Going into ALA’s Mid­win­ter Meet­ing last month, I knew Twit­ter was going to play a much more promi­nent role than it had in the past. It’s been used heav­ily at other librar­ian con­fer­ences, but usu­ally in a more social way or as com­men­tary on con­tent dur­ing the event. How­ever, Mid­win­ter is a dif­fer­ent beast, as it’s pri­mar­ily a busi­ness meet­ing for the Asso­ci­a­tion, so I won­dered how much of that work would hap­pen on Twit­ter this time around.

Most of the peo­ple on ALA’s staff, like most peo­ple any­where, have never heard of Twit­ter, let alone used it, so I wanted to give them a heads up in case it came up in meet­ings or in con­ver­sa­tions. A cou­ple of years ago, the IT depart­ment at ALA imple­mented monthly update meet­ings open to all staff, and since we had one sched­uled right before Mid­win­ter, I took advan­tage of the oppor­tu­nity to high­light Twit­ter, what it is, and how a few units are using it.

And then we all headed to Denver.

And wow did Twit­ter play a big part. Ken­ley Neufeld sums it up pretty well, and even notes how fun the expe­ri­ence was. If you had asked me, I wouldn’t have pre­dicted that four coun­cilors would tweet from the floor dur­ing coun­cil ses­sions, thereby pro­vid­ing an effec­tive, real-time tran­script of what was hap­pen­ing. Even beyond that, though, I got to par­tic­i­pate in meet­ings I wasn’t phys­i­cally at (from within other meet­ings), as did peo­ple who weren’t even in Den­ver. And good things came from all of it (includ­ing a help­ful guide for what *not* to do).

So when we got back, I decided to do a pre­sen­ta­tion at the Feb­ru­ary ITTS Update meet­ing about Twit­ter on ALA. Not ALA on Twit­ter, but Twitter’s effect on the Asso­ci­a­tion and the story of Mid­win­ter that Twit­ter pro­duced. Luck­ily, many of the peo­ple who tweet about us have a sense of humor, so there were some good laughs in the screen­shots, espe­cially about our con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (Col­lage). So thank you to every­one who pub­licly tweeted about us in Jan­u­ary, espe­cially at Mid­win­ter, because you helped me illus­trate a moment in time when some­thing changed for ALA. I def­i­nitely think com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­fer­ences will never be the same for our orga­ni­za­tion, and I’m fas­ci­nated to see where this all leads.

The only prob­lem with doing these two talks for staff is that I’m so buried in work on launch­ing ALA Con­nect that I don’t have time to do any train­ing right now. Ear­lier this month, Tim­o­thy Vollmer, an ALA employee at our Wash­ing­ton Office tweeted, “in hor­ri­ble ironic moment, U.S. Con­gress is mov­ing faster than ALA.”

For the last month, that’s how I’ve felt at ALA. Units are mov­ing faster than I can, and sev­eral have started new Twit­ter accounts. On the one hand, huz­zah! On the other hand, they’re fly­ing a lit­tle blind (so please cut them a lit­tle slack while they get their Twit­ter sea legs).

Since I really don’t have time to do train­ing right now, I wanted to pull together a few resources to point my co-workers to until we can do some­thing more for­mal. I’m also includ­ing some expla­na­tions for how I track ALA on Twit­ter in case oth­ers want to try these strate­gies, too.

Since I think it could be use­ful to oth­ers, I’m post­ing the list here, rather than just send­ing the infor­ma­tion out in an email to staff. If you have addi­tional sug­ges­tions, please include them in the comments.

1. Make sure you read up on some of the best prac­tices for using Twit­ter. There are many out there, such as Twit­ter 101: 8 Tips to Get Started on Twit­ter and How to Suc­ceed at Twit­ter. At bare min­i­mum, make sure you add an avatar and fill out the bio sec­tion, includ­ing a link back to your web­site.
    
2. I use Twit­ter per­son­ally, and I use the ALAan­nual and ALAmw accounts for work. It’s not easy to track two accounts through­out the day. So here’s the rou­tine I’ve estab­lished to this point.
   1. First thing in the morn­ing, I search Twit­ter for ref­er­ences to ALA. If it’s some­thing I can respond to, I do. If it’s not some­thing in my area (IT), I pass along the information.
   2. I use Tweet­Deck to try to track my Twit­ter­stream through­out the day. It’s eas­ily the best tool I’ve found for two rea­sons. First, it lets me set up dif­fer­ent groups of peo­ple I’m fol­low­ing, so I’ve set up a group show­ing all the ALA Twit­ter accounts and another of friends I want to track more closely. Sec­ond, it lets me do a search within groups by fil­ter­ing for a term. So a cou­ple of times a day, I’ll fil­ter every­one I’m fol­low­ing for the term “ALA.” I can usu­ally get a heads up about any­thing major just by doing this. At the end of the day, I do another search of Twit­ter just to make sure I haven’t missed any­thing. ALA staff, if you want to try Tweet­Deck, I think ITTS will have to install it for you, so con­tact us to request an install. There’s also a help­ful video explain­ing How to Tweet­deck Like a Pro.
       
3. I have a NetVibes page set up to track ALA as a term across mul­ti­ple sites. For exam­ple, the Twit­ter search appears here, although I don’t find it as easy to scan as the list on the Twit­ter site or in Tweet­Deck. But I also have RSS feeds from news sites and Friend­Feed dis­play­ing on this one page, so it can be handy for a quick scan. ALA staff, if you want help set­ting up some­thing like this for your­self, please let me know.
    
4. If you have a blog or other use­ful, not over­whelm­ing RSS feed, use Twit­ter­Feed to auto­mat­i­cally have noti­fi­ca­tions of new items sent to Twit­ter.
    
5. If you’re not using Tweet­Deck to auto­mat­i­cally shorten URLs, you can use TinyURL or is.gd. A URL like http://www.ala.org/heading/subheading/anotherheading/anothersubheading/title/index.cfm should *never* appear in a tweet.
    

As I was get­ting ready to hit the “pub­lish” but­ton, I saw Phil Bradley’s post about CILIP and Twit­ter (or lack thereof). It made me real­ize how far ALA has come, and how lucky I am to work in an envi­ron­ment where I’m allowed to exper­i­ment in these spaces and help inte­grate them into the Asso­ci­a­tion. I live in a really spe­cial place right now, both pro­fes­sion­ally and per­son­ally, and I don’t take that for granted.

Tags: ala, alamw09, mpow, twitter

There are days when it’s really tough liv­ing on the front end of the bell curve, and clearly Dave Lankes had one of those last week. But instead of let­ting it get him down, it caused him to redou­ble his efforts and even write an inspi­ra­tional post for the rest of us. (Empha­sis below is mine.)

“We live in Shake­spear­ian Times”

“…I won’t get into the details of the meet­ing, but suf­fice to say I had a choice to make — be silent or speak.

You may imag­ine the choice would be easy for me, but it was not. I too face deci­sions between easy dis­con­tent and uncom­fort­able action. To stand up invites more work, or deri­sion, and in either case courts con­flict. It is just eas­ier some­times to let things pass.

I know I am not alone in hav­ing these choices to make. As I go around the coun­try I encounter too many librar­i­ans who see the vision, who embrace change, but have grown too tired and dis­cour­aged to hope again. They are qui­eted by the scars of past opti­mism. These are the con­ver­sa­tions that I have the hard­est time with. I want to ‘go all inspi­ra­tional’ and call them to action, but I too have those scars, and have plenty of times when I tried and failed. It is not a good feel­ing. I would like to avoid it too. So I never want to fault oth­ers for their decisions.…

It may sound sim­plis­tic, but for me it comes down to need­ing some encour­age­ment. We need to know that we are not alone. We are not. There is a whole pool of fel­low librar­i­ans that ‘get it.’ We also need to real­ize that those who get it aren’t just new librar­i­ans, but direc­tors, man­agers, and pol­icy mak­ers. We have a lot of good exam­ples to show the way as well. When I have those bad days, the first thing I have to do is decide to speak up. Then I have to do some­thing. Even if what­ever I decide to do is wrong, it is some­thing. Finally, I lis­ten to Shake­speare. Seriously.

For some peo­ple when they need to get a pick me up it is music, for oth­ers a movie, for still oth­ers it is ‘the story’ I’ve talked about before (that time that you as a librar­ian changed someone’s life for the bet­ter). But for me, Shake­speare … Henry V’s St. Crispen’s Day Speech. I have to thank George Need­ham for intro­duc­ing me to it.…

How do I stay opti­mistic? I real­ize first the issues I face are minis­cule to the good I can do. How do I get inspired to face intran­si­gence, or lazi­ness, or inep­ti­tude? I look right past them at the real goal, and those who really need me.

Block me, and I will go around you. Build a wall, and I will build a door. Lock the door and I will break a win­dow. And if I don’t have have a leader to inspire me, I will lead. If I don’t have a team that will sup­port me, I will recruit a team from beyond the orga­ni­za­tional bound­aries — every pol­icy has a loop­hole, every sys­tem has a hid­den reward.” [The Par­tic­i­pa­tory Librar­i­an­ship Starter Kit]

I think I’m going to print this out and post it above my desk, so thanks for writ­ing this, Dave. And along these same lines, I want to note one other thing about librar­i­ans. We don’t get the credit we deserve for lead­ing in the 2.0 world, but more impor­tantly, we don’t give our­selves enough credit. While I always think there’s more we can do, exper­i­ment with, and improve, it’s also impor­tant to take a step back and sur­vey just how much we’ve done in this sphere as a profession.

Librar­i­ans were one of the first pro­fes­sions blog­ging, and by a pretty wide mar­gin. In fact, I’ll even go out on a limb to say that behind the techies, I think we had the largest crit­i­cal mass first — ahead of the jour­nal­ists, mar­keters, lawyers, and other trades that have a large pres­ence in the blo­gos­phere. And in terms of try­ing out new tools and inte­grat­ing them into our ser­vices, I’d be hard-pressed to find more early adopters in a pro­fes­sion other than librar­i­an­ship in the areas of instant mes­sag­ing, wikis, Face­book, and Twit­ter. We swarm on a new tool and play with it faster than 90%+ of the folks out there, and we’re con­stantly try­ing new things.

Sure, there’s a wide range of skills and adop­tion among librar­i­ans and only a small per­cent­age are on the front of the bell curve, but the next time you hear some­one berate libraries for stay­ing stuck in the past, don’t let them make a gen­er­al­iza­tion. We all need to keep mov­ing for­ward, but there are a lot of good things hap­pen­ing in the pro­fes­sion, mak­ing it an excit­ing time to be a librar­ian. Make a wall into a door and keep try­ing. It’s worth it, and you can make a difference.

Tags: david lankes, encouragement, inspiration, librarians, libraries

I’ve been think­ing a lot more about online pri­vacy for the last cou­ple of years, so I was already pre­pared for the cur­rent con­tro­versy over Facebook’s change in its Terms of Ser­vice, and it wasn’t much of a shock to me. I’ve never really posted pic­tures there, imported my own blog posts, or posted links to any­thing that wasn’t already pub­lic some­where else, because their Terms of Ser­vice always said they owned it and could do what­ever they wanted with it. Even though they seem to be back­ing off and revert­ing to the pre­vi­ous TOS, I hope every­one real­izes that noth­ing has really changed because they can imple­ment the same thing in the future at the drop of a hat.

One of the biggest ques­tions that should come out of this is do you want Face­book (and other social net­works) to man­age your online iden­tity for you and your chil­dren? Just as you should be tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity to shred your credit card receipts, check­ing on your credit reports, etc. to man­age your “real world” iden­tity, you should also think through how you man­age your online iden­tity, because ignor­ing the prob­lem and just not hav­ing an online iden­tity can actu­ally back­fire on you. Does every­one have to blog? Heck no, but there are smaller steps you can take.

I first started tak­ing my online iden­tity more seri­ously after read­ing an arti­cle titled Say Any­thing in New York mag­a­zine three years ago. I still find it fas­ci­nat­ing, and I’ve come to appre­ci­ate it even more after hav­ing a cou­ple of pri­vacy inci­dents occur in my own life.

The first inci­dent caused me to back­track on pri­vacy and limit access to many of my accounts to just friends and fam­ily, tak­ing a more tra­di­tional approach to the issue. I felt like I needed to shut down open access to my life in order to pre­serve my iden­tity, so I also cut back on the num­ber of peo­ple I friended and became a lot more selec­tive. I became like the father in the New York arti­cle, won­der­ing why I would ever make those things public.

Dur­ing the sec­ond inci­dent, how­ever, it turned out to be very for­tu­nate for me that I already had a well-known iden­tity online. In that respect I’m espe­cially lucky I started early because I don’t have a very unique name, “Jenny Levine,” made worse by the fact that I now share that online name­space with an actress.

Now I com­pletely under­stand the view of the teenager in the arti­cle, that it’s bet­ter to con­trol your own iden­tity than to let some­one else cre­ate one for you. I still keep Face­book sep­a­rate and lim­ited to friends, and I still post most per­sonal pic­tures for friends and fam­ily only, but every­thing else I share is avail­able pub­licly because it helps main­tain my iden­tity online. It also means I don’t have to strug­gle as much with who can see what, and how much, and should I friend them back, and all of the other ques­tions that come with par­tic­i­pat­ing in social networks.

I think the issue of hav­ing some sort of pub­lic, online iden­tity will become even more impor­tant in the future as kids grow up with dig­i­tal dossiers that – in many cases — their par­ents have cre­ated for them since birth. In fact, I think we’re going to see a trend in which savvy, edu­cated par­ents give their chil­dren strange®, unique names so that they can eas­ily reg­is­ter a domain name for them. That way, even a minor pres­ence like a blog or lifestream will always come up as the first result when some­one searches for the kid, either to com­bat false infor­ma­tion or pro­vide a pos­i­tive image (eg, to a poten­tial employer).

As the child grows up, s/he can take over the online pres­ence and pop­u­late it him/herself, but at least it’s already estab­lished so that some­one else can’t fake one. Who knows how long we’ll use domain names, but I think this will be an issue for at least the next decade, what­ever form it takes, and I fully expect to see a rise in iden­tity bullying.

Iris Jas­tram has writ­ten a great post titled Facebook’s Dev­il­ish Con­tract, explain­ing her inter­nal debate over what to do about her pres­ence on social net­works. I par­tic­u­larly love her use of the term the “social time out chair,” which is where you put your­self if you don’t main­tain a pres­ence on these sites.

As she notes, it’s not really an option for many peo­ple to opt out of social net­works alto­gether. Bet­ter to post things to your own site and par­tic­i­pate at a level you’re com­fort­able with, because I can tell you from expe­ri­ence that it could actu­ally hurt your iden­tity and rep­u­ta­tion if your response to these issues is to just ignore them or take your ball and go home. Even if you quit Face­book, you have to be vig­i­lant else­where. On the inter­net, no one knows you’re a dog, but they also don’t know that you’re you, and at this stage of the game, any­one can be you.

Tags: children, facebook, identity theft, online identity, privacy, reputation

Library of the Future:Nerve Cen­ter of the Com­mu­nity — Thomas Frey, Senior Futur­ist at The DaVinci Insti­tute, pre­sented at the Topeka Shawnee County Pub­lic Library

we spend most of our time think­ing about the past
– we know about it and have expe­ri­enced it
but we’re going to spend the rest of our lives in the future
it’s like we’re walk­ing back­wards into the future

epipha­nies are one of the things that sep­a­rate humans from ani­mals
every great new busi­ness is an epiphany

Frey had “a full cat­e­gory 5 epiphany“
“the life of an idea junkie“
Frey described a time he and his wife were sit­ting in a side­walk café when he heard a song and used “Shazam” on his phone to find out the name of a song, which he then imme­di­ately down­loaded
real­ized that his phone has a cam­era, too
the future of retail — when you see some­one wear­ing a jacket you like, just take a pic­ture of it to pur­chase it (just point and click at it)
in the future, all of our body info will be scanned in so that clothes fit the first time
no longer restricted to just what’s in stores
instead of own­ing a store, own­ers could hire mod­els to walk up and down the street (not just cloth­ing, but small appli­ances, too)
any prod­uct, any­where, anytime

showed a slideshow of mod­ern libraries

what form of pay­ment will you put in a vend­ing machine in 2059?
Frey thinks the vend­ing machine of the future will be mobile and will come to you
will know what you want
might even fly

what music that we lis­ten to today, will peo­ple still be lis­ten­ing to 100 years from now in 2109?
more impor­tantly, how will we be lis­ten­ing to music 100 years from now?
will it just appear in our heads? will it still come from speak­ers?
the ulti­mate music player will have the abil­ity to assess our reac­tion to the music and will only serve up music tha we react pos­i­tively to

ulti­mate drink dis­penser will have the abil­ity to assess what kind of liq­uids our body needs and will only serve up a liq­uid that we react pos­i­tively to
knows exactly how much sugar or cream should go in your coffee

the idea of “per­fect water“
we all know pol­luted water is bad for us
if we take every­thing out of it, it’s less than opti­mal
some­where in between is per­fect water for each per­son in the world (6 bil­lion dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions)
some­where in this line of think­ing is the inter­face of the future

sys­tem think­ing
no famous Roman math­emti­cians — they weren’t famous because they used Roman Numer­als, which was a stu­pid num­ber sys­tem
every num­ber was an equa­tion, which pre­vented them from doing any higher math with numer­als
– no place­holder num­bers
–> what sys­tems are we employ­ing today that are the equiv­a­lent of Roman Num­ber­als?
– Dewey Dec­i­mal Sys­tem, income tax code, “quart of oil“
is there a bet­ter sys­tem we could be using? invari­ably there is

Rick Wake­man video, key­board player for the rock band Yes
he writes music with 64th and 128th notes
the piece he played in the video could never have been played on a tra­di­tional piano — needed a mod­ern keyboard

Frey took a class about how to use a slide rule because he was told he had to
end of the slide rule era, begin­ning of the cal­cu­la­tor era
he named the space between the bot­tom inter­sec­tion the “Max­i­mum Freud“
a time of lots of chaos but also of lots of oppor­tu­nity
what tech­nolo­gies are at Max­i­mum Freud any­more?
– fax machines
– checks
– key­boards
– com­puter mon­i­tors and hard­ware
– tra­di­tional tele­vi­sion
– sign lan­guage
– inva­sive surgery
– AM/FM radio
– drill & fill den­tistry
– the end of wires (tele­phone lines, cable TV lines, inter­net lines, and even power lines — within our lifetime)

the evo­lu­tion of books
in what year will the last printed book be pub­lished?
Guten­berg Press — by 1500, there were more than 5,000 books in print across Europe
through the Espresso Book Machine
some­thing like the Kin­dle may be as cheap as $5 in 5 years
at what point, is it too expen­sive for libraries to cir­cu­late print books?
when do ebook read­ers become so ubiq­ui­tous that it no longer makes sense to print ink on paper?
when does pub­lish­ing become down­load­ing titles
small pro­jec­tors built into devices
infor­ma­tion dis­plays built into things
what does a book look like in the future?

every forum now is akin to an online forum, with authors, experts and other read­ers avail­able to dis­cuss and answer ques­tions on almost every impor­tant book ever writ­ten
books are now conversations?

10 Global Trends
—————-
1. more peo­ple live in urban areas than rural areas (200,000 peo­ple a day migrate)
2. 840 mil­lion peo­ple crossed national bor­ders, more mobile soci­ety (as opposed to 50 mil­lion in 1950)
3. num­ber of new prod­uct launches (300 per day)
4. 550,000 new busi­nesses were launched every month in 2007
5. more than 50% of all women reported being sin­gle in 2005
– more than 50% increase in the num­ber of peo­ple liv­ing alone in the last 20 years
– counter trend of par­ents liv­ing with adult chil­dren — grew 67%
6. the num­ber of peo­ple work­ing through retire­ment has dou­bled
7. minori­ties will become the major­ity in 2042 (30% Lati­nos, 15% Blacks, 9% Asian)
– inter­ra­cial fam­i­lies, 1000% increase in the past 30 years
– will stop talk­ing about races in the future because they’ll be so unde­fined
– rises in the per­cent­age of pop­u­la­tions that are foreign-born
8. smaller fam­i­lies, big­ger houses (700 sq. ft. in 1900)
9. com­ing boom in data cen­ters (will con­sume 3% of global elec­tric­ity sup­ply by 2010; some­time before 2020 power con­sump­tion will dou­ble)
10. only 14% of all col­lege grad­u­ates live in the U.S.

how long will it be before peo­ple can get a Ph.D with­out being lit­er­ate?
the first time Frey lis­tened to an audio­book, he thought he was cheat­ing
read­ing is the process of trans­lat­ing the char­ac­ters (text) on the page
still do it with sound when lis­ten­ing to books
method doesn’t really mat­ter — it still counts
Socrates was not lit­er­ate — never wrote any­thing
wouldn’t know any­thing about him if Plato hadn’t writ­ten about him

is read­ing the ulti­mate infor­ma­tion expe­ri­ence?
are books a tech­nol­ogy equiv­a­lent to roman numerals?

future of edu­ca­tion
——————
did an 18-month study on this topic
organ­i­cally gen­er­ated con­tent (courses) going to a global dis­trib­uted sys­tem
an iTunes-like approach to edu­ca­tion
teach­ing requires experts
we can’t train experts fast enough as infor­ma­tion expands expo­nen­tially
teach­ers become a chokepoint

over­lay a trend line of courses over YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google, it’s flat ver­sus the amount of infor­ma­tion being gen­er­ated — course­ware vac­uum
MIT Open­Course­Ware (1,400 courses) try­ing to fill that gap
– 12 uni­ver­si­ties have joined the Open­Course­Ware Con­sotrium (1,800 courses total available)

what is the most impor­tant thing I should be learn­ing today?
kids today aren’t being taught what they want to learn
what’s the pri­mary inflec­tion point for change?
– spe­cially archi­tected rapid course­ware build­ing, which doesn’t exist yet

12 dimen­sions of the future course­ware archi­tec­ture
————————————————–
60-minute learn­ing units
modal­ity and lan­guage agnos­tic (not just computer-based, get credit for expe­ri­ence); courses from every­where but man­aged online
smart pro­filer & rec­om­men­da­tion engine (what per­son is most inter­ested in and what they should take next)
truth & accu­racy — a high per­cent­age of what’s being taught in class­room today is the­o­ret­i­cal; every aspect of soci­ety has its own ver­sion of the truth
– need a truth author­ity? won’t work
– need a checks & bal­ances sys­tem where any group could put their stamp of approval or dis­ap­proval on these courses
cer­ti­fi­ca­tion inputs — early adopters for this will be pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tions (what con­sti­tutes suf­fi­cient learn­ing); home school­ers will also adopt this
offi­cial record-keeping sys­tem
global dis­tri­b­u­tion system

avail­able on demand 24/7, any­time, any­where
less depen­dent on teach­ers and schools, more indi­vid­ual con­trol
gen­eral study courses will be priced at $1/course
many schools will use these courses to plan their cur­ric­ula
teach­ers will go free­lance to cre­ate their own courses
stu­dents who grad­u­ate from the equiv­a­lent of high school in the future will be 10 times smarter than stu­dents today
the idea of tak­ing K-12 edu­ca­tion in one year, which will give rise to celebrity teach­ers
we’ll know when we get the right sys­tem put in place because a mil­lion new courses will be cre­ated
libraries will become the work­ing lab­o­ra­to­ries for the cre­ation of inno­v­a­tive new courses
libraries are cen­tral to his vision

com­mod­ity level — Star­bucks
prod­uct level — a cup of cof­fee
expe­ri­ence level is what they con­cen­trate on, though

how do we cre­ate the ulti­mate infor­ma­tion expe­ri­ence in libraries?
peo­ple are using their own PageR­ank test­ing to fig­ure out how rel­e­vant the library is to them individually

library as place, as opposed to library as ser­vice
———————————————-
build­ing is a gath­er­ing place

8 reccs for libraries of the future
——————————–
to improve rel­e­vance in the minds of the community

1. cre­ate a search com­mand cen­ter in your library; make it easy to peo­ple find infor­ma­tion
– can look like a lot of dif­fer­ent things, but have to help them con­duct searches
– really only doing text search­ing right now, but need to pre­pare for other search attrib­utes beyond just audio and video (taste, smell, tex­ture, reflec­tiv­ity, etc.)
when every­one records what their glasses see, we’re spi­der­ing the phys­i­cal world

2. remote office space
– for every 100 peo­ple who get laid off, 7 will start a new busi­ness (not that they’ll suc­ceed), so will see a new era of entre­pre­neur­ship
– “empire of one“
– cloud com­put­ing trend = consumer-driven inno­va­tion, rise of the power col­lab­o­ra­tor, eco­nom­ics of IT are chang­ing, bar­ri­ers to entry are falling (con­nec­tiv­ity, reli­a­bil­ity, a qual­ity user expe­ri­ence, and secu­rity can now all be assumed)
– busi­ness colonies — group­ings of “project peo­ple” work­ing together as projects form, com­plete, and dis­ap­pear
—> at the heart of every busi­ness colony will be a library
– peo­ple who work from home suf­fer from either iso­la­tion or dis­trac­tions
—> they need another place to go (prover­bial “third place”)
if you were to design a library for these peo­ple, what would it look like? what fea­tures would it include?
remote office space? a telep­res­ence room?

3. pro­duc­tion stu­dios
“when the tools of pro­duc­tion are avail­able to every­one, every­one becomes a pro­ducer” — The Long Tail
tran­si­tion from con­sumers to pro­duc­ers
they want to take own­er­ship of what they cre­ate
– blog­ging sta­tions in the library, pod­cast stu­dios, one-way mir­ror glass so that oth­ers can watch the pro­duc­tion of con­tent
—> pas­sive learn­ing to active pro­duc­ing centers

4. band prac­tice stu­dios
there are 2.2 mil­lion bands on MySpace right now, and every­one needs a space to prac­tice
if you put in sound­proof rooms, they’ll get used non-stop, all the time

5. enter­tain­ment stu­dios
gam­ing now touches 75% of all US house­holds
Sec­ond Life and vir­tual world sta­tions (cre­at­ing dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tion vehi­cles)
mini-theaters, mini-planetariums that peo­ple can use to cre­ate con­tent and post it
art stu­dios to make a cul­tural hub
exer­cise stu­dios that com­bine learn­ing and recreation

6. expert series
so many peo­ple are uncom­fort­able with tech­nol­ogy, so once a month, could put some tech experts at the front of the room and let the audi­ence ask ques­tions; let the con­ver­sa­tion go where it may
social learn­ing
fig­ure out what’s of inter­est to the com­mu­nity while rais­ing the tech IQ of the community

7. time cap­sule room
archiv­ing the his­tory of the com­mu­nity
what did it sound like to drive down Main Street? what did it smell like?
cre­ate the room but let the pub­lic decide what it turns into
many local com­pa­nies will prob­a­bly want their orga­ni­za­tions archived there

8. poetry park
pub­lic plac­ing inscrip­tions on large rocks set out around a park

elec­tronic outposts/branches
—————————-
– mag­a­zines & peri­od­i­cals
– read­ing area
– search com­mand cen­ter
– stu­dios
– no books
– effi­cient oper­a­tion 1–2 peo­ple staffing it

extend­ing influ­ence
——————-
very few library haters out there
very lit­tle out­bound com­mu­ni­ca­tion — need to change that; weekly online newsletter?

how do we cap­i­tal­ize on epipha­nies?
make your library an epiphany cen­ter where peo­ple can have ideas and then have the tools to act on them

Tags: #staffday, future, liveblog, thomas frey, tscpl

I’ve really been feel­ing my Gen Xness the last few months. I dis­like fram­ing Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 as gen­er­a­tional issues (I think it has far more to do with whether you’re used to cre­at­ing and shar­ing con­tent over­all), but the rise of Twit­ter and Friend­Feed in par­tic­u­lar have made me feel like even more of a bridge because I get stretched thin try­ing to explain both sides of an issue to two groups who aren’t really talk­ing to each other about these things. Like Johnny Cash, I walk the line.

As a GenX bridge, one side of me under­stands the Boomer con­fu­sion at these pub­lic posts and won­ders why these folks can’t just call, email, or text a per­son who could actu­ally do some­thing about the prob­lem they’re encoun­ter­ing. Recently, I felt this most acutely when Jason Grif­fey took the time to write a blog post dis­agree­ing with two rules for sub­mit­ting ques­tions to ALA pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates on YouTube. I’m close enough to the tra­di­tional, Boomer norms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that when I first read Jason’s post, my imme­di­ate reac­tion was to sigh and won­der why he couldn’t have just con­tacted some­one at MPOW to request that the rules be changed. The “direct” approach seems like the log­i­cal one for affect­ing change and hav­ing your voice heard.

And then the Mil­len­nial side of the bridge kicked in and I chided myself, because Jason actu­ally cared enough to take the time to write that post instead of just a 140-character rant. He explained his rea­son­ing in what has (sur­pris­ingly) become a long-form medium online (blog­ging). In hind­sight, his post helped change one of the rules he dis­agreed with, so it was bet­ter that he posted pub­licly where every­one could read it and com­ment, includ­ing us. And hon­estly, some of the com­ments on microblog­ging sites are com­plaints that some­one did try to call or email a human being and didn’t get a good response, so it’s not that these gen­er­a­tional pref­er­ences are exclu­sive. Writ­ing a blog post these days is a pretty high level of engage­ment, and car­ing enough to post a tweet or Friend­Feed com­ment is right behind that in terms of try­ing to get our atten­tion (hey, at least MPOW isn’t mediocre).

My per­sonal les­son from these recent expe­ri­ences is that it’s impor­tant for asso­ci­a­tions (and libraries) to under­stand that every blog post, every tweet, every FF com­ment is like a let­ter to the edi­tor or some­one stand­ing up in a mem­ber­ship meet­ing and voic­ing a com­plaint. They’re the 21st cen­tury equiv­a­lent of a phone call or a con­ver­sa­tion in the hall­way at a con­fer­ence, and we have to take them just as seri­ously and respond to them the same way we would those 20th cen­tury meth­ods of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It’s not that Boomers want to help any less, but I think they’re used to help­ing peo­ple one-on-one, even online. For many mem­bers who likely trend younger, the new chan­nels are their pre­ferred ones for these types of com­ments, and not just for com­plaints. There isn’t any­thing wrong with either approach, but they’re ships cross­ing in the night, and they don’t lead to con­ver­sa­tions between the two sides that would improve communication.

Some­times I think attack­ing MPOW is a national sport, so it can be depress­ing being the per­son con­stantly relay­ing what’s being said about us online. But it’s impor­tant for those of us in the mid­dle to be that bridge and find com­pro­mises that work for every­one. So I espe­cially appre­ci­ate those folks who take the time to com­ment online in a con­struc­tive way (regard­less of the chan­nel), because it helps me build that bridge.

This strain isn’t new, but I’m curi­ous to know if other Gen Xers are feel­ing an increase in this area due to microblog­ging sites? Have you found suc­cess­ful strate­gies for improv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion around these new chan­nels? I have some ideas that I’m going to try to imple­ment at work, and I’ll report back here over time, but I’d love to hear how oth­ers are han­dling being at this intersection.

Tags: associations, baby boomers, communication, friendfeed, generation x, genx, jason griffey, microblogging, millennials, mpow, twitter