Connecting Librarian

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.

Its my fourth anniversary of blogging, my blogiversary.  On the 29th July 2005, I posted my first entry to Connecting Librarian, at that time at blogger.com.  Four years later and wow, what a ride!

I’ve been thinking about blogging for a while now.  Even considered stopping altogether, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Although I’m not blogging as regularly, I still feel I have something to say and that this is one of the places I can say it.

Some of the reasons I have been blogging less, are that I am twittering more (most days and for most of the day usually) and I have been more writing away from the online, in the form of conference papers and articles, as well as continuing to do book reviews for ALJ.  I have 1 article and 2 conference papers on the go at present too.

I’m feeling less pressure to blog too, probably because of my increased presence on Twitter and Facebook – now I try to blog at least once a month, if not once a fortnight, but only when I have something to say, not just for the sake of it. Maybe I’m finally maturing as a blogger.

And just when I think about blogging less, I find the content to do 3 blog posts in 4 days.  Figures!

I’m far from being the only one thinking about how blogging is changing.  Iris Jastram (Pegasus Librarian) in her post The ebb and flow of my online communities talks about how, between chat rooms, Twitter and her blog, she is having trouble finding her centre.  I can relate to that.

Connecting Librarian was intended to be the centre of my online presence, but its now one of three main locations you will find me.  Its now becoming where I do my deeper thinking, whilst Twitter is where I have more of my interactions and conversations and Facebook is mostly just about connections.  Are others experiencing the same?

Meredith Farkas (Information Wants to be Free) in her post Whither blogging and the library blogosphere? laments what has happened to blogging in the face of micro-blogging.  I too miss the depth of content that comes with blogging and I have noticed a marked decrease in the frequency of blog posts arriving in my RSS reader.  On the other hand however, I love the immediacy and the contact that micro-blogging brings.

I twitter and then feed my twitters through to my Facebook status.  When I write a blog post, I twitter that.  So a blog post can be seen by people who read my blog, who follow me on Twitter or who have friended me on Facebook.  It becomes even more interesting when you start getting comments back on a blog post at each of these places as well.  So where is my centre?

I think that for now, my centre is Twitter – that’s where I spend most of my time in terms of an online presence, but I am not giving up my blog.  I still have many things to share and this is the ideal forum for that. Facebook is just another means of spreading the news from the first two and connecting with people that I can’t connect to otherwise.

So Happy Blogiversary to me and thanks to all my blog subscribers and readers. I am still amazed that you are following me and am grateful that you do.  Be reassured that there will still be blog posts, in the next year, although maybe not as often as I have in the past. I still want to blog though because I am still learning and discovering and find I still want to share all that I do, whilst “connecting new ideas and technologies with library service”.

Its my 3rd blogaversary and I’ve been trying to think about what to post about to celebrate and decided its a good time to review the past 12 months of professional activity.  So here’s what I consider are my major achievements professionally, both inside and outside of work.  This is more for me I guess, to remind myself what I have been doing that has kept me so busy and to encourage me in the year ahead.  I don’t know if you will get anything out of it, but I hope you do.  I won’t presume however, to say what it will be.

This is my 176th post, so things were a bit quieter in the past year, mainly because other things were happening to occupy my time and engage my attention.  Comments are up to 270 for the three years and I thank all my commenters for leaving them. They are encouraging and sometimes thought-provoking and knowing how busy we all are, I appreciate the time you took.

So in the last year, I have given 6 presentations, ranging from 10 minutes to 6 hours in length (the 6 hours was a day long masterclass), of which 2 presentations were at conferences (only 1 of which I attended the whole time), I have written a chapter for a book which has now been published, have had a journal article and 2 other conference papers accepted, which will be published and presented in the forthcoming year.

I attended the VALA conference and Michael Stephen’s Hyperlinked Library seminars, listened to countless podcasts, read countless journal articles and even more blog posts.  Its amazing my head hasn’t exploded from all the information I have taken in and yet it is still only a drop in the ocean of what’s out there, even in my own profession.

In the past year I have written 52 blog posts for this blog, as well as blogging at Invisible Ink (nowhere near as prolifically) and at 2 of my library’s 3 blogs, one of them at least weekly.  So I get plenty of time to write and my confidence in presenting has improved dramatically.

At work I have helped 60 staff to being the Learning 2.0 program, I have created Google Maps for all our branches and mobile library stops, I have helped other library staff create and launch 2 new blogs, built up the team on our existing blog and written our library policy to support these endeavours.  I have done screencasts on using our catalogues, introduced a web poll, embedded a search box and direct account login to all our library webpages, all whilst doing minor tweaks and regular updates on our badly needing an update website (which will now happen in this coming year).

So its been an awesome and life changing year.  If you had told me, even a year ago that I would feel comfortable presenting, I would have laughed at you.  What a difference a year makes.  (not that presenting will ever be easy, lol)  I feel like I have developed as more of a professional librarian, rather than just a librarian doing a particular job.  I am proud of that distinction, just as I am proud to be a librarian and proud of the job I have done for my library.

The coming year brings two conference presentations, the publication of my journal article and I am part of the organising committee for the VALA 2010 conference.  And that just the things I know of.  Its a good time to be a librarian and I’m going to make the most of every opportunity that comes my way – I’m having too much fun to be doing anything else!

This week its web-based apps and although the program directed us to use Zoho writer, I took the option of going with Google Docs instead. The reason? I have been having enough trouble keeping up with all the various logins and passwords, but with Google Docs I use the same login and password for Blogger and Gmail. One less login and I still get the same experience.
So what can it do? All the usual word processing stuff as you can see!

I like the idea of having versions, so that if you need to revert to an earlier version (and I know I wish I had been able to in the past) – You Can!

Now its 5 days later and I have just come back to editing the text. Really cool! I could get to like this!

Now before I upload this to my blog from Google Docs (another cool feature), the other part of this exercise was to examine an award winning Web 2.0 tool. I chose craigslist – which I knew of but didn’t know enough about.

craigslist describes itself as “Local classifieds and forums for 450 cities worldwide – community moderated, and largely free.” It started as a small, free not-for-profit site, but is now 25% owned by Amazon and although definitely for profit, much of the site is still free. Although very heavily US and Europe centric, it does have an Australian arm, with centres for Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. On craigslist you can buy and sell goods, find a job and contribute to or read forums (over 70 of them). The traffic across all city points of craiglist is phenomenal, but coming from Melbourne, it is still pretty small at present with only 827 postings at the time of this entry. Still, now that it has a presence in our fair city and once people realise it, I am sure that it will expand here as it has overseas, at a phenomenal rate.

Back to Web apps and amazingly my Google Docs post on this topic published to my blog seamlessly. Very impressive – I’ll have to keep this in mind when blogging at conferences etc.