Get this — kgb (short for Knowledge Generation Bureau) a “unique” service where people can get answers to their questions via text message:

Users who text 542542 (kgbkgb) receive real-time responses to questions any time, day or night, from any cell phone, for a cost of ninety-nine cents.

In one commercial I saw, a man was trying to remember the name of the Red Sox player who lost the Word Series for them in 1986 (Bill Buckner) and kgb gave him the answer. Users pay $.99, plus any fees they normally pay to send and receive text messages. Their questions are answered by “agents”, regular folks who are paid 10 cents per answer they give.

Now, what if there was a service where people could ask questions via text message, IM, phone and email for free, only their questions would be answered by individuals with specialized training in finding the most accurate and authoritative answers? If only such a thing existed!

What does this tell us? People don’t think of librarians when they want answers? Librarians aren’t available when people want answers? Librarians don’t get answers to people quickly enough? Many people would rather get answers via text than phone/IM/email? Or all of the above?

What can we learn from the service kgb provides?

It was some of the comments on David’s post (and in follow-up posts on other blogs) that really made me write this post. Particularly this comment from “Jill” (which also included her sweetly telling David that he’s out of touch with the realities of public services):

As to defining parameters for the service, I don’t see this as a bad thing. Unless you have a staff member dedicated to monitoring virtual reference at a location away from a public service desk, in-person patrons should absolutely take precedence over a virtual patron. Common sense dictates that you pay attention to the person who is physically in the same space as you. Not that the virtual patron’s question is any less important, but you do need to set some guidelines of who to help first

I may be as dense and out-of-touch as David, because I don’t see why common sense dictates that in-person patrons should take precedence. Why? Because they are standing in front of you and the virtual patron is easier to ignore? It’s still a human being sitting at their computer waiting for your answer. Because they took the time to come to the library? Don’t we all have patrons who are physically unable to come to the library? The logic of this really escapes me.

In academic libraries, I’ve seen a lot of virtual reference policies that say that they will always give priority to in-person reference queries. Anna confirms that her library has just such a policy in her post:

There is a note on the IM page of the website which states, “Users at the Main Service Desk have priority over IM users. IM users are taken in a first-come, first served order. If you would prefer not to wait, you may always email a librarian.” Essentially, this is the only way we can manage IM reference service with one person handling it at the same time they are answering questions at the desk and responding to email queries. So far, our users have been understanding, and IM reference makes up approximately 10% of our reference interactions.

I don’t see this as discriminating against our virtual users. Anyone in customer service will tell you that the person standing in front of you takes priority.

I work at a library that has fewer than half the staff of Anna’s library at the University of Richmond (and we serve a larger combined graduate/undergraduate population). We have six librarians who staff all of the hours we are available to provide reference services and only one person covers IM, phone, email, and physical reference all at once. Yet our policy for reference has always been “first-come, first-served.” If I am online working with a student via IM, I will not tell them to wait or give me their email address when a physical student comes to the desk. I will tell that student, “I am working with another student through IM, can you wait a couple of minutes?” Each situation is different and sometimes I can work with both simultaneously. Sometimes I will take down the question and email address of one of them (if their question is particularly in-depth and/or their paper is not due in 10 hours — sometimes we’ll do this regardless of having competing priorities because the question is huge or would be better answered by another librarian or I want to do more digging on it and the patron needs to go) and will get back to them as soon as things settle down. But I never give preference to the student physically standing in front of me — each type of reference customer is equally important and deserves the same level of service.

I really have to question the logic of the statement “the person standing in front of you takes priority” for libraries that offer synchronous virtual reference services. People keep saying it, but no one has explained why they should take priority. And I don’t get it. Is it because your physical patrons are more important than your virtual patrons? Because the reference interview can take longer with a virtual reference patron? Because it makes you uncomfortable to tell someone standing in front of you that you’re working with someone online and they’ll have to wait a moment? I really can’t understand that statement at all.

When I developed our IM reference service three years ago, I was guided by the ACRL Guidelines for Distance Learning Library Services, which includes the following statement:

Members of the distance learning community, including those with disabilities, must therefore be provided effective and appropriate library services and resources, which may differ from, but must be equivalent to those provided for students and faculty in traditional campus settings.

If you are saying that in-person questions take precedence over the medium open to distance learners for contacting you, you are not providing equivalent services. I can’t stand when distance learners are treated like second-class citizens — having been a distance learner and a distance learning librarian, it really makes my blood boil. And this is just one example of how service to on-campus patrons takes precedence over service to online patrons. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they’re less deserving of timely and high-quality services. They pay your salary as much as every other student does. Here’s our help page for distance learners which clearly does not state that there are any limits to the reference services available to them or that questions from other patrons take precedence over their questions.

I know plenty of libraries do not serve distance learners, but I think the spirit of this document should apply to all virtual users of our library. There are many reasons why people may not come into the library to ask their question. It’s not just because they’re lazy or didn’t feel like it. Perhaps they are disabled. Perhaps they do not have transportation. Perhaps they have a mental illness like social anxiety disorder or agoraphobia or are asking a question that they’d be too uncomfortable to ask in person. What excites me most about providing synchronous virtual reference services is not the convenience, but that it has made reference services accessible to many people who never would have or could have used our reference services before. And to tell these people that your physical patrons take precedence is a subtle message that they are less important than the people who could make it to the library.

And let’s not forget that there is a whole other synchronous reference medium that’s been around for many, many years: the phone. At our library, when the phone rings and I’m working with a patron, I’ll answer the phone, take down their info really quick and let them know I’ll call them back because I’m with another patron. If I’m on the phone with someone and another patron comes to the desk, I’ll let the in-person patron know that I’m answering a reference question on the phone and that I can work with them in a few minutes or they can write down their query and leave me their email address and I’ll get to their question as soon as I’m done. It’s no different from how we treat our virtual reference patrons. And I don’t understand why it should be any other way.

I know that the reference interview can be more challenging and take more time in the virtual medium. I know it’s hard to staff four forms of reference service at once. I get it. I work in public services too, at a library where our reference stats have not gone down over the past five years and where we have a very small number of staff members to cover reference (and we don’t use students). But to say that there’s some logical reason why the person standing in front of you should receive preference over the person on the phone or in your chat window makes absolutely no sense to me. Can someone explain it?

There are lots of library schools doing students a serious disservice by not making it clear that anyone coming out of library school these days needs to have some minimal level of technology skills. Where I went to school, Florida State, was definitely one of those (not sure if they still are). In 2004, you could get out of FSU’s program without having taken a single technology-related course. And I had friends who chose that route, graduating without the ability to even create a “hello world” HTML page. And it’s not just the sort of tech stuff that Dorothea does that they are lacking. There are basic tech competencies that people just aren’t coming out of library school with. Like the ability to scan the horizon to see what’s new in library technologies. Or the ability to logically troubleshoot technologies instead of throwing up your hands the minute something doesn’t work like it should. Or the ability to critique and compare technologies. I wrote a post a while back about Skills for the 21st Century Librarian where I argued that these “big picture” skills were ones that every librarian should have, regardless of position. I still feel that way and I am appalled by those library schools that are graduating public service librarians who are prepared for librarianship of the 1970s.

I am hardly a techie and would be embarassed to call myself a techie in the company of folks like Roy Tennant and John Blyberg. I call myself a “cut-and-paste techie” because I can figure things out by seeing how other people made stuff work and then modifying what they did for our needs. I’m good with web design — I’m very comfortable with HTML and CSS and I can use PHP and JavaScript to do the little things that make maintaining a website much easier. I know enough about server maintenance to keep it running (but it helps that our stuff is backed up daily so I can’t break anything TOO badly). I’m willing to play with code to see if I can figure it out. I’ll try something, break it, back out of that change and see if I can figure out how to do it right. I’ll do that until I accomplish what I set out to do. Everything I know, I’ve learned from trial and error. In my library school program, there were no classes available that taught scripting languages. I want to learn how to code. I want to be able to build things from scratch. But with the number of hats I wear at work right now, I’m lucky if I have time to read a single article in Library Journal during an average month. I can do a surprising amount with the skills I have, but I feel myself bumping up against the limitations of my tech skills from time to time. And it bugs the heck out of me. I guess we all feel that way sometimes.

But what qualifications are really important for someone whose job isn’t specifically to develop applications? There used to be more of a clear line between people who did public services stuff and people who did systems stuff. That has really changed. We’re seeing all these hybrid jobs out there — these web/reference librarians, or distance learning librarians, or user experience librarians, or emerging technology librarians for public service, and more. There are all these public service jobs that require people to do all the traditional public service stuff (reference, instruction, liaison work, collection dev, etc.) as well as wearing the techie hat. And it’s a good thing, because you want people who are focused on user services to be aware of the technological landscape and what could be implemented to improve the user experience. But what skills are really important for these people to have? I think that largely depends on your relationship with your systems and/or IT folks. If the systems/IT folks can implement anything you dream up, then you just need to know how to dream. But the more likely scenario is that they’re stretched too thin maintaining the technologies the library already has. And while they’d love to spend time coding up cool applications for end users, it’s just not a top priority. So where does that leave public services? It leaves them needing someone in public services who can deliver on what they dream up.

I’ve seen an increasing number of job ads these days asking for people with knowledge of 2.0 stuff — blogs, wikis, Flickr, etc. I know this has been seen as something really cool, but it worries me in some ways. What does knowledge of 2.0 tools mean? You have a blog? You read blogs? You edited the Wikipedia? You have a Facebook profile? It’s important for librarians to keep up with the hot technologies, but does it make someone a techie? No. Can you install MediaWiki software on a server? Have you moved blog content from one software to another (say Moveable Type to WordPress)? What do you do when your blog or wiki’s database becomes corrupted? What mechanisms would you use to prevent spam on a blog or wiki? Can you customize our blog or wiki to look like the rest of our website? I wonder if we’re really asking the right questions. Frankly, if no one in public services has tech skills in the first place, would they even know what to ask? It’s also critical that these librarians have skills that transcend knowledge of the latest and greatest. These libraries need to ensure that they hire librarians who will still be useful to them after Facebook, blogs, wikis, and the like are “so five minutes ago” and we’re on to the next batch of stuff. You need people with skills that are bigger than specific tools.

But more than having people with skills, I worry about the way many libraries’ technological infrastructure is set up. Lots of libraries have no access to a server. They’re controlled by the school or municipal IT department. That’s how it was at Norwich when I got here. To make changes to the website, we had to contact the University Webmaster who had a LONG list of change requests from every department on campus. When I was hired, a big part of my job was supposed to be creating screencast tutorials for the distance learners, but IT wouldn’t give me server space to put them online. I feel very lucky that when I said I couldn’t do my job without access to a server, my Director let me get a VPS and run it myself (which was a little scary at first, but there haven’t been many issues I couldn’t handle). It’s given me the opportunity to try out all sorts of technologies and choose the best ones for our needs. I’m grateful that I was able to gain the trust of the Webmaster who gave me FTP access to the server the University website was on so I could be in charge of the library pages. When I look back on the past almost three years I’ve been here, I’m blown away by what I’ve been able to accomplish. I love this profession because I can do concrete things that improve services for our patrons. If I don’t feel like I’m moving forward, I’ll end up a dead shark.

When I see major academic libraries that are using PBWiki or WetPaint and blogs that are not locally hosted, I know that’s not a place I’d want to work at. If you have money, technologically savvy people and you’re using free, hosted stuff that you have little-to-no control over, something is seriously wrong with the way your organization is structured. I think some organizations haven’t figured out how to deal with these 2.0 tools. Who is supposed to support it? Who makes the decisions and has the control? There are so many potential turf issues when you have technologies that public services librarians want to implement for the end user. The systems librarians may not have time to maintain this stuff, but they may not feel they can’t trust the public services librarians to take the ball and run with it.

So, I think the problem is so much bigger than library schools still teaching students that this tech stuff is optional (which is not to say that isn’t a huge problem too). It’s also the way organizations are structured. So many libraries have a 1.0 org chart for a 2.0 world. They’re not structured to support public services technologies like blogs, wikis, etc. They’re not set up to allow for the sort of experimentation and agile decision-making that is required to meet the changing needs and wants of our users. So I don’t know that in an environment like that, hiring an emerging technologies librarian or a 2.0 librarian or whatever is the answer. You’re just putting a band-aid on a problem that goes to the heart of how your organization is structured and how decisions are made.

I’ll be curious to see if and how larger libraries address these issues over the next few years. I love that Berkeley’s New Directions Initiative has the goal of “support[ing] an open process that will allow the Library to understand and adapt to the evolving information needs of our faculty and students.” And I’m blown away by what Jeff Trzeciak has accomplished at McMaster in terms of creating a more agile organization that is ready to meet the challenges of the future. I think many libraries will have to go through similar processes over the next few years or we’re going to have a whole lot of dead sharks on our hands.

A while back, I wrote about the challenges I had in finding the right platform for our subject guides. Well, I’m pleased to say that I just linked to our subject guides from the front page of the library website, so they are live! I ended up using MediaWiki for the guides and tweaked the skin, Cologne Blue to meet our needs. It’s not the sexiest thing in the world and we don’t have every subject covered by a long shot, but we decided that we’d rather put it out where it can be useful than wait until we get to some “totally done” state (which will never really happen). It’s perpetual beta, baby! We still need to make some last minute tweaks before the students come back on Monday, but I think we’re in good shape to start and will be adding many more in the future.

My hope is that this doesn’t look like a wiki to the end user. I made sure that the editing options and other stuff like that were only visible to those who are logged in (and the only people with accounts right now are the librarians). So while you see a ton of editing options on the left-hand sidebar when you’re logged in, all you should see when you’re not logged in is a search box. I love that the guides are searchable and that we can assign categories to each page to allow students to browse as well. While we don’t have a ton of categories now, we may in the future. I also like that we have the option in the future of opening this up to further collaboration. I’d love to work with an interested faculty member on a collaboratively-developed course guide or subject guide at some point.

While there were many issues factoring into my decision, the main reason I chose a wiki is because everyone can create their own guides and edit them. I’ll be taking over the liaison duties for the Social Sciences in February and will also be in charge of doing LibQual for Fall 2008 (eeek!), so I’m going to be a lot busier than I was before. If we’d been in a position where I had to put up everyone’s guides and update them when they needed me to, it probably wouldn’t have gotten done. And it doesn’t just benefit me. My colleagues are really happy to have that control over their pages. When you have to ask someone else to do something for you, you’re going to be much less likely to make minor improvements on what you already have up there (I was like that too back when I didn’t have the ability to change our library pages in WebCT). My colleague, Josh, and I did a training yesterday on how to edit the wiki and I was happy to see how open to learning this everyone was. While I think they were a little freaked out at first, as soon as they actually started using the wiki, the anxiety level went way down. Prior to the training, Josh and I had been putting up everyone’s content, and we were a little worried that people wouldn’t feel comfortable taking it on themselves. Since the training, my Director has already put up one guide and is working on another. Woo hoo! Talk about leading by example!

Probably my favorite part of the subject guides is the focus on how-to’s. More general subject guides are great, but usually students are trying to accomplish something more specific. They’re not doing “architecture research” — they’re looking for information on a specific building or architect or design style. They’re not doing “English research” — they’re looking for literary criticisms, book reviews, etc. That’s why I think a task-based orientation works so much better than a subject-oriented one. The majority of the questions we get at the desk are from students trying to do the same few things and now we have guides that address those specific things that students are trying to accomplish.

We’ve been doing course guides since last year, but before, I always had to take people’s Word docs, turn them into HTML and put them on our site. It was time-consuming for me and annoying for the liaisons who created them because they couldn’t just make small changes on their own. Now, we’ll be doing all of these on the wiki, which I think will lead to more guides being created for classes.

I know this isn’t super high-tech or super innovative these days, but it’s a big deal for my library and I’m so excited to see it go live after so many months of evaluating, testing, planning, tweaking, and content development. We built a resource that’s (hopefully) useful for students where content is easily searchable and browseable. We streamlined the workflow for getting guides up and for maintaining them, which should lead to more up-to-date guides. We empowered staff to create and edit their own guides. We created something that could allow for future collaboration with faculty and (gasp!) even students. While it may not be sexy in terms of the technology it’s sexy in the sense that it’s replicable. This is a technology project that any library can replicate. You don’t even need to have a server since there are free hosted wiki options. As long as you have staff with a willingness to learn, you can make this happen.

When we got back from winter break, the ILL Librarian came to me with a request from a student. When a request from an online student is unusual or the books s/he is requesting is over $50, the request comes to me, as liaison, where I either allow or deny it. I usually allow anything over $50 that would be a good addition to the collection. Anyways, this request was for five books from before 1910. All of them were on the same extremely esoteric topic, which was likely never to be researched again by anyone at this institution (it was an odd one). In addition, they were out of print and some were impossible to find through used book dealers. The ILL Librarian was ready to suggest that the student utilize the ILL services of his local public library. I asked if she’d checked to see if the books were available online. She hadn’t. I then proceeded to find two of the five in Google Books and another two in the Internet Archive. So four out of five of the books he was requesting were freely available online for him to read and download.

I explained to the ILL Librarian that any time an online student is requesting a book from before 1923, she should check online to see if the book has been digitized. She was so grateful for the information, as was the student, who was shocked that so many of them were available online (though there’s tutorial for his program on Google Books that I created some time ago… sigh…).

Sometimes we assume that the knowledge we have is common. Often, we couldn’t be more wrong. That trick you discovered with a difficult-to-use database? That website you found that offers a treasure trove of statistical and demographic data? That free site for creating citations? It’s very possible that your colleagues don’t already know about this stuff. We all have so much useful knowledge to share with our colleagues, with our students, with our profession. Finding ways to share it and collect it can be challenging, but what we will all learn in the end makes it worth the effort.

Needless to say, I will be offering a session for my colleagues on Google Scholar and digital book archives this semester, and I’m sure my colleagues will give me lots of useful knowledge to add to my reference arsenal as well. What I love most about this profession is that we are constantly and simultaneously teachers and learners. It’s a good thing.

Last Winter, I started an embedded librarian program, because I felt that a lot of students were still missing the information I’d provided. I’m embedded in 14 online classrooms and in each of them, I have a discussion board where I can provide instruction and answer research questions at the point of need. I explain to them what resources are available and tell them about the tutorials in their subject area. In the weeks before their paper topic proposal is due, I offer advice on choosing a topic and pre-research, and I offer to help anyone who’s not sure if their topic is appropriate given the available resources. I tell people all the time about how we will e-mail them any journal article they need and will mail books to their home. In some classes, I get a lot of questions; in others, hardly any at all. And yet, at the end, I get feedback via end of semester surveys that some people couldn’t figure out how to use the library. And I’m left to wonder why they didn’t bother asking (if not on the discussion board, than at least via e-mail or phone).

So, when I receive feedback from students that makes it clear that they haven’t looked at any of my instructions, I’m at a loss about what to do. One student who had been in a class I was embedded in last semester was shocked to discover that we could get him journal articles that we didn’t have available online. And ILL is something I talk about on the discussion boards like a broken record. It was obvious he’d never bothered to look. I get feedback that people couldn’t figure out who to contact for help or that they had to buy books because we didn’t have what they wanted online. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes people have legitimate criticisms that I can act on and am grateful for it. I’m happy to make changes. It’s nice to be able to do something about it. I’m just not sure what I can do when I am making all this information available and people simply are choosing not to look at it.

I would love to be able to stand in front of them and give them this information. I’d love to have the opportunity to work with them them in a chat or a webcast, but the programs are strictly asynchronous since so many people work and are scattered all over the place. Barring that, I can only put the information in as many places as possible and constantly suggest to the faculty members that they recommend our services (which I do).

I’m never going to stop trying to make things better, but with some people you have to put up you hands and say “I’ve done enough.” If you’re not willing to look at tutorials, read documentation or contact us, I can’t help you. The student has to take some responsibility for this failure. I can’t make JSTOR easier to use, but I’m happy to teach you how to use it if you ask (or check out my tutorial on it). The majority of complaints we get are things we can’t fix. I can’t make the eBrary reader not suck. I can’t make it so that every database has the same interface. All I can do is make myself as available to help as I can and provide documentation so they can help themselves. And if people aren’t willing to ask for help or look at my instructions, then I can’t beat myself up over it. When someone I remember talking to buys a book instead of requesting it through ILL as I’d suggested, I’m not going to feel badly about it when he later complains. That’s not true. I do feel bad. But I’m trying to recognize when things are beyond my (or the library’s) control.

The feedback we get from the end of semester surveys has definitely gotten better over time, so I know we’re doing a better job, but it seems there will always be those people who don’t want to take responsibility for their own learning. If they can’t figure something out, they won’t look at the help page to find out who to contact. They won’t look at the tutorial. It drives me crazy, because I wish there was something I could do to reach these people. And since they are geographically distant, I can’t do much in the way of outreach (these folks are not of the online social networking generation by and large).

I guess it’s like the whole serenity prayer. I have to learn to accept that sometimes I won’t be able to help people because I can’t control their motivation. It’s a two-way street. And I guess it makes more sense to focus on the things I can change. It made a huge difference when we started offering chat reference. It made a big difference when we started monitoring the library e-mail accounts all weekend. I could spend time continuing to wring my hands over the students who don’t want my help or I could focus on doing a better job for those who do.

Pennvibes is a framework for content delivery and organization inspired by Netvibes, iGoogle, and Pageflakes. It is being developed at the Penn Libraries using AJAX, XML and Java technologies with the goal of creating a web presence that is drastically more responsive and flexible to the needs of our patrons. We also hope that Pennvibes provides an extensible delivery platform for arbitrary digital library content. When we go live (end of 2007), Pennvibes will enable our Librarians to build new reference pages in a few minutes, complete with custom-tailored (and proxied) lists of resources built from PennTags, integrated search tools (e.g., a Pubmed widget), RSS feeds, editable Webnotes, rotating image widgets, and a “My Library Account” widget that integrates items checked out, fines, and document delivery requests for the patron. In the second phase of the project, we would like not only librarians, but also Penn faculty and students to be able to create and modify Pennvibes pages, thereby making our Library Web site fundamentally more interactive and collaborative. In our presentation, we will demonstrate Pennvibes, outline its potentials for Library Web sites, and discuss the strengths and challenges of the underlying technology. * Please note that “Pennvibes” is an internal name that might be changed when we go live.

Richard Akerman was kind enough to blog their session. Does anyone else have any insight into this project? It sounds incredibly cool and I look forward to seeing it in production.

Prior to the conferences, I’d come to the conclusion that I shouldn’t live-blog conferences. Some people are really amazing conference bloggers like Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Jenny Levine and Erica Reynolds. Me? Not so much. I’m more of a commentary person, so I didn’t want to bore you with badly done outlines of what people talked about. I was never that good at taking notes in college and I definitely haven’t changed. I noticed less conference blogging going on at this conference. Maybe I’m not the only one who came to this conclusion or maybe it was all the problems people had getting Internet access.

Internet Librarian

The sessions:
Like any conference, some were excellent, some were abysmal. It’s always depressing when you read a description that sounds so interesting and then the talk has no relation to what was submitted. As a speaker, even the bad ones are interesting, because you learn at lot of “what-not-to-do’s.” One thing that’s critical for me is enthusiasm. If a person doesn’t deliver their material enthusiastically, it’s hard for me to stay interested, no matter how cool their topic. I respond to people’s energy. One of my other pet-peeves is talks that are about really idiosyncratic projects that could never be replicated anywhere but their own institution. I come to talks looking for inspiration; things I can take back to my job. It’s selfish to give a talk (or write an article) on a project that no one else can benefit from. Maybe people should really write up some learning objectives before they create their talk.

One bright spot was the Evidence-Based Practice talk by Frank Cervone and Amanda Hollister. Frank talked about the usability program at Northwestern. I was really interested in the fact that people who wanted to become members of the Web Advisory Group must read a list of required readings on usability and go through a training. Sometimes these groups can get so bloated with people who aren’t knowledgeable or all that interested in usability or design. I love the idea of an induction process. The only problems is that Frank didn’t tell us what the required readings are and I know many of us are eager to hear (Frank?).

Amanda talked about the tool her library developed for analyzing the paths users take on their website. She got code off the web for dynamic page-based bread crumbs for web pages that would recreate the path you took instead of showing a specific static path. They adapted it to make it more usable and that created an XML crumb file that traps pages visited, IP, and page timestamp. So they can see where people went and how long they spent on each page to figure out what might be confusing people and what pages people are most keen to find. You can pick a single page to analyze and it will show you how people got there (and how people got lost). I’d say the only negative about this talk is that what they developed isn’t freely available online for us to download and start using. But it definitely got me thinking about better ways to do usability testing!

I also enjoyed Erica Reynolds’ talk, Web Lessons from 4,000 Years of Art, where she talked about how she and her team applied inspiration they got from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art to their web redesign. Considering how amazing the redesign of the Johnson County Library website is she is definitely someone I would listen to on the subject of web design. Her slides are here if you’re interested in seeing what it was all about. I have loved every post she’s written on her blog about art and design; I just wish she would post more often!

The other highlight for me was Joe Janes’ keynote. His column in American Libraries really doesn’t do him justice and should definitely be changed into a podcast. I nearly peed my pants during his talk he was so funny. And so right. His insights about reference were spot-on and really made me question how we do reference. I actually ended up quoting him in my talk at UC Berkeley a few days later (and got laughs from it! Thanks Joe!). To actually see what he talked about, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek and Erica Reynolds both did a beautiful job covering it.

Between the sessions:
I really do enjoy Internet Librarian, but so much of the material covered in the conference is a review for me. While I always get some insights and inspiration from the sessions, I find that I get the most value from the conversations that take place before and after the sessions. So many of us spend all our time in libraries where we are the only ones who care about social technologies. To be with a group of people who share my interests and my frustrations is absolutely energizing. I feel so comfortable among these people I see at most 3 times per year. I always have so many great conversations at lunches and dinner, over coffee and drinks, or even at karaoke! I’m lucky to have such a great group of friends in the profession.

I come back to work with a recognition that I’m not alone in this, that there is a huge network of other librarians struggling to create better subject guides, better information literacy tutorials, better communication tools. The reality though is that we shouldn’t need a conference to share that information. Some of us share information informally over Twitter, IM and on our blogs. But the knowledge isn’t collected in a single space and some of it is totally ephemeral. I created the Library Success Wiki in the hopes that people would share information there about the projects they’re working on. What do you use to create your subject guides on the back-end? How is your gaming program set up? How do you provide outreach to distance learners? It’s hard to motivate people to do that without someone asking specific questions though. I’ve been thinking of setting up wiki barn-raisings on certain topics. Maybe I could put a question out on my blog and/or on Web4Lib and ask people to contribute the answer to the wiki. That way it would be easily findable by everyone and everyone could continually add to and update the answers. I sorely wish I had more time to devote to the Library Success Wiki, but fortunately, it is constantly growing thanks to so many wonderful people in the profession. And remember, we all own the wiki, so if you have an idea for making it better, go for it! Some saint was in the wiki last week adding categories to pages that didn’t have them. Rock on!

It stands to reason that if the discussions are the best part of the conference for some people, then perhaps more of the conference should be dedicated to those informal conversations. Interested in subject guides? Get a group together to discuss that. Interested in Facebook and MySpace? Form a group to talk about that. People can submit what they would like to discuss and other people can sign up if they’re interested in talking about that. The person who proposed it isn’t the speaker or even the facilitator; it’s just a free and open discussion. Everyone is simultaneously the teacher and the learner.

Unconferences are a really neat idea, but I think so many unconferences get such big crowds that intimate discussions are impossible. I think there should be no more than 15 people in a group for any discussion or it becomes a conversation between the loudest and most dynamic people in the room (even 15 is a bit too big for in-depth discussions). That means that lots of different conversations must be going on at the same time. After going to the Readex Digital Institute at which there were only 30 participants and speakers invited, I am really a fan of the small, intimate conference setting.

I also would love to see conferences designed for those of us for whom Internet Librarian is a review and Code4Lib is way over our heads. A conference for the techie-non-coder (I’m sure there’s a better name for us, but I’m not good at coining phrases). I hear that LITA may be looking at creating a conference like that, but hopefully they won’t charge as much as they charge for Forum for people to attend. Really, I’d like to go to a conference that’s more about strategies than technologies. Ok, I already know what the tools are and how to use them in my library. How can I sell them to administration and staff? How can I market them to patrons? How can I mange projects. How can I do effective tech-training? How can I create organizational change? How can I make 2.0 stuff happen within a 1.0 organization? How do we know what our users even want and how do we get from assessment results to creating new services? That is the stuff that, to me, isn’t covered enough at conferences. And maybe talk of strategies is best suited to an unconference. Whatever the format, I think it’s the area that we really need to start talking about more. Otherwise, we’re just implementing these tools willy nilly without a thought about sustainability and user needs.

LAUC-Berkeley

Peter Brantley once told me I should try to get a job at UC Berkeley. I said, “yeah, but I’d have to live in a cardboard box” and he replied “yes, but it’s a cardboard box in Berkeley.” I get it now… sort of. I’d actually never been to Berkeley before last week, so it was really neat to see the area. I can see why people live there, but I’m a country-girl at heart. Not really my scene. Still, gorgeous campus, great city, lots of nice restaurants. Probably wouldn’t kill me to live there (though the whole cardboard box thing would).

I gave the keynote at the Librarians Association of the University of California-Berkeley conference. It was really weird to be giving a keynote when all of these really distinguished librarians were there. I mean, Michael Buckland was giving a talk!!! I was at dinner with him (and some of the other speakers) the night before and was too nervous to say anything to him other than “nice to meet you.” I still get totally star-struck over certain people. Buckland’s What is a Document is the only article I saved from library school. And I, with less than three-year’s experience in the profession, was giving the keynote. Power of Web 2.0, I guess, or maybe the world’s just gone crazy.

Maybe that pressure had a positive effect on me, because I think it was the best talk I’ve given. I never got such positive feedback from a talk before, and I felt really good while giving it. I’d finished creating the presentation a while ago, but at Internet Librarian, I ended up revising it because I got so many good ideas. The talk was about Academic Library 2.0; what I think it means in our work with our patrons and in our internal workings. I really think organizational change is critical to being able to make the sort of changes necessary to be more user-focused and agile, so after detailing all of these characteristics, I asked the question “Is your organization (as it is currently structured) able to make all this happen?” I think most of us would say no. Some libraries might need a McMaster-type change of their entire organizational structure. Others might need to just focus on creating a culture of learning and risk-tolerance. Others might need to give people more freedom to make decisions and nurture talent in their organization. Either way, I think it really does require changes from within to create an organization that can respond rapidly to user needs and really nurtures the talent of their staff so that they can do great things for their patrons.

My slides from the keynote can be found here on slideshare. My talk was recorded and I believe it will be made available as a Webcast within the next week. I’ll point to it when it’s up.

Michael Buckland’s presentation (with some of his colleagues) was definitely one of the most interesting talks I’ve been to in a while. It really piggybacked well on Joe Janes’ keynote on changing the way we do reference. Buckland sees reference 2.0 as being more about self-service than finding all sorts of cool ways to communicate with our patrons. Many patrons would much rather find the answer themselves than ask for help, so we should be looking to create online reference tools that are easy-to-use and reliable, taking advantage of the hyperlinked nature of web pages to link to contextual information about any topic. He also discussed the importance of having reference material grounded in time and space, which is often difficult to accomplish.

To this end the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative came into being, of which Buckland is the co-director. It is “a global consortium of people who share the vision of creating a distributed virtual library of cultural information with a time and place interface.” It’s a project that’s been in existence for 10 years and is well-worth checking out if you haven’t heard about it before (their site is rich with information). I found the whole talk fascinating and it made me realize just how incredibly insufficient what we currently have in terms of online reference resources really is.

I finished this post on Tuesday night, because I sadly was right about coming down with something. I’m achey, fatigued and have all the fun respiratory symptoms. Not surprising with all the people sneezing on me during my four hour layover at JFK on Saturday (what is with people not covering their mouths! Eww!). I had to leave work early today and ended up sleeping the entire afternoon away. While I do enjoy speaking and I do enjoy the discussions I have at conferences, they take a lot out of me. Then again, were I not to travel so much, I wouldn’t feel that same sense of joy at coming home and sleeping in my own bed. All in moderation.

When our Coordinator of Public Services started a little over a year ago, she was really gung-ho about creating useful subject guides for our patrons. There were a few barriers though. The first was (or is) time. Each librarian is a liaison to a whole lot of programs. One person is liaison to “Social Sciences.” Another is liaison to “Humanities.” As Distance Learning Librarian, I am the liaison to 10 academic programs (from Masters in Business Administration to Masters in Civil Engineering to Masters in Nursing to Masters in Military History and more). I’m lucky, because I’d been creating subject guides for my programs over the past two years and have pretty well-developed ones already in use. My colleagues are starting from scratch with our on-campus students, so it’s a lot of work and for everyone, subject guides are more of a “when I have free time” sort of task. Were I running the show, I would probably set a deadline for when people had to be done with these, because otherwise, there are always more pressing things to do.

The second barrier was technology, which wasn’t really seen as much of a barrier by anyone but me. Currently, the way the website runs is that people give me content and I put it up online. This seems to me like a recipe for disaster with the subject guides. Sure, it’s not so hard to initially put some subject guides online, but what about when links change? Or when a database changes its URL and I have to make the change on 20 separate pages? I’d originally thought that we were just going to link to the relevant area on the “databases by subject” page, but the Public Services Coordinator wanted the individual databases to be explicitly linked to in each guide. I wanted to figure out a system where I wasn’t totally in control of maintaining the content, because it would be a full-time job in itself (and, as you can imagine, I do have a few other duties… just a few!).

So began my exploration of the options for low-threshold, sustainable subject guides. I say low-threshold because I’m not a coder. I can’t rig up some fancy ColdFusion CMS like the lovely Karen Coombs did at the University of Houston. The main goal for me was to have my colleagues be able to update as much of their own content as possible and to not have a situation where when a link changes, I will have to change it in a million places.

The first thing I thought of was using del.icio.us. On the companion website for my book, I have a dynamic list of relevant links for each chapter. These lists actually pull from the things I’ve bookmarked chapter1, chapter2, etc. in del.icio.us. It would certainly be easy for my colleagues to bookmark web content in del.icio.us and add an annotation. And it’s definitely easy also to display it on a website. del.icio.us has a took called link roll which will display a chosen portion of your links. It allows you to choose what tag(s) you want to display, how many you want to display, and how you want the list sorted (alphabetically or chronologically). It will then give you the JavaScript that will enable you to display it on your website. If you know anything about CSS, you can even style the output to look like the rest of your site.

del.icio.us would also work for the database lists. I could create a bookmark record for each database in our library (with the proxy prefix). I could then tag each of these databases with the names of the subjects they should be placed into (such as db_political_science, db_mathematics, etc.). That way, if the URL of a database changes, I would only have to make the change in one place in del.icio.us.

I actually got so far as training my colleagues on how to use del.icio.us before I changed my mind. The main reason I didn’t go with del.icio.us was because I didn’t want to be so dependent on a third-party vendor; especially one that we didn’t pay to provide the service. I know del.icio.us isn’t going anywhere, but it can and has gone down. When it does go down, lots of the content from our subject guides will inexplicably disappear. While I don’t imagine that disaster will strike del.icio.us and it will be put out of commission forever, I’d just hate to be that dependent on it. As bad a server administrator as I am, I’d rather have the data living on our server. Also, I’d still be responsible for maintaining the rest of the content on each subject guide (contact info, subject headings, book lists, journals, etc.), so it wasn’t a perfect solution for the whole site. Still, I think this would be a great option for many libraries, especially those who don’t have regular server access to update their web content.

Our Electronic Resources Librarian and I discussed LibGuides, but we knew that the library was not going to spend the money on it. I must admit that LibGuides is very cool, but we don’t currently need a lot of the features they offer. I like that they have a bookmarklet for web resources, that you can easy embed search tools (for catalog, databasese, etc.) and that you can easily display RSS feeds on the site. Usage stats are very nice too. The rest of the stuff is cool, but not really that important to us. I think it’s a great tool for larger libraries where there are lots of subject guides and lots of hands in those guides. For the number of subject guides we’d create at our little library with six liaisons contributing, we don’t need something we’d have to pay for. It’s also great for libraries that are integrated in social networking software or have blogs and websites they might want to embed subject guide content on. It’s cool, but not really something we need. For more views on LibGuides, check out reviews from the Academic Librarian, the Librarian in Black, and BiblioTechWeb.

Next, I started looking at open source options. There are plenty of libraries that have created their own homegrown systems for creating and maintaining subject guides. Some (like the one that Karen Coombs created at the University of Houston) are Cold Fusion-based and are not something one can easily just install and get going with. Others are much simpler. Some libraries/librarians have been kind enough to make the products of their labor open source.

Here were some of the tools I looked at that seemed at least remotely feasible for me to take on:

• Research Guide – From the University of Michigan. Wayne State also uses it. Looks good. Was updated in 2006. Was just concerned about how to set up the authentication stuff.
• LibData – from the University of Minnesota. Hasn’t been updated since 2003 or 2004. library is not using it anymore. (update: looks like they are still using it; not sure where I got the idea that they weren’t)
• Pirate Source – This one was developed at Eastern Carolina University, but is used at a bunch of libraries. The install script didn’t work so I had to create the tables and SQL queries manually. Had trouble trying to get it to work with PHP5. Not sure I like the initial page since people are inundated with choices and it may confuse some.
• Subjects Plus – my personal fave. This is an enhancement of Pirate Source developed by Ithaca College. It’s great-looking though it takes up a lot of screen real estate. In the sidebar you can put info about the liaison, links to tutorials, call numbers and syndicated news feeds. I love the “Try these First” feature since students usually just want to know what the very best resources are. I still don’t love the initial page where they choose the guide and then have the option to select the types of resources they are looking for. It’s good to give people options, but sometimes less is more, I think.

I was actually all set to go with Subjects Plus (which really does rock as far as subject guide software goes) and had it installed on our server, but then got cold feet. While it’s a great option now, will I (or my successor) be able to successfully maintain the software? These are all software projects developed by one or a few people. If these universities end up implementing another tool in the future, there probably won’t be continued development of the software (as was the case with LibData). For libraries without coders, open source software like this is probably not a good long-term option. I can usually muddle around enough to get something installed, but if we eventually upgrade our versions of PHP or MySQL and something breaks, I won’t know what to do to fix it. And when I leave my job in the future, I have no idea if they will make web skills a real priority when hiring my successor. Non-coders are better off relying on thriving community-driven projects with lots of people fixing stuff, extending the functionality, and writing documentation. That was my next stop.

It’s kind of funny that it didn’t dawn on me to try MediaWiki until I’d exhausted most of the other reasonable options (does that mean I can’t be called the Queen of Wikis anymore?). It’s not that a wiki is a bad idea, but I worried about getting my colleagues on-board with using it. While MediaWiki is not the most difficult thing in the world to use, wiki markup isn’t intuitive, which I see as the big barrier to its use. Anything that involves learning a new way of doing things is going to be difficult for some people. I thought about installing a WYSIWYG editor, but I have a bad taste in my mouth from recently upgrading Drupal and having TinyMCE and the chat extension break. I want to be as little dependent as posible on extensions that could break when I upgrade the software. This is an important thing to consider when you’re using wiki/blog/CMS software. These extensions are great, but if they are dependent on a specific version of the software, you will either be stuck not upgrading or will have to make it compatible with the latest version on your own. Just like the wiki/blog/CMS itself, make sure there is a community behind the extensions you choose; a community that will make absolutely sure these extensions work with the latest version of the product.

There are a few key benefits of using MediaWiki software for this purpose in my opinion:

• It’s the software that runs Wikipedia, so it isn’t a project that’s going to go South anytime soon.
• Granular permissioning allows me to give my colleagues only the rights they absolutely need and to give a select few more rights.
• If we want faculty or students to contribute in the future, it’s possible.
• The full-text of the wiki is searchable.
• We can assign each subject guide to categories so that the guides can be browsed as well.
• It’s completely flexible; we can make the pages be however we want.

The two big negatives in my opinion are the lack of a WYSIWYG editor (which is something they said was soon going to be a part of MediaWiki back in August 2006) and the fact that it’s a pain in the behind to monkey around with the look. Because it’s designed specifically for the Wikipedia, making it easy to change the look wasn’t a big priority. I think I “broke” the wiki 20 times while messing around with the PHP for the skin I’d chosen. I’d make a change, get an error message, back out of my change, figure out what I did wrong, fix it so that the syntax is correct, make another change, get an error message again… I think I’ve made it look halfway decent (click on the pics below to view the full-sized images of the template I created for my colleagues), though there’s still a lot of tweaking I want to do, like adding our logo. We don’t have any content up yet, because no one has given me any, but once I receive it, it shouldn’t take me long to have it looking good. I’m itching to get some guides up there already!

To deal with the problem of database links being scattered all over the place, I came up with a decent, but not perfect, solution that I borrowed from UNC Chapel Hill. I noticed that in their subject guides, they didn’t link directly to the database but to what was essentially an “authority record” for the database; a single page where the link to and description of the database resided. I decided that I’m going to create a page for every database we have and in the subject guides, we will simply link to that page. Therefore, if the link to a database changes, we’ll only be fixing it in one place in the subject guide wiki rather than a million places. It means two clicks for the student, which sucks, but I’ll try to make it as obvious as possible what they need to click on once they get to that intermediate page.

I don’t think MediaWiki is the perfect solution and other solutions will work better at other libraries. I think it’s important when looking at any alternative to static HTML subject guides that you sit down and really think about what functionality/features you absolutely need vs. what would be cool but isn’t totally necessary. The simpler you can make things, the easier it will be to maintain. Then, look at what is already out there. Will anything out there meet your needs or do you need to create something yourself (or pay someone to create something for you)? Finally, think about whether this is a sustainable solution. What will it take to maintain this next month? Next year? In three years? If it’s an open source tool, is it developed by a community or just one person? If that person stopped development, would someone on your staff (or in IT) be able to continue development so that it continues to work and isn’t a security hazard? The same goes for something you create yourself or pay someone to create; think about what it will take to make this work in the long-term, not just to get it working now.

Honestly, I have my doubts that these subject guides are going to make much of a difference for our students. Looking at our Web stats, I see that our undergrads simply aren’t visiting our site, and I don’t think that is going to change. I’ve been putting course guides up for my own and my colleagues’ instruction sessions and it hasn’t impacted Web traffic (beyond the day of the session). I think the key is to focus on being where our students are, both physically and online. If we can understand their information-seeking behavior and put ourselves in their path, right at reach, we’ll be much more likely to have an impact. I think the library resources should be like the impulse buy area in a store. It’s just so easy when you’re paying for your groceries to reach out and grab that Star Magazine or that pack of gum. I want the library to be that pack of gum (or Star Magazine… that would work too). And while we truly have achieved that with the online graduate students, who have the library right in their classroom, we haven’t even started to move in that direction with the on-campus folks. Putting our stuff where our users are… now that would be 2.0.