In just the past few weeks, I’ve received two emails from companies whose services I’ve tried out who are now shutting their doors. Another one is changing its focus and will no longer be hosting the very thing I was using it for. Luckily these were tools/services that I’d tried out but wasn’t dependent on for providing services to my patrons. But what if I had been dependent? Would I have been able to move my content easily to another provider? Would I have had to find a way to host the content myself? Or would the content have simply gone up in smoke with no way to ever get it back?

While going with hosted solutions for one’s 2.0 services is cheap or free and is often the only option for a library with a tight budget, it’s not always the prudent way to go. Even if the service is free, the time library staff spend creating content on that service isn’t, and we don’t want all that effort (and content) going down the drain. We often put way too much trust in many of these services, having no backups for the content we’re putting on their servers. One great example of what can happen when you trust a company too much is Ma.gnolia, which was a very popular social bookmarking company that had a catastrophic server failure in January and lost everyone’s data. While they tried to restore the database, they failed, and now they’re going to start from scratch (though I can’t imagine who would trust them with their bookmarks now!). I don’t know if Ma.gnolia allowed people to back up their own bookmarks to their hard drive, but even if they did, I’d wager that a lot of people rarely, if ever, remembered to do it (she writes sheepishly, wondering when the last time was that she backed up her own del.icio.us bookmarks — done!).

My friend Stephen Francoeur created two of the best 2.0 tools for library staff that I’m aware of — an active and useful reference blog and reference wiki. For these tools which he created four years ago or so, he used Blogger and PBWiki. The blog and wiki are vital to their reference staff since they contain so much staff knowledge collected over many years. In his most recent blog post, Stephen describes how he decided that home is the safest place for all that data and how he had to move the blog from Blogger to a locally hosted version of Wordpress MU, and the wiki from PBWiki (now PBWorks) to a locally installed version of Confluence. He discussed how difficult the transition was, especially with the wiki since he had to literally copy and paste the content from the old wiki into the new. Had either of these companies gone bust before they could move that content to a local server, it might possibly have been gone forever. This just highlighted again to me how important it is that we gauge how vital the things we’ve created with these 2.0 tools are to our library (or to us personally if we use them outside of work) and take steps to protect that content or functionality accordingly. If the Google Custom Searches that I’ve created for several subject areas were to disappear, it wouldn’t be a grave tragedy. Were our subject guide wiki to disappear, we’d have lost content that is vital to our students and faculty and took us years to develop. That’s why our subject guide wiki lives on our own server.

We utilize the services of so many of these 2.0 companies because they provide services and space for free. However those services cost someone money, and if they aren’t making enough from pro accounts or ads, then they’re losing money on the bandwidth and server space it costs to run a successful site. Many of these companies lack any sort of a revenue model and while they may be funded by venture capitalists or big companies like Google and Yahoo! now, they may not be forever if they can’t find a way to make money for their benefactors. It scares me how dependent Iranians are on Twitter to get the word out about what the government is doing there when the company is losing money hand over fist. And many of the other big 2.0 companies we know and love are in the same boat.

There’s also the issue of their infrastructure. When I put things on our library’s server, I know that there are daily backups of the content. So if something goes kablooey, I can always roll it back to what it looked like the previous day. Not too bad. But do we know much about the server infrastructure of the companies we’re dependent on? Often we don’t know anything because that information isn’t provided to us. And this can even be a problem when you’re paying a company to run a service for you. Our Voyager ILS installation is hosted by Ex Libris, and a year or two ago they had too high a load on their servers and, as a result, we had a lot of problems with Voyager going down for a few months. It’s important, whether we’re paying or not, that when we’re trusting a mission critical service to a third party we know about their server infrastructure.

Another big issue is when a company decides to suddenly change how it operates, which may leave you high and dry or might at least force you to change the way you operate. A great case in point is PBWiki, now known as PBWorks. I really thought a great deal of PBWiki early on, so much so that I was on their Educational Advisory Board. Then they managed to alienate much of their original fanbase, me included. First they created a new version of their wiki software (PBWiki 2.0) which completely changed the way that authentication into the wiki worked. But you still had the choice of whether or not you wanted to create a 1.0 or 2.0 wiki. And in spite of a huge wave of negative feedback they received about PBWiki 2.0, they not only kept it the way it was, but forced people to switch their original PBWikis to 2.0. Now, they’re called PBWorks and I have no idea if the wikis (or workspaces) still look the same as the 2.0 wiki, because I wouldn’t touch a PBWiki at this point with a 10-foot pole. I don’t like companies that don’t listen to their users.

I don’t have a good solution for what libraries should do if they can’t afford to host their own content (or if the only technology providing that functionality is externally hosted), but I do think it’s critical that we should think critically about these companies with which we’re entrusting our content and whether our content is safe enough relative to its value. While your Twitter posts may not be super-valuable to you later on, your del.icio.us bookmarks or blog posts probably are. If your content is important to your library, consider whether or not you think that service that’s hosting your content is stable. Who hosts your content? A large, stable company that is making enough to at least cover its expenses, a start-up with venture funding and no revenue model, or some individual for whom this service is a hobby (though they hope to sell it to Google one day — and btw, it’s scary that “selling to Google” seems to have become a revenue model in itself)? Can you easily back up that content? Can you easily move it to another service? And do other services exist that provide the same or similar functionality? And equally important, what claims do these companies make on your content (always read their Terms of Service!). We need to consider all these things because I’d hate to see the hard work of librarians go up in smoke because it didn’t occur to them that these free 2.0 services might not be here forever.

Have any of you had disasters with hosted services? Have you moved your stuff from a hosted service to your own server and why? What do you consider before you put content on some third party’s servers? Do you feel like the your content is safe in all of the 2.0 services you use online?

My little guy is sick of beating up the animals hanging from his activity gym and seems to want some cuddle time now. Talk amongst yourselves.

When I was named the Head of Instructional Initiatives, the Rook Tours were the first thing that I wanted to tackle. I wanted to make them engaging, experiential, and maybe even a little fun. I immediately thought of doing a scavenger hunt, and after reading about some other schools who’d done similar orientations, I settled upon that as a good way of getting students familiar with the library. To make up for not taking them up and down the library, I figured we could make a movie that would introduce them to what’s on each floor.

Our movie is a testament to the fact that you don’t always need a lot of time, talent or technology to make a half-way decent orientation movie. When it was less than three weeks before rook tours and my colleague, Josh, hadn’t started on the movie (not his fault, he had a million other things on his plate), I suggested that we should just take pictures of the library and sew them together into a movie instead of trying to film and edit something full-motion, which would have taken much longer. So I went around the library taking photos of everything. Josh put those together into an order that made sense and then managed to create a pretty darn entertaining movie with his folksy narration. I don’t think it even suffers much from the lack of technical sophistication or full-motion. We got lots of laughs from students, some applause, and a number of students asked if the movie was going to be available on YouTube. Freshman are a tough audience, and I’m really impressed that Josh was able to put something so entertaining together in a matter of days. I also created a very brief screencast that introduced students to the library website and the features that they’d need to use during the scavenger hunt. We showed both together before the students were sent off on the scavenger hunt.

We plan to make a better movie during this year with work study students, but I was pretty pleased with how things turned out this time around.

For the scavenger hunt, I made a list of the things that it would be important for Freshmen to know about the library before they (hopefully) come in with their English 101 class. There were certain rooms I wanted them to be able to find (the Learning Support Center, group study rooms, etc.) as well as certain items (the new periodicals, etc.). I also wanted them to be able to look up a book in the catalog and find it on the shelf. Finally, I wanted them to be able to find the research guides on our website and to know how to IM a librarian from our MeeboMe widget. So I built all of those goals into the 6 separate sets of clues/tasks I created for five teams. We’d break each group of students up into five teams and each would have a separate bunch of clues to look for. But no matter what group they were in, they’d be developing the same basic skills.

Doing a scavenger hunt is exceedingly difficult when your orientation is scheduled the way our rook tours are. We had to pull off the same scavenger hunt 12 times, which meant hoping that the five sets of clues were still where they were supposed to be each and every time. For each thing students had to find, I put 15 clues (on color-coded slips of paper) in an envelope and put that envelope at the location they were supposed to visit. The students were supposed to just take one clue out and leave the envelope for the next group. Unlikely with the average Freshman population, but I knew that our Rooks tend to be exceedingly polite due to the fact that it’s drilled into them in the military part of their training. For each clue, I also kept a backup envelope in my office with about 25 more copies of the clues.

While we did have a couple of mishaps with books being put back in the wrong place, envelopes disappearing, etc., it went a lot better than I thought. My colleague, Josh, and I tried to check on the clues after every session or two and I was pleased by how few disasters we had. No group ended up not having a clue at their location. But still, it caused me a lot of anxiety throughout those three days. Next time, I plan to have people take shifts for checking on the clues before the next group comes. It’s too much for two people.

My other huge worry was timing. I had my husband (who isn’t a fan of libraries and doesn’t really know the dewey decimal system or the layout of our library) try doing one set of the clues and it took him about 15 minutes to get through it. I thought for the average Freshman, it would probably take 20-25, though really I had no idea. Would they pay attention to the movie and remember which floor things were on? Would they be able to figure out how to use the library catalog and then find a book on the shelf? I sweat bullets over the first group on Monday morning, but was relieved when one team got back in 15 minutes and the others made it back within 10 minutes of that. A couple of groups didn’t quite finish, but they were usually only one clue short of being done, so not bad.

I think they definitely learned a lot during the activity, which is fantastic. So many students give up on the library because they don’t know how to find a book or they don’t know how to get help. By having them learn these things in a game situation, I think it made it more tempting to try to figure things out on their own (well, in groups) instead of giving up. The best part was seeing how much fun they were having. The students got really competitive about the scavenger hunt and would rush around at light speed trying to get through it before any of the other teams did. It was also a great team-building activity. Students were really proud of themselves when they finished. We got comments from their Cadre (the upperclassmen in charge of the Rooks) that they’d wished their orientation had been like that. Awesome!

It’s always hard to try something new after doing it a certain way for years and years, so probably the biggest difficulty was with some staff members who were very accustomed to a certain kind of rook tour and weren’t quite clear on the details of how these needed to be done. But once each librarian had worked with one group, they had a much easier time facilitating it the second time. I’m sure it’ll be even easier next year.

I spent the few weeks before orientation really nervous about this new model. It’s easy to say that something is boring and suggest a change, but when the responsibility for its success or failure is 100% on you, you start to worry about whether or not your idea was really a good one. I had lots of doubts. It certainly would have been safer to do things the way we’d done them forever (and less stressful for me!), but I couldn’t be happier that things turned out as they did. Risk-taking can be super-scary, but it’s better to try something new than to stick with something that just isn’t working (especially if the students aren’t learning anyway). The worst thing that can happen is that it won’t work well and you’ll learn from it to make it even better next year.

Next stop, improving how we teach and assess English 101 library sessions. No pressure!

Really?

Maybe I travel in the wrong circles, but I know plenty of librarians who know little or nothing about screencasting. And even if they know about screencasting software, many of them have never used it themselves.

According to Jon Udell, the man who coined the term screencast (though the software has existed since the late 90s), “a screencast is a digital movie in which the setting is partly or wholly a computer screen, and in which audio narration describes the on-screen action.” Screencasts are often used to demonstrate software and so are great for library tutorials. What’s so cool about it is the fact that instead of reading a list of instructions on how to use a database or some other tool, a screencast concretely shows the librarian going into the database and executing searches. I’m the sort of person who needs to see something done to learn how to do it and I’ve never been able to learn much from text instructions. Screencasts are all about video, but often also include audio, captions and even interactive components. You can show a user how to do a search and then have them execute a similar search before the screencast will advance.

Lots of academic libraries have created tutorials on how to use library databases, the catalog, ILL, etc. However, I haven’t found too many public libraries using screencasting, though the two examples I have found are great ones. I am in love with the Calgary Public Library’s basic Internet tutorials — they’re concrete, interactive and really polished. I can’t imagine how long it took to produce these. The tutorials at the Orange County Public Library are pretty spiffy too.

When I first discovered screencasting three years ago (before I even worked in a library and before screencasts were called screencasts) I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. I was blown away by how easy it was to create a Flash movie of your desktop with very little in the way of tech-savvy. You can make a very basic screencast — that you film and narrate simultaneously — in 20 minutes. Or you can spend an entire day or more developing a really polished screencast tutorial. Other than the time invested, screencasts are pretty easy to create. I tried out Camtasia and Captivate (and reviewed them here) and found them both really intuitive. I’m still very excited about screencasting, but my enthusiasm has been tempered by the realities of creating them for library patrons. I thought I’d be creating screencasts day-in and day-out when I first got my job, but I have realized that it’s not always the best solution.

Screencasting has some major drawbacks. The first is the size of the file created. A movie of just five minutes can be as big as five megabytes, which is fine for those of us with broadband, but for people on dial-up, it can take forever to download. I recently created a screencast introduction to library services and resources for our online learners, and I felt that I had to create a text and screenshot HTML version of the same tutorial for students on dialup or those who can’t play audio for some reason. In addition, they take up lots of space on the server and can be real bandwidth suckers if they get a lot of use. Another issue is that databases and other things we might be demonstrating may change, forcing us to completely redo our screencast. I’d created a screencast on using Thomas about a week before they redesigned their Website and had to do it all over again. I’ve also completely redone our Web portal for distance learners since creating this screencast for Academic Search Premiere (though the students still could probably figure out how to find the database). Finally, screencasts can take a long time to create. I’m sure there are some people out there who can competently narrate a screencast and do the screen capture part flawlessly at the same time, but I’m definitely not one of them. I usually do the screen capture and then add elements like captions and highlighting. Sometimes I find that I missed something and have to film extra pieces and paste them in later on. Only once I have all the video ready do I do the narration and I need a script for that (otherwise you’d hear a lot of “umms” and “likes”). Finally, I edit the timing of the slides so that the audio syncs up with what I’m demonstrating. It takes a good long while to do… a lot longer than a little HTML tutorial that I can create in a couple of hours.

There are a few studies out there that have evaluated the efficacy of screencast tutorials, but none that have really shown that screencasts are better than any other method of instruction (at least none I’ve found). Paul Pival describes one interesting study, “If you buld it, will they learn? Assessing online information literacy tutorials,” which recently appeared in College and Research Libraries. It found that students who watched their screencasts were more confident in their abilities to use the resources, but that their test scores really didn’t improve. Intuitively, I assume that screencasts would be far more effective than more text-based tutorials. I also would think that some students (though certainly not all) would find screencast tutorials more helpful than face-to-face instruction because they can go at their own pace and repeat the screencast endlessly. But I really haven’t seen any studies that show that screencasting is really an effective tool for library instruction. And I often worry about investing time and resources in something that hasn’t been empirically shown to be better than other methods of instruction. It’s not going to stop me from creating screencasts when they seem like the best option, but I wish I’m going to reserve judgment on them until I see some evidence.

Here are some resources for learning more about screencasting:

Paul Pival gave a wonderful talk on screencasting for the SirsiDynix Institute a few weeks ago. You can listen to his Webcast, Show and Tell The Easy Way – An Introduction to Screencasting, in their archive (video coming soon!) and a list of links on his blog. Also, definitely check out the Q&A he put on his blog with the questions he didn’t have time to answer during the session.

Although it’s a bit old, Screencasting to Help Your Mom, by Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration is a great introduction to screencasting and the major software options.

The Screencasting post at Donation Coder is extremely detailed. It describes what screencasting is and what people should be looking for in screencasting software. It also reviews, in detail, the popular (and less popular) screencasting tools.

LibCasting is a great new blog all about screencasting from Greg Notess, who is one of the very few people who has been talking about screencast tutorials for a long time.

Animated Tutorial Sharing Project (ANTS) — this project is designed to collect database screencast tutorials so that libraries are not constantly having to reinvent the wheel. A basic tutorial for Academic Search Premiere can be used by people in all different libraries since we’re all dealing with the same interface. The tutorials are stored in a DSPACE instance at the University of Calgary and can be used by people at other universities. They’ve got a big wishlist for tutorials, so if you have one that others could use, please consider sharing it. I’m definitely going to endeavor to make my screencasts more generic from now on, both to share with others and for my own sanity.

Ok, back to my red runny nose, my swollen throat and my raspy voice. Bed, not blog, sounds like a very good idea right now.

Speaking of screencasting… I am on the program to be speaking at the ASIS&T 2006 Annual Conference, but I will not be able to attend due to funding limitations. So instead, I created a screencast of my entire presentation that they will be playing at the Wikis and Blogs panel. It’s all about my experiences creating conference wikis, why I did it in the first place, and what I’ve learned from it. I’ll be sure to make it available online after the conference.

I’d really hoped to go to ASIS&T, but they charge over $400 for speaker admission to the conference. Yikes! I’m not on a tenure track, so I wouldn’t go all the way to Austin just to give a talk and head home. I want to go to other people’s talks, learn, network, etc. I will only speak at a conference if 1) it’s online or for a good cause, 2) it’s fun and won’t cost me much to attend or 3) I’m getting paid. I just think charging a speaker (especially for the day they’re speaking) is no way to treat someone who is contributing to the success of your conference. What I really love about Information Today conferences is the appreciation that they show their speakers. I don’t need my ego stroked, but it’s nice to feel valued. I’m not a bigwig who can ask $2500 for a talk, but I do know that my time and effort is worth something and I shouldn’t just feel grateful to be asked to speak. Too many of us don’t know what we’re worth.

Still wish I was going though. Looks like a really cool conference with so many fascinating talks based on scholarly research. If you’re going, won’t you blog it for me?

Call For Presenters

We invite you to propose presentations for HigherEd BlogCon 2006. Please refer to the detailed listing of tracks below for ideas from Section Chairs about the kinds of topics suitable for each track.

In each track, we welcome two kinds of proposals: 1) longer thought pieces demonstrating originality and expertise in the area being addressed, and 2) shorter pieces discussing applications the presenter has been involved in designing or building.

Vendor Proposals: Vendor proposals are welcome, but product pitches will not be considered.

Format of Proposal: 250-500 words, written. Proposals are a way for the review team to assess your contribution quickly. Please do not submit full presentations. Proposals should indicate the format in which you plan to offer your presentation (fully written, audio, screencast, etc.). They should also indicate whether you intend to present a longer thought piece or a shorter application-focused presentation.

Required Information to Accompany Proposal: Name, email address, institution, position, track in which presentation belongs (see below for a listing of the tracks). If you have questions about where your presentation belongs, please email us at higheredblogcon@gmail.com.

Suggested Information to Accompany Proposal: Author’s blog or website address.

Method of Proposal Submission: Please refer to the instructions found on the Proposals page.

Method of Presentation Submission: Presenters will be required to submit their final presentation material (or, in the case of an audio, screencast, or video presentation, a summary with links to it) via the conference blog, where it will be reviewed by the Section Chair and published on the blog at the appropriate time.

Proposal Review: Proposals will be reviewed by a team consisting of Section Chair and Section Editor, together with input from the conference planning committee. Interviews with Section Chairs provide detailed information about how each Section Chair plans to evaluate proposals.

Key Dates

Due Date for Proposals:January 31, 2006

Notification of Acceptance: February 20, 2006

Due Date for Presentations: March 15, 2006

Conference Track Detail

We invite you to submit proposals for presentation in the following tracks. Below are some suggestions about topics that might be appropriate in each track.

Library and Information Resources

* Library 2.0: What Does Web 2.0 Mean for Libraries?
* New Media and the New Librarian (What skills do librarians need to create the 2.0 Library?)
* Impact of social software on learning in library and information science.
* Using social software to communicate, educate, and build community online in libraries (blogs, Wikis, RSS, IM, podcasting, photo sharing, screencasting, etc.).
* Improving Access to Resources (Search engines, Federated Search, OpenURL, collaborative filtering, usability, accessibility, etc.)
* Web services and the library: seamless, interoperable, modular, reusable.
* User-created content (folksonomies, wikis, wiki-like function in the catalog, etc.)
* Does or should technology affect the way we define and teach information literacy?
* Guidelines for evaluating and recommending tools
* Emerging Technologies in Libraries: Looking Ahead

PR/Marketing/Development

* PR professionals and the faculty/staff/student blogger
* Top-down versus bottom-up
* Selecting student bloggers and podcasters for blogosphere campaigns
* Measuring and evaluating blogging and podcasting efforts
* Guidelines for students blogging and podcasting on behalf of the institution
* Consumer-generated media and new sources of marketing material
* Monitoring, evaluating, and responding to blogging about your institution
* Integrating new media efforts into existing campaigns
* PR/marketing and new media in non-recruiting contexts

Teaching

* Challenges surrounding intellectual property
* The changing nature of in-class activity in the age of podcast lectures
* Impact of new media on attendance patterns
* Impact of new media on online learning
* New media and course platforms
* What do new media mean for the so-called digital divide?
* Video versus screencast versus podcast
* Wikis and learning
* The RSS divide
* The role of games in education
* Open courseware
* Changing expectations of the student and teacher at the educational interface

Websites and Web Development

* The evolving role of the webmaster in the age of social tools (including how these technologies will affect working relationships across areas and disciplines)
* Uses of and coordination of RSS and syndication across the institution
* Implementation and utilization of social software and other applications in higher education websites
* Web standards and accessibility in blogs, wikis, etc.
* Utilizing students in the development of websites, web applications and social applications.
* Production and distribution methods for podcasting
* Choosing, installing and maintaining a blogging system
* On the horizon: next generation web 2.0 applications

Faculty Blogging (Under Development)

* Risk and reward
* Anonymity
* Professional versus professional/private versus private blogs

Student Life (Under Development)

* Developing a culture of blogging—why or why not?
* Educating students in new media

higheredblogcon, highered blogcon, blogs, libraries, conference, higher education, academia, social software, library 2.0, call for proposals

When I proposed the Web redesign project to the staff, everyone was very supportive. The staff aggreed that they should have a hand in editing content for the areas that they know a lot about. Obviously, it makes very little sense for the newest employee to be in charge of all of the content, especially stuff like circulation and ILL which I don’t deal with at all. After discussing the idea with the Library Director, I created a staff wiki and then spent many hours taking all of the existing content from the Web site and plugging it into the wiki, organized in the new Web page hierarchy I’d developed for the redesign. I then explained to the staff that they could go into the wiki and update and edit the content for the sections. I gave detailed instructions on how to use the wiki and told them that I’d be happy to give any of them a one-on-one explanation. This was almost 2 months ago, and so far one other person has gone into the wiki. No one else has even bothered to look at it, including people who had told me it was a good idea. Yes, wikis are easy to use, but many of the people I work with are averse to new technologies, especially those they don’t absolutely have to learn for their job. I learned something important from this: the tool may be the right one for the job, but if the staff isn’t ready for it, no one will use it.

A couple of months ago I also created a blog. At the library, we had been talking a great deal about how to improve communications between the library, Academic Computing, and the Online Graduate Programs. I had recently given a talk to the administrators of the Online Graduate Program about social software and they were very interested in learning more. The idea of a blog came to me immediately. I thought a blog would be a great way to do that without everyone having to be in the same room. I suggested to the Library Director that I could start a blog where we could share things that are going on at the library and offer information about blogs, wikis, RSS, etc. We could also ask for people from Academic Computing and the Online Graduate Program to take part also and they could share the interesting things they’re working on. I thought it would be a great way to make the three departments feel more like a team (since we’re all supporting the online grad students) and the Library Director agreed. I started the blog, did a few posts about using RSS to keep up and sent out an e-mail to all of the relevant people, letting them know about the blog and asking for people to volunteer to write for it. I got a few “thanks for doing this” comments, but no one volunteered. Looking at my site stats a few weeks later, I found that almost no one had visited the blog. From this, I learned that the group might be tech savvy enough to appreciate the tool, but if they don’t see a need for it, they won’t use it.

I have had some successes though. I’ve helped the Dean of the Online Graduate Program set up a wiki for policy development, and helped another faculty member set one up for similar purposes. I’m helping to advise the Online Graduate Program about blogs, because they want to set one up to share information without e-mail and without having to call a meeting. I have since used the wiki for another project where I developed content with only two other librarians, and that worked out fine. I’ve been working with a faculty member on developing a comprehensive research guide for the Masters in Justice Administration program that includes screencasts to demonstrate each database. Once it’s done, there are several other departments that want me to create something similar. My fellow reference librarians have also shown interest in creating some sort of reference wiki for the reference staff. Each of us has strengths in different areas of research. Rather than running to my colleague every time I have an architecture question or to my supervisor when I have an engineering question, I can find the information I need about library resources in the reference wiki. The librarian who knows a lot about architecture could put her knowledge about architecture resources into the wiki. The librarian who knows a lot about engineering resources could add information about resources that he uses frequently. When a number of students come to the desk with the same assignment, the librarian could enter information about the assignment and what resources they used. That way, the next librarians at the reference desk would have this information at their fingertips. By putting all of this information into the wiki, it’s like having all of your colleagues at the desk with you each time you need to answer a reference question. The difference with these projects is that the people using the tools have a need for the tools and were sufficiently tech-savvy to be inclined to use them.

I’m definitely more cautious now about trying new things. In my excitement to make a difference and in a climate where I was basically given carte blanche, I think I tried to do too much too quickly. Now I know that just because you can doesn’t mean you should. I’m only going to try things where there is a real need (and not one only I see) and where the population is ready for what I’m trying to offer them.

One thing I learned as a psychotherapist was to start from where your client is. Some of my clients were in complete denial about their issues. Others were at a place where they could start to better understand their problems. Still others were already on the road to making changes in their lives. The way I approached each client had to be based on where they were at that moment. If someone is ready to talk the trauma in their life that’s great, but you can’t base your intervention on what worked with another client. Similarly, Library 2.0 is good goal to have, but you really need to start from where your staff and your patrons are. Sometimes it’s not the staff or the administration that are the barriers. Even if your staff is 2.0, your patrons are unlikely to use the “2.0 tools” if they’re not using the tools in their daily lives. I wonder how many patrons actually started using Instant Messaging because IM Reference was offered by their library. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. It’s great that all these cool things worked at the Ann Arbor District Library or at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library, but not every library has a population like theirs. They patrons in Barre, VT are certainly not the same as the patrons in Chicagoland or Ann Arbor. In addition, there must be a perceived need that can be fulfilled by this technology. I’m just as eager as the next person to do cool things with technology, but I think we all need to take a step back and ask ourselves “where are our patrons at?” “what needs are not being met or could be met better?” “can technology actually fulfill any of these needs?”

As much as I like trying and learning new things, I really don’t want to have any more “brilliant failures.”

learning, technology implementation, technology, libraries, library2.0

I ended up speaking about IM Reference, wikis, and screencasting as I had limited time and those were things we are either already using or will soon be using at our library. I had slides and notes prepared as I always do (the notes held in my shaking hands), but I didn’t end up using them so much in this talk. About 2 minutes into my schpiel, I was interrupted by one of the faculty members in the room who asked me lots of specific questions about screencasting. And instead of being annoyed at being interrupted, I was relieved. I liked answering their questions much more than I liked talking at them for 20 minutes, because I knew I was talking about things that were interesting/useful to them. They asked terrific questions about practical applications of all the technologies (wikis in particular), and I was happy to be grilled if it meant that they could see the possibilities of using social software in their work. Instead of being flustered, I found that I was much more in my element being interrogated than I was giving a prepared talk.

That night, I got an email from the Dean of the Online Graduate Program asking if he could meet with me to talk about an idea he had and how I think wikis could be used for that project. The next morning I got a call from another faculty member about using wikis internally. The head of one of the graduate programs wants to integrate wikis into his classes immediately for use in group projects. It’s pretty amazing that these big tenured faculty members, these division heads, would listen to some young, newly-minted librarian! Like I said last week, what you can offer faculty is more important than what title you have.

Now I just need to figure out how I can turn every talk I have to give into an interrogation and I’ll have it made in the shade!

So I, too, was put at a “distinct disadvantage” by my library school, especially since my interests leaned toward the more blended librarian-type positions. My fantasy was to become a Distance Learning Librarian (funny how things work out!), which I figured required a lot more tech-savvy than I had coming into my final semester of my graduate degree. I realized I would have to take my education into my own hands if I wanted to be at all marketable in the academic library world. And I have a feeling this is how many of our colleagues learned to be the fabulous tech-savvy librarians they are.

The first thing I would recommend for anyone in the field is to learn to design a website. Whether you are a youth services librarian or a web services librarian, it is tremendously helpful to know some basic HTML. Knowing some CSS also can make your life a whole lot easier when you have to make changes to a site’s design. I can’t tell you how many job ads I saw for “traditional librarian” positions (youth services, reference, etc.) that wanted people with web design skills. When you have the sort of libraries that hire new employees once every 10 years or more, they are going to want to hire someone with some tech-savvy, since it’s likely that no one else on staff has those skills. What I learned in my web design classes I improved upon by simply creating more websites and by critiquing library websites. You can learn HTML in a book, but you won’t be able to design a decent website if you don’t practice, practice, practice. If you want to purchase a WYSIWYG website development program, I’d suggest Macromedia Dreamweaver, because it lets you see the code as you are designing the site. Most of the time I just hand code pages, since I don’t want to forget my HTML. It’s just like any language. Use it or lose it.

Obviously for some library positions you’ll need to know more than HTML and CSS. I’ve seen many job ads asking for PHP, Java, Javascript, MySQL, XML, Perl, and others. Probably if you don’t know any of those by your last semester of grad school, you’d be hard-pressed to learn any of them them by graduation. I plan to learn more programming languages in the future, but after trying to learn Java last Fall (which has to be the most frustrating language!), I need a break. In terms of books, I’m a big fan of the O’Reilly and Visual Quickstart/Quickpro series of books. The Visual Quickpro book on PHP and MySQL is fantastic (though a little dated at this point) as is the HTML Visual Quickstart book. But just like textbooks, what’s good for one person may not be good for another. Look through them in a bookstore if possible and see if the format works for you.

Another great thing to do is to play with new technologies. I never created any podcasts of my own (I hate my voice), but I downloaded plenty and even played around with Audacity a bit. I was interested in wikis so I created one (though one could more easily edit the wikipedia or something). I didn’t have any practical use for Jybe at the time I tested it, but I played around with it and became a fan. And in the future, it may be something I recommend to my supervisor. A big part of the reason I got my job was my experience with screencasting and knowledge of screencasting software. I learned about screencasting by reading about it in blogs, downloading trial versions of Captivate and Camtasia, and playing with them. I created a screencast for one of my interviews and everyone was really impressed with it. I just thought it would be a good thing to have some experience with. And it was. Depending on what sort of library work you’re interested in, play around with software that may be relevant to that job. It’s not only a good thing to put on your resume, but the software is often a lot of fun to play with (or maybe I’m just a geek).

The place in which I learned the most about library technologies was not in a classroom or in a book. It was in the blogosphere. I think I had first started reading Jessamyn’s and Jenny’s blogs last summer and realized that I didn’t know about half of what they were talking about. So I found other technology-related blogs while trying to figure out what in the world they were talking about. I found Steven’s blog. And Michael’s blog. And Andrea’s blog. And Sarah’s blog. Luckily there was a huge buzz about RSS at the time, so I learned about Bloglines, got myself account and kept adding to my collection of blogs. An RSS aggregator is one of the best keeping up accessories. When I was reading 5 blogs it wasn’t such a big deal to go to each site and see if anything new had been written. However, when the count gets up to 20, 50, 100 or more, the task becomes a bit unwieldy. An RSS aggregator simply collects new content from all of the RSS feeds you’re subscribed to and allows you to look at them all on the same page. So shortly after Jessamyn writes something new, I get to see it in my aggregator along with the new content from every other blog or journal I’m subscribed to. (I know to most of my readers this is redundant, but not everyone who reads blogs knows about RSS and aggregators. And they should because it will make their lives so much easier.)

Whatever one thinks about blogs, it is hard to deny that they are a great way to share information. The medium offers an immediacy that journals lack and gives people a space to talk about things in libraries that maybe wouldn’t fit into a journal. Thanks to the blogs I read, I have so many great ideas for my new job that I’m just about ready to burst!

I also think it’s important to read journals. At the moment I don’t read as many as I should — just the ones I can read for free online like Ariadne, D-Lib, Library Journal, CLIR Reports, and the Information Today journals, and the ones I get in the mail through my ALA, RUSA, and ACRL memberships. Once I start work and have access to plenty of library science journals, I’m sure my reading list will change, though I will continue to only read the articles that interest me.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of listservs or email lists. With blogging, you have one person or a small group of people who own the medium, so I think there is more of a commitment to creating something of quality. With a listserv, no one feels like they have to post because the medium belongs to everyone. I’ve never felt guilty about not posting to a listserv, but I do feel guilty when I don’t post to my blog. Maybe it’s just me, but I find that I learn much more about what people are doing at their institutions from blogs than from listservs and discussion groups. Also, I just hate getting the stuff in my Inbox. For a while, I resubscribed to some listservs in Bloglines (here’s how to do it), but I found it frustrating to wade through the 100 messages that were useless to me to find the two that were interesting. I think listservs can be a great place to get involved in an online community and make contacts. I guess I just haven’t found one that’s a good fit for me. In terms of online communities, I like models like WebJunction and wikis much better.

The main thing to remember is that you don’t have to read everything. Read what you’re interested in and not what you think you should be reading. Learn to scan articles and blogs for the interesting parts. You’re not being disloyal if you skip a blog post that holds no interest for you (as I’m sure many experienced “kept-up” librarians will do with this post). I used to drive myself crazy trying to read everything in my aggregator, but sometimes you just need to click on something, not read it, and move on. You’re not going to miss something huge. If it’s that important, it will be covered in other blogs. Get a del.icio.us or Furl account and save really meaty articles and posts for later. The point of this is to be aware of what’s going on in the library world, not to know everything.

The final piece of the puzzle is networking. Meet other people in the field. Meet people whom you admire. Comment on their blog, email them about an article they wrote, or IM them if they publish their handle (though I think email is better for a first introduction). I remember when I wrote to a blogger I admired (someone I am friends with now) I felt so embarassed. I figured that all sorts of people emailed them all the time and they wouldn’t want to get another dumb “fan” email. But the majority of the bloggers I’ve dealt with have been amazingly gracious and helpful people. They are happy to offer advice and encouragement. They like to communicate with people who are interested in the same things they are. Also be sure to go to conferences. This past ALA Conference was the first time I got to meet most of my fellow bloggers in the flesh. I was totally intimidated at first (to me, people like Michael Stephens, Walt Crawford, and Roy Tennant are rock stars!). But again, I found that everyone was just as down-to-earth and passionate about libraries and technology as I am. So don’t let yourself be intimidated by the people in the library world you admire. After all… we’re all just a bunch of librarians!

So to A.M.F. and all of the other folks who are trying to figure out how to be tech-savvy “kept-up” librarians, there is hope, even if your library school is not teaching you what you want to know.

The Indian Blogger mentions several other offerings, including Windows Media Encoder (recently used by Alan Levine to create his first screencast), BB Flashback, Wink, Demobuilder, and WinCAM. The only one I’ve used thus far is Wink (per Sarah Houghton’s recommendation). I played with it some time ago, and am definitely going to give it a more thorough trial. Does anyone else have experience using these low-cost screencasting options?

Also, I’m trying to collect the URLs of libraries that have created screencasts. So if your library has screencasts up on its website or you know of a library that does, please send me the link. I’d also love to hear more about people’s experiences creating screencasts, how useful their students/faculty/patrons have found the screencasts, and how open your colleagues were to the idea of screencasting. Thanks!