The Shifted Librarian shifting libraries at the speed of byte

A few things I’ve wanted to blog about in-depth but am just throwing out there for now.

• Paul over at ResearchQuest beat me to the punch to post about Carnegie Mellon University’s Library Arcade. This is a must-read, must-play combo for all library staff interested in using gaming in instruction. Heck, maybe we should have a leaderboard on this one. ;-) I love the idea of adapting an old school style game (like “Diner Dash”) but putting a library spin on it.
• When I wasn’t looking, Penn State turned its Virtual Worlds blog into a big ol’ Educational Gaming Commons, now with forums in addition to the blog.
• Chris attended the Games, Learning, and Society Conference back in July (the one that I also went to), and you can read his notes over on LibLaureate. In his reflections on James Paul Gee’s opening keynote, Chris wrote, “When do we reach a threshold and go grab a walk-through or a cheat code? Is this the importance of social networks – I’ve reached so far and now I need some help?” That’s a great question, and I think the answer is yes.
• At Learning2007 later this month, they’re going to do a Rapid Learning Game Experiment. While the exercise itself is fascinating, it’s the last sentence that intrigues me most (emphasis is mine).
  “We are going to push Gaming for Learning Development to the max in an upcoming experiment. Here are the ingredients:
  • Take several undergraduate students from Champlain College’s Electronic Gaming & Interactive Development Program in Vermont and bring them to Orlando for Learning 2007.
  • Give them an assignment to create a Learning Focused Game, defined by a group of companies at Learning 2007.
  • Over the next 58 hours, in full view of 2,000 participants – with feedback every few hours – they will build an web based immersive learning game.
  • This learning activity will then be reviewed, edited and released into Open Source for the entire global community to use.“
• The following video is just awesome in every sense of the word. I laughed, I cried, and then I laughed some more. Watch the whole thing to find out who’s behind it. Not only is it an object lesson in how social gaming can be and how libraries could implement it, but it’s also a great marketing lesson for us. I’ll definitely be showing snippets of this one in my presentations.
  

originally posted by thegloaming

This is my new favorite library sign. I always think you can send a better message using humor than heavy-handedness, although in this case, the librarians are also making a great statement about privacy.
I’ve been mulling over a lot lately the trust librarians have built up with users just through our actions (they speak louder than words, right?). I think there’s a lot we can do here, teaching people (and especially students) how to manage their online identity. “How to be a good digital citizen” should also include how to represent yourself online, in addition to how to participate and media literacy in general.
I’ve also been thinking about “persistence” a lot lately, and I’ll be writing more about that because I think it’s one of our biggest assets in the digital world (from many different angles, too).
In the meantime, I’m happy to see Bloglines has incorporated OpenID, something I wish libraries – and particularly library vendors – would pay more attention to. To learn more about what Bloglines is doing in this area, go to http://www.bloglines.com/about/news and scroll down to the current second item (or just try going here). (Hopefully the folks at BL are in the process of turning this page into a blog so that we can point to specific news in the future, rather than one long page. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.) Bonus points to them for adding openID authentication in the first place.
I’d like to think libraries could be influential in educating Americans about the benefits of OpenID and help folks tame some of this chaos. The more sites that use an open standard like this (cough, libraries, cough), the better it is for all of us. And let’s face it, in a situation like this, who are you going to trust – your local library or Big Brother?

Erik and Jaap, the guys from the Delft Public Library who visited the Chicago area in February to talk with librarians about gaming, are coming back this month on a nationwide tour to explore innovation in U.S. libraries. Yes, a nationwide tour. Only these two could pull off something this ambitious. They’ll be driving cross-country on their way to the Internet Librarian conference in California at the end of October, stopping at the following libraries along the way:

• New York Public Library
• Darien Library
• Public Library of Charlotte Mecklenburg County
• Ann Arbor District Library
• Mortenson Center
• Council Bluffs Public Library
• Denver Public Library
• Salt Lake City Library

They’ll be talking with librarians, interviewing them on camera, shooting video of services, driving westward, participating in the annual “gadgets” presentation at the IL conference, and then heading home to create another great documentary (like the one they did for their first trip). They’ll be in the Chicago area around October 20-21, and I can’t wait to see them again. If nothing else, we will definitely have another video game night. :-)
If you’re on or near their route, consider contacting and getting together with them – I guarantee you won’t regret it. Their enthusiasm and creativity is infectious. I mean really, who else do you know who could get funding for such a big idea as this?
When Erik first drew up the plan on a napkin in February, I loved the idea of librarians as “shanachies.” Their theme is “Keep stories, tell stories, make stories.”

“Originally the shanachie in Ireland was a very important person who in rank came after the chief and the druid carried the gift of keeping and telling the stories. They travelled the country and were given free lodges and food in return for stories. The gift was passed on when the Shanachie died.”

More info is available on the official Shanachie Tour site. They’ll be posting a video diary there as the trip progresses. I can’t wait to watch what they do next!

I’ve learned a lot of things about ALA (my employer) during my first year working there. Sometimes it’s interesting and helps me understand why something is the way it is. Other times my jaw drops because of an interesting statistic (good and bad). I don’t think you could build an organization that works the way ALA does if you spent your life trying. I also hear about good, valuable services we’re providing that are difficult to publicize widely. In fact, there’s a lot going on at ALA that I think would be of interest that doesn’t fit into an “official” channel.
I’ve wanted to write about these things, but I didn’t want my personal blog to turn into “all ALA, all the time.” Now, though, I have a place where I can do this, as I am a co-author of the new ALA Marginalia blog. It’s a place where a few of us can help explain the behemoth that is ALA and comments are open so that anyone can ask questions or give us feedback.
I’ve been asking a lot of questions internally during my first year (my co-workers would probably say annoyingly so), some of the same questions I hear members and non-members asking. This is going to be a forum where we can discuss these things, so I encourage you to join us there.
RSS feed is here (comments feed over here), and I think later today I’ll add an r-mail box so readers can get updates emailed to them. I think we’ve got all of the kinks worked out, but please us know if you run into any problems with the blog.

One of the great things about my colleagues at ALA is that they tend to have very interesting backgrounds. Some of them do improv comedy, some are artists, one has a radio show, and one is an honest-to-god-real-live documentary filmmaker. Last month I had the pleasure of seeing the Chicago premiere of Dan Kraus’ second film, Musician, at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I enjoyed it very much, and I’m looking forward to watching Sheriff on DVD and seeing future entries in the Work series.

You may already be enjoying some of Dan’s work, as he’s been creating and editing videos on AL Focus, the online video arm of American Libraries. Inspired by what he has learned about our profession through his work as an AL editor, he is hoping to focus his next entry in the Work series on a librarian. If you meet the following description, or if you know someone who does, please email Dan.

“The first movie was called SHERIFF. The second was MUSICIAN. The fourth will be PROFESSOR, the fifth will be PREACHER, and the sixth should be SOCIAL WORKER.

What’s missing there is the third movie, which I’ve been having trouble with. Because of the demographic spread of the other movies already shot or in-progress, I would really like to profile a Latina/Hispanic woman. And I was thinking (duh), what about LIBRARIAN?

Although I am open to any and all suggestions, I think it would be fascinating to profile someone dealing with multiple cultures, languages, and economic levels. I also think it could be good to find someone who works at a very small library with limited resources, a place where the librarian is forced to be everything at once: Librarian, Teacher, Career Counselor, Babysitter, IT Specialist, Sage, Freedom Fighter, Fundraiser, and so on. For these reasons, I think finding a librarian in a small town, possibly one with a heavy immigrant population, could be quite dramatic.

Also (although this is not a hard-and-fast rule) I’d prefer to avoid the following states that I’m already shooting movies in: North Carolina, Illinois, Iowa, Virginia, and Florida.”

MooWee Plays Internet TV with Your Wii

“MooWee is an application that lets you watch Internet TV content on your television screen using your Nintento Wii game console. You’ll need an Internet broadband connection with a minimum bandwidth of 384kbps as well as an Internet browser on your Wii console in order to hook this up to your television….
The MooWee service can be enjoyed online as well. MooWee is of course an alternative to other set top devices like Apple TV, and other game consoles like the Xbox, which has recently indicated that it would like to work with th BBC on providing content for users. Sony is another company that’s looking to be more competitive in this market, and will be using a collection of devices and services to do so. Other services include Building B and Jaman. StumbleVideo offers a similar service for Nintendo Wii.” [Mashable]

Anyone tried any of these services on the Wii yet? If I have time this weekend….

John over at Library Clips does an amazing job of explaining just how detailed you can get using RSS aggregators to become more efficient by setting up a Getting Things Done implementation in Google Reader. It may even make your head swim a little. Me, I’m nowhere near this level of productivity, but it’s good to see someone else taking full advantage. As with all software, John is a power user and the other 99% of us will never achieve this level, but see if there are any tips (and sites) here that you can incorporate into your own routines.

If you can read this, the move to the new server is complete!

SXSW Panel: Why Do We Need Libraries Anyway 
“On June 25, 2007, California recognized the Internet Archive as an official library. As digital resources become a formal part of our civic structure we ask: How are physical and virtual libraries used, what are the emotional connotations of being a library, and what do we do with librarians?
Our perceptions of libraries and librarians are often based in childhood nostalgia or media stereotypes (The Music Man’s Marian the Librarian, Hogwart’s Madam Pince, Noah Wyle’s Flynn Carsen, ‘The Librarian’), but today’s library is as much about bytes as about books. If you would like to join us for a discussion about the future of libraries and information generally in a networked world at the 2008 South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, TX, take a minute and vote for our panel at the SXSW Panel Picker, located at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/295.
We have tentative commitments from speakers Aaron Schwartz (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/), technical lead for the Internet Archive’s Open Libraries project (http://demo.openlibrary.org/about) and Lorcan Demsey (http://orweblog.oclc.org/), Vice President for Research and Chief Strategist for OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center (http://www.oclc.org/research), home of WorldCat (www.worldcat.org) to offer their thoughts on libraries, both physical and virtual, and on the services that librarians provide. The panel will be moderated by Danielle Cunniff Plumer (http://darchivist.blogspot.com), coordinator of the Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission and project manager of Texas Heritage Online (http://www.texasheritageonline.org).
The voting process for the 2008 Panel Picker closes at 11:59 pm Central Standard Time on Friday evening, September 21, so please vote soon (although perhaps not often!) at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/295.”[WEB4LIB]

First NY Times Restaurant Review, Circa 1859?

“While poking around in the newly opened archives of the New York Times yesterday, I stumbled upon an article called How We Dine (full text in PDF) from January 1, 1859. I’m not well versed in the history of food criticism, but I believe this is perhaps the first restaurant review to appear in the Times and that the unnamed gentleman who wrote it (the byline is ‘by the Strong-Minded Reporter of the Times’) is the progenitor of the paper’s later reviewers like Ruth Reichl, Mimi Sheraton, and Frank Bruni….
The entire article is well worth the read…one of the most interesting things I’ve found online in awhile.” [Kottke.org]

I think it’s great the New York Times has opened up its archive, but sadly, Jason Kottke probably could have found this article ages ago simply by using his public library’s databases. But he wouldn’t have been able to easily link to it or discuss it with nonsubscribers. This move by the Times certainly illustrates how paywalls prevent findability and browsability of content. And as Kottke notes in a previous post, thousands of old links to NYT articles magically started working once this happened. That last post also includes links to historically interesting articles, ones you wouldn’t have been able to just click to before this week, so they’ve already imbibed themselves with a discussability they’d lost.
From the email that went to TimesSelect subscribers:

“Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion – as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.”

It was browsable and findable behind the library login, but readers couldn’t interact with it on the open web in “meaningful ways.” Obviously not every publication can or will want to do this I think the Times has made a good call here, because its archive will indeed be interacted with in more meaningful ways by everyone now. They’ve put themselves back into peoples’ flows and are going where more users are in a more accessible way.