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