Library Revolution

As a trainer, one of the most interesting things about the new Google Search options is how they have decided to demo them:

What I love most of all is that they show the basics in around 2 minutes without going into arduous detail, then suggest you go try it out. And they tell you ahead of time that it’s going to undergo changes as they try to improve the interface.

Wish we could do more of this in libraries….

Here is my tagging presentation from yesterday’s Long Island Library Conference. Available at Slideboom.com

There was a great crowd for this; very enthusiastic and with many great questions. I was really happy to meet some new people yesterday!

Also, I will post some photos to Flickr with the tag lilc09 tonight (I forgot to bring my camera cord to work to upload them).

Thanks to everyone who contributed tags for my sample picture. I also got a bunch of contributions from folks at work and via email. Now I’m pumping them into Wordle, and here are some preliminary results:

I’m finding it a little fascinating….

More tests for things the local libraries can generate and control content and have it show on their local OPACs.

Here’s another experiment bringing in Flickr photos and posts from the library’s blog.

Just a thought.

Thoughts? Concerns?

Edited to add:

Here’s another example of how something like this might look. I think I like this one even better. Would work better for different screen resolutions.

For those of you who suggested setting this up for individual libraries in our consortium to feed updates from their own Twitter accounts into their local scopes, here is the sample I set up on our public OPAC’s test port.

With the County-wide one already set up, inserting it into a particular scope was about a 10 minute process.

So what’s the verdict?

Hi all!

Maybe all of my peeps out there in LibraryLand could help me out with a little something. I am doing a library conference presentation in a couple of weeks about taggins, and have an idea for a fun illustration. If you want to help out, just take a few minutes and comment on this post with ten words you would use to describe this picture:

Thanks!!!!!

(For the full explanation of this little idea of mine and why it seemed like a good idea for us, see this post from last week.)

After a little bit of brainstorming with colleagues both near and far, I did a little updating to the whole Twitter-in-the-Catalog thing I was working on last week.

Here’s how it stands now:

For our Staff Catalog (available in-house only) I have it set up on our staging port to bring the latest Twitter Update telling the staff in our libraries what’s going on with the system. While the Tweet loads, you get a little progress indicator at the bottom of the page and a link to this Twitter account.

When it loads, it looks a bit like this:

(The Tweet is at the bottom, and brings in the Twitter image associated with the account, the Twitter Username linking to the Twitter profile, the latest tweet, and a time stamp.)

For our Public Catalog, I took a little different approach, choosing to display only the latest Tweet (on a different account) with no other information. When we don’t have an announcement we want to show up on the catalog, we just delete the Tweet. So that account only has one Tweet at a time. When there is no Tweet, nothing shows up in that spot.

For us (a large consortium), this represents a good, quick way to send a message out to all of our Public OPAC users.

But I could definitely see this having a lot of cool applications for individual libraries in terms of posting announcements, links, or othermessgaes for patrons. In a consortium like ours, it would definietly be possible for each library to have their own Twitter account that could feed into their OPAC Scope only, so the staff of that library could have local control over the messages they are broadcasting. (Thanks Sam and Greg for brainstorming these possibilities with me!)

So what do we all think now? Ideas?

This is long-winded, I know, but hang with me, I’m trying to brainstorm.

So, here’s my situation (for those who might be unfamiliar):

One of my responsibilities at work is to maintain the catalog for a large public library consortium. It’s a pretty big catalog – 83 scopes, most of which have custom layouts so that each individual library can have its own interface and branding.

Not only that, but we have two servers for our catalogs – so we’re really maintaining two OPACs. One is for Staff, and can be accessed from within one of our member libraries only. This gives us a chance to present more search options, more detail, staff-specific incoming RSS feeds, links to staff resources, and a few staff-only functions. The public accesses a different catalog running on another server, so we can present them with something more suited to their needs.

Maintaining this is a huge job, but I think we do a pretty good job of keeping it going. However, I have had a challenge come up lately that I was trying to use a little creative problem solving to address.

Communication can be a challenge in any organization, and no more so than when there is a problem. I would like to find some new ways to use the Catalog as a way to communicate with staff in our libraries as well as patrons when there is a system issue they should be aware of. For many of our users, patrons and staff alike, the catalog is the main interface they interact with each day, and rather than trying to send them to other places to get information that they need about issues, I’d love to use the Catalog to put in right in their faces, so to speak.

But how do I do that in a reasonably sustainable way when I’m talking about such a huge entity as our two giant catalogs?

One brainstorm I had a while ago is this. (And I want to know what folks think.)

In a nutshell, I have set up two twitter accounts that I can feed into the OPAC display.

For our Staff Catalog, I created the account PALSstatus, and I embedded the most recent “tweet” so it displays at the bottom of the staff interface on every page of our catalog. (See the image below)

The idea is to keep this updated reasonably often with the most current status of the entire ILS, posting things that the staff would need to know about, such as “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties on the Public Catalog” or “The Circulation module is currently down. All transactions must be performed offline until further notice.” Stuff that would keep people in the loop in a real-time way, especially some of the front-line staff who sometimes feel left out of our information dissemination methods. More detailed information would be available through our ListServ or our Website, but at least folks working the desk would have some idea that it’s not just them.

Since it’s a twitter-based message, staff who wanted to could also follow PALSstatus for updates, and even get the updates texted to them, if they’re a department head or someone who really wants to be constantly informed of major problems. Not only is it easy to instantly update, we could use it to link staff to some of the online information we have available to them, and going back through the older “tweets” would give us an automatic log of what communication went out. So I see a lot of possible benefits to using this method to communicate with the staff in our libraries.

For the public, I set up a second twitter account, SuffolkLib, but thought I could handle it a little differently.

This time, I embedded the tweet so that it shows up at the top of the display on each page of the catalog. (This one currently is set up on our public catalog just for the full county scope- but I want to think about adding it in to all of the individual library scopes if we decide to go with this.)

(See image below.)

This one would only have a message if there was currently a problem. I have already used this once to announce to our patrons that the catalog was going to be down for maintenance on a certain evening. I “tweeted” a message that said “Due to routine system maintenance, the catalog may experience some service interruptions between 9:30 and 11:00 pm on Tuesday, March, 24th.”

When I typed that into Twitter, it appeared at the top of every page in the County Catalog. When the maintenance was over, I went to twitter and deleted the “tweet”. The message disappeared from the catalog. Simple as that.

However, I do have a few reservations about really launching this throughout our whole catalog and jumping right in to this. For one, I am concerned about impacting the performance of our catalog by using more things that must constantly refer to outside sites. We already do this for some other stuff, and I just don’t want to bog things down too much.

Another concern I have is something that seems to be coming up more and more with out libraries. I won’t go into the issue too much here (I think another post is in order!), but many of our libraries have their public catalog terminals locked down like Fort Knox, and are very hesitant to allow content from outside sites to come into the catalog. I guess the worst thing that this might cause is the few dedicated OPAC terminals in the libraries would not show the messages we publish this way. Staff (in most cases) and the public accessing the catalog from outside the building (most of them!) would see the messages.

I really need to play with this a bit more on our staging catalogs (oh, yeah, we have those, too!), and take some time to assess performance impact. But while I do some hard thinking about this, does anyone have any input they’d like to share? Is this just a dumb idea? Do you have other solutions for similar problems that you use in your libraries? Other concerns I haven’t mentioned? Other suggestions? I’d love to hear from people!

Flooring the Consumer has an interesting interview posted today – an interview with Jay Ehret, founder of The Marketing Spot.

He has some interesting thing to say in this interview about social media and small businesses, and about bridging the gap between new and old technologies. Good stuff for libraries and librarians to consider, so check it out.

His five suggestions for small businesses who want to brige “old” and “new” media to connect with consumers:

1) Start now. Establish a presence and get comfortable using social media. It’s not yet imperative that use social media, but it probably will be someday. You need to be ready.

2) Don’t try to do everything. Pick one thing, the most appropriate for your business, and get good at it.

3) Don’t ignore traditional media. It’s not dead and never will be. However, look for traditional media that are innovative and also understand the new media.

4) Don’t get evangelized. There’s a lot of hype out there coming from so-called social media evangelists. I’ve seen the question asked by one social media evangelist: “Can social media save (a particular) small business?” Turns out, no. That particular business went out of business. A business will not live or die based on involvement with social media.

5) Do what your customers will accept, not what you want them to do. If your customers do not congregate on Facebook, there’s nothing you can do about it. Be where your customers are likely to be.

Love it. Especially #5. And this little nugget of wisdom:

Use social media authentically. Don’t try to be someone you’re not. Don’t try to trick customers or present a false image. The Wizard-of-Oz strategy is not sustainable.

Tags: marketing, social media, technology, words of wisdom

Well, remember how I mentioned I was expecting another baby? Well, here she is:

Claire Emily Clasper D’Orso was very inconsiderate and arrived nearly a month early, throwing off my plans entirely. These pics are from yesterday, with Claire aged about 2 and a half months. She and big brother Robert are, as you can see, the best of friends!

And yes, I am back to work…