these presences. The first thing they did right was setting their aims for Trove’s social media:

To increase use of Trove

To increase the visiblility of Trove

To provide customer service to Trove

To solicit feedback about Trove, in order to improve the service

Getting it wrong was not thinking about which social media channels they should use. They thought they could re-purpose the content for use across different channels. They couldn’t do it easily.

Facebook didn’t work for them – there were some technical issues, but they weren’t able to resources many different feeds. Need to acknowledge that it is a far more interactive presence and requires more work than a broadcast medium like Twitter. So they moved away from Facebook quite quickly.

Twitter worked perfectly for them. Their aim of constantly exposing their content. Were able to use quirky humour. Thought it would be used differently than it was. Rather than linking to blog posts which contained multiple Trove links, they instead linked directly to digitised snippets. Side benefit was a huge growth in media interest in the content shared and in Trove itself.

Under-estimated how quickly and easy it was to communicate to and with their user base. When you treat your user with that sort of respect, you get a return of good will.

When you user has a win using your service, you are more likely to receive a complimentary tweet, than you are to get an email etc.

Twitter presence is not just about getting Twitter followers, but to get people to come into Trove itself.

There is a cost to not operating in this space. If we are not there, we are missing what people are saying about us and missing a chance to get your message out.

Tim Sherratt – Mining the treasures of Trove: new tools and technologies

1913 – the year that Canberra was officially founded. It was also the year before World War 1 began. Showed a word cloud based on articles from Trove which included the phrase “the future”. It included 11,000 articles. To make this job easy, Tim created a Python script which harvests the data in a form which you specify. Instead of 35,000 clicks, it was a handful.

Once the text files were returned, they were cleaned up. He was able to identify consistent OCR errors and bulk correct them. Once done, we combined them into one file and then put the file into Voyant (a text exploration tool). More refining to remove stop words, so that the more significant terms could come to the fore.

There are a number of tools besides Voyant, that enable you to explore text in interesting ways. Mallet will look at large amounts of text and identify themes (clusters). You have to do some work and decide what the clusters relate to. Natural Language Processing Toolkit (python resource) – enabled him to extract the next six words after a given phrase.

None of these are analyses on their own, they are starting points for future research. They are ways of peeking inside the dataset and helping to decide what approach to use. However, it can be rather slow.

How to speed up the process?

Used QueryHarvester which examined how many articles mentioned your search terms, as compared to the total articles for a year. He then used QueryPic to graph and create a html page which you can then add text to. It encourages exploration in a way that the Harvester alone does not. If you then click on the point on the graph, it then retrieves the first twenty articles from Trove. It gives another interface into the depths of Trove.

This channel is starting to be used by other people, including the Airminded blog. You can too – they are all available and free from Wraggelabs Emporium. Check his blog for more on what he is doing and how.

Why is he doing this? The nature of historical research is changing. In the past, we had scarce resources, but with digitisation, our trickle is becoming more like a flood. “nearly every day we are confronted with a new digital historical resources of almost unimaginable size” Dan Cohen (2008). Its even more true now.

Other tools are out there: Mapping Texts.

Researchers need “a methodology for the infinite archive” Bill Turkel (2006). Now that the historical resources are growing, we will be able to do so much more with the data we can harvest. We can start exploring in ways like never before.

Interfaces are just points of contact between us and the data. Interface development will happen everywhere and they will continue to be developed and alternatives created.

Check out the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities.

There are challenges around this material. One is the de-humanisation of data – the danger that we might forget what its about. We need to keep perspective, understand the human story behind the data.

Phillip Minchin – Stacks of fun: games, community, libraries, technology

Asked questions and used A4 coloured paper to get audience feedback. Consensus was that although most didn’t play games a lot, most considered them very important.

Books are very important and have a place in our lives, but are no longer enough.

Collections: lending is suitable for RPG book and for ones that don’t require registration. Also online subscription games. In-house is suitable for board and card games – is changing with advent of 3D printing and generic self-printing game pieces. Curation is suitable for rules-only games, free electronic games and PDF rule-sets. Subscription suitable (but not available) for: some online games, some ebook-based games. Unsuited to libraries, except as a venue: Collectable Card Games.

Gaming is much more common than most people realise. Part of the appeal of gambling is the gaming. There are a surprising number of games clubs around and they get big numbers. Conventions are big and friendly. Melbourne has a club called Cafe Games – something that libraries could be tapping into.

Gaming is a great way to build community. His library is looking at using games to connect two disparate local communities – older affluent and poorer migrants. Games are a good way because they are non-threatening and fun.

Games in the library: for managing teens/rowdies, chess/scrabble clubs, informal/self-organised play, games club (like book clubs), gamers are our people – geeks and libraries are a natural fit – most are heavy library users already, games and community also a natural fit – Herodotus story – read it in full paper.

Benefits – welcoming space, increased inter-patron interaction, more visitors and longer stays.

Drawbacks – increased potential for patron disputes, more stuff to keep track of, noise level management.

Shared spaces – noise has to be OK and games have to be amenable to audiences or new participants. Dedicated spaces – soundproofed, but preferably visible, but need to manage curiousity.

Games days – for specific well-known games, trying new games, BYO games, open games. Tournaments – if the game is sold commercially, the makers may well support you. Self-organising events – BYO games or open gaming events might well spawn these.

 International Gaming Day @ Your Library – First Saturday of November – 3^rd. http://ngd.ala.org/

I have been thinking about this subject for weeks, longer probably and I’m not the only one. There’s been a lot of discussion about what social software people are using, people stopping blogging and some restarting and more. In the light of this, I thought it was about time I sorted out all the myriad of thoughts and ideas that are going around my head and totally confuse you about it too.

I have been exploring lots of social software online in the past 3 years or so and I think I am finally settling into a few selected ones that I am enjoying. The places I spend at least a little time everyday are Twitter (feel free to follow me - tango2), Facebook and a gaming site Gold Token, besides the several email addresses I monitor for myself, my work, hubby’s business and my church. I also believe in this blog still, although I am not posting as often, probably for a couple of reasons, which I will go into later.

http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2007/11/

I tried Library 2.0 on Ning, but there’s only so much you can do online and I find that most of the people I want to be in contact with are on Facebook. I never registered for Linked In, never felt the need because of my Facebook connections. And Facebook has great word games, although I could do without the vampires, zombies, knights etc. I use IM mainly at work, but not much at home, probably because I don’t have many addresses yet, so that could change. I love del.icio.us, but at home I am using it more as ‘I want to know where these websites are when I need them’ account. At work however, I am having a ball, using it for our Olympic Games links. And don’t get me started on podcasts and RSS feeds (both of which I love).

I want to do more with my Library Thing account, maybe integrating it more with my blog, like I have with Twitter, the same with my Flickr account and I haven’t gotten into YouTube or any equivalent yet, except as a regular viewer. We’ll see what happens though. Still that’s a lot to be using and trying to keep up with on a regular basis.

I have a feed from my blog going into my Facebook and I have integrated my Twitter feed into my Facebook and my blog because I don’t want to be concentrated in one spot. I like the idea of being able to be seen and heard in a number of places. Exhibitionist maybe, or maybe just a librarian to the core, making it as easy as possible to find that information. Dispersing my twitter feeds means that have to open them up, which for some people is a legitimate privacy concern, but I can live with that. Again, I guess its the librarian in me that just wants as many access points as possible. On the otherhand, it means that I can’t discuss everything that I may want to (ie. the odd rant), as it would viewable by all, including those about whom I am ranting, but that’s the price you pay.

So why 2008 in the title? Because all this will change. Two years ago I just had the blog, email and a bit of IM. Delicious was something new on the radar for me then too. Its only in the last year that I have really got immersed in Twitter and Facebook. So who knows how the landscape and how I choose to use it, will change in the next year.

So I guess I’m saying, that I plan to be found online in these places: my blog, facebook, twitter, delicious, flickr, library thing (getting there anyway) and that’s enough for now. I like being in all those diverse places, but I also like my content coming together in one place, to give a big picture view, so that’s where this blog will still play a big part.

The blog as I said earlier has been quieter, for a number of reasons. Firstly, because I am spending time in the other places I have mentioned, secondly because I have been doing some presentations, writing papers and have just finished a couple of articles (waiting to hear if they will be published). Thirdly, the big changes that seemed to be happening and happening fast with Web 2.0, seem to be slowing down a bit. Comes from being on the cutting edge I guess, we are now just waiting for everyone else to catch up a bit before we move onto to the next big thing – or maybe we’re just waiting for the next big thing to appear? Or is it just me?

So how do I manage to keep up with all this. I don’t know really. But Clay Shirky, author of “Here comes everybody“, has some thoughts on that. I really recommend you take the time to watch this video, where he explains where the time comes from. Its worth the 15 minute investment (and I really must get the book and stick it on Library Thing).

Anyway, so now you know where to find me. And wherever you go looking for me, you can be guaranteed that you’ll be able to find out what I’m up to. Whether or not you want to, is entirely up to you!

Eli Neiburger, head of Information and Administration Services at Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) gave me most of his day to outline the great things that are happening at Ann Arbor. I so want a programmer on our staff. Eli leads the Information Access and Systems team of 9 fulltime staff who provide help desk support (2), programmers (2), ILS (1), systems administration (1), vendor/hardware specialist (1), AV media producer (1) and public training coordinator (1). The AV media producer also has 2 part-time assistants. Check out the flickr photos.

AADL has a reputation for doing great things with gaming, which arose when their Teen Librarian started in 2003 and suggested the idea. They didn’t just want to do a supporting collection and building limitations meant that installing gaming kiosks was difficult, so they chose a different means.

They want to build community with their teens, so their gaming is tournament based. Once a month, they will run a tournament weekend – Friday night is open to all ages, Saturday is teens only and Sunday is either for young kids or is open play again. It is usually held at the start or end of a school break. These tournaments are no different to storytimes, with the same sorts of relationships being developed and is the highlight of the kids relationship with the library, smashing their preconceived ideas of it.

Recreational reading teens are a minority audience. One of their teens has said that their gaming program is “a gateway drug for libraries.” It is not just bait to get teens in to the library and using other resources etc, it is an end in itself.

Out of gaming came the gaming blog, before the first tournaments began. School visits stirred up further interest. So their stats thus far are: 65 gaming events run with about 5000 attending across all events. Their database of gamers has 1000 players, with over 200 unique players last season. They get an average of 40-60 kids to each event, but their biggest tournaments have had 100-120.

As for their website, the previous incarnation had blogging, but was not blog based as it is now. They started planning in January 05 and went live with the website when they launches their new ILS in July 05. They used a graphics design company to design the look and the CSS templates. They also took paper copies of the proposed organisation of the site, to check terminology and structural transparency with their users. The study showed that had the right plan.

They looked at various content management system (CMS) options, limited to those that were php based as that is the development skill they had in-house. John Blyberg (who is now in Darien) brought in Drupal, mainly because of its open API. They now have 50,000 accounts on Drupal, not all are library members. Drupal works as a web interface for their ILS, logs their users in and returns search results. This enables them to use php scripts to do more. Their web server then becomes an application server, bypassing limits of their ILS. Next generation ILS for them may be an open source product, with all their written scripts as the front end.

Any one can blog on the website, with the approval of their manager and after they complete a 1/2 hour training session to ready them. They adapted the Drupal wiki to allow them to easily link to images, catalogue searches and individual items. Their blogs have had 10,000 comments, but over 9,000 of those have been on the gaming blog.

They started their gaming with $5000, buying 8 TVs, 8 Game Cubes, all the controllers, cabling etc, with 8 copies each of Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. They also have PS2 and DDR dance pads. They have also run “Retro octathlon” sessions using compilations of old games. Have also started doing huge Pokemon XD tournaments and have Guitar Hero too.

Sessions are run by Eli and some of the IAS staff, with teen staff handling food, answering questions etc. They are also doing some family events and have had a parent/child tourney using Eli’s own Wii console and games. Hoping to get 4 consoles for more such events in the next year.

System staff and some OPACs are Macs, otherwise all machines, including their thin clients which work well, are PCs. Use in house developed software for PC management, which allows unlimited use, unless someone is waiting. The longest anyone has to wait is 10 minutes, minimum booking time is 1/2 hour. They use Pharos for their print management. Their PC training lab uses Macs, but they can open a Windows screen and run the software. They run an IRC channel for their intradesk communications, including inter-branch. No virtual reference service at present, they are examining options with IM.

Their server farm is awesome. They have an OSX server for managing the Mac OPACS and development, 2 ILS servers, a training server running a copy of the ILS, a number of infrastructure boxes, storage boxes, spam firewall in front of the mail server, media server installed but not yet used, a production server, windows file share server, terminal servers, firewall, domain controllers and more file storage. New servers awaiting installation will be used to supplement capacity and migration, for a Pharos update, as a new imaging server for PC images (ie. maintenance not pictures).

They also are starting a public development box – open up their applications and see what people come up with.

They are also starting up with Library Lego League, using Lego Mindstorms Robots. Run over 4 days, the kids build a robot from the kit which has to do a particular task set at the beginning. The champions then play off for the title of Grand Champion.

Eli, it was a great day and I appreciate all the time and effort you gave to my visit. I learned a lot from you and hopefully I will be able to blog about some of what I have been able to get done as a result.

Tonight, the Main Library at PLCMC had an Open Night to celebrate Library Week. Invitees were able to sample food from local restaurants, cafes and a winery and the opportunity to find out more about library programs and more.

The more included the opportunity to play with the Library’s Wii games (I bowl better virtually than in reality), driving consoles (my physical driving is marginally better) and I could really grow to enjoy Guitar Hero and Dance, dance revolution – had a lot of fun with those (check out the flickr images). I even created a short animation which they will email it to me soon. When I get it I’ll post it to You Tube. Wow, me on You Tube!

So that’s me done in Charlotte, I’m flying to Ohio tomorrow for my third full week in the US. Its going to be busy with a place a day. I’m going to miss Charlotte, I really clicked with Helene Blowers – an amazing lady, but she’s coming to Oz in July and then next February so that will be awesome. Catch you from Ohio!

http://theshiftedlibrarian.pbwiki.com.

Gamers – not just teenage boys in the basement. 90 million gamers up to age 35. Boomers = 77 million, 70% once in while, 65% regularly.

Average age = 33 years. Largest percentage is middle aged women.

Wii opening up video games to a new generation. Kids with disabilities, elderly are bowling and playing baseball.

Gamers see themselves as heroes on a quest, willing to experiment and keep trying, willing to ask for help. Have an inherent distrust of bosses, beat a boss to get to the next level. “Can’t say cos I said so and I’m the boss”.

Have strong organizational skills, creative problem solvers.

Different library services:
- collection development (Mario Bros memorial public library, Gaming Target, check
LibSuccessWiki)

- support materials for gaming culture (board games, graphic novels etc)

- post game reviews, myspace for gamers, blog etc

- Readers advisory – instead ask what movies, tv shows they like and what games they play – refer them to books about gaming – Booklist covering this

- Non-video games – board games not just virtual games www.goecaching.com

- Open play – buy equipment or get the kids to bring theirs in – or use Runescape sessions on internet PCs

- Gaming blogs get most of the comments – check out Ann Arbor. Free online games, runescape, sepmania, 4 librarians and good experience..

- Game pods – consoles in the library for use. Carver Bay Library lets kids accrue hours to play on 50 inch plasma screen – library card, book reviews, borrowing books, all help to accrue hours

- Tournament play – bragging rights. Kids will even self organize them.

- Bibliographic instruction – Uni North Carolina , Arizona State Uni – library board game now a flash game “Quarantined”

- Game creation – hold classes on how to make games – Gwynett Public – kids are content creators, great avenue for them.

- Participation gap – “confronting the challenges of participatory culture” report. Skills required for 21^st worker, play, performance, simulation, multi-tasking, judgement, networking and more, all used in gaming. Machina – write a story in a game – check Bloomington, who run a film festival out of the results.

- Lifelong learning

Potential gaming groups – families – DDR, Mario Kart; 20 and 30 somethings, middle-aged women – DDR and greatest generation men – WWII games, Seniors in general – Brain Age.

Nintendo DS – wireless networking between them so can play same game against each other. Has a lot of interesting learning games.

Storytime are communcal experiences. Need to think about how libraries can do the same with gaming. Check out the further reading on Jenny’s slides, to be posted at the wiki site listed at the top.