As you probably know, WordPress MU is a multi-user blogging environment (hence the “MU”) that allows users to set up their own blogs with a couple of clicks. It’s pretty sweet overall, but we’ve had our fair share of tussles over getting the admin end to work over SSL (thanks to Kevin Gilbertson at Wake Forest and Karen Coombs for putting up with my numerous questions and sharing their code! And to my super-patient colleague, John Fink, for being a troubleshooting superhero). PmWiki, on the other hand, has been nothing but golden, from an administrative perspective. Installation took all of 6 minutes and configuring the installation as a “wiki farm” took another 3 minutes.

The deal with PmWiki is that data is stored in html files (not databased), which is probably why administration is so lightweight. I’m trying to steer clear of local configurations on a per-wiki basis to keep upgrades streamlined, but we’ll see how long I can stay that course. The only real drawback with PmWiki is the lack of native support for wysiwyg editors like FCKeditor and TinyMCE. Strict adherence to wiki markup is actually part of the PmWiki “philosophy”, which means no one should be holding their breath for that native support. The wiki purist in me gets that wiki markup is way more flexible, but the part of me that has to support faculty use of wikis is a little worried. Looks to me like some attempts have been made to integrate a wysiwyg editor, but those attempts do not look altogether successful. It’s certainly something I’ll continue to fiddle with and I’ve got a keen ear tuned to the developers’ list for any wysiwyg chatter.

Overall, it’s been a fun project to work on and I’m glad it’s out there and ready for action. Project updates right here as progress warrants!

If you’re familiar with Access, you know that there isn’t usually a CFP process associated with the conference. I’m sure that probably has a lot to do with the fact that Access/code4lib regulars are a pretty tight group, so everyone has a pretty good sense of what everyone else is working on and what would make an interesting conference session. Which is great, but I’m sort of on the periphery of that group, and while I have a general sense of what folks are working on (and what would make an interesting conference session), I feel far from equipped to plan a 2.5 day program based on this sketchy knowledge. So, we wrote a CFP! And I’m expecting a flood of brilliant proposals! If you have an idea for a session, ping me because I can’t wait to hear it! Here are the details:

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Call for Proposals for Access 2008
Location: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Date: October 1-3, 2008 (Hackfest: Oct 1; Conference: Oct 2-4)
CFP Deadline: Friday, February 22, 2008
URL: http://access2008.mcmaster.ca

Access is Canada’s premier library technology conference, featuring a single stream of sessions that deal with technology planning, development, challenges and solutions. We are now accepting proposals for prepared talks on the following topics (other ideas are more than welcome):

• customized web applications and search interfaces
• open source software
• national and provincial/state-wide consortia technology initiatives
• information policy
• digital and social media
• library catalogue innovations
• digitization projects
• institutional repositories
• end-user searching behaviours
• protocols and metadata

…or anything else suitably geeky, innovative and/or awe-inspiring! Sessions are usually 45 minutes or 1 hour in length. Proposals should include:

• your name, title, institutional affiliation, contact information, blog/website URL
• 100 word (max) abstract describing your proposed presentation
• co-presenters you will (or hope to) present with

Submission Procedures:

• deadline for submission is February 22, 2008.
• send your proposal to Amanda Etches-Johnson, Program Chair, at etchesa AT mcmaster.ca
• each submission will be acknowledged and all presenters will be notified of the status of their proposal by April 15, 2008.
• if you’d simply like to recommend topics and/or speakers (other than yourself), feel free to get in touch!

Depending on the number of submissions, we can’t promise that every proposal will be accepted. However, we will have sessions set aside for Lightning/Thunder talks, which provide an informal opportunity to share your ideas with your peers.

For more information about Access, see the Access 2007 website. Alternatively, feel free to get in touch with the members of the Program Planning Committee:

Amanda Etches-Johnson
User Experience Librarian, McMaster University
etchesa AT mcmaster.ca

Jenn Horwath
Virtual Branch Manager, Hamilton Public Library
jhorwath AT hpl.ca

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If posting CFPs on your blog/listserv(s) is your thing, feel free to post away! Thanks, folks. And, see you at Access 2008!

Apart from feeling completely out of my depth talking about the topic, it went OK. There were a fair number of questions after the session, and some great comments too. Including one from Dale Askey, from Kansas State, who blogged my session and said enough to tweak the interest of the Endeca folks, who saw Dale’s post, emailed me, and asked to chat more about my ideas and why our users are not all over the facets in our catalogue. Cool, huh? Dale blogged about it here and Jessamyn (who was there and did a brilliant keynote) picked it up here.

The rest of the conference was great. I took a fair amount of notes and the to-do list I scribbled down for myself was ridiculously long by the end of the conference (always a good indication of how much I learned). Also, I finally realized that I am no longer the conference-blogger I once was (I think I’ve known this for a while now). My wrap-up, “what-I-learned” post has taken a back-burner to preparations for IL, but I should have that up in the next day or two. Hopefully.

I’m presenting about our Endeca implementation at Access this week and I’m in the throes of presentation prep at the moment. I think I’ve got most of the good stuff covered but I thought I’d put the question out there so that I can make sure to address the burning questions and other need-to-know details. I plan on fleshing out the content in a well-annotated presentation (which I’ll link to here for anyone who is interested & not at Access), so if there’s something you’d really like to know about our implementation, or about the process, let me know? Thanks!

It takes a village to raise this child
If you’re lucky enough to have one individual at your institution who is responsible for staff development, and if this person is lucky enough to be able to devote 100% of his/her time to developing and implementing a Learning 2.0 programme, then you probably don’t need a “village” to get this thing of the ground and running! We had no such individual, so L2@Mac was put together and run under the auspices of the Emerging Technologies Group (which I chair). While we borrowed from PLCMC’s excellent programme, we added a lot of our own content too, so it was nice to be able to spread that work around the committee members. Also, ETG members served as “Team Leaders” for L2@Mac participants (more on that later) which is something we would not have been able to do if we didn’t have a committee to start with! (A word of advice on the size of the group: there are 5 of us in ETG and we’ve found that to be the perfect number — enough to spread the work around, but not too many that booking meetings and getting things done becomes a problem.)

Leave yourself plenty of time to plan
We started talking about doing L2@Mac in August 2006. We launched in February 2007. While I can’t say that we devoted tons of time to planning in the early months (we really got down to it in November 2006), I will say that it took A LOT of time and energy to get where we needed to get to by launch date. Also, we launched the programme with a guest speaker (only the best: Michael Stephens!) and planning that event alone took a considerable amount of time.

Launch. Wait. Begin.
Our official launch was on February 1st but the programme didn’t begin until February 12th. At first we worried that staff enthusiasm might wane if we didn’t begin the programme right after the launch (Michael did a tremendous job of rallying the troops and we wanted to take advantage of that enthusiasm!), but in retrospect, I think those extra days were a good idea — it gave our staff time to think about what they were getting into (!) and I think we had more sign-ups because of it.

There is no perfect time to run the programme
If you’re at an academic institution, you probably understand where I’m coming from. We thought long & hard about when to do it: we ruled out the fall because, well, it’s THE FALL — the beginning of a new school year and our busiest term! While the summer might have seemed an obvious choice, we ruled it out on account of too many people being away during the summer and therefore missing out on a lot of what we had planned. So we settled on the winter term. Some of our participants (especially public service staff) told us that they were still too busy to do justice to the programme, but they also acknowledged that there is no perfect time, so they plugged along (bless them!). If I were to do it over, I might choose to do it between April and June (again, not perfect, but maybe a bit better than right during term).

Don’t reinvent the wheel
Obviously we modeled our programme on the one Helene built at PLCMC. We changed a few things and added some modules, but it was so great to be able to draw from an already successful programme and learn from their experience. Helene had the foresight and generosity to license her content under Creative Commons, so there is a huge number of institutions that have done/are doing their own versions of the programme. So there literally is no reason at all to reinvent the wheel!

Not everyone is self-directed and not everyone learns the same way
One of the reasons I was drawn to Helene’s idea was that it was a completely self-directed programme — learners interacted with the content on their own, they worked on the activities in a self-directed way, and they took responsibility for their own learning. All good things. However, I knew early on that an entirely online programme would not work for our staff. I also knew that since our staff are all located in close proximity, we could definitely use that to our advantage. So we did two things:

1. we organized all participants into “learning groups” & assigned each group a team leader (a member of ETG);
2. we held drop-in sessions in our teaching lab to give staff the opportunity to leave their desks for an hour, come to the lab to work on the activities for the week, ask questions, and get help from their peers.

We started the drop-in sessions during a 2 week break we had right in the middle of the programme, and they were so well received that we decided to hold at least a couple of drop-ins a week until the end of the programme.

Give participants time to catch up
That 2-week break in the middle of the programme was essential. Initially we scheduled one week (again, not wanting enthusiasm to wane), but we changed it to 2 weeks when we realized that some participants were stressing out over not getting the activities done. Everyone really appreciated the 2 weeks off and most participants caught up as a result of the break. We also had 2 weeks of “play time” scheduled at the end of the programme, which ended up being “catch-up time” for many, without which we would have had far fewer participants complete the programme.

Find a content balance
I’m not sure how to go about doing this but the lesson here is that it’s important to NOT try to do too much with this programme because that will just stress out your participants (especially the less tech-inclined). But, at the same time, I think it’s important to build enough into the programme to keep people interested and engaged, especially those who are ahead of the pack in terms of using emerging technologies. How to reach this balance? I think 2 things helped us get there:

1. we kept our minimum requirements low and non-threatening;
2. we offered “enrichment” exercises and further reading options for those who were coasting through.

I think there was probably more we could have done to keep things interesting for those who were already comfortable with the technologies — such as giving them a “guest blogging” role on the L2@Mac blog to share their knowledge and enthusiasm, for example.

Enticements are…enticing!
While I’d like to think that so many of our staff members would have signed up EVEN IF we didn’t promise them an MP3 player at the end of the programme (and a chance to win a laptop), the truth is that we probably would have had fewer sign-ups and completions! So, yes, enticements are a good thing.

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Whew, sorry for the length! I might add to this post if I come up with anything else, but this pretty much it for now. If you’ve read this far (!), chances are that you’re planning a Learning 2.0 programme yourself, so feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about what I’ve said here or about our programme in general!

Nice, isn’t it? It’s an interface that we’re pretty proud of (I’m on the UI group) and there’s quite a bit of functionality that makes it far sweeter than what we were used to. Some tidbits:

• Our catalogue used to be called “MORRIS” but we dropped the name in favour of, well, “Library Catalogue” (complete with Canadian spelling, of course). We did this based on the fact that we’re pretty much over cutesy names for search tools, but also based on feedback from users.
• It’s browsable like never before, but then that’s what we’ve come to expect from Endeca-powered search, right? The guided navigation on an average search results page has increased functionality enormously, it truly does make searching (and finding!) a pleasure. The interface you see when you first visit the catalogue page also has multiple browsing options, everything from subject, to language, to author, to location (and more). Personally (and this is just my opinion), I’m still torn over the decision to present all those options right up front (before a search has been entered), mostly because I’m not sure that giving users more options is necessarily a good thing. On the other hand, guided navigation is one of the selling points of an Endeca-powered search in the first place, so it seems a shame not to present those options wherever possible. For now, we’ve decided on the latter, mostly based on use case scenarios, but, like I said, I’m still torn – is it useless clutter or useful functionality? I’m looking forward to usability testing to inform this one (we’ve done a bit, we plan to do more).
• One word: typeahead. When the user starts typing a search term, suggestions appear below the search box in drop-down menu format. The suggestions are culled from title, author and subject MARC fields. It’s super useful, but we still need to tweak a couple of things (there’s a tiny bit of lag; we have to re-look at prioritizing the queried fields so that the most suitable suggestions rise to the top; and a couple of minor design issues). The other concern is that during the minimal usability testing we did do, we observed one user waiting for the typeahead suggestions to come up before hitting the “GO” button (or the “Return” key), which made us think that maybe he didn’t realize that he could go ahead and execute the search even if nothing (or nothing appropriate) appeared in the typeahead menu. This might be something that can be cleared up with a couple of design tweaks (adding the word “Suggestions” to the top of the typeahead suggestion list, for example), and will also probably be informed by more usability testing.
• Another word: AJAX. Clicking on any title in the results list will bring up an AJAX layer that contains all the bibliographic data for that item. The cool-factor here is high, but how usable is it? We’re still not sure (or maybe it’s just me who isn’t sure). Currently, we’ve got the layer coded such that it will disappear after a few seconds when you mouse away from it, which can be either extremely useful or annoyingly frustrating. On the other hand, I’m not sure that requiring a click to close the layer is the way to go either (there is a click-to-close button at the top-right corner of the layer for those who don’t want to wait). Then there’s the design element – does it clutter up the screen too much? Would a lighbox effect be useful at all or would that be too over-the-top design-wise? Still work to be done here obviously, and we’ll likely run it all through (you guessed it) usability before making any final decisions.
• Search within results: how did we ever live without this feature? I find myself asking this question every time I help a user with a catalogue search. We’re still experimenting with the placement of the “search within results” function (you have to perform a search to see where we’ve placed it), but in terms of functionality, I pretty much can’t live without it.

Many of these tweaks, as well as more usability testing obviously, will happen over the next few weeks/months, so it’s still very much a work in progress. If you get a chance to give it a whirl, do pop back here and leave a comment, we’d love to know what you think!

• La Grange Park Library
• Lansing Public Library – syndicates their del.icio.us feed right on their home page (along with their blog feed)!
• Maui Community College Library – syndicates their feed on their “About” page, under the heading “Our Current Interests”. Sounds like a library with living, breathing human beings at work. Imagine! (note: they’re also on MySpace)
• San Mateo Public Library – links organized in Dewey bundles!
• Seldovia Public Library – syndicates their feed in their blog sidebar.
• Thomas Ford Memorial Library – syndicates their feed on a neat little links page.

I had a couple of people email me/comment about using social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and Furl to collect and share resources amongst staff, which is another great use of the technology, in my opinion. At my library, I co-chair our Web Team with a colleague and since we both do a lot of scouring and hoarding of links, I set up a del.icio.us account as a central location for those links. We’ve got the feed syndicated on a couple of our Web Team pages for all to see (internally, the pages are on our Intranet), and we’ve shared the login details with the rest of the Team in the hope that they will post the results of their web meanderings too. As far as I’m concerned, del.icio.us is easily the simplest, quickest, and most efficient tool out there for this sort of information sharing.

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.