(CNN) — A lone gunman is dead after police said he killed at least 21 people Monday during twin shootings on the Virginia Tech campus — the worst school shooting incident in U.S. history.
As I’m sitting here at Computers in Libraries, I’m wondering if there are librarians here from V Tech, and how they can possibly continue to be here with this happening on their campus. I don’t know how I would deal hearing something like this about UTC from afar.
Presentation and handouts available at librarian.net
Firefox is open source, standards, compliant, cross platform
NB: Jessamyn is a great speaker…you can get some from the presentation, but she’s great in person
Demos how to install a Firefox add on: Google Favicon
Adding a keyword to a search field, allowing you to search the form/site from the address bar using only a keyword
Greasemonkey! Does as sorts of fun scripty stuff including removing ads and pressing buttons for you.
Our heirarchical organizations may not survive the web 2.0/library 2.0 shift.
2.0 tech is changing the way we think about when we work, where we work, and how we work
We have become more distributed in our tools, more collaborative, etc…but not in our expectations or work hours.
Organizational change: nothing is more difficult. it is fundamentally about making choices and changes, and both are scary
Org. Structure
Stability signals staleness and death
Clarity dissolves conflict
Authority and power is increasingly associated with the people that know and understand the 2.0 principles
2.0 Leadership
Make the invisible, visible
Make the intangible, tangible
Most of the time, most of the people do what they do best.
Lee Raine from the Pew Internet & American Life Project
Web 2.0
Asked by the Pew American Life to not advocate for anything…simply collect information.
“I adore librarians”
What is web 2.0? Show’s the “Ask a Ninja” Podcast episode. “That is web 2.0”
6 Hallmarks of Web 2.0 that Matter to Libraries
1. The Internet has become the computer
2. More than half of teenagers have profiles on social sites like MySpace or Facebook: The social comes to the virtual.
3. Even more internet users are accessin the content created by others
4. Many are sharing what they know and what they feel online and that is building conversation and communities
5. People are sharing their expertise and resources online
6. Online Americans are customizing their online experience
5 issues libraries must struggle to address
Here is the Quicktime of my presentation from last night to the Chattanooga Area Library Association on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0. While a small crowd, they were very interested in what we’re doing at MPOW to try and move ourselves into a more 2.0 mindset and process.
Thanks to Jessamyn, from whom I borrowed the kitty scared image and the general “Don’t fear the user” concept. I briefly considered just using her slideshow and talking over it, because she puts things together so well.
Warning: this is the full-size QT, so be warned.
Next week I’ll be heading out to Crystal City, VA to attend CiL 2007. It’s the first conference in many moons that I don’t have a presentation or other formal commitment to attend. This means, of course, that I have completely overbooked my time in sessions, because there is so damn much good stuff. Plus, I’ll get to catch up with lots of good friends.
But, if you are attending, and you want to catch up with me, take your pick as to calendar format:
The last part of my day was spent whipping up a couple of newspaper ads for the Student newspaper here on campus, the Echo. Since I’m pretty happy with them, I thought I’d share:
The survey is for faculty and students here on campus, so don’t go running trying to win the iPod, gang. đŸ™‚
Just an idea that others might find useful…after participating in the remarkable 5 Weeks to a Social Library course offered by my heroes, I began to think of ways to re-use all of the incredible content.
As you may have noted, at MPOW we’re hiring two new librarians. Hiring new librarians is always accompanied by some type of orientation process. The Head of Reference and I are going to collaborate on the orientation process, and the plan is to use some of the 5 weeks presentations as introductions to tools we’re using and concepts we’re interested in pursuing. Here at UTC we’re using WordPress, Joomla, RSS, del.icio.us, GAIM, and the plan is to implement other things discussed during 5 weeks…why reinvent perfectly good introductions and explanations of those tools?
I’m thrilled with the thought that all of this content can be used for free, and for any number of things…learning takes many forms. I know that it’s going to save me enormous amounts of time at MPOW. Thanks to the organizers, and also to the participants who graciously allowed your work to be licensed for reuse.
My hands have been far from idle these last few days. In fact, they’ve been nearly frantic…you certainly wouldn’t know it was Spring Break around here. I know that my life has gotten overly full when I realized that I didn’t realize that I hadn’t written here in days. Days!
In no particular order, here’s some of what’s keeping me up at night.
The complete overhauling of our Database pages at UTC. We’re moving away from this organization eventually (going to be aiming for a more holistic presentation of our informational sources) but for the interim we still needed to update to the new website look and feel. While I was at it, we worked up some better ways to present the information, like collapsing the database descriptions using javascript. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. The pic is of the old page, the new one can be seen here. Throw me some feedback if you have any.
The LITA election podcasts have started, and over at LITAblog things are getting good and busy. Some really amazing content in the podcasts…I’m thrilled with the way they turned out. I heartily recommend people head over and listen or subscribe to them before voting for LITA officers. Congrats go out to Jane, Karen, and David for helping make this a reality, and to the existing LITA officers for supporting it. More podcasts to come from LITA, so stay tuned to LITABlog for those…we’re hopefully going to seriously up our audio/video capture of portions of ALA Annual this year.
The launching of the first official Lupton Library blog. I’m not linking to it, and it’s not google-able, because it’s designed to be an internal communications device…we’re trying to reduce the number of emails that get sent around updating people on status of things. Plus, its handy that it’s searchable and categorizable and such, so that we can return to it and see that, for instance, our printing system has been down 3 times this week. The goal is to get people familiar with seeing/using a blog, and the move forward more aggressively with a public one.
On top of the above projects, its Goal/Evaluation time around the old UTC. This is a hard year for me to evaluate, as I’ve officially had three positions this year, and my goals I wrote 12 months ago seem less than appropriate now. Oh, and, of course, today was the application review date for our two open positions, so I have stacks of applications to look at.
I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to technology usage. While we are using a blog (WordPress, of course) as an alert system, I made some concessions to existing technology usage and comfort. For instance, rather than teach everyone in the library the blog interface, as simple as it may be, I set up the blog so that it can be posted to via email (and only from the email addresses of our faculty and staff). In this way, there’s no learning curve for use…simply add the blog to your address book, and send away. It’s a bit of a hack (using Postie for WP and a cron job to force Postie to grab the pop email) but it works.
My question is: when does helping people move into the realm of enabling? Is there a point where, in moving forward, you risk leaving people behind, and how does that get managed in your organization? Libraries haven’t had to deal with this issue for very long…as I said to someone today, prior to the online catalog, libraries really hadn’t changed significantly in a long, long time. There are plenty of librarians who made it through that change…how was that handled, and did you have people who just refused to move away from the card catalog? Did you just have to remove the catalog to get them to move on, and how was that handled politically?
And after all that, what I should have really been doing was writing my due-all-too-soon book chapter. *sigh*
9AM Tell Me What You Think a ‘Book’ Is
Patron: Ummm, I’m looking for a book.
Librarian: Okay, well, do you know what it’s called?
Patron: No.
Librarian: Do you know who wrote it?
Patron: No.
Librarian: Are you just hoping that we have some sort of book?
Patron: Yeah.
Librarian: You know you’re in a fuckin’ library, right?Austin Public Library
Austin, Texas