Connecting Librarian

I can’t believe its been3 weeks since VALA 2010 finished.  But it has been and in the wake of all my notes from the conference and inspired by some excellent summary blog and twitter posts from fellow conference attendees, here are my key reflections from VALA 2010.

1. Discovery layers

It doesn’t matter what vendor you use these days, a discovery layer will sit over pretty much every library system and open your content to your users in a new and exciting way. Academic and State Libraries have already implemented this software and public libraries are starting to. And it sits on top of your website to give the integration between the website and catalogue that our users expect and that librarians have been seeking.

I never realised the range of offerings available until I chaired the Vendor session which demonstrated a wide range of the offerings available from different companies. If you don’t already have a discovery layer in place or in process, you need to be looking at them now.

2. Metadata

I have heard talk about metadata for well over a decade.  Til now, I thought it was the domain of repositories, archives and the like. After VALA2010 I can finally see its relevance for my own library’s web content, which is neither archival nor relating to repositories in any form.

So add another thing to the list of things to do.

3. Semantic Web

Linked data and the whole concept of the semantic web is moving from a concept to a reality in small ways.  Its fascinating to watch this evolution, from concept to working tools. Its early days yet, but there will be a lot more interesting developments in these areas in coming years, which I will be watching for with continued interest.

4. Mashups and APIs

I always thought that APIs really belonged to the realm of programmers or those with some programming knowledge/skill, of which I have a minuscule amount.  After listening to Paul Hagon at the L-Plate Series at VALA, that misconception has been corrected. I have already been planning with APIs without realising it (its only Google Maps, but hey, its still an API) and Paul pointed out some great tools to help us get into some more serious stuff. It’s time to play!  Thanks Paul.

5. Trove

This new service from the National Library of Australia is very cool and I look forward to learning more about it and seeing how we can better utilise it and promote it to our users.  There was several papers on Trove, so check them out to find out more about how it was created and exactly what it can do.

6. Open source

Is more widespread than I had ever thought about. But when I did, realised that we are using so much open source software already – it runs our Internet servers and our browsers, as well as much of our communications.  Is it that big a step for us then to start using open source software for other purposes? It’s already proven its worth in those areas listed.

7. Twitter and Blogging

Twitter was the new kid on the block at the last VALA conference.  This year, it made its presence felt big time.  It was a great back channel to what was going on in other sessions, a guide to what was worth checking out and a great way to network with other librarians, both at the conference and following along from outside.

Much to our delight, the hash tag #vala2010 was in the top 5 twitter tags in Australia the week of the conference, hitting number 1 on the Thursday – the last day.  It was also a great delight to finally meet all those twitterers I had only known online before then and to meet and start following twitterers that I met there. I think that I have started following at least another 20 people since the start of the conference.

Keep up  the good work all – you make working on computers all day all the more interesting and what you share is  entertaining, informative and useful in turn.

Twitter probably outdid blogging in terms of content sharing this VALA, but it still had its place for the detail on content. Being a conference blogger myself, I really appreciate the depth that I can get from a blogger’s reports. They are also a great teaser for the papers that I may want to go and read in full. The papers BTW are freely available from the VALA website – well worth checking out.

8. Networking

It was the best conference ever, for just spending time with other like-minded library staff.  The social events were great for this, but it was even happening whilst waiting for sessions to start, or during the breaks. It was wonderful sharing thoughts, ideas, feedback and what you’re up to, with other enthusiastic librarians (and others), who speak the same language.

9. Presenting

I was fortunate enough to present two papers, and get away with it, lol.  Both my papers, presented with two different co-authors were well received much to my amazement and relief. I have had several people follow me up with questions on both papers since, much to my delight.

Writing a paper is a difficult enough process to begin with, but then trying to present that paper in a snapshot presentation is even more so. I learnt a lot from other presenters at VALA about how to engage the audience and even how to present so that you retain their interest.

10. VALA Conference Committee

I was a member of the conference program committee this year, but the role we played was so small, compared to all the work put in by the VALA committee in general. These guys all have regular jobs and real lives, yet put everything into getting this conference off the ground, running as well as it did and responding to issues quickly and efficiently as they arose.

Alyson Kosina, the backbone of VALA is an amazing lady, who you should take a moment to meet and chat with. You will walk away enriched. David Feighan and Bart Rutherford, the Conference Chair and VALA president respectively, were endlessly everywhere, managing, listening, participating, anticipating and in Bart’s case, presenting one paper when the speakers couldn’t get here in time. Dedication personified.

I really enjoyed working with them in the small role I played and learnt a lot. I very much look forward to more opportunities to be involved with VALA.

And amazingly, this blog posts has ended up with 10 reflections. That was not my intention, it just developed that way.

Thanks to all my co-conference attendees for helping to make it the best conference I have ever attended.  Bring on #VALA2012!

Have a big week coming up – attending and giving a short showcase at VALA in Melbourne. So before I start blogging that (hopefully live), I thought give my readers some interesting things to read.

Pew/Internet regularly produces reports related to online use. One of the latest was conducted with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois on Information searches that solve problems: how people use the internet, libraries and government agencies when they need help.  Interesting results include high use of public libraries by Generation Y’ers for the scenarios surveyed, digital divide is still an issue and the expected result of the internet as a first stop.  Well worth a look at.

University College London has produced another in their series of Ciber briefing  papers, this one on the Information behaviour of the researcher of the future.   The study was commissioned by the British Library and JISC to “identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years’ time.”  Very eye opening with some interesting results.

The Horizon Report 2008 from the New Media Consortium is out.  It aims to “identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning or creative expression within learning-focused organizations’.  This is their 5th annual report.  Considering the link between libraries of any type and our learning organisations, this is a key document to be watching.  The key emerging technologies highlighted in this report include grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence and social operating systems.   You can get the gist of the report through the Executive Summary.  Definitely food for thought for our libraries.

Enjoy!

Glenn Peterson, a fellow presenter at CIL took me through some of the behind the scenes. At the moment he is working on mashup between Google Maps and Flickr which will show their branches on a map with address and contact details. He is including geotagging, so that you get a Google image of the branch, which will also show nearby geotagged images.

They use Cold Fusion on their web server, which works well with Dream Weaver their HTML editor. Their database info is kept on Microsoft Access which has a nice interface, is easy to learn and to use. Glenn has also developed some Microsoft SQL databases, mostly for their most heavily used content. Their webs server is Apache – windows based, as are most of their servers, however some do use Linux. Four web servers are used – one for the public website and one each for the staff and public ILS access. The final one does their catalogue integrations and has access permissions which the web servers don’t. They also have a separate development server for the website which has the same structure as the production server.

Scripts have been written for many different functions (green with envy, green with envy), including one that saves the users login card number and pin on their computer so they are automatically logged in when they visit the library website. A script is also used to gather their patron comments and attach them to the catalogue records. It also brings together comments from all the different formats and editions of the same title, ie. Audio, large print etc. They use an OCLC list which returns all ISBNs which are related to any given ISBN, which they cache so on their server, to speed up processing time. Each comments page also brings in related information from Syndetics. Glenn has also been talking to the team at Library Thing about how they could use their tagging feature and their recommended list on the HCPL catalogue.

Glenn scripts in Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML) to bring all this together. The script seeks out staff reviews if available before getting the Syndetics content, if not there then it seeks content from Amazon. It also links to booklists that include that title in it. They also have audio reviws to listen to (not podcasts at this stage, although they are looking to make them so), using a Flash audio player. It can also call in customer views from Amazon, recent comments and gives you the option of adding a comment. There are RSS feeds on the titles and comments. A script gathers the last 4 hours of comments and sends them in an email to a team of librarian on a rotating list, just to scan for the content and remove any inappropriate ones – this is rare.

Comments have a name link which if clicked will take you to other comments left by that person – a form of reader recommends. Would like to make those commenters links into a a list of profiles with more information about the commenter, including their booklists etc, bringing a social networking/building community capacity to the space.

They have bought Wii gaming consoles for the branches, testing the water with this.

Jody Wurl is the newest member of the Web Services Team and is a Teen Librarian. They have an online Teen advisory group who contributes blog entries, highlighted websites and polls to the HCPL Teen Links webpages and they have automatic RSS feeds for their teen events and new books. You can also change the colours on the teen website, I will leave it to you to find the Easter egg that uses this feature in a cute way on the site.

Teen Links has two sets of subject guides – Teen Topics (teen issues) and Do your Homework. At the moment, Jody does all the links but she is looking to get the same model as is used on Book Space, with multiple contributors working. There is strong interest in readers advising at Hennepin, so they have good teen reading lists.

The At Your Library part of their site needs work, so Jody hopes to get the soon to be developed teen advisory groups in the branches to possibly contribute a webpage and blog posts for each branch. Each library has its own webpage with community links, friends news, library events fed in from the calendar, library news – which can be submitted. Some information is hard coded – ie. hours, the photo, special services etc.

Ann Melrose, former children’s librarian and Web Services team member took me upstairs where we both were taken on a tour of Ridgedale Library, one of Hennepin’s regional libraries. Check out the Flickr photos. They are in a building, which also houses a county service center, as do their other 2 regional libraries. They have renewable floor signage, lots of study rooms and wifi throughout the building. Self-serve holds are huge. 116 public PCs, 14 catalogue only, only ever all booked out on a Monday night or weekend.

The amazing thing was their automated materials handling system. Anything returned to a chute, whether outside or at the desk, is conveyor belted up to the second floor, where this amazing locally made (Minnesota that is), shift, sorts, returns and delivers the stock to trolleys, either ready for shelving or to go to one of the other branches or holds, as appropriate. At least one staff member monitors the system, at peak time there are too. Check out the Flickr photos. In another HCPL branch, the conveyor runs under the floor at one stage, so you can watch the stock move along – the kids love it!

After the tour, Ann did an awesome job covering the children’s side of the web at HCPL. KidLinks is the latest iteration of their website and is coming about after extensive consultation with local Grade 5 kids. The graphic designer has created the layout, the programmers are working on creating it in the development server. They will be using Flash mouseovers and sounds. Launch date is June 4th.

Children’s book reviews area added with the same web tools as others at HCPL. In the summer they make it a competition – all reviews are added to their Access database and a randomiser draws the winners who get book prizes. Looking at having 5 x a week long summer book clubs this year, using Moodle. They must register to contribute and Ann will try to organise it so that all participants in each group gets online together at the end of the week to chat.

KidsLinks news is a monthly kids email newsletter, which has 2 book reviews, promotes events and has links to cute sites. It is created in HTML each month, but they use a script to send it out to all the subscribers in their database. Also doing a birth to six newsletter with relevant content for parents and caregivers in the same way. Looking to do RSS feeds on them.

Kids polls on the webpages changeover automatically every Sunday night. All questions are grabbed automatically from a database and Ann usually has a few in reserve. She is also able to reuse old questions after a few years. The kids love the polls.

It was an awesome day at Hennepin and I can’t thank the Web Services Team enough for their time and all they covered in such a short period. You guys are inspiring and I will be taking much from my time there, for quite a while to come. Thanks!

Couldn’t get to a power or get my laptop out in this crowded session, so had to use treeware and now is the first chance to type this up. This session was Monday morning, so sorry for the delay.

Karen Huffman spoke of her experiences at National Geographic (NG). Web 2.0 is what we are already in, it’s where our users are and where our desktops are going. Adapt, adopt or die. We envision Web 2.0 in different ways, but are all still figuring it out and have different ways of applying the same solutions.

NG has RSS and podcasting hosted externally. Started with RSS feeds posted on a simple web page, then using Magpie RSS and php, they started streaming RSS to the homepage. Started with current content and recorded it as podcasts, then educated their users. Relaunched podcasts into iTunes and NG is now rated at No. 8. Have a staff news area which includes RSS feeds from NG blogs.

They use Newsgator for intranet news feeds instead of the external Bloglines. Newsgator can give mobile access to feeds which staff can access via their Blackberrys.

They are investigating Google gadgets to enhance their website. One gadget they are using on the their intranet is a Word Press plugin which shows a thumbnail image of the commenter on their blog comments. Simplified wiki page creation with a widget that gives them a “Create a new project” button. Also investigating Mind mapping software, including Gliffy and Mind Manager. They are also using Google Maps and Google Earth mashups in their Women Explorers wiki and BioBlitz projects as well as mapping out recipients of NG grants.

Lessons learned:

• need the right people on board
• work in the white spaces
• collaboration
• understand organic culture
• prototype ideas, keep it simple
• communicate
• adapt if the strategy doesn’t match needs

Derek Willis from Washington.com spoke on creating browsable data with Django.

Information gap includes:

• what doesn’t make it into the news
• the data you don’t use
• what you can do about it

Can search it and searching is fun, but what happens when you don’t have a clear search term – are your users good searchers?

Django users a python web framework, takes data and puts it on the web. It is open source and automated as much as possible. More info and software available at http://www.djangoproject.com/ Presently django is used to run chicagocrime.org – a database of crime reported in Chicago and several Washington Post projects including the congressional votes database, Faces of the fallen and Recipe Finder. It is mainly browsable, although it can be free text searched or browsed/searched by category.

Need the Python script language on a web server, a database such as MySql. It runs on all operating systems and is free. Advantages include control over your data, using your data is easier, has built in admin interface, plus it supports syndication, generic views, authorisation, forms, file uploads and is used for about 15 smaller newspapers around the US.

Things to do to make it happen:

• become or find a geek
• scavenge for hardware
• think about your data

Give your users the value in the information you already have.