The official “what I learned at IL2007″ post is coming soon, right after I get to the one I promised for Access! I’ve got a couple of days to make it happen before my course for the Education Institute begins, and before the Learning 2.0 programme I’m leading for campus Career services also begins. On Monday. Don’t hold your breath, yo.

Michael gave me his copy of his Learning Technology Report when he was in town last week. And he inscribed it too! Thanks, Michael!

I furiously took as many notes as I could during Helene’s session because this is something I’d love to do at my library! Here are some of Helene’s “lessons learned”:

• Build the programme for late bloomers: don’t expect everyone to jump on board from the get-go, so make sure the programme can accomodate those who want to get in on the fun later!
• Allow participants to blog anonymously.
• Communicate weekly using 1.0 methods: Helene sent emails to the participants every Monday and Friday. Makes sense because not everyone will be comfortable with RSS (and blog feeds) early on.
• Focus on discovery and encourage challenges: Helene recommends making the exercises easy enough for everyone but with enough of a built-in challenge for those who want to take things further. This will also encourage staff to use each other as resources and work through the exercises together.
• Remember that it’s not about acceptance and doing it right, it’s about exposure. Not everyone will love every tool they experiment with and that’s OK. Learning 2.0 is about exposing the participants to the tools and technology, it’s not about making them love all those tools!
• Give your staff permission and time to play: the programme would simply fall apart without both!

1. Expand the brand.
Michael used the example of Starbucks and their attempt to reinvigorate their brand: it’s not just about coffee anymore, it’s also about comfy chairs, providing a space where people can come together to work, and organizing events (book talks, to be specific; Mitch Albom is doing a book tour & all his stops are at Starbucks venues). Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Michael also highlighted the importance of putting ourselves “out there” – promoting the profession & telling stories about what happens in our libraries. His extremely powerful example was that no one cares if 1000 people walk through your front door; what people care about are the experiences these people have when they are in your library.

2. Break down barriers.
I love this one, I really do. One look at the library signage stream on flickr says it all. Our focus should be on not making more work for our users (Karen Schneider: “the user is not broken”. Love it. Heard it more than once at the conference) because it’s not the users that are broken, it’s our policies, systems, and services. Not all, by any means, but many.

3. Adopt a 2.0 Philosophy
Grab the longtail and harness the wisdom of crowds! Discover new realms (Second Life Library 2.0), value experience & play (Learning 2.0). Helene Blowers is up next to talk about the latter in more detail

4. Create a culture of trust
Trust your users and makes sure your staff knows you can trust them. This is a difficult one for libraries/librarians, I think, because it necessitates a fundamental shift in philosophy on so many levels (especially the user trust issue). Yes, we’re the “experts”, yes we’ve got information organization covered par excellence, and yes we’re damn good at connecting people to information. What Library 2.0 does is push us to the next level where we can facilitate connections between people, whether that means opening up your catalogue to user comments or seeing the value in tagging & folksonomies, none of it can be embraced without that culture of trust.

Emerging Tech @ McMaster
IM Reference
Emerging Technologies Group
Endeca, soon to transform our catalogue!
Digital Reference Shelf

Blogs @ Academic Libraries
Fairfield University
Ohio University Libraries Business Blog
Kansas State University Library Blogs
UBC Physio Info-Blog

IM Reference @ Academic Libraries
Libraries Using IM Reference @ Library Success Wiki

Wikis @ Academic Libraries
Ohio University Libraries Biz Wiki
USC Aiken Gregg-Graniteville Library
Butler University Libraries Reference Wiki

Podcasting @ Academic Libraries
Podcasting @ Library Success Wiki

Getting faculty buy-in for emerging tech
Academic Blog Portal
Blogging in education

Getting staff buy-in for emerging tech
On getting staff members to buy into a new technology, Meredith Farkas @ TechEssence.Info

Training library staff in emerging tech
Learning 2.0 @ PLCMC
Making Time for Web 2.0, David Lee King

Social Networking @ Academic Libraries
Brooklyn College Library on MySpace
Morissville College Libraries on MySpace
UIUC Undergrad Library on MySpace
Colorado College Tutt Library on Flickr

Paul is a great speaker — funny, engaging & passionate. He began his presentation with an outline of the four topics he was going to cover:

• libraries and trust
• reaching out from the library
• library 2.0 platform
• shared innovation

Minor aside: the session overview is so crucial. It has the potential to hook your audience or lose them from the get-go. I’m often amazed at the lack of attention paid to the overview. But anyway. Paul’s overview was great — succinct, interesting, and had me looking forward to the rest of the session.

He began with a few high-impact slides, to the effect of: “how do people find stuff?” audience: Google. “How else do people find stuff?” You guessed it: Google – just different iterations of the same tool (google searchbar, google desktop, etc.). He then contrasted this with some findings from a couple of recent studies (OCLC’s Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources and a MORI study that I didn’t get the title of) that prove a few things:

• the number of active borrowers in our libraries has plummeted and continues to fall
• the number of people visiting libraries is on the rise
• 89% of people in the UK trust libraries (the #1 institution when it comes to public trust – more than the BBC!)

So, people are coming into our libraries, and they trust us, but they continue to use Google and other web 2.0 utilities to find things. Begs the question: where did we go wrong? A couple of places:

• we design user interfaces that suck
• we continue to alienate with our jargon

Paul’s response to this disconnect is Library 2.0. Here are the attibutes and goals of library 2.0:

• open the library
• push the library everywhere
• engage with actual and potential user communities
• disaggregate library systems – unpack the big ILS box, take what you need, leave what you don’t, build what you want, and…
• …put it all back together again – library system as lego: build what you want to build, not the picture on the box
• shared innovation – we need to work together, share experiences and innovations, learn from each other.

Paul went on to highlight some of the ways in which libraries and librarians are doing these things already (Casey Bisson’s WPopac, greasemonkey scripts, etc.), making their data work harder, not necessarily for a worthy cause, but often because it simply engages users. His point though was that we should all be doing this together — building a “Library 2.0 platform”, a platform that makes efficient use of our collective development efforts (i.e.: in aggregate, we have more data and more borrowers than amazon has buyers).

I really, really liked Paul’s vision for the Library 2.0 platform especially the bits about the platform needing to cross the vendor divide, because if this has any hope of succeeding, we need to be able to share our data and our ILSs need to be able to “talk” to one another without too much bludgeoning on either end. As Paul noted, we shouldn’t need to change our library systems just to take advantage of the networks that we’re building.

His call to action and conclusions:

• we need to do this together
• this will only work if we all collaborate and participate (that includes vendors)
• we need to share ideas, experiences, code, innovation
• get the discussion rolling at Talis’ Shared Innovation blog
• the library deserves to reach out beyond our walls
• vendor and library initiated silos just don’t make sense
• challenge current business models and assumptions (ditch the “that’s the way we’ve always done it” attitude; everything is fair game and up for grabs)
• share innovation

Paul has posted his presentation slides over at panlibus, definitely give them a read when you have a chance.
[Technorati tag: cil2006]

During the interview process, the candidates had the opportunity to address the staff on the future of the academic library. Jeff’s angle: Library 2.0.

So, how excited am I? Very.

• Kathy reports that she’s had excellent support for the blog, from the administration, teachers, and students.
• Comments enabled! And they’re being used!
• Kathy has set up some excellent information pages on the blog (how to blog, RSS, and Podcasts) and reports that teachers are using these pages for more info.
• Varied and interesting content, from web 2.0 tools for collaboration, to class assignments, to quirky news, to school social events.
• Categories for each of the school departments.

Brilliant. Way to go, Kathy!

An interesting thought. I’m not overly fond of the term “technology evangelist”, but I guess I do a lot of that, both at my institution, and as part of the Web 2.0/Library 2.0 talks that I do at other institutions. But for me, and I suspect for a lot of other people in our library world who have been talking about these technologies for a while, the really crucial question I encourage people to ask themselves first is “what need is this going to fulfil or what problem will this fix?” When we implemented a blog at my institution two years ago, it was to fulfill a couple of really specific needs:

• we needed a better way to archive our news stories
• we needed to provide more people with an easy way to add news content (without having to know html)
• we needed an easy way to repurpose news content on the rest of our site

So, yeah, not hard to guess that a blog would fulfill these needs. We went through the same exercise before we implemented our IM reference service last year: we knew that a large number of our users worked virtually, yet we had limited services to assist them (e-mail only). We also knew that most of them were on MSN (as evidenced by a glance at any given public workstation in the library!), so IM reference just made sense.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. There certainly is a cool-factor associated with these “shiny new toys”, but implementing them for the sake of their “shininess” makes no sense. If your library’s cool-factor goes up as a result of implementing any of these tools, that’s a nice incidental benefit (by the way, I don’t think my library’s cool-factor budged when we implemented our blog/rss feeds. When we implemented our IM service? Through the roof. If that means our users like it and will use it, I’ll take it. Is that why we implemented it? Of course not).

I finally got to meet Michael Stephens, after years of reading his blog and admiring his work! I was pretty-well sitting back and enjoying his talk for the most part, so this is mostly summary stuff.

Update: Michael’s presentation materials are here.

————

- blog as tool, CMS, software, to generate web content.
- brief history of blog: hand coding began it, then Blogger and Livejournal in 1999
- 2000-2005: the tools made it easy to publish to the web, no html needed, no ftp; dozens of features, dynamic, quick, easy to develop

Taxonomy of library & librarian blogs:
- library-sponsored blogs (marketing, topical, internal, organizational, etc.)
- independent librarian blogs (frontline, innovator, commentator, etc.)

Newer trends in blogging:
- photo-blogging, flickr, podcasting, etc.

Rrecent research in weblogs & libraries:
- lawley, blanchard, clyde
- blogs as virtual communities
- trust in blog communities: high degree of self-disclosure, bloggers with internal evaluation system, medium of publishing in progress

Conversations and the cluetrain
- aadl
- talk to users, allow comments, get interactive, share book reviews, thoughts, more…
- cluetrain: networked conversations going on and we need to learn from them; speak with a human voice, see the face of the library, make the library human, transparency, communicate with market directly.
- catalogue as blog
- library wikis – great for subject guides. At SJCPL, librarians use MediaWiki to create and edit subject guides and patrons can “discuss” the pages.

Questions for further research:
- how have blogs changed communication between librarians?
- how does blogs serve the social purpose of the library?
- who comments on library blogs and why?