Connecting Librarian

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!

Second day at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenberg County. Today Helen introduced me to Charles Brown, PLCMC’s Director. That was an honour and a privilege to enjoy our short chat together about our respective parts of the world.

Helen then took me to their CheckIt Outlet, a small shopfront library at the other end of the Charlotte city centre. (Check out the flickr photos) It is a small popular materials library with 3 staff, open only during business hours Monday to Friday and they do roaring business, particularly at lunchtime. Very cool!

It was then back to the Main Library where Helen gave me a quick rundown on what they want to do with the Virtual Village. This includes changing an unused part of the service desk to a collaborative space between library patrons and staff, plasma screens to inform and engage library patrons and to be used for on the spot teaching as required and a digital display area. They are planning to pipe music into the Virtual Village to help contain the issue of noise. They will also add more equipment to a studio to enhance music creation and make it a more collaborative space and reorganise a 2nd studio into another smaller PC lab. They will hope to reorganise some unused office space for gaming.

Back upstairs, we chatted about some other things that PLCMC is doing or has done. They have an IT department of 12 staff, who do everything in house. They host 75 servers and service over 1500 PCs throughout their admin areas and 24 branches, including help desk assistance.

Their website has recently included podcasts on their Readers Place website. Book reviews are easily uploaded through a simple form interface. They have filtering on all PCs, a condition of federal funding and have found it works well, with no real issues arising from its use. They have a MySpace page (Library Loft), which includes a library catalogue search box and has over 1100 friends.

Patrice Ebert, Head of Public Services took me on a tour of one of PLCMC’s regional libraries - Freedom and one of their branches - Sugar Creek. It was very interesting seeing what their libraries are like away from the Main Library. I’ll let the photos on flickr tell the story.

When I got back, I grabbed a few quick minutes from Matt Gullett, the Emerging Technologies Director. He spoke about libraries needing to be more interactive, collaborative and having a life-long learning facet. I have copies of some plans that they have and they look awesome. They want to use emerging technologies to help develop experience and learning opportunities.

Matt would like to develop programs that attract a lunchtime crowd, appealing to the corporate culture that is their neighbour, the banking town. Ideas include a digital art exhibition, guest speakers and more.

They still have those experiencing the digital divide. They want to give them training to enable them to get basic certification, which will open job opportunities for them. Want to offer enrichment, learning and Web 2.0 tools type training to the public.

They are having a big open night at the Main Library, partnering with local restaurants who will provide food for the evening. There will be wine tasting, gaming to enjoy and speakers. Should be a ball and I’ll be there. Will blog it later.

In the meantime, thanks to Helen and the team at PLCMC (particularly Kelly), I have had a ball here in Charlotte and have a lot to take back with me about virtual services. I really appreciate the time, effort and attention you have spared for this visitor from down under.

An amazing service is provided from the lower area of ImaginOn. Storytimes to go (STG) provides pre-literacy kits for preschool teachers and carers. The kits are themed and aimed at getting children interested in reading. The kits have 8 to 12 picture books, a booklet of original activities written by the staff (of 4), flannelboard activities, recordings of activity songs, a puppet or educational toy and a family activity sheet. They also have art kits, adversity kits which explain cultural diversity, meet the author kids (including one on Mem Fox) and bilingual (English/Spanish kits). They have over 560 kits on over 100 themes.

The way it works: a teacher from the local county contacts them. They must first attend an orientation workshop where they learn the rules, about the kits and how to use them and how to care for the materials. Once they have completed orientation, they get the list of themes. The teacher calls and asks for a kit, STG sends the kit to their nearest PLCMC kit to collect. They have it for 4 weeks and all loans are managed from the STG office. There no overdues on the kits and late kits are returned after a follow up phone call. STG also offers workshops on storytelling and other skills.

They have now expanded their services to their website. Between 1000 and 2000 free activities are available online over 50 themes, with more being added which will eventually number between 150 and 200 themes. This is all the supporting material that is available within the kits. Teacher resources are also available.

I spent the afternoon talking with Chuck Rigney - Web Services Manager about PLCMC’s internet presence. If you haven’t checked out the PLCMC websites, you really should and allow some time to do so, as they have so much content online. They have 16 websites with their own domain names plus their intranet. Initially they got the domain names because they didn’t want people to know it was the library providing the content. They are considering leveraging the content back to the PLCMC website, but may keep the domain names.

Web Services comprises Chuck, with 2 developers and a graphic designer based in their Main Library. They have 5 active web teams who provide the content for their website, each with a different focus and comprising 6 to 8 people. They focus on book reviews, childrens, adults etc and meet monthly with someone from Web Services attending every meeting. Unlike other teams at PLCMC, these are not arbitrarily rotated - librarians move on when they want a change. When this happens, their position is internally advertised and potential members can be interviewed.

They use Active server pages and built the interface themselves, making it flexible and adaptable. It may take longer than off the shelf packages, but they get exactly what they want. The IT department maintains all their servers in-house, for the website they have 2 production servers and a development server. A recent access issue resulted in content being split between the 2 servers and a clean-up of superseded files which resolved the issue. Apart from the PLCMC website, the others use templates to call on the content from the database as required.

Some content has been developed off-site as it came for a grant - including the Smart Collection and Hands on Craft. StoryPlace is by far their biggest website, so now has its own T1 line to manage the traffic. They have considered hosting it out due to the bandwith requirements.

Looking at new options, such as creating content in a blog and then pulling content from the RSS feed into a HTML webpage.

Their Intranet was developed in-house and is 6 years old. They will be updating the look and functionality soon, getting complaints about not being able to find things. At present Chuck is the only one updating the intranet, they want to share the content management and are considering replacing it with a wiki.

They use a system-wide calendar, with the branches entering all their own data. Proprietary software then pulls this content from this and into the website. On their intranet they have a link on each page, “Does this need an update” and the equivalent on their webpages “Comment on this page” which is on the same level as the breadcrumbs, which enables their users to easily let them know of any problems on a Intranet or webpage.

Their latest website design, which was launched last year, was user tested. They took the 2 prototypes of the website which they designed in-house and a consultant user tested it with focus groups. The feedback included: patrons interested in their local branch, not the wider service, wanted to see people, not buildings. As a result, users can set their local branch and its info as their homepage, but as a result they can miss out on regional happenings as it appears further down the page. They have over 1600 individual webpages, although some were created for one off events and have yet to be removed from their servers. The main PLCMC is the biggest in terms of pages and management as the others use dynamically driven content.

They used to host external websites, but it became too expensive for them to do so. They may consider doing it again if it was revenue generating.

Chuck ensures that he and his team have time to play, learn and find out what’s out there on a daily basis. Its the best way to ensure that they stay current and are using the best means and options for their websites. They are looking to use more of the Library 2.0 tools to add more functionality to their website, particularly patron content, including patron comments on their catalogue (Sirsi-Dynix’s Horizon ILS).

Will blog some post conference thoughts on Computers in Libraries 2007 soon. In the meantime, here’s my notes from my first day at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (PLCMC). PLCMC is a regional service, with 24 branches, the main library being in downtown Charlotte.

Helen welcomed me to their main library and Branch Manager Susan Herzog took me on the tour. Lots of photos, so check them out on my Flickr account. I loved their columns out front, where each of the four sides has a book or library related quote - check out their list of quotes. I will only describe the buidling briefly here, the pictures tell a better story, so check them at Flickr. The building is over 4 levels, the ground floor level is circulation, the popular library, gallery and music and movies. The second level is reference and non-fiction, the third is the admin area and Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room which is their local history collection. In the basement area is the Virtual Village, their funky tech area. The library was first built in 1903, demolished the rebuilt on site in the 1950’s, then extended in 1989. They are now looking at their options for the future development of the library.

Helen then took me to ImaginOn which is 2 blocks away. (check the Flickr account). Lois Kilkka the manager, took me on a fascinating tour of this amazing facility. It is a purpose built shared building which houses the children’s and teens area of the library as well as their partner the Charlotte Children’s Theater. It is a green building, which uses a lot of recycled materials, including feature walls built of recycled headstones and the toilet walls made of recycled detergent bottles - fascinating! There are 2 theatres in the building - one seating 270+, the other 560+, which are used for children’s programs as well as the theatre performances.
They have experienced a lot of challenges with their shared facility, including the need for shared staff in the theatre spaces.

Their story lab, which contains the Story jar is a place to inspire creativity and collaboration. Using the items hanging from the jar, they encourage children to create stories. They also have individual computers to do the same and group collaboration is possible on their “create a scene” with each child contributing costumes, music, characters and more to a production which they then perform. After they complete their story or scene, the children can scan their library card and their creation is published to the web.

They also have dedicated literacy PCs in the children’s area, but also had to install the same software in their tech area upstairs, as the demand for group visits far exceeded their expectations and needed to be accommodated. Lois explained that they needed to adapt their thinking about the facility and look at it a bit more like a children’s museum than a traditional children’s library - it is a real destination for groups of children of all ages.

They had to create a parents space and added activities for preschoolers to better accommodate families. The parents space has magazines, a paperback exchange and the whole facility has wireless internet access throughout.

The teen tech area upstairs includes 4 rooms which are used for theatre camp, school activities and are occasionally hired out. This space has 30PCs and 5 Macs for use. They have a 15 PC training lab and have run programs like MySpace for parents here.

The Loft is the teen library, with the teen library collection as well as drop in activities such as crafts/games and affinity group programming (ie. Anime group etc). The only rules here are respect yourself, respect others and respect the facility. They have Blockbuster events quarterly where they open up to the public after hours. The PCs in this area have Photoshop and productivity software for film post production. They also have 11 laptops for use in this area and there is plenty of seating available.

The jewel in this crown is iStudio, where teens can create animation, music and more. They have 2, 2-dimensional animation stations, a 3-dimensional animation and a live action station as well as music creation equipment which has been wildly popular. They have library staff and high school interns to assist students with their works, with some of them available on YouTube. Check out Troy Story which was created at ImaginOn and won a national award.

ImaginOn also holds the offices for the Children’s Theater, including costumes, set design and 2 large rehearsal rooms. The facility has a vibe as a result, because there is always creation going on somewhere in the building.

Kelly then took me on a tour of Teen Second Life which PLCMC manages in partnership with the Alliance Library System and is only accessible to teens and background checked adults. We went to the robotics labs, were a teacher meets with teens to create robotic examples, at present they have a machine making cookies! There is a Teen Art Gallery where they display works created in real life. A radio station plays resident created content (a Linden Labs initiative) so you can stream music into Second Life. It has a park which has a memorial for Virginia Tech, which was created by a teen and has the facility for leaving messages. The area is still under development and includes teaching space, performance space, meeting space and a coffee shop!

The animation studio is used by girl scout and boy scout groups as well as teens in general, who come in to learn about the processes involved, as well as creating content. They have recently added a Mac with Garage Band (music creation software), with a midi keyboard coming. Another Mac is coming with more editing software.

Will blog more about my day later. I will finish with a summary - WOW! This facility is amazing and really reaches to teens and kids - it is all about creation and collaboration and I would love to have something like this in my city.