Aaron Schmidt, Adina Lerner, John Bly­berg, Carol Bean, Allan M. Kleiman, Glenn Peter­son, Mar­i­lyn Turner

ques­tion: book­space page is great, looks great; I won­der about these lists, because blogs are self-correcting, but the lists seem to be more sta­tic; how do you know the lists are doing their job and accom­plish­ing what you want them to accom­plish?
answer: glenn — recently noticed that on one of the lists, some­one said “here are the titles that I like about such and such and if you have favorites, com­ment below,” but we don’t have offer com­ments on the lists; so there are ways we can make the lists more organic and dynamic
Mar­i­lyn — there’s a list called “all pink book cov­ers,” so you can’t really cor­rect everything

ques­tion from allan: we haven’t been very suc­cess­ful to get our staff to adapt to 2.0, although we’re play­ing with sites; how did you actu­ally moti­vate your staff — with or with­out a stick — to blog? ref­er­ence staff don’t see this as part of their job
answer: Mar­i­lyn — can’t pre­tend we haven’t had peo­ple kick­ing and scream­ing, but feels that if you can snag new librar­i­ans who aren’t afraid of doing these things and see this as part of their job, try to har­ness them; had trou­ble get­ting peo­ple to con­tribute con­tent for the web back in 1996; saw that staff started to rely on resources their col­leagues were main­tain­ing, which helped; some­thing col­lab­o­ra­tive finally hap­pened, but not sure it can be described eas­ily; they use sta­tis­tics to show usage of the web resources; staff will update their blog if you tell them you are going to fea­ture it on the home page; some­thing is mak­ing it real for them, but it didn’t hap­pen overnight
Glenn — have had their intranet for a long time, which helps, because they were able to start their in a con­trolled and safe environment

ques­tion: why did you use cold­fu­sion instead of php?
answer: we selected CF in the mid-1990s, one of the few devel­op­men­tal lan­guages at the time; rapid devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment, can use dreamweaver with it, easy to learn, sim­i­lar to HTML in the way it uses tags; might have made a dif­fer­ent deci­sion of mak­ing it later

ques­tion: when I go home, my cowork­ers will ask the “what if” about user-generated con­tent — how you deal with the bad stuff, who deals with it, etc.
answer: john — it’s a good ques­tion; need to under­stand it could hap­pen, but can have a plan for how to deal with it; you won’t get a flood of par­tic­i­pa­tion to begin with; aaron — noted that you can mod­er­ate com­ments so that they have to be approved by the per­son who is wor­ried about this hap­pen­ing
glenn — com­ments go live on their site unless they get trapped by their “naughty word” fil­ter (eg, “title” gets blocked because of the first three let­ters — about one of these a day gets trapped and has to be approved); trapped com­ments are sent to a group of employ­ees via email every cou­ple of days — can click on a link to follow-up

ques­tion: NJ library where user-generated com­ments are approved before going live; has never seen a prob­lem; if any­thing, peo­ple think they’re reserv­ing a book; have a home-generated chat room for book dis­cus­sions, staff meet­ings, etc.; can see the num­ber of lurk­ers, which is pretty high — they don’t have any­thing to say; in the web 2.0 world, really likes the SOPAC, how do you get the lurk­ers to par­tic­i­pate? he recently put up a “sug­gest a new title” box on their web­site, and it’s been a flood; thinks all of these peo­ple never thought to par­tic­i­pate or con­tribute until they saw that box
answer: john — by lurk­ers, you’re really talk­ing about peo­ple who are not pre­dis­posed to using those types of ser­vices; no bet­ter way to get some­one to par­tic­i­pate than to make them mad, but in the end, you really need to cre­ate incen­tive for them to par­tic­i­pate; eg, if you put in 10 reviews, we’ll waive your fines; the end game is to build a com­mu­nity around the core ele­ments of the social soft­ware, get that net­work effect rolling
allan — one of the issues that came up a few years ago is that the ILS ven­dors looked at 2.0 and were going to incor­po­rate all of these fea­tures, but that’s come and gone so we have to imple­ment it; it’s the ven­dors who really need to be the ones work­ing on this, rather than us recre­at­ing the wheel

ques­tion: how do you mea­sure and report value? we can all agree that there is inher­ently good value in these things, but how do you mea­sure that value and report it out so that it is use­ful for decision-makers who are not librar­i­ans?
answer: aaron — at a very basic level, you can take your web­site sta­tis­tics and look at hits from other sites where you have a pres­ence
john — it’s also impor­tant to remem­ber that you can look at met­rics but your ulti­mate goal is enhanc­ing the user expe­ri­ence in a way that changes the face of librar­i­an­ship
allan — has been doing work­shops around the state about the value of libraries using a web-based cal­cu­la­tor that high­lights the value based on your usage; gives annual reports to cus­tomers
Mar­i­lyn — it’s impor­tant to put mod­esty aside and send com­ments up the chain; she is con­stantly sur­prised how many users leave pos­i­tive com­ments on the site; leave mod­esty aside and pro­mote those comments

ques­tion from Michael: can each of you tell us a chal­lenge you’ve faced and how you over­came it?
answer: aaron — he’s the direc­tor of a small pub­lic library with a small bud­get and lim­ited staff, and the social soft­ware they use has been of immense help to them; was able to get a decent web­site going using free blog­ging soft­ware, staff col­lab­o­rates with google docs, etc.
adina — is try­ing to find ways to bring more peo­ple into the library and offer more chal­leng­ing classes, so at the end of next month, she will be offer­ing a new class on web-based image edit­ing soft­ware
john — often­times, we reach for the stars and we climb the high­est peak we can find, and that leads to fail­ure because we’re not focus­ing on the bedrock of our ser­vices (the back­end, the foun­da­tion), so rec­og­niz­ing that fact we can’t inno­vate for a year because we need to lay the foun­da­tion and put the ground­work in is a way of acknowl­edg­ing our lim­i­ta­tions; so when you present a project that really works (like SOPAC), that’s a cul­mi­na­tion of not just that project, but also lay­ing the foun­da­tion
Carol — when she was first hired, she was the only one who under­stood the prob­lems of hav­ing to get a mouse to teach how to use one; she just went out and did things (buy­ing a mouse); when other staff didn’t like what she did, other staff pitched in and did some­thing dif­fer­ent, which helped move things for­ward; if oth­ers aren’t doing it, just do it your­self
allan — the biggest resource we have is our staff, and the biggest hin­drance to going to the next level is our staff, so our biggest chal­lenge is to get our staff to real­ize that their jobs have changed and they are all now tech­nol­ogy spe­cial­ists; he him­self has this chal­lenge because he tries to stay out in front of his staff, which seems impos­si­ble; the chal­lenge is what we are as librar­i­ans to keep up with tech­nol­ogy
glenn — our biggest chal­lenge is with staff, not the pub­lic; patrons don’t have high expec­ta­tions for library tech­nol­ogy; it’s a great chal­lenge to have when peo­ple fig­ure out what tech­nol­ogy can do for them, but then we have to man­age expec­ta­tions for what we can do; they see the magic in front of them but they don’t always have an under­stand­ing of what it takes to make that hap­pen; so empha­siz­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion (what projects they are work­ing on, what infor­ma­tion they need to make some­thing hap­pen, etc.)
Mar­i­lyn — her biggest chal­lenge has been to be at the table of system-wide plan­ning; because they’re not in each build­ing, peo­ple plan with­out con­sid­er­ing the web ser­vices com­po­nents; her staff goes to a lot of meet­ings in order to con­tribute to these dis­cus­sions and be part of things

Bookspace.org — Glenn Peter­son, Mar­i­lyn Turner (Hen­nepin County Library)

Mar­i­lyn

book site went live on valentine’s day
con­tri­bu­tions from staff and read­ers have been key
hen­nepin county is a county of read­ers
– on aver­age, every sub­ur­ban HC res­i­dent checked out 17 books, DVDs, and CDs in 2006
– twice the national average

wanted to max­i­mize this when redesign­ing their site
– wanted to bring together rel­e­vant resources for a par­tic­u­lar genre or sub­ject
– to allow librar­i­ans to eas­ily con­tribute con­tent with­out need any pro­gram­ming knowledge

when they came up with the name “book­space,” it was con­ceived as a true space where peo­ple could read, share, and learn
domain name was owned by a young adult librar­ian in mis­souri who was never able to use it so she gave it to them to use

lat­est blog post title appears on the home page
email newslet­ter that goes out every other month
fea­tured read­ers list
find a good book

who is work­ing on the site?
– coör­di­na­tor
– work­group of 5 librar­i­ans
– con­trib­u­tors (30 librar­i­ans)
— 2 librar­i­ans on each genre page team

easy to use tools for the librar­i­ans, all form-based on the web
they help each other to show new blog authors how easy it is
these are not vol­un­teer activ­i­ties, which is impor­tant
– this is part of your job and part of your per­for­mance expec­ta­tion
– it’s become an expec­ta­tion over the last few years that their librar­i­ans will add con­tent to the web

Glenn

social fea­tures
– user com­ments on books and other titles
— right now there are 234 com­ments on the final Harry Pot­ter book; com­ments started on this title while it was still on order
– blogs, where users can also com­ment
– book­lists
– list top con­trib­u­tors of com­ments
– “It’s Alive“
– user pro­files
— more than just screen names
— bring together user’s com­ments and book­lists on their pro­file page
— also show what they have checked out as a wall of books (“what they’re reading”)

look­ing ahead
– new ways to con­nect users
— users who are read­ing x are also read­ing y
— face­book “wall“
— show user’s “friends”

chal­lenges
– con­trol issues

geek stuff
– database-driven
– RSS every­where
– Cold­Fu­sion (or ASP, PHP, etc.)

take­aways
– draw on library staff
– empower your users (they want to add con­tent, espe­cially your younger users)
– cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties for serendip­ity
– let users interact

slides at http://hclib.org/extranet/

John: The Social Catalog

the trans­for­ma­tive library
based on “The Expe­ri­ence Econ­omy” book -
ser­vices, goods = 1.0
trans­for­ma­tion puts ser­vices, goods, and expe­ri­ence (par­tic­i­pa­tion) together into a whole = 2.0
the media ecol­ogy is chang­ing rapidly
the way we con­duct busi­ness means we need to change the way we do things

cre­ate an expe­ri­ence in the library itself to offer a trans­for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence for the user
the social cat­a­log is one way to do this
a vital interim step to wher­ever we end up going

3 social cat­a­log envi­ron­ments
1. pseudo-social
— author­ity pre­sented as col­lab­o­ra­tive (ie Encore); sub­ject head­ings as tag cloud
— there’s no feed­back loop, though, no real col­lab­o­ra­tive expe­ri­ence, and not really social
2. syn­di­cated social
— 3rd party data (ie Library­Thing for Libraries)
— the results you get are gen­er­ally well-formed and almost always out­strip the use­ful­ness of sub­ject head­ings
— but get a homo­ge­neous blend of infor­ma­tion from a par­tic­u­lar record
3. indi­vid­u­ally social
— user-direct and self-contained (ie Hen­nepin, SOPAC)
— run into other lim­i­ta­tions, such as crit­i­cal mass of content

showed Michi­gan State University’s imple­men­ta­tion of Encore
– tag cloud, AJAX
– not really a social sys­tem, though, even though inter­face ele­ments are indica­tive of social sites

showed Dan­bury Library’s imple­men­ta­tion of Library­Thing for Libraries
– tags, but still no real social elements

showed Ann Arbor’s SOPAC
– users tak­ing advan­tage of the social ele­ments are prob­a­bly teens, prob­a­bly a hand­ful of them (so have to be care­ful your data analy­sis isn’t skewed)

you need to ask your­self…
– do we want non-authoritative (user-generated) meta­data asso­ci­ated with a record dis­play?
— only your insti­tu­tion can decide
— author­i­ta­tive and non-authoritative infor­ma­tion can co-exist
– if you include folk­son­omy, do you:
— want it to orig­i­nate from syn­di­cated data?
— reflect your com­mu­nity?
— if you don’t have the con­tent, how do you pro­vide the incen­tive to use the sys­tem? and if you don’t have incen­tive to use the sys­tem, how do you have the con­tent?
– what kind of devel­op­ment is involved?

the net­work effect

ques­tion: how do you prime the pump for com­ments?
answer: glenn — thinks we’ll see a phased approach in pop­u­lar­ity; needs to build, not there from day one; their sta­tis­tics show that peo­ple are more inter­ested in read­ing than con­tribut­ing, but thinks that will change over time; Mar­i­lyn: Glenn has put the oppor­tu­nity to com­ment in places she hadn’t thought of (where nor­mally it would be an email); have done a lot of PR with prizes when they intro­duce these types of things; can put your name in to win after you comment

- Allan M. Kleiman (Old Bridge Pub­lic Library)

inter­net is not gray yet
“while you were whale watch­ing, some of us were watch­ing the salmon spawn“
whale watch­ing = myspace, face­book
salmon spawn = cranky & other senior sites
sites that are spawn­ing and going upstream to die
what has spawned is some­thing “new” and “excit­ing” in social net­work­ing
com­par­ing the whale and the salmon is interesting

when peo­ple think of senior sites on the web, they only think of AARP, but that’s not really a social net­work­ing site
most of all, you need to share today’s infor­ma­tion with your col­leagues and the boomers and older adults who use your library

the num­bers are con­fus­ing
22% of seniors 65 and older use the inter­net (Pew)
fastest grow­ing seg­ment of inter­net users are those 85+
– well, if you have no one 85+ using the inter­net and then you do, it’s the fastest-growing segment

cur­rently 35 mil­lion older adults and by 2020 the older adults pop­u­la­tion will dou­ble
big busi­ness in devel­op­ing & “hook­ing” the baby boomers now
they’re try­ing to hook them into social net­work­ing sites, but how? no idea because don’t see any ads, fly­ers, etc.
older adults are not attracted to these lifestyle web­sites
sites that are con­nected to another orga­ni­za­tion are doing well, while inde­pen­dent sites are not doing so well
they all have the same col­ors and design and look the same after awhile

Senior­Net was the first orga­ni­za­tion to develop senior sites around the US, but you had to pay to join and that usu­ally doesn’t work with how libraries oper­ate
Allan’s library is work­ing with Senior­Net to expand their ser­vices into libraries
their web­site is good for view­ing struc­tured online learn­ing; they have book clubs, blogs, etc.
every­one else’s site looks the same, but they did it first

Third Age was the “first” social net­work­ing (learn­ing) site in 1997

all of these sites are intended for upper to mid­dle class, white, women
no com­pa­ra­ble site for men yet

Eons site
they know noth­ing about their users’ lifestyles and don’t mar­ket to them
focus on peo­ple, fun, love, money, body, lifepath, obits (ha!), games, travel
was founded by Monster.com CEO Jeff Tay­lor, but he’s not a boomer so he doesn’t get it
most of the boomer web­sites are look­ing at peo­ple with money, hop­ing you’ll click on com­pa­nies who can help you travel, invest money, etc.
Eons has $32 mil­lion invest­ment
half of their staff was let go, though

begin­ning to see the col­lapse of the new hope of social net­work­ing sites
let the com­pe­ti­tion begin
if a site is not allied with an orga­ni­za­tion, it is run­ning on ven­ture cap­i­tal invest­ments hop­ing to reap rewards

what is use­ful?
– more friendly ver­sions of myspace and face­book
– “Eons, Rezoom, Mul­ti­ply (a fancier Flickr; don’t even men­tion money, life, etc.; only site that shows peo­ple of dif­fer­ent ages and col­ors), Maya’s Mom, Boomj, and Boomer­town. They look like Face­book — with wrin­kles.” NYT 9/12/2007
— also said “old peo­ple are sticky,” mean­ing brand-loyal
but boomers are not brand loyal

new search engine — http://cranky.com/
it’s an out­growth of eons
found the 5000 most pop­u­lar web­sites among a group of 500,000 web users aged 45 and older and rated each site
pos­si­bly based on ask.com’s search engine
about once or twice a day, they change the rank­ings on the home page
#1 search was about sex
which isn’t sur­pris­ing, any good social net­work­ing sites for seniors will include com­pan­ion­ship
(at his library, they’re request­ing a speed dat­ing night for seniors!)
also high in rank­ings
– longevity cal­cu­la­tor
– sudoku
– eat healthy
– jobs after retire­ment
– wall­pa­pers
– online dat­ing
– retire­ment com­mu­nity
– work from home

the search here is non­threat­en­ing and eas­ier to use, eas­ier to read because of lower start­ing set
results are com­pa­ra­ble to yahoo
almost 80% of what he picks up on cranky dupli­cates what he gets on google
they only dis­play 4 results per page
head­ing = cRANKy
because it’s con­nected with eons, their con­tent is listed and linked to at the bot­tom of each page

what’s new out there?
eldr.com — mis­sion is to help baby boomers and their aging par­ents deal with the chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties of aging by pro­vid­ing the most use­ful thought-provoking and trusted infor­ma­tion avail­able any­where
one issue is out
web­site looks the same as the other senior sites
believes this will stay around because there is a com­ple­men­tary mag­a­zine and because it was started by a builder of homes for older adults; he wants to give back to the com­mu­nity for the peo­ple he works with

oth­ers
– redhatsociety.com; 40,000 chap­ters in US/worldwide; wear red hats, pur­ple dress
— “all my life I’ve done for you, now it’s my turn to do for me“
— another site that’s based on an orga­ni­za­tion
– Boomers! TV: Redefin­ing life after 50
— pro­duc­ing shows on PBS about grow­ing older, retire­ment, etc.; site has a lit­tle social networking

gray­ing of the inter­net is really about blog­ging
AP found that seniors love blog­ging because it helps them keep their minds going, keep your­self up-to-date because you’re ready other blogs, can share life expe­ri­ences, can meet other peo­ple from across the world
in some cases, senior blogs give the authors a bit of fame
3% of seniors in the US have cre­ated a blog
17% have read some­one else’s blog
22% of amer­i­cans aged 65 and older use the inter­net (1 in 5)

The Age­less Project
a web­site that lists blogs or web­sites of peo­ple in order of their birth year; there are 2 sites for peo­ple over age 90!
(sites with no com­mer­cial con­tent)
Allan’s library is start­ing a blog­ging class next month
will try to mar­ket the blogs of the class participants

so what do we do with all of this infor­ma­tion?
there’s life beyond myspace
– we should show peo­ple Cranky in com­puter class train­ing
– link some of these resources from your library’s web­site (libraries usu­ally link to neg­a­tive sites, whereas social net­work­ing sites are usu­ally pos­i­tive
– join the sites and test them; oth­er­wise you won’t really under­stand what they do
– become a par­tic­i­pant
– add web 2.0 tech­nol­ogy to your web classes
– pro­vide feed­back, both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive to the sites

social net­work­ing sites for seniors are here to stay, even if these spe­cific sites don’t survive

things that Old Bridge PL can do that you can, too
– have cre­ated a “senior space,” pos­si­bly the first in the US (users can lis­ten to records)
— phase one set up the area
— phase two is to develop a web 2.0 class­room where seniors can also use com­put­ers on their own
— adding a “let’s try it” lab­o­ra­tory
— adding to their class list based on their Advi­sory Board
– first library to launch Wii for older adults on Novem­ber 9
— teens will teach the older adults to Wii
— plan­ning for a Wii NJ tour­na­ment in spring 2008
– are re-training their librar­i­ans to train 2.0

keep look­ing for infor­ma­tion about what’s going on with older adults and social networking

his pre­sen­ta­tion will be at libraryolderadults.blogspot.com or infolink.org/seniorspaces

ques­tion: you didn’t men­tion AARP, why not?
answer: AARP is still an infor­ma­tional site, not a social net­work­ing site; it’s not the site I think of when I want to go some­where and have fun; I use it a lot and link to it, but doesn’t see it as a true inter­ac­tive site where peo­ple can meet

ques­tion: ABA is look­ing at imple­ment­ing MyABA; do you have point­ers for how to get peo­ple to use these sites?
answer: you’ll have to do a lot of hand-holding and tuto­ri­als; train the assis­tants (para­le­gals, sec­re­taries, etc.) to help them

ques­tion: do you know if web­mas­ters at these sites are talk­ing to boomers and seniors?
answer: doesn’t think so because the sites don’t reflect these groups; that’s why we need to join these things and com­ment on them — help them change the con­tent to make it more use­ful for us and for the community

- Adina Lerner (Santa Mon­ica PL), Alan D’Souza (San Fran­cisco PL), Carol Bean (BeanWorks)

Adina

“review the pew” — A Typol­ogy of Infor­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Tech­nol­ogy Users report
we’re not going to help the élite tech users, want to try for mid­dle of the road users, but really want to help the 49% with “few tech assets“
have to know your community’s demo­graph­ics
census.gov only gives you 2000 num­bers, which may not reflect what’s going on now
need to know your local resources, too

locat­ing stu­dents
– lis­ten to your patron requests
– cre­ate a sur­vey (they did a “com­puter classes ques­tion­naire“
– ask patrons to sub­mit ideas to a Sug­ges­tion Box

com­mu­nity out­reach
– appeal to niche groups, such as par­ents want­ing to help chil­dren with home­work online (offer a class on home­work help for par­ents)
– offer health-related search­ing class using your data­bases for older patrons

bring­ing new skills to old hands
can the 20% mid­dle of the road users be tempted?
– man­ag­ing files/folders
– dig­i­tal cam­era skills — using free sources such as Flickr, Pix­e­nate, Pic­nik, Snip­shot, Slide
— they found that 49% of their users had dig­i­tal cam­eras, even though they might not have com­put­ers at home
– eBay skills
— they’re not legally allowed to offer classes on ebay because of lia­bil­ity issues, but they found cer­ti­fied ebay uni­ver­sity train­ers to do the ses­sions in their labs
– inter­net secu­rity issues
— help them under­stand about not using IE, virus control

you have to acknowl­edge your lim­i­ta­tions, both of your library and your patrons
– hard to do Sec­ond Life in 90 min­utes and you may not have band­width
– lack of reli­able access to com­put­ers both in library and at home due to lim­i­ta­tion of space and funds
– lack of trans­porta­tion or mobil­ity of the patron — go to a senior cen­ter, etc.

at what point will infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy become a basic skill, sim­i­lar to read­ing a news­pa­per or a book, nav­i­gat­ing a library cat­a­log, or using an ATM?

pre­sen­ta­tion will be on slideshare (search on her name)

Alan — Non-English Classes at SFPL

The Foun­da­tion
– mis­sion state­ment
– have to present staff who look and sound like our com­mu­ni­ties
– lit­er­a­ture & sig­nage should reflect wel­com­ing atmos­phere, not just the “No’s“
– strong col­lec­tions for pop­u­la­tions
– web­site is in two addi­tional lan­guages, chi­nese and span­ish
— have an “eth­nic ser­vices com­mit­tee,” although they rely on the indi­vid­ual branches to do the pro­gram­ming
— book club in russ­ian and span­ish
– offer com­puter classes in chi­nese (can­tonese and man­darin), japan­ese (don’t really offer these any­more), russ­ian, and span­ish
— key­boards not in the native lan­guages (such as chi­nese) is an issue
— they have a class in chi­nese wikipedia
— part­nered with the senior­net peo­ple for a 4-week course that takes seniors from turn­ing on your com­puter, to man­ag­ing fold­ers, to man­ag­ing email; now they are ask­ing for how to upload pho­tos
inter­est­ingly, atten­dance num­bers across all lan­guages are down, though

have a “book a librar­ian” pro­gram where patrons can sched­ule a con­sul­ta­tion with them about any­thing at all
need staff inter­ested in teach­ing these things

recruit­ing train­ers
– staff & vol­un­teers
– lan­guage flu­ency
– tech­nol­ogy flu­ency
– enthusiasm

train­ing the trainer
– InfoPeo­ple
– Senior­Net (still use their les­son plans, even though they don’t part­ner with them any­more)
– Men­tor­ing — main way they train train­ers now
– File shar­ing — share hand­outs, les­son plans, etc. this way
– Feedback

The Num­bers for 2006/2007
– 3752 classes taught
– 450 atten­dees for non-english classes were taught in 50 classes
– >45 is the aver­age age of atten­dees
– had a 100-year old Chi­nese woman attend a class!

hur­dles
– facil­i­ties — ren­o­va­tions, adding meet­ing rooms
– tech­nol­ogy — try­ing to upgrade, adding wire­less, try­ing to use lap­tops, but that means issues such as smaller screens, touch­pads, etc.; IT locks down all of the com­put­ers, which is another prob­lem
– patrons — skillset is very, very low; requires a lot of patience; hand-eye coör­di­na­tion issues
– time & money — go for a lot of grants

over­all, though, peo­ple are very, very grate­ful for these services

Carol — Make the Con­nec­tion: Tech­nol­ogy Train­ing for the Older Generation

what she’s learned in 6 years of cre­at­ing train­ing for this group
– phys­i­cal effects of aging (cataracts and declined vision, arthri­tis, neural noise, increased sen­si­tiv­ity to cold, decreas­ing hear­ing, etc.)
– cog­ni­tive effects (increased dis­tractabil­ity, neural noise, etc.)

solu­tions include adap­tive tech­nol­ogy (move the screen closer, get glasses for com­put­ers, use track mice)
– they set res­o­lu­tion of screens to 400x800 res­o­lu­tion
– adap­tive train­ing techniques

North County Regional Library’s approach — mou­s­ing tuto­r­ial
begin­ning com­puter classes (Get­ting Started Series)

mou­s­ing tuto­r­ial assumes noth­ing and is pro­gres­sive
– includes instruc­tion on com­mon expe­ri­ence with a com­puter
– includes instruc­tion on phys­i­cal prob­lems using a mouse
– and it’s *fun*

Get­ting Started Classes
– went from 4 to 5
– designed to get older adults com­fort­able on the com­puter
– own­ing a com­puter is not required
– web-based

Class 1 — mou­s­ing
Class 2 — the browser
Class 3 — web forms
Class 4 — sign them up for web-based email, send an email
Class 5 — how to read email, more about email

classes are small trainer inten­sive, don’t last more than an hour max because their eyes glaze over after that
offered in the morn­ing, no longer than 3 days apart (after 48 hours, they’ll lose the infor­ma­tion if they don’t use/build on it)

classes teach only what they need to know with step-by-step instruc­tions
make sure steps and pages are num­bered
hand­outs should use a large, easy-to-read font
train­ers speak slowly, with clear enun­ci­a­tion, and use unam­bigu­ous terms
stu­dents are encour­aged and val­i­dated fre­quently to boost their self-confidence

prospec­tive stu­dents are inter­viewed by the train­ers to be sure they belong in the classes; makes sure every­one is at the same level, too
if they are moti­vated, they can learn it

out­comes
– <5% drop out
– <3% retake the course
– <99% have positive responses/comments
many go on to take reg­u­lar classes at the library

there will always be some that fall through the cracks no mat­ter what you do

can see the mou­s­ing around tuto­r­ial in eng­lish at http://pbclibrary.org/mousing/

all class mate­ri­als are at http://esnips.com/users/ncrlab in word format

how does it feel to be these peo­ple — http://grouper.com/

ques­tion: as part of your decision-making process or pub­lic­ity efforts, is there an out­reach com­po­nent at all, not just on your sites and loca­tions? do you net­work with other groups to pub­li­cize these ser­vices?
answer: Alan — lan­guage librar­i­ans put up fly­ers in the eth­nic super­mar­kets, etc. but we strug­gle with this; have not yet done a ses­sion at a facil­ity that isn’t ours

- Eleni Gogas and Donna Fed­dern, Escon­dido Pub­lic Library

Eleni:

About Escon­dido PL
– medium-sized library with no pre­vi­ous intranet
– city main­tains sites and servers
– just used a net­work drive in the past
they have an awe­some trad­ing card for the library

Phase 1 — pre-wiki
– net­work drive issues
– infor­ma­tion on the drive was very old
– took 15 min­utes to search for some­thing on the drive
– city intranet was too for­mal
– wanted to improve inter­nal km; many employ­ees are approach­ing retirement

why a wiki?
– col­lab­o­ra­tion, infor­mal­ity, and trans­parency
– want staff to par­tic­i­pate and get out of the ver­ti­cal struc­ture
– eas­ier to use and find infor­ma­tion
– web man­ager is unable to main­tain two web­sites (bottleneck)

pick­ing a wiki
– WYSIWYG
– free to afford­able
– bet­ter search­ing
– web-based (wiki farm); needed a 3rd party to host it because they don’t have access to the servers
– pass­word pro­tected
– wanted indi­vid­ual staff pro­files, wanted staff to be part of the dis­course and have a face on the site
– easy to setup, use, and learn
– blog­ging

decided to go with JotSpot
– free + matched all cri­te­ria
– key­word search within doc­u­ments
– group direc­to­ries app
– RSS & email reminders

issues with JotSpot
– Google acqui­si­tion (no new users, future?)
– main­tain back­ups on net­work drive
– exist­ing JotSpot help group

other wiki-farm options
– list on wikipedia
– PB Wiki
— they used this for their online ref­er­ence rolodex
– wet­paint
— exam­ple of Nancy Pearl Book Lust wiki
— poten­tial issue that they show google ads, though
– wik­ispot
— they use it for their e-gove ref­er­ence por­tal
— a lit­tle more com­plex, no WYSIWYG editor

other intranet options:
“web con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems” — twiki, joomla
– but require direct access to your server and require programmers

Phase II — wiki setup
– orga­nized wiki: staff needs
– build frame­work
showed screen­shots
– “impor­tant stuff“
– depart­ments
– staff devel­op­ment
– com­mit­tees & boards
– “post it” page where staff can post fun stuff

was dif­fi­cult at first for non-techie staff, but once they were given instruc­tions and train­ing, they caught on and were able to do it

Phase III — train­ing (in process)
– showed off wiki at an all-staff meet­ing
– trained super­vi­sors first to help
– techno­pho­bia: fear of edit­ing web­sites; peo­ple think they can’t edit the pages because it’s per­ma­nent; teach them they can roll­back changes
– let them play — no policies/rules
– use wikis for other library-related work

put out a call on the wiki, with a sign-up sheet on the wiki, vol­un­teer to sign up to write an arti­cle about an author (“author spotlight”)

Phase IV — imple­men­ta­tion (never-ending, really)
– des­ig­nate go-to peo­ple for trou­bleshoot­ing
– develop guide­lines (not so much poli­cies); want it to remain infor­mal; don’t want peo­ple to think they’ll get in trou­ble for post­ing the wrong thing
– dep­tart­ment heads respon­si­ble for their infor­ma­tion
– keep train­ing staff, keep remind­ing them about it in email
– on-going process, think of it in terms of the long term

issues and trou­bleshoot­ing
– bugs: you get what you paid for (free)
– make sure you have back­ups just in case
– fear of change from some staff; just keep encour­ag­ing them
– staff interest/participation
— now set­ting up a com­mit­tee and del­e­gat­ing tasks
– time: more than a year (approx­i­mately)
— have to invest time in set­ting it up, even though it’s easy to use

cool tools
– Good­wid­gets: flash photo wid­gets
– FD’s Flickr Toys slideshow & other photo edit­ing tools
– Wid­get­box: weather, games, news, cal­cul­taros, and way more
– Jing: screenshots/casts from any­thing on yoru desk­top
– stats counter: siteme­ter, etc.

Donna:

some issues they are fac­ing right now
– build­ing ren­o­va­tion
– mov­ing to a “mar­ket­place” model for the library
– chang­ing job descrip­tion
— needed a place to com­mu­ni­cate with staff about all of these things — another rea­son for the wiki
– using the wiki for train­ing, includ­ing RA train­ing
– cre­ated a tuto­r­ial for their online cal­en­dar
— room reserve tuto­ri­als, etc.

really like the blog­ging aspects for brain­storm­ing and shar­ing arti­cles, ideas, etc.
asyn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tion helps between meet­ings
hasn’t done train­ing yet for para­pro­fes­sional staff, but using a new blog to com­mu­ni­cate with media staff
have a secu­rity alerts blog where they post pic­tures from the sur­veil­lance cameras

why the wiki works for them
– eleni does ref­er­ence, cat­a­loging, and web devel­op­ment, so she can’t be the only per­son respon­si­ble to update the site, so it’s great that every­one can update it now
– staff are excited to post meet­ing min­utes, etc.
– sim­plic­ity works, although they do want to make it a lit­tle flashier
– staff loves search capabilities

for the future, they want to be even more cre­ative about how they use it
don’t like the city’s intranet because they have to wait for the city’s edi­tor to update it
they live in San Diego County and lost 75 homes in the area; many staff were evac­u­ated, were stay­ing with friends, pets were scat­tered; were closed for 3 days
– any­one with inter­net access could have posted staff updates dur­ing the fires
– com­mu­ni­cate with work fam­ily, but hadn’t inte­grated enough quite yet

want to make the site more brows­able, too

ques­tion: another library in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion at a city that doesn’t want infor­ma­tion on 3rd-party servers
answer: we’re call­ing this our “wiki” and not our “intranet” so they don’t even know

ques­tion: i know free is good, but are there prod­ucts you know of that you would have paid for that are really good
answer: if you have server space, joomla is really good; same with twiki; social­text; may still need pro­gram­mers, though

ques­tion: can you tell us more about the staff pro­files and if they have suc­ceeded?
answer: cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ment is about to start tak­ing pic­tures of all of their staff and updat­ing everybody’s infor­ma­tion; they have 87 staff mem­bers so they don’t know some folks very well or don’t know what all the pages look like

ques­tion: how much time per week does it take in admin­is­tra­tive work:
answer: eleni works on the wiki an hour a day, mostly see­ing what peo­ple are post­ing; does this maybe 3–4 times a week; train­ing takes the longest, espe­cially because they have two branches

ques­tion: do you have plans to include your friends, foun­da­tion, etc.?
answer: already included the com­mit­tees and boards (min­utes right now, plan­ning to add pro­files), but do plan to expand to those things, yes

ques­tion: how do you man­age secu­rity on site?
answer: not every­one is log­ging on right now, but cer­tain staff mem­bers have the abil­ity to restrict pages; encour­ag­ing them to keep their con­tent open, though, for trans­parency; when man­age­ment team meets, they have some staff issues they don’t want every­one to see so use the “share” but­ton where you can choose who can see the page (by indi­vid­ual or group)

ques­tion: you showed a pic­ture of a prob­lem patron — is that a poten­tial lia­bil­ity?
answer: dis­cussing this inter­nally via email right now; only do this for peo­ple who have com­mit­ted a crime in a library, the kind of per­son they need to call the police for if they come in; don’t keep many pho­tos, based on inci­dent reports

ques­tion: same ques­tion about the pic­tures of chil­dren
answer: they do get per­mis­sion to post these, although they’re more lax about the teens; Flickr pic­tures of chil­dren are set to pri­vate on Flickr; eleni and donna are the gate­keep­ers and require per­mis­sion slips

pre­sen­ta­tion will be avail­able at http://www.library.escondido.org/wiki.ppt

- Sarah Houghton-Jan and Aaron Schmidt

Name 3 places your library should be on the web besides your library’s web­site
From audi­ence:
1. Sec­ond Life
2. MySpace
3. Flickr

“online in-reach”

sum­mary: make your web­site two-way where peo­ple can have a voice on it
if they can’t con­tribute to it, there’s noth­ing there for them
online, everyone’s patrons are your patrons
– talk this over with your gov­ern­ing agency
– loosen up!
– mimic online what we do in the real world, where you help other libraries’ patrons

free is good
much of this is free, which helps

search engine find­abil­ity
– search for vari­a­tions of your library’s name
– ensure your site is accu­rately at the top
– minor or metasearch engines
– buy AdWords from Google ($)
– search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) ($)

look at your site sta­tis­tics to see what other search engines folks are using to reach your site

library direc­tory list­ings
– Lib­Dex
– Map­Muse
– Libraries411
oth­ers
make sure you’re found in these

blog search engines
– Feed Sub­mit­ter sub­mits your blog’s feed to 15 sites at once
– Robin Good’s list of where to sub­mit your blog and feed
– RSS Spec­i­fi­ca­tions list of where to sub­mit your feed

sweet wikipedia good­ness
– list your library on the appro­pri­ate town or county entries
note if your library has won any awards, etc.

wikimapia
– add loca­tions for your libraries and other com­mu­nity fea­tures of interest

com­mu­nity web­site pres­ence
– americantowns.com
– event­ful
etc.

blogs and forums
– local blogs
– tech­nol­ogy boards
– con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion boards
– forums and groups with local flair (google, yahoo)

find local blogs
– search the tags for your zip code on Flickr
– blogdigger.com

inter­act with local blogs
– no mar­ket­ing speak
– don’t intrude, but be avail­able
– find appro­pri­ate blogs
– don’t be heavy-handed
– enter­ing into an online com­mu­nity can be hard work
– have authen­tic voice, information

showed an exam­ple of Sarah com­ment­ing on a local professor’s blog as a model

pres­ence where it’s war­ranted
– ensure your library has a pres­ence on local web­sites (schools, uni­ver­si­ties, etc.)
– are you linked anywhere?

in google, link:YourLibraryURLhere to find who’s link­ing to you

social review web­sites
what are your cus­tomers say­ing when you’re not around?
– yelp
– judy’s book
– city­search
– insid­er­pages
– local2me

viral mar­ket­ing because you can mar­ket your services

social net­work­ing sites
– cre­ate a pro­file for your library
– major options: myspace, face­book, flickr, ning
– find great exam­ples on the lib­suc­cess list

a lot of peo­ple are mov­ing off myspace onto face­book
if you are still in the mid­dle of a 2-year project to start a site on myspace, you need to move faster
there’s so much you can do to face­book to reach out to people

give them some­thing new often to keep them back
you must have follow-through
don’t use your library’s build­ing as your avatar

Con­tra Costa Library had 2 para­pro­fes­sional staff work on the myspace page
it’s impor­tant to real­ize as librar­i­ans that we don’t have to *do* all of this, that we can hand some of these things off to peo­ple who are experts at this or have an inter­est in it
tap the local tal­ent and don’t limit to MLS hold­ers
helps dis­trib­ute the work­load in a prac­ti­cal sense

Hen­nepin County Library’s Book­Space
inter­ac­tive, aes­thet­i­cally beautiful

showed a Face­book Flyer exam­ple from Tutt Library

showed Ask MetaFil­ter site and Slam the Boards (which is now repeat­ing the 10th of every month)

duh, we’re experts, too
– allexperts.com
– ziki
– illu­mio
– qunu
– yedda
– FAQQLY
– Otavo
– yahoo answers
list your staff as experts in var­i­ous free expert tools

wifi is king
if you offer wire­less in your build­ing, make sure you are listed in wifi direc­to­ries
– wififreespot
– wifi­hotspotlist
– wifi411,
– wifinder
– jiwire
– wi-fi zone
name your net­work some­thing fun that adver­tises your library, not just “default”

push the info out
via email and rss
– invest in newslet­ter soft­ware (maybe $)
– get email addresses from ILS
– send peri­od­i­cally (don’t spam)
– vari­ety of fea­tures
push out info as a per­son, not an institution

blog geo-search engines
list your library’s blog on geo­graphic blog search engines
– frappr
– feedmap
– blog­wise
– gFeedMap

where are peo­ple look­ing for phone num­bers?
are you in those places yet? list your con­tact info in online directories

- askc­ity
– yahoo! local
– google maps
clinton-macomb pub­lic library as exam­ple with a great review in google local

sec­ond life
– Info Island
prob­lem is band­width and hard­ware issues
if you have a super active com­mu­nity in sec­ond life, put energy into that; if you have a super active com­mu­nity of blog­gers, put energy into that
will prob­a­bly get more bang for your buck putting your energy into blog­ging right now

URLs
OPAC URLs suck
use wccls.org instead of wccls.lib.or.us, but even bet­ter is booksandmovies.org

instant mes­sag­ing
– a pri­mary forum of com­mu­ni­ca­tion
– free, easy

text mes­sag­ing
– cell­phones and SMS con­tinue to grow
– Orange County Library Sys­tem exam­ple; only pub­lic library doing this?

make A/V con­tent find­able
– youtube
– blip.tv
– blinkx
– singing­fish
– yahoo pod­casts
– podcast.net
– pod­cast alley
– dig­i­tal pod­cast
– pod­scope
record and put up a few sto­ry­times as a way to get your feet wet
tran­scribe audio con­tent with podzinger

find men­tions of your library
all over the web, not just the social review sites
– google/yahoo news
– ice rocket
– tech­no­rati
– feed­ster
– blog­lines
– youtube
– flickr
sarah found lots of pic­tures of peo­ple skate­board­ing down the rails at the library :-p

chit­ter on twit­ter
– is it worth it?
– be clear about what you’re send­ing
– works best when send­ing out quick info
– guide to twit­ter in libraries by Ellyssa Kroski

are your patrons using these tools?
we think so
but even if they’re not, we can model this behav­ior and lead the way

ques­tion: how did they cre­ate the face­book flyer?
answer: tool on face­book site where you upload an image and text