Archive for the ‘Library 2.0’ Category

Sally Pewhairangi at Finding Heroes suggests 20 Everyday Ways To Escape The Library Echo Chamber. This excellent list goes beyond writing and contributing to discussions about libraries and recommends practical ways to find out what’s happening outside libraries and how that can benefit your organization. Here are just five suggestions.

1. Watch a TED Talks video on a topic you know nothing about. What did you learn? How could you apply this to library presentations?
2. Ask someone outside your immediate circle of influence for their thoughts on your current project.
3. Read the book reviews in the local paper. What value could your library add to those reviews?
4. Ask the next person you meet when they last visited the library and why.
5. When writing your next report, consider how you could make it more visually appealing. Try it (even though you may not actually submit it).

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

If you’re fed up with your eBook package and are looking for other ways to put your library’s budget to good use, you’ll want to check out Andy W’s Alternative Uses for the Pesky eBook Budget at Agnostic Maybe. He suggests five ways to spend that money. Here are the recommendations discussed.

1. Programming
2. Hire Someone!
3. Build Something Cool!
4. Start a New (and Different) Collection!
5. Start Your Own eBook Partnership!

There were an amazing 395 responses to last week’s poll question: Which new technology(ies) do you think will have the most impact on libraries over the next 2-5 years? e-Books, mobile, and cloud computing technologies dominated the responses. Here are the results:

e-Books: 79 votes, 20%
Mobile Apps: 68 votes, 17.22%
Cloud Computing: 60 votes, 15.19%
Semantic Web: 31 votes, 7.85%
Social Publishing Applications (blogs, wikis, Twitter, YouTube): 30 votes, 7.59%
RFID: 25 votes, 6.33%
Social Networking Applications (Facebook): 23 votes, 5.82%
Augmented Reality Apps: 19 votes, 4.81%
QR Codes: 18 votes, 4.56%
Social Bookmarking (Pinterest): 18 votes, 4.56%
Location-Aware Technology (Foursquare): 12 votes, 3.04%
Other: 12 votes, 3.04%

And here are the results of the “Other” category

• Discovery Services
• HTML5 as an app platform
• Book scanners for ILL and photocopier replacement
• GIS
• iPad
• Mobile devices
• moble web
• large screen, gesture-based info exploration
• linked data
• None of the above

After looking at Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies predictions for the past couple of years, I wondered what librarians thought were going to be significant technologies for our field over the next 2-5 years. So I created a poll! Please choose as many as you think are relevant:

Charles Hamaker, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Technical Services at Atkins Library, University of North Carolina–Charlotte writes for Searcher Magazine about Ebooks on Fire: Controversies Surrounding Ebooks in Libraries. This is a thought-provoking article on the pressing issue of e-books in the library realm:

“Ubiquitous web and print ads tell individuals and libraries to “buy” ebooks. But long-term preservation and retention rights to stable content are not the norm, because many resellers and vendors don’t possess those rights from the publisher or author. Instead of true ownership, most ebook “purchases” are more like leases, and leases with few residual rights at that. The only way to assure continuing access and storage for an ebook is a permanent download to a device with rights not governed by strict DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems. With content delivered from a hosted service on the web (aka the cloud), the “purchaser” has no control over the content. Even Google Books bears the disclaimer:

[I]f Google or the applicable copyright holder loses the rights to provide you any Digital Content, Google will cease serving such Digital Content to you and you may lose the ability to use such Digital Content.”

Marcus Sheridan at the Social Median Examiner comes up with 5 Ways to Get Your Entire Company On Board With Social Media. All of these suggestions would also apply to getting library staff invested in social media. Here are the recommendations discussed:

• #1: Someone Must Take the Lead
• #2: Educate Via an Event
• #3: Encourage Employee Action
• #4: Create a Company Social Media Newsletter
• #5: Continue Training and Education

It’s Social Media Week here in NYC and I’ve been lucky enough to attend several sessions that are a part of this cutting-edge conference. On Monday the New York Public Library hosted a session titled Making Collections Possible Through Collaboration during which they discussed 3 exciting digital projects undertaken by NYPL Labs, each involving collaboration with users.

GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

The NYPL’s Stereogranimator lets users create and share animated GIFs and 3D anaglyphs using more than 40,000 stereographs. Users can browse through the NYPL’s collection of dual photos and then combine them to make a 3D image. This project was inspired by Joshua Heineman’s project that he started four years ago. The San Francisco-based artist was using the NYPL’s collection of stereographs to create animated gif images for his Cursive Buildings site. His project went viral and the Library took notice and began collaborating with him to create the Stereogranimator.

The NYPL’s menu collection includes over 40,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present. In order to be able to search the menus by dish, price, etc., they are transcribing the menus, dish by dish with the help of their users. The What’s on the Menu project has had over 782,059 dishes transcribed from 12,426 menus. Users can share menus via Facebook, Twitter, and other popular social media website. All of the data is openly available in zipped format for export, and the NYPL plans an API for release shortly. They are considering incorporating their historic playbill collection, and plan on mashing this application up with their Map Warper.

The NYPL’s Map Warper is an application for digitally aligning (“rectifying”) historical maps from their collections with today’s maps to create a brand new version. This allows for comparative, spatial history. Users can view the maps which have been rectified or warped already, or they can help the NYPL align other maps. The NYPL map collection consists of over 433,000 maps and 24,000 books and atlases. They have been digitizing this collection over the past 12 years and have digitized 15,000 maps, 10,000 of which are NYC maps. They will be making the software package openly available for other libraries to use. To date, they have 1600 collaborators who are helping rectify maps on NYPL’s site.

The iLibrarian Personal Digital Archiving series of posts was based on a 3-hour hands-on workshop I give on the topic. Here’s a wrap up of all 8 articles as well as some recommended resources that I found exceptionally helpful in putting together the session.

Series Articles

1. Personal Digital Archiving: An Overview
2. Personal Digital Archiving: Part One – Strategy
3. Personal Digital Archiving: Part Two – Storage Options
4. Personal Digital Archiving: Part Three – File Formats
5. Personal Digital Archiving: Part Four – Policy
6. Personal Digital Archiving: Part Five – Implementation
7. Personal Digital Archiving: Part Six – Cataloging
8. Personal Digital Archiving: Part Seven – Stewardship

For More on Personal Digital Archiving

• Personal Archiving: Preserving Your Digital Memories, Library of Congress
• Creating a Personal Digital Archive ABC News
• Digital Preservation Management Tutorial. Cornell University Library.
• Decoding the digital: a common language for preservation: British Library Conference Proceedings.

Jennifer Amanda Jones at the Social Media Examiner offers 10 Tips for Creating a Social Media Policy for Your Business, each of which could be implemented by libraries. It’s becoming increasingly important for libraries and other organizations to create effective social media policies that protect, guide, and empower staff. This article provides helpful tips to do just that:

• #1: Gather Your Team
• #2: Focus on Creating Culture
• #3: Consider Legal Ramifications, Including the National Labor Relations Review Board (NLRB)
• #4: Separate Overall Policies from Site-Specific Guidelines
• #5: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
• #6: Include External Regulations
• #7: Create Two Policies
• #8: Emphasize Education
• #9: Ask a Lawyer to Review the Policy
• #10: Don’t Let it Collect Dust

Bobbi Newman at Librarian by Day offers advice about How to Talk to Your Patrons About Penguin & Other Publishers Not Loaning eBooks to Libraries. This helpful post provides a suggested script for discussing ebooks with patrons, contact info for publishers, and plenty of resources on the topic.

This post is a follow-up to an earlier post titled 5 Ways to Use Pinterest in Your Library. Since it was so popular I decided to continue with 5 more suggestions for using this hot new social site for your library.

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6.) Showcase Educational Videos and Webcasts

Since Pinterest supports sharing YouTube videos, the library could create boards highlighting tutorials, webcasts, and instructional videos for researching different subject areas, using specialized databases, or navigating the library website.

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7.) Create an E-Books Board

Are you trying to spread the word about your new e-books program? Create a Pinterest board highlighting new and popular e-books. You can even specify which devices each e-book is compatible with and pin video tutorials for uploading to patrons’ eReaders.

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8.) Give Patrons a Library Tour

Create a Pinterest board with an annotated photo tour of your library. Show off your new renovation, computer lab, or children’s area through pins. If you’re feeling adventurous, download the mobile app and take the photos with your iPhone and add location information to them.

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9.) Market Upcoming Events

Use Pinterest to let patrons know about exciting upcoming events, workshops, and classes at your library. You might even create boards with photos of past events as well.

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10.) Highlight a Special Collection or Exhibit

The visual display of Pinterest’s boards offers an excellent opportunity for libraries to showcase their special collections. Create boards of interesting manuscripts, exhibits, and image collections.

Bonus Suggestion:

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11.) Create Boards for Staff Inspiration

Pinterest can be used to save ideas for later use, like other social bookmarking applications. Create a space where librarians can pin fun and interesting ideas for library programs, events, and services.

Kim Westad at the Times Colonist reports that Publishers Put the Squeeze on Library eBook Lending. This excellent article discusses the current state of e-books and libraries in Canada and provides a great list of 13 websites for free e-books. Here’s a short sample:

“In the Greater Victoria Public Library system alone, there has been an eightfold increase in the use of ebooks. In 2010, total ebook circulation at the GVPL’s 10 libraries was 3,699. That jumped to 29,741 in 2011. And that interest isn’t expected to dwindle…

…library users can’t download Steve Jobs’s biography. It’s published by Simon and Schuster, and they will not sell ebooks to libraries. You can download the Stieg Larsson trilogy at the library, but not the new Stephen King – different publishers, different rules.

Five of the titles on last week’s Globe and Mail fiction bestseller list were not available in ebooks, although they are in print. They are published by companies that are still struggling to find a way to deal with a way to sell ebooks to libraries.”

In her latest “Technology in Practice” column titled Providing the Tools, Meredith Farkas writes about “bringing digital creation technologies to libraries”. I love the idea of libraries providing patrons with access to expensive video editing software like Final Cut Pro. Not only would this enable people to be creative and produce videos, but this is a valuable skill to have for people who are in the job market!! Here’s the first paragraph of the article, be sure and click in for more.

“In the 1990s, libraries were pioneers in providing access to the internet in their communities. Even today, libraries are the only place some community members can get online. Over the past few years, libraries have begun positioning themselves as the go-to place for digital creation technologies, providing hardware and software that most people wouldn’t have at home. By providing these creative tools to their patrons, libraries fill a valuable niche in the community, a niche consistent with their historical commitment to bridging gaps in technology access.”

I attended the LegalTech conference yesterday here in NYC and went to this inspirational panel sponsored by ILTA. David Neeson, CIO at Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger, LLP kicked off the session with some eye opening stats such as:

-There were 25 million iPads sold by June 2011
- the iPad holds 83% of the tablet market

His 80 attorney firm just finished an iPad rollout to all their associates. He shared that while he thinks that the iPad is an outstanding device for the consumption of information, it’s not so outstanding for the production of it. These are some areas where he thinks the iPads really shine:

Reading and Reviewing – great for reading deposition transcripts, reading ebooks, using GoodReader for reading documents.
Notetaking - iPads are excellent for typing notes, using Evernote, Draftpad, Notability, and OneNote. They’re also great when you need a handwritten signature for a pdf.
Research - the iPad is great for conducting searches on Fastcase, researching on Lexis and West apps.
Presentations - while not as strong in this area, iPads can be used to create presentations using Keynote and TrialPad.

The challenges for IT that Neeson identified have to do with device management and what happens when the user takes the iPad home and syncs it with their desktop’s iTunes. Also, app deployment, the update process, and deploying them en masse have all been challenges for his team. However, he mentioned that there are third-party utilities available for mobile device management which can help with deployment and configuration, policy enforcement, app management, remote control, tracking lost devices, and selective wipes of devices.

Brett Burney of Burney Consultants spoke about his recommended list of iPad apps, many of which I can’t wait to try out. These are the apps he suggests:

• GoodReader: This is an excellent app for reading documents. It can carry thousands and they can be organized and synced with Dropbox.
• PDF HD: Place bookmarks in pdf documents to quickly jump to that section.
• PDF PROvider: Read and create PDF documents with this app.
• PDF Expert: Fill out PDF forms and create signatures.
• IA Writer: A simply word processing app that syncs with Dropbox.
• SoundNote: Record audio notes that sync up with your typed and handdrawn notes.
• Noteshelf: Scan in handwritten notes and work with them through a zoomable interface. They can be exported to Evernote or as PDFs.
• Notes Plus: This notes app provides a dual pane interface where you can have your notes up in one and a webpage or PDF alongside it in the other pane. This app will convert written notes to text.
• Favorite News apps: USAToday, Guardian
• Zite: Similar to Flipboard but it makes recommendtions based on user behavior.
• Documents to Go: Create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentation with this mobile office suite.
• Atomic Web Browser: this browser can identify itself as other browsers such as IE, Firefox, and Safari.
• Legal apps: Westlaw Next, Lexis Advance HD, Fastcase HD.
• Find My Phone/iPad: Locate your missing, (or stolen), iPad with this tracking app.
• Klammer: open up files you would normally need Outlook to open such as .eml and .msg
• PST Mail: Transfer Outlook pst files to your device, and have access to your messages.

ALA Midwinter has kicked of the 2012 library conference season and soon we’ll be looking forward to Computers in Libraries, PLA, and ALA Annual among others. Here are 8 phone apps which will come in handy at these all of these events:

Foursquare

Check in not only at the event itself, but into indiviual sessions, receptions, luncheons, local restaurants, museums, and other venues. See who else is there, leave tips for other conference attendees, and network via this mobile social app. (Available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phones, & more).

unsocial

This app lets you connect with business professionals in your proximity. It uses geo-location and smart tagging to help you find and be found. (Available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, & Windows Phones).

BeamMe pro

beamME finds interesting people nearby based on your profile. You can then easily chat, share your actual location or contact information and meet – all from within the app. You can even connect it to Facebook and Twitter to see which contacts are at the event. (Available for iPhone only).

Facebook

Access social information about the conference you’re attending such as scheduled events, who’s attending the conference, what people are saying about the sessions and the locale, view photos that friends are posting, and chat with other conference attendees. (Available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phones, & more).

Bump

Share all sorts of contact and social network information by bumping two phones together with the app. Just choose what you want to share/send and then hold the phones together. you can then message them through the app as well. (Available for iPhone and Android).

Ustream Live Broadcaster

Stream live video from the event to your Ustream account from your phone. You can notify your Twitter and Facebook social networks as you start your broadcast so that they can join you. You can make your broadcast social by integrating a live Twitter or Facebook feed. (Available for iPhone and Android).

Shhmooze

Shhmooze lets you check into conferences or meetup events and find out who’s interesting based on your profile and theirs. Connect with other attendees by virtually waving to break the ice.

(Available for iPhone and Android).

Free Wifi Finder

This handy app uses your iPhone’s GPS and network triangulation capabilities to instantly locate free Wi-Fi Internet hotspots wherever you are in the world online or offline. (Available for iPhone and Android).

Please list the apps you find most helpful at library conferences in the comments!!