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What Can We Stop Doing by Merilee Profit in Hanging Together – This is fairly old, but is something I’ve wanted to blog about for a long time and have realized that it’s never going to happen. Unless you have an influx of new money and people, in order to undertake new initiatives, you have to give up something. I really loved the quote in it from the President of the Getty Museum “‘If no programs are allowed to ever die, in the end you become captive to decisions from the past… Every now and then . . . you’ve got to step back and say, ‘Certain things have been very successful, but we should sunset them now.’” I think that the unwillingness to stop doing things is largely behind the failure of a lot of Web 2.0 initiatives, as people simply aren’t given dedicated time to make them successful.

Introduction to Online Pedagogy – This is a self-paced course designed by the WISE Consortium (a consortium of library schools that teach online and allow students to take classes at the other universities — SJSU is a member). It’s designed to prepare LIS faculty to design and teach effective online courses. Useful for anyone designing online instruction.

Customizable Library Portal Pages by Aaron Tay in Musings about Librarianship – Again, not a brand-new blog post, but Aaron showcases some libraries that are WAY ahead of the curve in developing customizable library home pages. I strongly feel that this is the future of the library website — users should be able to design their own library website experience based on what they actually need/want to use. After talking with our Systems Librarian about this idea, he started playing with Drupal to see how he could create a customizable library homepage. He’s still in the very early stages, but it’s already looking promising. Thanks for the nudge, Aaron!

So You Want to do Anthropology at Your Library? or A Practical Guide to Ethnographic Research in Academic Libraries by Andrew Asher and Susan Miller. Asher and Miller were the anthropologists involved in the ERIAL ethnographic study conducted jointly by five Illinois universities. They created this amazing PDF guide for libraries (like mine) that want to undertake similar research. Such great practical advice in here!!!

Patron Driven eBook Acquisition: Crab Legs vs. Spinach by Eric Hellman at Go To Hellman – A thoughtful post about patron-driven electronic acquisition, a topic near and dear to my heart these days as we prepare to go live with eBook Library in a few weeks. The post also contains some really useful links at the end if you’re interested in the topic. As we are a teaching university and our focus is on building a collection out students and faculty WILL USE, I am looking forward to seeing how we can make patron-driven acquisition a larger part of our overall book purchasing.

Making the case for a fully mobile library web site: from floor maps to the catalog by Laurie Bridges, Hannah Gascho Rempel, and Kimberly Griggs in Reference Services Review. This issue of Reference Services Review is all about mobile library services (with lots of awesome, awesome, awesome articles!), so if you are interested in the topic, I’d highly suggest reading the whole shebang. This article from librarians at Oregon State is a perfect read if you are looking to make the case to the powers-that-be that you absolutely should be mobilizing your library website.

Does Where You Work Define Who You Are As An Academic Librarian by Steven Bell at ACRLog – while I actually liked the title and the comments more than the post itself (not that the post was bad by any stretch!), it asks a very interesting question: Does where you work define who you are as a librarian? My answer? YES!!! To me, it’s less about prestige and more about the size and structure of the library. I think where you work early in your career can have a tremendous impact on your career path and on your work personality. I have gotten so accustomed to working in a small place with a very risk-tolerant and change-oriented director where we can move quickly on just about any project, that when I was offered a position at a pretigious ARL library, I turned it down because I knew I’d be miserable dealing with bureaucracy and moving SO SLOWLY on things (not that all ARLs are like that, but I knew this particular position would have sapped my passion and energy). After working at a small place, I really like to wear a lot of hats and work on a lot of different projects. This place really does suit my personality, but I often wonder how different I would be had I first worked at a large ARL with a lot of bureaucracy and a tenure track for librarians. I’ve had so much FREEDOM and CHOICE here and now I feel spoiled by it.

e-texts and (library) accessibility by Char Booth at info-mational – accessibility is a topic that I think most librarians and educators would rather not think about because it ’s just another thing we have to assess when considering new technologies and services. But try to imagine the person who can’t watch your screencast, can’t use your Meebo widget, and can’t use the Kindle you’re lending out. I’d much rather make text transcripts of my video lectures than potentially marginalize one of my students. This thoughtful post provides great insight into accessible (an inaccessible) design in the digital world and I can’t wait to see the e-text usability/accessibility rubric for librarians that Lucy and Char are going to create. Char is truly a force of nature, churning out one useful article, book, guide (PDF), report, etc. at a dizzying pace. She totally inspires me!

And yet, here I am, the owner of a Kindle. No, I didn’t have a total change of heart and buy one for myself. I actually won it in a raffle at a conference I was speaking at. Even if you don’t necessarily want to buy a Kindle, it’s pretty exciting to win one! From my hotel that evening, I registered my Kindle and downloaded a couple of books. I read stories from Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness on the way home the next day and found it to be a pretty good reading experience. It’s nothing like reading on a computer screen — no glare, no backlight. To my surprise, I actually found it to be just as pleasant as reading a print book. A few weeks later I read a 320-page book, Orange is the New Black, on the Kindle (by the pool, in the bathtub, and in bed) and, other than having to plug it in at night, I never thought about the fact that I was reading on an electronic device. The reading experience was just as absorbing. I even fell asleep reading on it! I’ve been pleasantly surprised by it and am actually reading more now that I have it than in the entire year since my son was born.

Knowing what I know now, would I have bought it? Probably not. I don’t travel enough (or read enough, with a toddler in the house) to make it really worthwhile. But there are other reasons why I think the Kindle, and eBook readers like it, are not where it’s at. First of all, while you can annotate a book, it’s extremely cumbersome on a Kindle. When I was in college, I highlighted and underlined the hell out of my books and wrote notes in the margins. When I thought about transferring my Immersion readings to the Kindle, I rejected the idea because I knew I’d want to write notes in the margins and underline important passages and it seemed like a hassle to do that on the Kindle and then refer back to those annotations at Immersion.

Most also don’t take advantage of one of the most exciting things that’s happened in computing in the past decade — the growth of the social web. In addition to easily annotating the things I read, I might want to see what annotations others have added to what I’m reading, if they choose to make them public. If I’m working on a group project, I certainly want to share my annotations with my team members. I want to make it easy for friends to see what I’m reading and what I thought about it and to see what people I trust thought about the book I’m considering downloading. I know the upcoming update to the Kindle firmware will have some social features, but it’s still a long way from what could be possible in the future. I can’t even imagine what reading online is going to look like in the future!

I’ll wait to spend my money on a device that offers all this and is more than just an eBook reader (go convergence devices!). The iPad still isn’t exactly what I want, and at that price it’s just not worth it for me (though I must say that I’ve had fun playing with other people’s iPads). I know so little about the market for eBook readers, but I feel like everything is really in its infancy, is so proprietary, and is so tied only to recreating the print reading experience rather than reimagining the reading experience. I definitely enjoy reading on my Kindle, but I’m much more interested in seeing what comes out in the next several years. I have a feeling it’s going to put what’s available right now to shame.

If you’re planning to attend and there’s something you’d specifically like me to cover in my talk, please let me know!

I loved this comment he made early in the talk, “if you don’t promote yourself, you’re doomed to defend yourself.” Libraries suffer from the curse of high satisfaction. We do a great job, but as a result, no one talks about us, complains about us, or asks the powers-that-be for us to get more resources. Libraries don’t get rewarded for outstanding performance or even for poor performance. Libraries tend to be bad at presenting our data in a way that is persuasive. We need to look at how to present our data to the powers-that-be to get what we want and need. It’s not just about showing that demand went up, it’s about tying it to things that are important to the powers-that-be.

Leadership is about social influence rather than hierarchy. We all need to be leaders. Leadership is about building trust, building social capital and listening to others more than speaking. I really agreed with Ken when he mentioned that he prefers informal mentoring to having a formal mentor role. You should seek out people whom you admire to be your “board of directors” and be the CEO of your own life. You don’t have to ask them to be mentors; just get their thoughts on decisions you need to make. These people may not even realize they’re your mentors. This is exactly what I’ve done in my career – I haven’t asked people to be my mentors, but there are a number of people whom I consider mentors in light of the wisdom they have offered me over the years.

I also loved when Ken said that arguing for libraries on the basis of the public good is “so last century.” We need to argue for public value – what real value to we provide our patrons?

Ken talked a lot about advocacy. Public relations is all about us (“here’s what we do!”), but advocacy is all about our users. We need to learn what our users need and then give them what they want. Advocacy is planned, deliberate, sustained effort to develop understanding and support incrementally over time. Advocacy is really about respect and connecting agendas. We can’t just come to the door of the powers-that-be with our hand out. “You can’t make a withdrawal before you make a deposit.” We need to build relationships and connect with the values of the people we want to influence. We need to be at the table when the problem of the larger organization (University, municipal authority, state, etc.) is defined and offer solutions from a library perspective. This totally meshes with my thoughts on the promotion of information literacy – that it’s so much more persuasive when it’s tied to already existing university goals and initiatives. Ken recommended a book called “Yes…” that is definitely on my to-read list now.

One interesting tip that Ken gave is about personalizing the things – that a handwritten note on a report is going to get more attention on the report than if it just comes to them via email or something. I plan to start doing this for important things I want to make sure people read and respond to.

The last talk I went to was on Staff Development: Soft Skills, Firm Results, given by three of my favorite librarians: Janie Hermann of the Princeton Public Library and Mary Carmen Chimato and Colleen Harris of NCSU. The Princeton Public Library had never done a staff development day for the entire staff, but when they moved into their new building, it became necessary because people were on different floors and were more separated physically. They began to feel out of touch. PPL doesn’t have a full-time staff training coordinator – it’s sort of an “other duties as assigned” thing for a few librarians at PPL. This sounds familiar. They decided to do a library camp. They asked people to suggest ideas for birds of a feather sessions and had people vote on the sessions they wanted. They then picked the ones that got the most votes for that day’s discussions. They also had lightning talks. I love the idea of doing a Library Camp for a staff day and I really would love to create a Library Camp in Vermont.

Mary Carmen and Colleen (who run the Access Delivery Services department at NCSU) talked more about the how to develop shared values among staff (or “organizational clarity”) and how to correct staff behavior when norms were violated. The Access Delivery Services staff had a retreat to determine fundamentally what they do, how it fits into the larger library system, group norms, and what staff want from management. They found that staff wanted more communication, more responsibility, more risk taking, more “being given projects and told to run with them”, higher expectations for them, training and development, and recognition for their achievements. This jives with what I’ve read about what workers want. People don’t just want recognition, but they want to be trusted and given responsibilities and freedom to do things on their own. Having that freedom is a key component to feeling valued, because people who are micromanaged do not feel like their bosses think they’re capable of doing things without that level of supervision.

Staff also looked at what great customer service looks like, and determined some metrics for measuring customer service. Metrics included error rates, satisfaction surveys, compliments vs. complaints, service desk demeanor, and the claims returned rate. I think it’s important that customer service is not just thought of as “being nice” because you can be the sweetest person in the world and do a really crappy job, not help the customer properly, etc. I like that they are really thinking about how customer service is measured and making sure those measures are meaningful.

They then talked about how to deal with staff who are not meeting expectations. As managers we’re going to come up against the fact that not everyone is going to be able to learn what they need to keep up with the changing work of libraries. Sometimes the issue is that they have no interest in learning and changing and sometimes the issue is about ability. Punishment is not the answer with staff issues because there is too much uncertainty and inconsistency with that. You don’t want people to feel like they’re a target.

There are two reasons for a performance problem – lack of knowledge or lack of execution. With execution issues: make sure expectations are clarified (can your staff explain what you expect?), what obstacles your staff have, that you’re giving your staff regular feedback, and that you’ve arranged appropriate consequences. These discussions should be serious and planned and have a very specific goal. Be specific about the issue and make sure you know what the problem or problems are. Tell them what the desired performance is vs. what they’re giving you. Finally, gain agreement and determine consequences – they need to know what will happen if they don’t shape up (disciplinary or discuss). End on a positive expectation of change and follow up in writing.

After this session, I had to leave for the airport. This was my first trip away from Reed since he was born, and I wanted to spend as little time away from him as possible. I got home an hour and a half before Reed went to bed, so got to spend some cuddling and play time. While I had such a fantastic time at this conference, I am much happier to be home with Adam and Reed. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to be a mother and still be able to have my professional life and enjoy networking with amazing librarians. I also feel lucky to work in a profession with such passionate, caring and helpful people. Most of the people presenting at CIL weren’t doing it to get tenure; they speak because they genuinely care about sharing information with others. What generosity! Add to that the fact that most of the people I knew at CIL were wicked fun, and this made for a brilliant conference. Good people, good sessions, decent wifi, good food… a great first conference away from my family.

I try to never miss a talk that Rebecca Jones gives, and, as usual, I was not disappointed by the talk that she and Deb Wallace of Harvard Business School’s Baker Library gave on Critical Thinking: Getting to the Right Decision. Rebecca started with the seemingly obvious point that if you’re not willing or ready to change, don’t bother doing strategic planning. While I’d like to believe this is obvious, I know of libraries that have done strategic planning with no intention of changing in any meaningful way. Rebecca stated that critical thinking is not about being critical; it’s about decision-making. You have to challenge base assumptions. When people have to make decisions, they tend to do one of two things – they oversimplify the issue or they get overwhelmed by the decision and are like a deer in the headlights. To employ critical thinking, people must demonstrate clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, use sound evidence, have good reasons behind our decisions, be fair, and open-minded.

We need to be clear on the fact that when we are challenging assumptions we are challenging a situation, not people, but people may feel challenged by it. When making decisions, we need to look at our assumptions and how our views of things are colored by time/perspective/others. We need to look at statistics and trends with clarity and try to think about what they’re really telling us, rather than looking at them through the colored lens we usually employ to examine such things. I really like what Rebecca said about sunk costs and how people often stick with something that’s not working because they already invested so much in it. “When you find yourself in a hole, the worst thing you could do is keep digging.”

Deb works at the Baker Library of Harvard Business School, which is an iconic structure, but they’re trying hard not to be identified only as a building. They have an important role in educating leaders who make a difference in the world. Over the past few years, they have worked hard to connect all staff to the bigger picture of the library and how it can move forward, which was difficult with some staff who had rote tasks and were not really in the habit of thinking that way. They wanted people to look at the library with new eyes and ask themselves if they’re anchored in stuff that was done a specific way 35 years ago. When you erase the status quo, people actually have to exercise judgment, which can be scary for some.

Deb said a lot of profound things, but there was one thing that really stuck with me as the Head of Instruction. She talked about making clear the distinct capabilities we bring to the table that the faculty don’t have. The different roles should be clear to avoid butting heads when we collaborate. This has been a big issue at our library as we try to ensure that every freshman gets basic information literacy instruction. While we’d like to standardize this and do it through the library, some English faculty are really against this, arguing that it’s their role to teach information literacy (though some don’t do it or at least don’t do it well). So I’m really struggling to define what we offer that’s unique in this realm, when faculty can (and in some cases do) teach information literacy as well.

In the afternoon, I gave a talk with Joan Petit on Virtual Learning & Training: From Classrooms to Communities. I talked about how I use Drupal for my online class in SJSU’s SLIS program to make class more engaging, encourage reflective learning, and create a more constructivist learning environment. Joan talked about how she used blogs in a face-to-face information literacy class to extend learning and make the class more engaging. Joan was a last minute addition to the lineup as my original co-presenter realized on Friday that she couldn’t make it to the conference. In light of that, it was even more amazing what a great job she did. It was such an interesting session and we got a lot of good questions from the attendees. My slides are below and links to my classes also can be found on my presentation wiki.

I was so energized by the ladies from UNC Greensboro (Beth Filar Williams, Lynda Kellam, Amy Harris, Hannah Winkler) who presented on Instructional Technology: It’s a Team Thing (a much more detailed blog post on this session can be found on Heather Braum’s blog). Before the four women came together, instructional technologies at the library were not used systematically, and it was dependent on the individual instructor. One of them was tasked by her supervisor with trying to standardize the use of instructional tech to a greater extent. To that end, she asked interested members of the library staff to meet with her about instructional tech, and from that group, she assembled a team of four librarians to be the instructional technology team. They each have different skills/strengths and really complement each other. They brainstormed ideas for tech to implement, and broke them down into high impact/low effort, high effort/high impact, etc. to figure out what would net the most impact with the least effort. Those were the things they decided to try first. I was really impressed by how organized their meetings were, with very detailed agendas (with what/who, details, and time allotted for each topic). It’s something we really don’t do at my library and as a result, we often end up with overlong rambly meetings that veer off on various tangents. At the meetings I run, I think I’m going to start organizing meetings the way they do.

In April 2009, UNCG had a big budget freeze and had no money for anything, so they had to reprioritize what they wanted to do. They created tutorials, an assignment calculator, and several other things that they could do for free. Later on, when they had money, they could get things like clickers and a video camera and boom mic. These are all things I’d really like for my library too. The women also started a team blog to communicate amongst themselves and with the other staff members about what they’re working on.

In addition to their internal group, they also started an instructional technology group with librarians from other local academic institutions. This is something I’d really like to do in Vermont (or at least central VT). It’s so easy to develop tunnel vision or groupthink when you’re talking to the same people everyday. It’s really nice to get out of your little box and talk to other librarians on a semi-regular basis.

Stay tuned for Day 3!

I did not take my computer with me to sessions and did not use my iPhone to Tweet much. I instead took a notepad and pen and wrote down things that I found particularly interesting. My notes are not a play-by-play, but are the things I got out of the conference or the thoughts I had about a session that really meant something to me. I’m happy I was less connected during the sessions, since I feel like people can get really distracted when they’re tweeting and following tweets. I wanted to get as much out of this conference as I could, especially since I’m not traveling as much as I used to. It’s funny how most people have become more and more connected to social technologies at conferences and I am trying to be less connected. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but I think I found a perfect balance for me at conferences.

Like all ITI conferences, Computers in Libraries started with Lee Rainie’s keynote where he shared lots of statistics on how people use the Web today. While I love the work that Lee Rainie and the Pew Internet and American Life Project do, I have become a little cynical about the statistics he offers us in his keynotes, because I think a lot of librarians use statistics like these and from other think-tanks and organizations in place of actual research on their own user population. That’s great that so many people are using social tech, but how many of those people are library users? And how many of them are MY library users? Every library really needs to determine the technology use and behaviors of their own patrons, because your patron population is unique, and assuming that what is the case in one place is the case in your community is a huge mistake.

One thing I really enjoyed in Rainie’s keynote was the story he told about a vodcast created by a teenager and her mother where they discussed reality shows they watched together. It ended up becoming a very successful video series, with thousands of subscribers and even more people watching individual videos. The teenage girl ended up using the video to get accepted to a prestigious media studies program at NYU. I love examples like this, because they illustrate how people can build a brand online (while having fun!) that can help them to further their career. Rainie called it “building reputational capital” and this is truly an important currency these days.

I went to Chad Mairn’s talk on Information Fluency Strategies and Practices and got a lot of little insights and some technology ideas I’d not thought of before. I totally agree with him that students will not learn something well unless you have them do it yourself (rather than just demonstrating it to them). I had not heard before of TRAILS (Tool for Real-Time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills), which is an assessment for 9th grade students, but apparently also works well for college Freshman. I also loved the activity that he did where he had students use Diigo to bookmark articles and then highlight and annotate parts of the article to determine the main ideas of the article. The ability to distill meaning from an article/book/website is a critical information literacy skill that is too often ignored in IL instruction.

Chad also creates course pages in Facebook and uses static FBML to customize them. I really like this idea. He also uses an app called Vivox in Facebook to actually have audio conferencing with his students. I wonder if any other librarians are using Facebook for course-specific (or even program-specific) outreach. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to creating a Facebook page for myself as liaison to the social sciences, so this is something I’m really interested in.

Chad also suggests that instructors can use Yuuguu or LogMeIn Express to have students demo things through screensharing/screen control, or the librarian can take control of a student’s screen to demonstrate something. This would be fantastic when working with distance learners, but it could also be useful in the class to get students to demonstrate something you just showed them how to do from their own computer.

Next, I gave a talk on Achieving Organization 2.0. It had been almost a year since I’d given a talk in person, and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed speaking in front of an audience and engaging in discussions. This talk focused on why so many Web 2.0 initiatives at libraries fail and how libraries can be better structured and can operate better to effectively implement 2.0 tools and services. My slides are available below, with slides and links available on my presentation wiki.

I didn’t take great notes on the Developing Specific Fluencies: Case Studies talk I went to, but one of the data librarians there who had spoken about training CRS librarians on GIS said this, which stuck with me, “we don’t teach the tool, we only teach the task.” This is a very simple statement, but one that every teacher and trainer should keep in the forefront of their minds. We get so stuck on teaching specific databases or specific technologies, when that’s not what our users actually want. What they want is to be able to find an article or do some specific task. We need to focus in teaching on giving students/patrons/staff what they need to do the things they want to do, not what we think they should know.

A lot of the stuff discussed in the session on Innovative Applications of Federated Search Technology went over my head, but I really enjoyed Ken Varnum’s discussion of how he “made the wait [in federated search] worthwhile” for students. Ken is the Web Systems Manager at University of Michigan and also won the Deep Web contest that asked applicants to describe the best idea for federated search they could imagine (he even got an oversized check – I’ve always wanted one of those!). Ken described how at University of Michigan they developed a system for customizing the results shown to students when they do a search based on their academic level and major. The University has all sorts of data on what courses a student has taken, and this can be capitalized on by the library’s systems. The subject liaisons selected specific databases or journal sets to be searched based on a user’s major and level (lower-level undergrad, upper-level, etc.). So when a student does a search, the system will figure out what subset of the library’s online collections to search based on the courses the user has taken. I think they also do some personalization based on search history as well, but that was a little less clearly described IMHO. I was totally blown away by this idea, though.

Libraries are really bad at capitalizing on user data – search history, courses taken, borrowing history, etc. – because we’re so obsessed with privacy. But we’re at a point where it would not be so difficult to protect the privacy of our users while still using individual data to make our systems more intelligent.

More to come with Day 2!

For the way I like to get information, life was a lot easier before Twitter came on the scene. For the most part, the Web was asynchronous. I could visit blogs any time I wanted, read the content, and comment on posts. Especially with RSS, once I was subscribed to a blog, I would never miss any content coming from it. I would never miss a good conversation and I could do it in my own time-frame. With the growth of the real-time web, this has changed. It’s so easy to miss an important conversation or a useful link. With Twitter, the conversation is going on 24X7, and if you’re following more than a very small number of people, you can’t easily go back and see what you missed while you were busy doing other things. While I do know people who seem to spend endless hours on Twitter and/or FriendFeed, most of us just try to jump into the conversation (or the stream) when we can and have to accept that there will be things we’ll miss.

Twitter (and FriendFeed, and other microblogging and lifestreaming apps) has been an amazing boon to those looking for connection and conversation. Now, the playing field is so much more level. You don’t have to have your own blog or write long-form posts to make a name for yourself and become a part of a community. You can just follow people, start a conversation with them. I’ve become friendly with people I’ve never met in real life, but connected with online because we had something in common (babies, libraries, etc.). Maybe they commented on some of my tweets/posts or I on theirs, but over time, through those comments and back-and-forths you build connection. You build community. I know people who have created proposals for conference presentations with people they don’t even know in real-life through Twitter. And it’s very different than the blogosphere where each person had their own “home” that they controlled. Even when people can comment on your blog, you own the conversation because it’s your blog, your destination. While I do like having my own space too, I think there is a powerful draw to these real-time web spaces where everyone is welcome and anyone can jump into the conversation.

Many of my students commented — during the week they were required to use Twitter — that they were pleasantly surprised that Twitter was a lot more useful than they thought it would be. Some students had already used it before, and found additional professional uses for it through the week’s activities. Some students who had never tried it before are still using Twitter over a month later. Others tried it and realized that other social networks (mainly Facebook) were a better fit for them. It’s certainly not for everyone, but a lot of my students were pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t just all about what people are eating for lunch that day.

I know I’ve had moments where I’ve hated Twitter and found it pointless and frivolous and there is certainly a lot going on in Twitter that is less than useful. However, even beyond the personal and professional networking and community-building that goes on in these spaces, Twitter has a lot of utility for those who use it. Here are just a few ways that Twitter can be practically useful:

1. It’s great for querying the hive. When I was looking for examples of Facebook pages to share with my class, I asked people on FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter what Facebook pages they like the best. And I got a lot of great responses from people I knew and people I don’t who follow me in those spaces. I’ve gotten feedback on websites and tutorials I’ve created on Twitter as well.

2. It can be great for sharing knowledge. It’s so easy to post a useful link, tell people about a tool you used that you really liked, etc. in Twitter, and for other people to amplify those messages they find useful through Retweeting them (RT).

I use TweetDeck (an external Twitter client) to manage the people and organizations I follow, and I’ve separated them into the various subject areas I’m interested in keeping up with. I have a feed of library and tech-related people who share useful content, a feed of parenting-related stuff (shopping deals and safety info mainly), and I have a feed for Vermont-related info from news sources, people, and local stores I frequent. So many of the librarians I follow share useful blog posts, articles and studies that I’d probably have never discovered otherwise. One parenting Twitter feed shared with me the fact that several babies had died using a product we had for our son. It’s more than just hearing what people had for lunch or how cool the library is; it’s actually about getting useful news and resources.

While it’s a great medium for sharing knowldge, it’s not great for storing knowledge, since Twitter wasn’t really designed for doing anything with Tweets other than favoriting them (which isn’t exactly an effective way to store thousands of useful ideas you may want to save). Some sites and applications have been developed to help with this, but tweets are still so much more ephemeral than blog posts, which, as a librarian (and in light of some historic events that have unfolded on Twitter) concerns me.

3. It can be great for conferences. When you’re at a big conference, it can be difficult to find people and figure out which are the best sessions to attend. With Twitter, you could be walking around and hear about people who share your interests who are at a session that you realize would be perfect for you to attend. Or you could be in a session, tweet that you’re looking for people to go to lunch with, and have plans by the time you get out of that session.

On the flip side, this makes me worry about Twitter taking our attention away from the sessions and important learning going on at a conference. I think sometimes it does, and it can do worse, creating a distracting and hostile environment for speakers, as you can see in the case of danah boyd’s speech at the Web 2.0 Expo. I’ll be attending Computers in Libraries in just a few days, and I do not plan to use Twitter much, even if it makes me more “out-of-the-loop.” I’d rather be out-of-the-loop and get more out of the sessions I’m attending.

4. It can be a great advocacy tool. Libraries and non-profits are using Twitter to promote their services and get the word out about projects they’re working on, current needs, and the news on issues related to their cause. And people who support them can amplify their messages through retweets. It’s also a great way to join conversations happening among their community of users.

I think it takes time to figure out how best to manage the flow of information from Twitter and how many people you can realistically follow. Before Twitter Lists came out (which I haven’t really used) TweetDeck was a godsend for helping me to manage the stream of information. I could separate the people I follow by the reasons I follow them and also made a list of favorite people (most of whom I’m friends with) which is the list I keep track of the most.

I think how you feel about Twitter is all in how you approach it. I think some people still don’t like it because they feel like they’re always missing something. If you see it as something you can easily pop in and out of (as interest and time allow) without missing a beat, it’s a great platform. It took me a while to realize that it didn’t matter if I missed a big conversation, argument, useful link or clever quip — if it’s important enough, someone will retweet it or blog about it and I’ll see it at some point (can I just tell you how much I love Bobbi Newman’s weekly Top 10 Links on her blog? Awesomely useful!). For people who approach Twitter as I do now, it can be a great tool for learning that requires so little of you and allows you to be as social (or unsocial) as you want at your convenience. It’s an always-on social gathering that you can enter and leave at will. And while it messed with my Type-A personality for a while, I’m now getting a lot out of Twitter.

One of the commenters on my post wrote “where is a David to take down this Goliath?” In my mind, what we really need to take down this Goliath is another Goliath; specifically, a Goliath made up of a lot of Davids. Pretty much all libraries are members of consortia of some sort; local, regional and national groups dedicated to advocating for and supporting their member libraries. If these aren’t the groups that should be fighting unfair or unethical practices of vendors, I don’t know who should! It’s only in large numbers that we can actually make a difference in scholarly publishing.

We’ve certainly seen major Universities doing it, since it seriously impacts their bottom line. Back when I was in library school, I remember when a whole bunch of big schools like Cornell, Harvard, etc. boycotted Elsevier journals in response to bundling of journals, exorbitant pricing, and an unwillingness to negotiate fair deals. In addition, their faculty Senates made statements suggesting that faculty not support journals with exorbitant pricing by not publishing in them or serving on their boards. When we’re being faced with unfair deals or unethical behavior from publishers, we should get our faculty members involved too. We have three members of the Society for Military History on the Norwich faculty. I contacted them last week, as I thought they might be able to exert pressure on the Society. If faculty drop their memberships and stop publishing and serving on the boards of journals like this, the journals will have little choice but to change their practices (not that I think that will all happen, especially with historians rather than scientists, but one can dream, right?).

I’m not an expert on what consortia do by any stretch of the imagination, so maybe those of you with more experience can answer this. Are our consortia exerting pressure on vendors when they do things like this? I know the consortia we belong to get us discounts with vendors (and mainly seem focused on group discounts and training), but do they fight vendors when those vendors do things that are harmful or exploitative to their member libraries? I see that an International Coalition of Library Consortia exists and that they’ve made some statements about issues in scholarly publishing, but they’ve made so few over the years in light of the huge number of issues libraries have grappled with. Looking at the mission statements of a few consortia, they talk about group purchasing and a single point of contact for dealing with vendors, but I see nothing about actively advocating for member libraries.

So, if the consortia don’t fight for us, who should? ALA? ACRL? I always hear about how ALA has such a strong advocacy arm, but it seems to be all about advocating for libraries in the national and state governments, not with scholarly publishers and content providers. It certainly makes no sense for us to form separate organizations to advocate for libraries in this realm when we have these consortia that have relationships with publishers and are supposed to be negotiating with them on our behalf.

More important than making our dissatisfaction known to our vendors is to make our dissatisfaction known to the organizations that are supposed to represent and advocate for us. We are much more powerful in large numbers than we are alone, and we joined consortia in the first place to band together for our common good. It’s not just about getting deals and taking classes on cataloging and Web 2.0 technologies — it should be about collective advocacy. And if the organizations we give money to are not providing that for us, then we should pressure them to do so. Because we will not be able to create real change in the scholarly publishing and library technology landscape unless we act as a group.

I made a lot of changes to the topics covered in the class in light of how much Web 2.0 technologies have changed. I’d originally wanted to teach a class on online communities, but I couldn’t find enough good readings (or a textbook) for an entire course (now that Nancy White, et al.’s new book on Digital Habitats is out, it might be easier to do). I decided instead to focus more on online community-building in the course and am spending two weeks on it. I’m also having three guest speakers who run online communities: Frances Roehm of Skokie Net, Jessamyn West of MetaFilter, and my hubby, Adam Farkas, of ODwire. I know there are a lot of other topics I could have covered (cloud computing, mobile technologies, mashups, etc.), but I’m pretty happy with this semester’s lineup and I look forward to read my students reflections and discussions on these topics.

A while back, I’d asked folks on Twitter/FriendFeed/Facebook for suggestions of good Facebook pages to use as examples in my class. I thought I’d share those in case others are interested. You can find the list here. I don’t know that they’re the best Facebook pages, but I think they will give students some interesting food for thought.

As always in my classes, people from outside the class can register in the classroom and post comments on mine and my students’ posts. So feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed and/or join the conversation!

There was a big part of me that loved Library 101 (for those of you who don’t know, this is a video produced by Michael Porter and David Lee King — with a group of essays from others in the profession — designed to encourage people to keep up with new technologies). I love Michael and David’s enthusiasm and creativity — I think of them as the profession’s greatest cheerleaders. I was on a panel with them at ALA and I felt like a curmudgeon sitting there in the face of their true belief and optimism. The Library 101 video was really fun, though perhaps a bit long. I certainly appreciate the time and effort and passion that went into it and wish I had the video editing skills they have. I also love how many people in the profession love libraries and love Michael and David enough to photograph themselves for the project and how many really cool, smart people took the time to write essays for it. My contribution is less than stellar in my opinion because I dashed it off at a time when I was dealing with family illness and lack of sleep (pretty much the one constant in my life these days). I wish I could have written something better for the project. A lot of the other pieces are far better-written and more thought-provoking.

While I loved it as me, Meredith Farkas, friend and fan, I didn’t quite understand it when I tried to look at it through the lens of a library worker who is not that into technology. Or a library administrator. Would that inspire me to start learning about technology or to start a Learning 2.0-type program? Probably not. And when I commented that I didn’t understand the project, that’s what I meant. I don’t really understand who they’re doing it for. If it’s for people like me, they hit their mark. If it’s for a library administrator who doesn’t see the value of continuing technology education or a librarian who just doesn’t care about all this web 2.0 stuff, I don’t think this is going to reach those people. It just feels like preaching to the choir, because I think the people who are going to love the video are already drinking the kool-ade about the importance of continuous learning about technologies. I guess what I would have liked to see is something constructive coming from the Library 101 site — like a call to create a continuing education program like Learning 2.0 or Five Weeks to a Social Library, where the video could direct/inspire lots of people from all over the profession to share their knowledge of library technologies through creating educational content that anyone could benefit from. It just seems to be missing that “next step.”

While I’m all for criticism, and some people have leveled some very constructive criticisms of the project, I really hate how mean some people have been about Library 101. I know what it’s like to put your blood, sweat and tears into a project and then have people say mean things about it. Even when 90% of people are saying great stuff (or at least constructive stuff), it’s that 10% that you hear the most (at least I do). I’m not saying “don’t criticize people,” I’m just saying that when you do, you should think of how much effort that person put into their work and criticize in a constructive and humane way. Because the last thing we want to do is discourage creativity and risk-taking in this profession by beating people up for it.

My little guy just woke up from his nap, so I’d better run before I write something stupid again.