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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some highlights from this week:

our terrific presenters: In her talk this week on RSS, Michele Mizejewski likened getting content via RSS to getting a magazine via a subscription versus getting a magazine at the newsstand, which we all thought was brilliant! Jason Griffey taught us stuff about del.icio.us that even veterans like me didn’t know. Gabriel Lundeen made tagging easy to understand and quite fun (Gabriel, you should be on the speaking circuit)! Melissa Rethlefsen got folks really excited about syndicating feeds onto their Websites. All of their presentations are linked from the Week 2 page.

connecting at a distance: Sandra Hodgson considers how social software can save time and add richness to our interactions with colleagues at a distance (certainly something we’ve found in this class!). Robin Grant wonders if blogging can help lonely people connect to others online. Jill Markgraf considers how to use some of these tools in the distance learning classroom.

RSS-mania: Rachel Kingcade and Josalyn Gervasio (who must have been hungry while writing her post) get absolutely giddy over RSS. Josalyn gets really into syndicating feeds on a Web page and inspires some of her classmates to play more with technology.

folksonomies versus taxonomies: Tiah Edmunson-Morton and Josalyn Gervasio muse about folksonomies. Tiah asks “why would we encourage a move away from what has become an essential part of libraries and their functionality?” Personally, I don’t think we are moving away, but are moving to incorporate both librarian and user-generated metadata in our systems. It doesn’t have to be an either/or dilemma.

playing with tech is fun!: Shireen Deboo discusses how RSS and del.icio.us have revolutionized how she keeps up with information and “keeps found things found.” Karen Bjork calls Bloglines “my very own mini-conference” (great analogy!).

all about the workplace: Tamara Cameron, Candice Watkins, and Katharina Penner have some great ideas for implementing del.icio.us and RSS in their library settings.

del.icio.us anxiety: Fred Jahns worries about choosing the right tag while Robin Grant wonders what will happen to her stuff if del.icio.us goes out of business.

are del.icio.us results useful?: Missy Van Dusen brings up the idea of del.icio.us group-think, which is not something I’d ever considered before. Jini Errichetti questions whether searching or browsing tags really helps you find results any better than searching Google.

is it worth the effort?: Tamara Cameron considers how to implement social software tools in a setting where staff thinks e-mail is too impersonal. Jini Errichetti asks “who has time to read all this stuff?” and wonders if her staff could grasp stuff like RSS.

Week 3 is all about wikis, a topic near and dear to my heart! If it’s a topic you’re interested in too, join in on the conversations by commenting on our participants’ posts.

Incorporating Web 2.0 into Library Websites by Karen Coombs

Web 2.0 concepts –

• Radical decentralization – usually you have a Web manager who puts the content online. The University of Houston’s library has 1500 pages, so responsibilities for Web development needs to be decentralized. They developed a content management system to allow anyone on the library staff to update pages. Karen also integrated wikis and blogs into the library Web site.
• Small Pieces Loosely Joined – Website is a combination of different technologies that are modular and work well together. Different modules for news, resources, etc. Content is reusable throughout the site and anywhere else. A faculty member can grab a subject guide or a bibliography and put it into their courseware. Any piece of the CMS can be replaced as needed (rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater).
• Perpetual beta – Deploy systems early and make constant improvements. She brought the wikis up in a month, had alpha testers on staff, got feedback, and made changes. It gets users involved in the development process. It allows you to get input and make continuous improvements. They started using Moveable Type for their blogs and are looking to move away from it. But because people are used to change now, the change will be less disruptive.
• Remixable content – APIs to allow content to be incorporated into other systems like the campus Course Management System. AJAX to add a database link to any page, blog, wiki. Librarians and faculty didn’t know how to create a persistent link to the database or the catalog (this is a big problem where I work) and Karen wants to build a tool to make that easy (because it really isn’t).
• User as contributor – Allow users to add and update content on the library’s website (class wikis, etc.). Institutional repositories. Library as a host for student and faculty blogs (HOT!). User tagging and comments in the catalog.
• Rich User Experiences – Multimedia, interactivity, GUI-style application experiences. Idea of personalization and customization (need to balance against privacy issues). Spaces for collaboration and interaction.

Karen then showed us her CMS at University of Houston and it is ridiculously impressive. Very user-friendly. You can just choose certain elements (contact person, subject guide, etc.) to be shown on the page and they come up automatically. Man, I wish I could clone Karen and get one of her at my library.

Social Tagging and Folksonomies in Practice – Jason Clark

Jason is talking about tagging. Showing us tags in del.icio.us and amazon. Tagging allows us to describe items ourselves, rather than depending on traditional controlled vocabularies like LC Subject Headings. This is the people choosing the keywords that describe the item. Del.icio.us is about people essentially cataloging the Web… defining aboutness. People can also look at what other people have tagged and can learn from that. If you are into css, you can look at what other people have tagged “css” that they find interesting. Tagging is the act of describing the item. The tag is the user-added descriptive metadata.

How can this be used in libraries? Assign friendly terms to indexes and databases. Create communities of practice around library articles. Users tagging the library catalog. Organizing a series of Web pages for a library guide. Give users the opportunity to label library Web pages.

Jason showed Penn Tags, which is like del.icio.us, but is designed just for the University of Pennsylvania. People can create bibliographies, bookmark things in the catalog or outside of the library Web site (articles, Websites, etc.). Classes could use a common tag to share resources.

At MSU, they are creating an electronic Thesis and Dissertation repository where people can use tags to describe the documents. It allows people to find documents in their subject based on the tags that other users had assigned to the documents (as opposed to LC Subject Headings).

Why does it work? It embraces the social nature of the Web, scales to large datasets, offers a broad discovery model, it’s adaptable and it maps and displays simple relationships between items.

Why is it not great? No precision of language. No true hierarchy of terms. Vulnerable to gaming of the system (making things popular by using certain tags), lack of a controlled vocabulary, and users can be wrong (well… I don’t know if users are wrong, they might just see things differently. There really isn’t a wrong or right in a folksonomy).

When to use it? Establish an architecture of participation. Organize resources for a company intranet. Allow a class to collaboratively build a subject guide. Build and refine library controlled vocabularies. Allow people to browse through a tag cloud.

Jason mentioned Zoom Clouds and FreeTag (links to be provided later) which I have never heard of before. And I didn’t realize that unalog could be downloaded for use in libraries.

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

Keep up the great work Ellyssa!

I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels completely overwhelmed (but excited) about what’s going on in social software. So I thought I’d point out some stuff I’ve been playing with and reading that seemed interesting.

Here are some applications I’ve been playing with that I think are pretty neat:

Blummy – not only does it have an adorable name, but this is something I really needed since there was no room left on my toolbar for bookmarklets. Rather than having lots of bookmarklets crowding your toolbar you just have blummy. As it says on their front page, “it’s a kind of drop down menu consisting of widgets (called blummlets) that provide rich functionality. It works on every page on the web. Just click on it at your toolbar.”

schtuff – is a wiki application with something I think is particularly brilliant — threaded comments. It’s doesn’t have a pretty interface like PBWiki, but if you’re collaboratively editing a document, threaded comments are a dream come true. That’s really the only thing that keeps me from using collaborative editing applications like Writely. Having a discussion tab or a place for comments is essential in a wiki (I still don’t understand why PBWiki doesn’t have them!).

Blinklist – as I mentioned a few days ago, this is truly a social bookmarks manager. Check my review for details.

KiskRSS – This application allows you to pull a bunch feeds together and display them on one page. It displays the posts all together chronologically as if they were all one blog. You can also search the feeds. Check out the cool example that Steven Cohen created!

Goowy – There are a lot of virtual desktops out these days, but Goowy really stands out for me. First of all, they use Flash 8 instead of AJAX. They provide two really terrific applications — an RSS reader and e-mail. You actually get your own @goowy.com address. The widgets (del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr, and all the usual suspects) and the calendar app are nice too. Best of all, but worst for productivity, they have a lot of fun games including Sonic the Hedgehog and Tetris. I don’t imagine that Goowy is going to make me more productive — I wasted an hour on Sonic last night — but it’s a really interesting application to play with. And I had no idea you could do so much with Flash! I just tried out Netvibes and I’m very impressed with it too, even though it doesn’t have Sonic.

SuprGlu – With so many social software applications scattered around the Web, our web content can also become scattered. I have stuff on my blog, at blinklist, on my wikis, at Flickr, etc. SuprGlu allows you to create a really cute web page using basically anything that has an RSS feed associated with it. It’s a whole lot like KickRSS. My only gripe is that it doesn’t create an RSS feed for the whole kit and kaboodle, trapping my integrated content on their page. It’s like, so Me 2.0 (so lame!).

Here are some articles I’ve been reading on Web 2.0 and social software:

• Library 2.0 Movement Sees Benefits in Collaboration with Patrons by Jason Boog in Publish. (he mentioned the Library Success Wiki! Woo hoo!
• Finding “the life between buildings”: An approach for defining a weblog community by Lilia Efimova, Stephanie Hendrick, and Anjo Anjewierden
• Social Software and the Future of Conferences Right Now by Vicki Suter, Bryan Alexander, and Pascal Kaplan for EDUCAUSE
• Manifesto for the Reputation Society by Hassan Masum and Yi-Chen Zhang for First Monday
• The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems by Scott A. Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman at HP Labs

Blogs to keep up with Web 2.0 and libraries:

• Library Crunch
• The Shifted Librarian
• Tame the Web
• TechCrunch

There’s a lot of social software out there. The trick is picking applications that actually fill a need you have rather than trying to find a use for the technology in your life. Otherwise you’re bound to have Burnout 2.0.

Now back to LTR (life trumps blogging).

social software, wiki, rss social bookmarking, Web 2.0

Here are some of the reasons I’m switching over to them:

• If you highlight text on the page you are bookmarking (or “blinking”), it will show up in the description section. I never have the time or inclination to write descriptions myself, but they sure are useful when you have more than 500 items bookmarked, some lacking descriptive titles. This is probably my favorite feature.
• If you don’t have time to tag a site but want to remember it, there is also a “Quick Blink” bookmarklet that allows you to bookmark the post and tag it later. What I like best about it is that you can find your quick blinks in a special folder. Otherwise, I’d never remember to tag it later on.
• You can make individual bookmarks private or public so your friends don’t have to see what you bookmarked on Amazon to buy them for Christmas
• They make it very easy to backup your bookmarks
• It was super-easy to import my bookmarks from del.icio.us
• You can flag bookmarks that are really important to you and view them in a separate tab.
• Their advanced search function allows for boolean searching
• You can add people to your watchlist so that you can keep track of what your friends are bookmarking. The My List page includes your bookmarks and those of your friends. When you click on a friend, you will only see their particular bookmarks. Love it! It’s a great way to make the invisible Web visible by using trusted sources (friends).
• Not that it matters too much in terms of functionality, but the interface is really pretty and I love the AJAX-ian movement of pages. Popups are now “fade-ins”. It just adds to the user experience.
• For each bookmark, BlinkList tries to generate screenshot of the site. This is very helpful when trying to remember what exactly it was that you bookmarked.
• When you are browsing other people’s bookmarks and you see something you like, just click the “blink it” link and a form will fade into view with the tags and description that the other person assigned to the page. You can change the tags or just click “submit” and you’re done.

What I like best is that they seem to be very open to suggestions and are constantly making improvements. del.icio.us definitely has made improvements since I started using them, but not too many, and now they are really lagging behind many of the other social bookmarking tools. Though I do like that “to:_____” tag that del.icio.us has to bookmark things for other people.

If you’re using BlinkList, let me know. My username is librarianmer. I’d love to get a bookmark list going of people in libraries and/or educational technology so that we can share our bookmarks and learn from one another.

I’m currently doing a survey to attempt to figure out which are the key features that users of social bookmarking services are looking for. I’m hoping to hear from about a thousand influential social bookmarking fans.

Basically we know that social bookmarking has great potential but we are trying to figure out what is holding it back from going mainstream.

Djoeke is trying to get 1000 people to answer her survey question (yes, there is only one question) so if you have any opinions about social bookmarking, please give her your two cents. She’s going to publish the results for the online community, which I’m very interested in seeing.

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.