Jamie Coniglio, George Mason University

- com­put­ers aren’t tech­nol­ogy
– inter­net is bet­ter than tv
– doing is more impor­tant than know­ing
– learn­ing more closely resem­bles nin­tendo than logic
– mul­ti­task­ing is a way of life
– typ­ing is pre­ferred to hand­writ­ing
– stay­ing con­nected is essen­tial
– zero tol­er­ance for delays
– consumer/creator are blurring

quick overview of social net­work­ing and dif­fer­ent types of sites

at George Mason Uni­ver­sity, they’re play­ing with:
– wiki for inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion
(showed Chad Boeninger’s busi­ness wiki as an exam­ple of a pub­lic wiki)
– Meebo wid­get chat box
– blogs, although they have fewer now than before because they were using them to route around the fact they didn’t have a CMS
– mov­ing to a research por­tal that blends Word­Press and the Inter­net Scout Toolkit
– have fooled around with MySpace, and they’ll respond, but not much going on for them there
– same thing with Face­book
– seri­ously look­ing at LibGuides; play­ing with it right now
– have dis­cov­ered Zoho and are try­ing Zoho Show as a way to share mate­ri­als among staff
– del.icio.us book­mark sets
– showed the UThink blog­ging project at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota
– vir­tual real­ity
– showed the browser Flock

mar­ket­ing & social net­works
– keep your con­tent fresh
– pro­vide reli­able con­tent
– know your mar­ket
– have good content

from an orga­ni­za­tional point of view, where do we put the per­son­nel for this

chal­lenges
– declin­ing visits/gate counts (at least in acad­e­mia)
– fewer ref­er­ence desk trans­ac­tions
– fewer cir­cu­la­tions of print mate­ri­als
– com­peti­tors in the infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment
– disintermediation

- being where our users
– being use­ful where our users are
– real­iz­ing we aren’t in con­trol (chaotic ver­sus struc­tured)
– silo-ing or per­son­al­iza­tion
– who’s on desk
– face time ver­sus online
– pri­vacy? her staff uses nom de plumes on Face­book to pro­tect their email addresses and iden­ti­ties
– keep­ing up/“losing” skills
– getting/keeping good para­pros
– rid­ing the tsunami
– orga­ni­za­tional structure/agility
free the bound peri­od­i­cals? and more?
– dis­com­fort (cer­tainty ver­sus uncertainty)

stu­dents aren’t using their GMU email addresses because they already have other per­sonal ones

responses
– stay aware of “über” envi­ron­ment to kee up
– pilot/try it out (if some­one wants to try it, she says sure)
– stu­dent input/feedback/training us
– keep/move on/ can’t be wed­ded to “one way“
– avoid search­ing for a magic bul­let; can’t empha­size flex­i­bil­ity enough
– depart­men­tal facil­ity; take advan­tage of your staff’s exper­tise
– stream­line aspects of “stan­dard” job ele­ments
– read spe­cial library “tac­tics“
— cre­ate zones of exper­i­men­ta­tion
— build­ing a “knowl­edge prac­tice;” start with the ones who will work with you
— closer align­ment with cur­ric­u­lar changes, emerg­ing and redesign aca­d­e­mic pro­grams
— move­ment from “sup­port ser­vice” toward col­lab­o­ra­tion and part­ner­ships
– value risk-taking
– reori­en­ta­tion toward user-centered ser­vices; noted Uni­ver­sity of Rochester’s anthro­po­log­i­cal report pub­lished through ACRL

ser­vice trans­for­ma­tion to
– vis­i­ble
– trainer/learner
– col­lab­o­ra­tive
– infor­mal
– visual

Karen Cal­houn

meta­data man­age­ment bw (before the web) and aw (after htet web)
bw
– or find­ing library mate­ri­als
– cat­a­log records (well-understood)
– shared coöper­a­tive cat­a­loging systems

aw
– for find­ing all kinds of things
– many types of records and sources
– loosely-coupled meta­data man­age­ment
– mul­ti­ple batch cre­ation and extract

meta­data is now really cool stuff

rec­om­mends O’Reilly’s arti­cle “What is Web 2.0?” and David Weinberger’s book Every­thing Is Mis­cel­la­neous
“the third order of order” — make the biggest pile you can
“include and post­pone” — can be orga­nized over time, some of them will be grass­roots (like Library­Thing), some will be offi­cial (tax­onomies, etc.)
– need them both, but have to pay atten­tion to the less for­mal ones

peo­ple are using meta­data to inter­act and con­tribute, even though they may not know what it is

what would meta­data 2.0 be like?
– not your father’s meta­data
– remix­ing, reuse, mashups
– wth the nec­es­sary rights
– meta­data syn­di­ca­tion
– enabling a rich user expe­ri­ence
– global, group, and local meta­data man­age­ment
– long term vision
– things you can do right now at your library

Ama­zon relent­lessly enhanced meta­data and rede­fined it for the world of books

what is a “full record?“
showed the same record from Libraries Aus­tralia, World­Cat, and Ama­zon to show the dif­fer­ences between a “full record” for each
from a user per­spec­tive, which one is the “full record?” ama­zon
– the horse has left the barn

using meta­data from mul­ti­ple sources
all of this remix­ing has gen­er­ated a high inter­est in copy­right
Cre­ative Com­mons licens­ing has proven to pro­vide an alter­na­tive to full con­trol — it’s a bridge between a world that con­trols every use (“all rights reserved”) and anar­chy where con­tent providers are exposed to exploita­tion
CC lets you pro­tect your work while also allow­ing your con­tent to be remixed

“intel­lec­tual prop­erty man­age­ment” is one of the burn­ing issues of Web 2.0

be where their eyes are; syn­di­cate your meta­data out­wards
OCLC calls this get­ting libraries to “web scale” — get­ting col­lec­tions to show up in as many places as pos­si­ble through this kind of syndication

showed World­Cat Face­book wid­get
– showed how you can share a WC list with peo­ple in FB
makes library col­lec­tions more vis­i­ble and con­nects every­day users the abil­ity to share books in new and excit­ing ways

over­whelm­ingly, users start with an inter­net search engine, not library resources
this doesn’t mean peo­ple are no longer using libraries or library resources, but it does mean they no longer begin with the library web­site
so we have to take our col­lec­tions where the users are

cat­a­log used to be our sun in the galaxy, but now it’s just a planet in the user’s galaxy
the story of the cat­a­log is not over

one library work­ing by itself is not going to make this hap­pen, is not going to get to “web scale“
can’t com­mand a huge amount of atten­tion for just one library
she believes that to keep libraries strong and vibrant in their com­mu­ni­ties, we need to work together to com­mand a much larger pres­ence on the web for library collections

talked about Open World­Cat Part­ner Pro­gram
showed an exam­ple of dri­ving traf­fic from the web to a library-owned title
chose a Ger­man title (since the inter­net and books aren’t just for Eng­lish readers)

we can be con­nected: a new vision for meta­data man­age­ment
data can flow local <–> group <–> global

worldcat.org sta­tis­tics
– num­ber of libraries vis­i­ble through WC and part­ner sites = more than 10,000
(ed. — see my Flickrstream for the rest of this slide)

every­where, the library
anchors for neigh­bor­hoods and com­mu­ni­ties, just as they always have been
wel­com­ing space in the com­mu­nity + great vis­i­bil­ity of the col­lec­tion on the web so that no mat­ter where you start, you can end up at your library

long-term vision
no less than a new age in which an indi­vid­ual library cat­a­log is one node on the web that is attached to many other nodes and the user can tra­verse those nodes eas­ily and con­ve­niently to their library’s col­lec­tions
can retain your inde­pen­dence but be loosely con­nected in Web 2.0-fashion, the same way so many other things are today

what can you do right now?
– take libraries to a wider audi­ence, eg sur­face your col­lec­tions in as many places as you can on the web
– encour­age a Web 2.0 “cul­ture of par­tic­i­pa­tion” in your own com­mu­ni­ties; sup­port dig­i­tal cit­i­zen­ship
– part­ner with muse­ums, his­tor­i­cal soci­eties, cul­tural orga­ni­za­tions, eg to add new online content

push­ing our data out, pulling users in: libraries and course man­age­ment systems

in 2004, 40% of classes used course man­age­ment sys­tems; more now
good: embed a library pres­ence in course sites
bet­ter: cus­tomize RSS feeds to course sites, links to course readings

Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity has done some great work inte­grat­ing conent into LMS courses using cus­tomized RSS feeds

pub­lic libraries in Canada cre­ated http://mycommunityinfo.ca/
work­ing with the com­mu­nity to index locally-relevant sites
has a “life events” sec­tion (retire­ment, what to do if you lose your pet, going off to col­lege, etc.)

pub­lic libraries in the UK cre­ated The People’s Net­work
was funded by the lot­tery
part­ner­ing with indi­vid­u­als and com­mu­nity groups to cre­ate content

ques­tion: if we spoon­feed the con­tent into the LMS, does that give stu­dents less incen­tive to learn how to do it them­selves
answer: if 2% are start­ing with the library web­site, 98% of them aren’t see­ing this stuff any­way; doing this can drive users back to using your resources and services

ques­tion: what should cat­a­logers be doing dif­fer­ently in terms of their work
answer: they should be embrac­ing many sources of data, reuse it, get it done as quickly and as eas­ily as you can; make sure your cat­a­log is cur­rent — never have a back­log; revamp your skills and this kind of meta­data man­age­ment; learn how to inter­act with your user com­mu­nity; learn how to han­dle spe­cial collections

ques­tion: is there a way for me at my pub­lic library to find out how many links are com­ing back to my cat­a­log from World­Cat?
answer: yes!

Kate Shee­han

the OPAC sucks

showed Library­Thing
Kate stalked Tim Spauld­ing in order to be the first beta tester of Library­Thing for Libraries
LfL takes all of the warm, fuzzy, reader-generated infor­ma­tion about books and puts it into your cat­a­log
showed a record with MARC info above and LfL info below on the screen
showed tag cloud

you end up click­ing around from book to book in Library­Thing think­ing “I want to read this, this, this, this, this“
when do peo­ple ever just hang out in your cat­a­log?
LfL is great for reader’s advisory

showed the code side of it — it’s just 3 lines!
mon­keys could do this — it’s really that easy :-p
it’s like Syn­det­ics info — it’s just out­side content

using Inno­v­a­tive for their cat­a­log
imple­mented LfL in April 2007

cost:
.003-.006 cents per circ of books (not count­ing A/V mate­ri­als)
frac­tions of a penny per circ
they’re really nice peo­ple and they’ll work with you; no hard sell
why can’t we have this expe­ri­ence all the time??
*and* they under­stand the con­straints libraries are under (POs, etc.)
floor entry is $1000

staff have loved it
Kate loves how easy LfL is for folks to use with­out hav­ing to under­stand how to log in to a site
thinks patrons like it, although they don’t give a lot of feed­back about it
patrons like it when staff shows it to them

they just added stats
the ser­vice includes children’s books, but it’s stronger in YA

she had a big social jus­tice moment when they did this — “we can do this — it doesn’t have to be just the big libraries“
it’s not extra work, and it’s very easy to add
the OPAC still kinda sucks, but it’s bet­ter than it was
Dan­bury just isn’t going to be able to do a SOPAC, it doesn’t have the resources, so this is great for them

LfL has a full-time pro­gram­mer and a cus­tomer ser­vice rep
might be work­ing on patron reviews and rat­ings back into LfL

Ear­lier this month I had the incred­i­ble good for­tune to visit DOK in Delft, Hol­land. Nor­mally I would call it the Delft Pub­lic Library, but it just goes by the name “DOK” and the sign on the door says it’s a “library con­cept cen­ter.” The staff did this on pur­pose to get away from the tra­di­tional stereo­types of the pub­lic library, because the insti­tu­tion they’ve cre­ated is about as far away as you can get from the con­no­ta­tion of a 1950s build­ing, filled with quiet peo­ple, all of them sit­ting alone, in a rel­a­tively dreary build­ing, being shushed by an old lady with a bun.

Instead, it is eas­ily the most col­or­ful and aesthetically-pleasing library I have ever seen. Granted, I’ve seen a very small per­cent­age of the world’s libraries, but the use of a diverse palette of bright and unusual col­ors was a very stark con­trast to every other library I have seen in per­son or in pictures.

Even more impres­sive (and truly strik­ing) is the amount of rad­i­cal trust the staff has placed in its patrons. Some of the stark con­trast with Amer­i­can libraries is due in part to the liti­gious nature of our soci­ety. Every­where I went in Delft and in DOK, I found exam­ples of things we could never do in the U.S. out of fear of being sued out of exis­tence. In some cases, it’s as sim­ple as hav­ing some of the shelves for chil­drens books and dis­play cases on wheels so that they can be moved around as needed to cre­ate pro­gram or play space. The kids can even stand on the book­shelves (as can adults). There’s a room that’s tucked away on the side that truly is built for chil­dren, with low benches for sit­ting and light­ing under­neath them for lit­tle ones who want to read or play on the floor. In another case, it’s the open lis­ten­ing sta­tion pods. When I was there, I could hear music drift­ing through the build­ing from one of them. Some kids would put on an album and let it run while they were else­where on the floor talk­ing or play­ing videogames. It wasn’t over­whelm­ing, though, and there were other places where I couldn’t hear it at all and could sit in silence if I wanted to.

The small design touches every­where are stun­ning, but that’s not sur­pris­ing giv­ing the Dutch aes­thetic. DOK eas­ily has the coolest, most com­fort­able chairs of any library. As I walked around, I kept sit­ting in them just because I could and wanted to. Some of them are even prac­ti­cal. Recently, I was in a pub­lic library in the U.S. where I had trou­ble find­ing a com­fort­able place to sit. My only choice as an adult was the stan­dard box cush­ion chair with wood arms. Com­pared to DOK, fur­ni­ture used in Amer­i­can libraries is at best cor­po­rate and at worst unwel­com­ing. They also use nat­ural lan­guage names for sec­tions of the col­lec­tion (psy­chol­ogy, com­put­ers and inter­net, etc.), not Dewey num­bers, and the graph­ics for the ban­ners are col­or­ful and eye-catching. They are clearly done by a pro­fes­sional, and they don’t all look the same. Also note the lack of steel shelves that make the library look like a ware­house. Instead, they used flex­i­ble shelv­ing made from recy­clable mate­ri­als (also done for some gor­geous tables and desks).

You walk into DOK and you imme­di­ately feel wel­come into a place you know you can spend hours at if you want to. DOK is what I’ve always wanted libraries to be in terms of the “expe­ri­ence” that hap­pens around books, infor­ma­tion, con­tent, media, and peo­ple. You can’t help but smile when you’re inside, and you just feel hap­pier in gen­eral. A cou­ple of years ago, I heard a speaker at a Min­nesota Library Asso­ci­a­tion con­fer­ence say that the clas­sic mis­take libraries make is that we focus too much on how we want peo­ple to feel about the library when they walk in. His the­ory was that we need to focus on how peo­ple feel about them­selves when they walk in, and DOK illus­trates that the­ory in prac­tice. Each time I entered the build­ing, the bright, nat­ural light from the glass ceil­ing had an effect on me. If I feel bet­ter about myself there, I will feel bet­ter about the library and enjoy my expe­ri­ence more.

DOK’s Direc­tor, Eppo, told us that “libraries are (for the most part) all about not hav­ing fun.” At DOK, they delib­er­ately turned this stereo­type on its head. Instead, their the­ory is that “life is all about hav­ing more fun than you can think of, and it starts at the library.” So they have videogames, lis­ten­ing sta­tions, com­fort­able chairs, a café, a cir­cu­lat­ing art col­lec­tion, pro­grams through­out the build­ing (not just hid­den away in a room in the base­ment), a piano, toys for kids to play with, a brightly-lit room devoted to graphic nov­els, an entire room (done in red) devoted to romance nov­els, and more.

When you walk in the build­ing for the first time, if your cell­phone is dis­cov­er­able via blue­tooth, you’ll receive a text mes­sage from DOK that says, “Wel­come to the most mod­ern library in the world,” a claim well-lived up to. There’s an RFID sys­tem for both library cards and books (with no pri­vacy prob­lems to date). There’s a sys­tem of LCD screens mounted around the build­ing for nav­i­ga­tion and infor­ma­tion which runs off Nin­tendo Wiis. The dis­play is a Flash appli­ca­tion of a Wii chan­nel and the top bar’s infor­ma­tion and color changes based on your loca­tion in the library. Staff can log in to a web­site to change what shows on the dis­play in order to update mes­sages for the pub­lic (about pro­grams, clos­ings, etc.). The afore-mentioned lis­ten­ing sta­tion pods are truly amaz­ing, and I now have to find a way to fund one for my home. Plans for later this year call for the instal­la­tion of a mul­ti­me­dia cre­ation area for podcasting/vidcasting/etc. and a “genius bar” type of setup for tech­nol­ogy help for the public.

None of which pre­cludes the pro­vi­sion of and help find­ing print mate­ri­als and ref­er­ence help. Staff are smartly sit­u­ated through­out the build­ing, and books are every­where. Mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers are eas­ily acces­si­ble, housed in a bril­liant design of cubes that makes the most cur­rent edi­tion vis­i­ble and recent issues avail­able with­out staff inter­ven­tion. While there are fly­ers and hand­outs on top of var­i­ous shelv­ing, the walls are not plas­tered with hand­made signs of rules and nav­i­ga­tion. Of course, there isn’t a sin­gle “no cell phones” sign to be found since they actu­ally com­mu­ni­cate with patrons via mobile devices.

I could go on all day about how DOK gets the big things and the details right, but you can see some of this for your­self in my Flickr set. It is every­thing the big, fancy Amer­i­can libraries want to be but just miss. If your library is plan­ning a new build­ing or a ren­o­va­tion, I highly rec­om­mend you talk to the peo­ple at DOK and if at all pos­si­ble, visit this amaz­ing library. You will be amazed at how much bet­ter than a book­store a library can be at mer­chan­dis­ing and aes­thet­ics, let alone the social experience.

Adden­dum: Even bet­ter pic­tures from the DOK folks them­selves here, and an arti­cle in Mar­ket­ing Library Ser­vices about inno­va­tion at DOK here.

When I talk with skep­tics of videogame ser­vices in libraries, I remind them that gam­ing isn’t a new con­cept for us. Most pub­lic (and even school) libraries have some sort of past asso­ci­a­tion with chess, as well as other board games, and most pub­lic (and even aca­d­e­mic) libraries today real­ize that some per­cent­age of their users are play­ing games on the library’s inter­net ter­mi­nals. So if chess is okay in the library, how are videogames dif­fer­ent, espe­cially the socially-oriented ones that libraries tend to offer?

This isn’t a new ques­tion, as I recently learned when Val alerted me to a very pub­lic dis­cus­sion about videogames in libraries that took place back in 1982–83, even spilling over onto the May 9, 1983, “CBS Morn­ing News” show.

It all started with a Novem­ber 1982 col­umn in School Library Jour­nal by Carol Emmens about four pub­lic libraries that were — even back then — cir­cu­lat­ing videogames. Some quotes from that piece:

“Pac­Man has invaded restau­rants, doc­tors’ offices, arcades, homes, and the world of tele­vi­sion as the star of a Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toon show. And now he has even invaded libraries! He is at the fore­front of a new library service–the cir­cu­la­tion of video games. A sur­vey turned up four libraries that cir­cu­late games.

‘As far as I’m con­cerned, the cir­cu­la­tion of video games is too suc­cess­ful,’ says Har­vey Barfield, audio­vi­sual librar­ian at Arling­ton Heights Memo­r­ial Library (Ill.).…

The library (serv­ing 65,000) owns 400 video­cas­settes and 50 Atari car­tridges, pur­chased with AV depart­ment funds. The com­bined monthly cir­cu­la­tion for video­cas­settes and games is approx­i­mately 2500.…

With $1000 seed money pro­vided by the Friends of the Library, [East Brunswick (N.J.) Pub­lic Library] bought 55 car­tridge locally, and on the first day of ser­vice every car­tridge was checked out. The Friends donated another $500, and now the car­tridge col­lec­tion totals 105.

[Assis­tant Direc­tor Sharon] Kar­mazin says, ‘All the car­tridges are out all the time and the cir­cu­la­tion is really incred­i­ble: 235 in July and 259 in August. Peo­ple hang around the library for hours wait­ing for returns.…

In Feb­ru­ary, the South River (N.J.) Pub­lic Library (serv­ing 14,000) started to cir­cu­late 20 car­tridges, which had been pur­chased with $200 donated by the Friends of the Library.… Cir­cu­la­tion is very high, and [Direc­tor Irene] Cack­owski, not­ing the many new users brought into the library, says, ‘What a ser­vice! I can’t say enough good about it.’…

The inno­va­tions at Clo­quet [(M.N.) Pub­lic Library] reflect the phi­los­o­phy of Head Librar­ian Mike Knievel, that libraries are not lob­by­ists for print. He says, ‘The role of the library is not to push books per se, but to acquire, orga­nize, and redis­trib­ute infor­ma­tion and recre­ational mate­ri­als,’ regard­less of format.”

Libraries exper­i­ment­ing with videogames and find­ing them to be a very pop­u­lar ser­vice turned out to be too much for Will Man­ley, though. He wrote a blis­ter­ing attack on the prac­tice in the March 1983 edi­tion of Wil­son Library Bul­letin. As early as 1983, he was sound­ing the alarm that videogames in the library would be the death of civ­i­liza­tion as we know it.

“Noth­ing, repeat noth­ing, in eleven years of being a librar­ian has upset me more than a lit­tle, one-page arti­cle in the School Library Jour­nal of Novem­ber 1982, in which the direc­tors of four pub­lic libraries boasted about the won­der­ful suc­cess they were hav­ing cir­cu­lat­ing video game cartridges.

Video games! In the pub­lic library! Chain saws, paint rollers, ham­sters, drill bits–these items for cir­cu­la­tion, when we’ve read about them over the past ten years in our pro­fes­sional lit­er­a­ture, con­cerned a num­ber of us as con­sti­tut­ing non­sense. But there is some­thing faintly tol­er­a­ble about non­sense. It’s part of the human con­di­tion. We come up against non­sense all the time–at school, the post office, the dentist’s office, and yes, occa­sion­ally the pub­lic library. But non­sense, once it is accepted for what it is, can even to a degree be funny. The key to non­sense is that it just happens–there is very lit­tle rhyme or rea­son or phi­los­o­phy to it.

But cir­cu­lat­ing video games at the pub­lic library is not non­sense. It is seri­ously wrong. It is an aban­don­ment of the mis­sion of the pub­lic library. It is sur­ren­der­ing to the com­mer­cial and the super­fi­cial. It is con­trary to every­thing we stand for.…

In effect, video games con­sti­tute the most seri­ous threat to that impor­tant rela­tion­ship between chil­dren and books since the advent of the television.…

The ‘it brings new peo­ple into the library’ argu­ment is issu­ing forth from the lips of more and more librar­i­ans, and that’s an indi­ca­tion that we’ve for­got­ten what a library is all about.…

And when those pop­u­lar ser­vices not only don’t com­ple­ment our focus on the printed word but actu­ally clash against it, then we begin to sub­vert that com­mit­ment [to the com­mon good].…

If we stop stand­ing for the impor­tance of books and infor­ma­tion, then we will lose everything.”

All of this must have become so con­tro­ver­sial that Man­ley and Knievel were invited to debate the topic of “print vs. non-print” on “CBS Morn­ing News” with Bill Kur­tis. In the same over-the-top tone of his writ­ten edi­to­r­ial, Man­ley pro­claimed on the show that, “Offer­ing videogames in libraries is like serv­ing mar­ti­nis at AA meetings.”

This atti­tude was overly-simplistic and short-sighted 25 years ago, and it still is today. I’m going to give him the ben­e­fit of the doubt that in this day and age, espe­cially with usage sta­tis­tics sup­port­ing the inclu­sion of non-text mate­ri­als and pro­gram­ming, that he has since changed his opin­ion that pub­lic libraries should focus only on text on paper.

But the whole thing does illus­trate how libraries aren’t just about books, how new con­tent for­mats are always viewed sus­pi­ciously as not being part of the library’s mis­sion, and how that view changes over time once the for­mat becomes more main­stream. Twenty-five years later, it’s impor­tant for librar­i­ans to real­ize that videogames are just one more for­mat in a long line of many, and that they are an exten­sion of the same types of ser­vices we have pro­vided for decades such as sto­ry­time, board games, pro­grams for adults, craft pro­grams for chil­dren, meet­ing space for knit­ting clubs, com­puter classes, and more. How could we pos­si­bly jus­tify such basic cur­rent ser­vices as inter­net access and ref­er­ence ser­vice if we cling to out­dated def­i­n­i­tions of the library as being focused solely on the writ­ten word?

Per­son­ally, I believe pub­lic libraries are the last safe spaces that serve (and wel­come) every­one in the com­mu­nity, regard­less of race, eco­nomic posi­tion, age, or any other fac­tor. Many libraries have worked hard to become the cen­ter of their com­mu­ni­ties, and the con­cepts of the library as a space for civic engage­ment and as a “third place” are valid and impor­tant roles. The library as a 19th cen­tury vault of writ­ten knowl­edge with no other pur­pose but to raise the moral con­science of the masses through “good” lit­er­a­ture is a long-gone propo­si­tion. Times change, and libraries need to change with them.

I’m not call­ing Man­ley out on his views from 25-years ago, so much as show­ing that we’re still hav­ing these same argu­ments today and to note that you could sub­sti­tute “fic­tion,” “chil­dren,” “music,” “com­put­ers,” “inter­net,” or “videos” in any of the above quotes to see where we’ve already been on this. The key is to remem­ber that gam­ing in libraries in any form is an “and” propo­si­tion, not an “or.” It can coex­ist peace­fully with the books, mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, and other ser­vices. It’s not the end of the world as we know it.

Check out the cool PicLens browser exten­sion for Fire­fox or Inter­net Explorer on Win­dows or Mac. It gives you a full screen expe­ri­ence of fly­ing through a pho­to­stream from a vari­ety of web­sites. Sim­ply install the exten­sion and a small “play” but­ton will appear over pic­tures on cer­tain web­sites (such as Flickr, Face­book, etc.). Click on the play but­ton and you’ll see a wall of the images that you can maneu­ver through. It’s very cool. Try it on the first photo of your Flickr con­tacts or on Rita Niland’s pic­tures from the UGame ULearn con­fer­ence, but be sure to use it when I post pic­tures of the amaz­ing DOK and Ams­ter­dam pub­lic libraries next week!

I found this cool lit­tle toy in CuriousLee’s Flickrstream, which is the type of unin­tended con­se­quence I’ve been talk­ing about with groups lately. I’m fas­ci­nated by how an image shar­ing site end up being used for book­mark­ing or knowl­edge exchange. I wish more library data lived out in the rest of the world so that we could see what kinds of unin­tended uses spring up around it.

3 days left to win a Wii!
Orig­i­nally uploaded by The Shifted Librar­ian

Just a reminder that you still have three days to make a dona­tion to LIShost and win a Nin­tendo Wii! More info here.