Connecting Librarian

After two weeks of various technical difficulties, I was finally able to join in on a session of Uncontrolled Vocabulary, a “weekly live interactive roundtable discussion of all things library”. Hosted by Greg Schwartz, Library Systems Manager for the Louisville Free Public Library, it is held most Wednesday nights at 10pm, US Eastern time, which made it 2pm AEST.

Uncontrolled Vocabulary uses Talk Shoe to host the live discussion and to record the hour for dissemination through podcast. The discussion is on newsworthy library-related items that have arisen during the week and are often suggested by listeners, through the use of an unvocab tag in del.icio.us. Greg has an Uncontrolled Vocabulary blog and also a Facebook group which sends out reminders about the upcoming episode.

It is 32 episodes strong now and I have been listening in since the 1st episode. It is entertaining, informative and a fun way to keep in touch with library news, whilst also doing some professional development activity.

So this week, I finally got onto the call - Uncontrolled Vocabulary #32 - Cranky people make good audio. The few communications issues I had encountered in the previous 2 weeks were finally bypassed through the use of Skype. I had a great time being a part of the call, even if I didn’t contribute all that much and I am looking forward to joining in again where possible.

If you haven’t listened to the podcasts, I highly recommend them. Greg is a accomplished moderator, there is a great group of regular callers and some very interesting topics arise, with conversations sometimes taking unexpected turns or presenting points of view you may not have considered.

Thanks Greg, from grateful listener and now participator. It is a lot of fun and I appreciate what you do to make it happen (nearly) every week.

After a beautiful lunch of soup and salad, it was back to talking with Janie Hermann, one of the Library Garden bloggers, who is also presenting at CIL 2007. Princeton Library runs a Databytes program, where twice a month, a librarian gives a session on a technology topic. That day, Romina - who coordinated my program, did a comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica, with about a dozen people in attendance. The Databytes program came out of their staff training program. Each librarian had to become expert in one of their database and then train staff in it. After a few months, it was rotated around. The training was done in their Technology Center and they used to get the public wandering in, so they ended up making it available to all. They get about half staff and half public, with the benefit of having staff expertise in the room to help the public when needed.

Princeton is using Flickr for library photos but is careful with what they upload as they don’t have permissions from the public. This is an area which Janie says has generated much discussion in library circles, but no resolution at this stage. Their website design was outsourced and is also hosted externally, although they are hoping to bring it back in house with only the design being outsourced in future.

Their Booklovers Wwiki, using pbwiki will not be repeated, as they will be using features from their Innovative ILS. They used pbwiki as they did not have not the time or the money to use Media Wiki on their own server, which was their preferred option. They experienced some difficulties with pbwiki at the time, as it needed basic coding, not having the WYSIWIG interface that it has now. As a lead up, they did Databytes sessions on wikis and the Book Lovers Wiki. Even with this, most participants in the program emailed their reviews in to the library, where teen volunteers coded and uploaded them. It also lacked relational linking, so they could only post under either author, title, category etc. However, Janie said it was a great experiment which helped develop staff awareness and skills and that will look at using wikis for their staff handbook and reference procedures using their own server and Media Wiki. They are also considering doing a public technology help wiki.

I then spoke with Evan Kimple about their podcasting. They are using a laptop, a standard USB mike and free online service Audacity to create the podcasts and then are using archive.org to host them online. Evan showed me what was involved and it is very straightforward. They are doing podcasts of poets reading their original works and of authors reading selections from their works. They have the blog for these on a hosted Word Press blog, which is where the MP3s are placed and can be subscribed to. They are also podcasting special events, like their upcoming Teen Book Bash. Eventually they would love to podcast their guest speakers, but at the moment, they are time poor and there is also the issue of permissions.

Bob Keith, who is just about to graduate as a MLS, took me through some more techie stuff, in particular how he set up the Library’s OPAC computers so that they can only access the catalogue and related content, not the internet in general. He is using Firefox’s Kiosk mode with a few other enhancements to get the PCs just the way he wants them. As we are having a similar issue now with our new ILS in place at MPOW, it is a solution that I think we can use and he was kind enough to give me all the documentation and files to do so.

To finish, I had the honour of meeting with Library Director and ALA President Leslie Burger, who was generous in allowing me to take up both her valuable time and that of her staff. To Leslie and the staff at Princeton Library, many thanks for sharing your time, your expertise and your insights, they have all been very much appreciated.

Evan

Instead of typing up more pages, here is an audio of my thoughts on the Learning 2.0 program. It goes for about 1 1/2 minutes. As I did it in only take, I hope you will please excuse my pauses and the few ums that are in there. It also somehow got cut off at the end (I’ll improve with practice I’m sure), so the bit that was missed was something along the lines of - if you have been thinking about doing the Learning 2.0 program, I would encourage you to do so, its well worth the time and effort.

So here it is - enjoy!

powered by ODEO

Wow, final week of Learning 2.0. Taken me a bit more than 9 weeks, but I’ve been a bit distracted with other things. Having finally completed it makes me all the more enthusiastic about starting it at my library, but only after we have our new ILMS bedded down - so probably later this year.

The first task was to link to a YouTube video, but of course I had to take the extra challenge and embed it into my blog entry. Which once I joined up to YouTube (oh the problem of so many logins and passwords!), was pretty straightforward. I wanted to embed the video of the help desk for the book (monks, Norwegian, funny), but unfortunately the English subtitled version is no longer on YouTube, so instead I chose the Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us - which is a clever 5 minute video which gives an overview of what Web 2.0 is. Enjoy!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE]

So what did I think of YouTube. I haven’t visited the site much as I usually get pointed straight to the video URL via Digg or blog posts. However, my first exploration of it left me impressed. Its easy to search, easy to join and after I did, it was easy to find how to embed a video in my blog. All good! Once we get started on our own videos at my library (goodness knows when that will happen though), this will definitely be the place to put them.

Next was podcasts, I have already listened to quite a few, usually through my computer, although I am downloading a few to my iRiver for when I go overseas. So the last part of the exercise I had already completed - I am subscribed to podcasts from Opal, the Sirsi Dynix Institute and Second Life amongst others.

The first part however, was to check out some podcast search engines. I chose Yahoo Podcasts and Podcast Alley, both of which I had heard of before. After looking at Yahoo’s overview of podcasts, I used their podcast search to find Thomas Ford’s click -a-story, an audio storytime of public domain picture books. Great service, one I hope we can copy someday. I also searchd on some of the other places I am visiting on my study tour and found that OPLIN also has a number of podcasts. Podcast Alley on the otherhand was a bit less user friendly. When I did a search on Princeton Public Library, it did an or search, so I got everything else but. Not very helpful. However, they do have a genre search which could be very useful.

The extra challenge was to add audio to your blog, using Blogger’s Audio Blogging service, unfortunately it was discontinued in November last year.

So that’s the program. I will do one more post to sum up what I have learned and I’m done with it, but not with learning!