Some­times we tell peo­ple that things live for­ever on the inter­net and that any­one can find them (so don’t post that pic­ture of your­self drink­ing alco­hol, young man), but I want to high­light how some impor­tant things from just a cou­ple of months ago are becom­ing impos­si­ble to find. If we’re not care­ful, the haystack is going to dis­ap­pear, never mind the needle.

For exam­ple, take the dis­cus­sion that hap­pened on Twit­ter dur­ing ALA’s Mid­win­ter Meet­ing just under two months ago. The Meet­ing had a hash­tag for track­ing con­tent (#alamw09), and almost every­one used it most of the time. There was a lot going on in that tag, so much so that I thought it was a tip­ping point for the Asso­ci­a­tion in terms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools. I even debriefed what hap­pened on Twit­ter for ALA staff after­wards so that they’d be able to see the patterns.

But try to find that dis­cus­sion now, and it’s almost impos­si­ble. Most peo­ple (includ­ing me) rely on Twitter’s search engine (which was for­merly called “Sum­mize” and run by a dif­fer­ent com­pany until Twit­ter bought it). If you search Twit­ter now for the #alamw09 hash­tag, you get exactly one page of results (yes­ter­day there were two), and only a cou­ple of those tweets were actu­ally posted dur­ing the event itself. If you look up #alamw09 at hashtags.org, you’ll get more results from the Meet­ing itself, but there’s still only one page, and you had to have man­u­ally fol­lowed the hashtags.org Twit­ter account for them to have tracked your tweets, so even if you could see older results than what shows, it would be an incom­plete archive at best. Search Tech­no­rati for #alamw09 and you get eight blog posts. Iron­i­cally, you can get most of the pub­lic tweets from Mid­win­ter by search­ing Friend­Feedlooking for anything from #ala2008 on Twitter, although there again FriendFeed saves the day, but for how long?

So for all of our aggregation attempts of that Twitter content, they may only work in the moment for the moment. It turns out they're mis­cel­la­neous *and* search­able in only one place (for now), a pretty bad com­bi­na­tion in hind­sight. Thank heav­ens I favor­ited in Twit­ter so many of the alamw09 tweets, although that’s still not ideal. I have to man­u­ally page through them to find the ones I want, and I already have 35 pages of favorites.

After Mid­win­ter, I tried to start mov­ing my #alamw09 favorites into Ever­note so that I’d be able to search and group them, but I haven’t had time to com­plete that process, and I just can’t seem to train myself to add new tweets there as I favorite them. The ratio of effort between click­ing on a star and fill­ing out a few words of meta­data is just too much in the mid­dle of my day, so this looms as a project in my future if I really want to save this stuff. Even then, there’s no guar­an­tee Ever­note will stick around, but at least I can export from it.

So if you were using a hash­tag to aggre­gate con­tent, think­ing it would be eas­ier to find it all again in the future, think again. You’re going to have to do some­thing more proac­tive and man­ual than rely­ing on Twitter’s search engine or Google. You’ll have to decide what level of ephemer­a­li­ness you’re com­fort­able with for that con­ver­sa­tion, because you may not be able to get back to it if you let some­one else man­age access to the archive. In this con­text, it’s a shame so much of the con­ver­sa­tion has moved away from blog com­ments (where indi­vid­u­als can openly archive it) to Twit­ter and Friend­Feed. And if you’re a gov­ern­ment or archive orga­ni­za­tion look­ing to pre­serve this kind of dig­i­tal con­tent, the stakes are get­ting raised on you.

Am I miss­ing any other options for find­ing past hash­tag con­ver­sa­tions? Please tell me yes in the comments.

Adden­dum: Poten­tial ideas for archiv­ing — you could sub­scribe to the RSS feed of a hash­tag in an RSS reader and export them, right? Or sub­scribe to the RSS feed via email? Other ideas?

Tags: archives, conversations, disappearing, ephemera, friendfeed, hashtags, twitter

Often. But I had a great time play­ing Library Mini Golf at the Down­ers Grove Pub­lic Library on March 8, as did hun­dreds of other peo­ple on LMG’s biggest course yet (a full 18 holes across two floors). Check out the pic­tures from the day in my Flickr set to see just how much fun we all had. I’ll be includ­ing the event as a case study in my next issue of Library Tech­nol­ogy Reports on gam­ing in libraries, which I’m cur­rently writing.

The DGPL staff, Friends group, and the Library Mini Golf crew (Rick, John, and Bob) all did an amaz­ing job on this totally amaz­ing event!

Tags: dgpl, downers grove public library, fundraiser, gaming in libraries, library mini golf

This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. Check out Aaron Schmidt’s new project — Cre­at­ing (the) Future (for) Libraries. Get yours now while you can — they’re a lim­ited edi­tion run, and they’re beyond awesome.

Tags: aaron schmidt, blank books, libraries, walking paper

Today I was part of a panel ses­sion about Web 2.0 tools for the GMC/PCMA

Greg Fine — Asso­ci­a­tion Forum

showed some of their Asso­ci­a­tion Pro­fes­sion­als through­out His­tory video
showed the map of online com­mu­ni­ties from 2007 (“gulf of youtube”)
social media is about build­ing com­mu­nity, and Greg likes this visual because it shows there are actual places and you can’t just aim­lessly wan­der around
– it lets you lever­age exist­ing net­works
– it allows us to eas­ily cre­ate and share infor­ma­tion with one another (as asso­ci­a­tions, we’re about asso­ci­at­ing)
– allows this to hap­pen in an instan­ta­neous way
– on a plat­form that peo­ple are com­fort­able with
so if we as orga­ni­za­tions lever­age these plat­forms, we make it eas­ier for our mem­bers to find us and inter­act with us
– it allows you to evan­ge­lize your mem­bers and your customers

there are gen­er­a­tional dis­tinc­tions — gen­er­ally accepted dis­tinc­tions
uses accept­able footwear for men on day one of their new job as way to dis­tin­guish between them
great­est gen­er­a­tion — wingtips
Xers — black lace-up, but moved to the boat shoe
Millennials/GenY — ten­nis shoes
Gamers — flip-flops
can’t talk to a flip-flop from a wingtip per­spec­tive
even the ten­nis show crowd may not totally get the flip-flop one
also have the 80–20-1 rule
80% of peo­ple who are on the inter­net only look/lurk and don’t engage
20% of the 80% actively engage (read RSS, have a Face­book page)
1% of that 20% are active users of social media online (blog, post to Wikipedia, etc.)
EXCEPT for the gamers, where the num­bers are reversed
only 1% are not active online, etc.

the #1 rule is that the orga­ni­za­tion totally loses con­trol in this envi­ron­ment
if some­one wants to say some­thing bad about you, they don’t need your site/platform to do it
so embrace it
do you use free or pro­pri­etary and build your own?
Greg is a big believer in free
– free
– pro­pri­etary usu­ally means sep­a­rate authen­ti­ca­tion scheme and peo­ple have pass­word fatigue now
– do you have an open or closed sys­tem (can any­one be a mem­ber or is it a mem­ber benefit)

Asso­ci­a­tion Forum makes every­thing open because if you care enough to join, maybe you’ll even­tu­ally become a mem­ber
there’s no right or wrong, but you need to be delib­er­ate about what you’re going to do

set rea­son­able expec­ta­tions
men­tioned a case where a group thought they’d failed because they only had 1,200 peo­ple on their Face­book page
but they only had 10,000 mem­bers total!

you can­not think like you — you have to think like your audi­ence
just because you don’t use it doesn’t mean oth­ers shouldn’t
oth­ers may cre­ate these sites (like a Face­book page) for you if you don’t do it
you have to inte­grate it with tra­di­tional meth­ods
you don’t just do one thing in iso­la­tion — f2f, email newslet­ters, etc. are still valid
taken all together, it makes it all more valuable

it’s like a foot­ball expe­ri­ence — it’s the future of the asso­ci­a­tion expe­ri­ence
the audi­ence in the sta­dium are the mem­bers, who paid admis­sion
within that audi­ence are dif­fer­ent lev­els (box seats ver­sus bleach­ers)
over time, our expe­ri­ences inside the sta­dium may be more valu­able than just being a member

some tools:
– Face­book
– Forum Effect (blogging)

Flickr — an online pic­ture shar­ing site that lets you tag images
showed pic­tures tagged with ASAE
user-generated con­tent (pic­tures from atten­dees)
every­body has a cell phone these days, and these phones have cam­eras
35,000 pic­tures were posted from a con­fer­ence when they asked peo­ple to take a few and then they had a down­load station

YouTube — videos
when some­one comes in to present now, they do a “5 ques­tions with xxxx speaker” video
total time invest­ment per video is one hour, includ­ing the inter­view
they also allow the per­son to use the video, too

LinkedIn and Face­book
don’t upload your mem­ber list to a third-party site to require peo­ple who join are mem­bers, because this is a vio­la­tion of your mem­bers’ pri­vacy
let any­one become a mem­ber on your page
takes five min­utes to set this stuff up

strat­egy is impor­tant!
when you’re think­ing about all of this
Asso­ci­a­tion Forum uses these sites as guide­posts to help peo­ple get to the Forum website

Brad Lewis — Pro­fes­sional Con­ven­tion Man­age­ment Association

“lux­ury expen­di­tures” — travel
is in the media coun­ter­ing these neg­a­tive per­cep­tions and the dis­tinc­tions between legit­i­mate travel and these types of excesses

PCMA uses:
– Face­book
– Flickr
– LinkedIn
– blog on Type­Pad
– YouTube

goals for PCMA:
– want to be where their mem­bers are
– need to par­tic­i­pate in the cur­rent tech­nolo­gies
– facil­i­tate con­nec­tions
– cre­ate mem­ber engage­ment, reten­tion
– brand expe­ri­ence; how can your mem­bers inter­act with you?
– enhanced expo­sure for events, pro­grams, prod­ucts, and ser­vices
– cre­ate added value
– learn some­thing new every day

their most suc­cess­ful site is LinkedIn
rec­om­mend to their chap­ters that they cre­ate sites, too
you do lose some control

PCMA has 6,000 mem­bers and more than 1,000 have joined the LinkedIn group
PCMA posts new con­tent there and posts event news
no hard sells there
eases peo­ple into par­tic­i­pa­tion in the orga­ni­za­tion
present jobs, speaker info
most of the room was already on LinkedIn
from an asso­ci­a­tion stand­point, your mem­bers can already do a mul­ti­tude of things there (and on these other sites)
one sign-on
try to make your name the sign across plat­forms
want the full name and the acronym because you don’t know what peo­ple will search on

mon­i­tor­ing and con­trol:
– wild west; just need to accept that because you can’t pre­vent it
– PCMA does delete some stuff like direct sales solic­i­ta­tions
– does take a staff com­mit­ment, regard­less of which depart­ment is assigned to mon­i­tor
– think about how you’re fos­ter­ing and feed­ing the com­mu­nity, too; that’s why you want to choose which sites are best for you and your members

PCMA doesn’t mind when peo­ple say a ses­sion was hor­ri­ble, because it gives them feedback

take action:
– work with mar­ket­ing to cre­ate a group, work with mem­ber­ship to update it
– if you’re not mon­i­tor­ing what’s hap­pen­ing, your com­pe­ti­tion prob­a­bly is
– mon­i­tor for refer­ral requests (“who knows of a good xxxx com­pany?”), even if you don’t answer back
Brad encour­ages third party responses

what it’s for:
– net­work­ing with col­leagues
– get updates
– ask ques­tions
– gain insights
– share ideas

what it’s not for:
– solic­it­ing (it’s like using the wrong fork at din­ner)
– direct promotion

aver­age age of a PCMA mem­ber is 47
one of the young kids at a table didn’t know what LinkedIn was — “face­book for old people”

Face­book
– tar­get mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion
– stu­dents (announce schol­ar­ships, intern­ships, com­mu­ni­ca­tion with PCMA stu­dent staff)
– cre­ate event
– dis­cus­sion boards (stu­dents were vol­un­tar­ily mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions to oth­ers about join­ing PCMA)

Flickr
– annual meet­ing (linked from com­mu­ni­ca­tions, pho­tos for dailies, mem­ber engage­ment even if they can’t attend)
– social net­work­ing cen­tered around pho­tos
– share pho­tos within groups and tags

Type­Pad blog
– new PCMA Chair­man John Folks’ blog
– puts face on lead­er­ship
– way for lead­er­ship to con­nect with mem­bers and get feed­back
– start con­ver­sa­tions among colleagues

YouTube
– PCMA has a YouTube chan­nel
– some lead­er­ship hasn’t wanted to be on YouTube
– only have a few select videos but it’s a good way to put a face on the orga­ni­za­tion and tell stories

pro­pri­etary sys­tems
– PCMA did pur­chase an expen­sive prod­uct for “PCMA Con­nect“
– can trial on free before you try pro­pri­etary
– had bells and whis­tles but was a sep­a­rate destination

Learn­ings
– con­ver­sa­tion hap­pens organ­i­cally
– hot top­ics are anonymity, reluc­tance to speak your mind, gen­eral best has been more social (New Year’s res­o­lu­tions)
be rel­e­vant to the peo­ple who con­nect with you

philoso­phies and con­clu­sions
– your mem­ber pro­file will deter­mine which plat­form works best for you
– lead­er­ship accep­tance, need some buy-in
– cer­tainly trial this stuff
these are just new assets in the arse­nal, and they’re even free
– impor­tant to engage in rel­e­vant busi­ness of today

Jenny Levine (me)

here are my slides (12MB, PDF)

Tags: ala, association forum, blogs, brad lewis, facebook, friendfeed, greg fine, linkedin, mpow, pcma, twitter, web 2.0, youtube

I’ve writ­ten before about Rick Bolton and his Library Mini Golf non­profit that cre­ates 18-hole mini golf courses for libraries to use as fundrais­ers. This time I’m par­tic­u­larly excited to note that Rick has part­nered with the Down­ers Grove Pub­lic Library Foun­da­tion in Chicago’s west­ern sub­urbs to hold the first such event in this area, because DGPL is my home library.

If you’re in the Chicagoland area, I hope you’ll make some time to come play mini golf at Down­ers Grove PL this Sun­day, March 8, from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. It’s a fundraiser, so adults can play the whole course for just $5, while kids age 15 and younger can play for $3. Putt your best and if you do well, you might find your­self in a play­off round at 4:15 p.m. Expe­ri­ence the stacks in a whole new way!

I can’t wait to finally see this in action for myself, so I’ll def­i­nitely be there. Give me a heads up if you’re com­ing, and we can tee off together. If you live in the area, con­sider thank­ing the local spon­sors by doing busi­ness with them.

Tags: dgpl, fundraiser, gaming in libraries, libraries, library mini golf