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All you librarians out there, look at the cool Web 2.0 learning program the Allen County Public Library is doing for its staff!

The ACPL in Fort Wayne, Indiana has been running an amazing Web 2.0 program called “Geek Out, Don’t Freak Out” since March 29, 2006 for the staff.

Here is the information and the very first classes that were run at the ACPL last year:

Geek Out, Don’t Freak Out!
Last Wednesday of each month
8:00-9:00 am

What’s this all about? The Digital Collaborative has been talking about ways to help interested staff feel more comfortable with new technology, and we’d like to try a new idea. It’s part training session, part question and answer period, and part test drive: we plan to give a short presentation on the topic of the month and then allow time for questions, discussion, and experimentation. The goal is for you to see if technology will help make your job easier, and let you off the hook if it doesn’t. No registration is necessary; just show up if you can make it and join the (geeky) fun!

Episode 1: The Joy of Firefox
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
8:00-9:00 am
Genealogy Reading Room
Main Library, 3rd Floor

You have this new browser icon on your desktop — so what? Why use it instead of what you already know? We’ll talk about some of the features in Firefox that you might find beneficial, and give you a chance to see what the big deal is.

Episode 2: What’s So Simple About RSS (really simple syndication)?
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
8:00-9:00 am
location TBA

RSS is a way to keep track of updates to a website without having to go and check the site. This isn’t such a big problem with just a couple of favorites, but if you’re regularly reading a dozen blogs, and you want to keep track of headlines, and you want to see when new stuff is added to the Librarian’s Internet Index, RSS can make your life easier.

Episode 3: Blog Boot Camp
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
8:00-9:00 am
location TBA

ACPL has a blog. ACPL has bloggers.
Get practical information on how and why to blog for the library.

And the sessions have been ongoing since then! Here is a link to the latest set of classes (taken from the ACPL IT Blog - Innovation Through Technology). And here is the schedule. Doesn’t the ACPL sound like a fun and innovative place to work?!

Episode 13: More Tasty Del.icio.us
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
8:00-9:00 am
Main Library, Meeting Room B

Access your bookmarks from any computer, tag them, and share them with the world. Good for home (bookmark that page you want to get back to when you have more time), and good for work (share your favorite sites with other staff).

Upcoming sessions will be on the last Wednesday of each month. Here’s what’s on the schedule:

Rerun! Episode 5: My Friend Flickr
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
8:00-9:00 am

Digital photography makes it so easy to document your life, and Flickr makes it just as easy to organize and share your images with the world. We show you what Flickr is, how it works, and how you can use it at home and at the library.

Episode 14: YouTubeTorial
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
8:00-9:00 am

Find cool stuff on YouTube. Put cool stuff on YouTube. It’s even easier than you think!

Episode 15: Let’s Play
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
8:00-9:00 am

Why should our patrons (or your kids) have all the fun? Come check out the world of gaming at the library, and try your hand at Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, and Wii Bowling, among others.

~Susan Mellott

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Stephen Abram, noted Library 2.0 speaker and Vice President of Innovation for SirsiDynix and Chief Strategist for the SirsiDynix Institute will be at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana to speak to the ACPL staff on the Top 10 Strategies for Library Success and a public speech on Library 2.0 in the Real World on September 19, 2007 at the ACPL Downtown Main Library Auditorium. Follow the link above for more information about Stephen Abram. Here is an overview of each session.

The Top 10 Strategies for Library Success

Session 1: 8 am – 9 am Auditorium Main Library (ACPL staff only)

“Now that we are well into the new Millennium, what are the top ten issues facing libraries and the library profession? What are the top strategies we need to employ to ensure our success in our communities and learning institutions? Will advertising driven search engines really win the hearts and minds of our customers? Are our collections right for today or will use of Google’s vault of digitized books grow wildly? Are we ready for the next round of technology and social change? Will our local and national cultures be overwhelmed by generic world services?”

A Tech Forecast: Library 2.0 in the Real World

Session 2: 11 am – noon (Open to general public and ACPL staff)

“RSS, YouTube, Blogs, Wikis, Facebook, MySpace, and more! There is a global conversation going on right now about what will the next generation of the web be like? It’s happening largely under the meme of Web 2.0. It’s the McLuhanesque hot web where true human interaction takes precedence over merely ‘cool’ information delivery and e-mail. It’s about putting information into the real context of our users’ lives, learning, research and play. Concurrently, a group of information professionals are having a conversation about the vision for what Library 2.0 will look like in this Web 2.0 ecosystem. Some are even going so far as to talk about Web 3.0! Web 2.0 is coming fast and it’s BIG! What are the skills and competencies that Librarian 2.0 will need? MySpace and Facebook are just the tip of the iceberg! Come and hear an overview of Web 2.0 and a draft vision for Library 2.0 and an opinion about what adaptations we’ll need to make to thrive in this future scenario.”

(Note: you can substitute “concept” for “meme” and “media-rich” for “McLuhanesque” if you are like me and don’t really understand those terms)

Here is the Public Service Announcement (on YouTube, of course!) about Stephen Abram’s upcoming visit by Sean Robinson, Head of Information Technology at the Allen County Public Library.

I am really looking forward to it and I will definitely be there!

~Susan Mellott

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Check out these Library Genius 2.0 T-shirts for the Allen County Public Library Learning 2.0 program, found on this post from the ACPL’s Innovation Through Technology Blog. Kay Gregg designed these shirts and all the icons associated with each Learning 2.0 course completed! They will be used to kick-off the ACPL Digital Collaborative’s Learning 2.0 presentation. Here is Kay modeling one of the new t-shirts:

Look at this post from ACPL’s IT blog on Library 2.0 Bling for a closeup of each icon. and here is a picture of the Learning Video 2.0 button.

For more information on the ACPL’s Learning 2.0, check out these posts from the ACPL Innovation Through Technology blog. And for what ACPL’s Digital Collaborative is creating for Learning 2.0, check out the ACPL DC Wiki’s “21 Things“. Click on the links to see what each person has created. This wiki is a working wiki for the Digital Collaborative and is constantly being updated.

I want to be a Library Genius 2.0!

~Susan Mellott

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Found on this post from the Atlantic Free Press was a heartbreaking and thought-provoking article by Chip Ward, former Assistant Director for the Salt Lake City Public Library System. And if you want read all of it (which I highly recommend), please go to the Atlantic Free Press post where the full article can be found. Here are also a couple of posts that point to this article that have more thoughts on the matter. This one from Library Journal and this one from the Puget News.

Excerpts from “What They Didn’t Teach Us in Library School - The Public Library as an Asylum for the Homeless” by Chip Ward.

“Ophelia sits by the fireplace and mumbles softly, smiling and gesturing at no one in particular. She gazes out the large window through the two pairs of glasses she wears, one windshield-sized pair over a smaller set perched precariously on her small nose. Perhaps four lenses help her see the invisible other she is addressing. When her “nobody there” conversation disturbs the reader seated beside her, Ophelia turns, chuckles at the woman’s discomfort, and explains, “Don’t mind me, I’m dead. It’s okay. I’ve been dead for some time now.” She pauses, then adds reassuringly, “It’s not so bad. You get used to it.” Not at all reassured, the woman gathers her belongings and moves quickly away. Ophelia shrugs. Verbal communication is tricky. She prefers telepathy, but that’s hard to do since the rest of us, she informs me, “don’t know the rules.” ”

“Ophelia is not so far off after all — in a sense she is dead and has been for some time. Hers is a kind of social death from shunning. She is neglected, avoided, ignored, denied, overlooked, feared, detested, pitied, and dismissed. She exists alone in a kind of social purgatory. She waits in the library, day after day, gazing at us through multiple lenses and mumbling to her invisible friends. She does not expect to be rescued or redeemed. She is, as she says, “used to it.”

She is our shame. What do you think about a culture that abandons suffering people and expects them to fend for themselves on the street, then criminalizes them for expressing the symptoms of illnesses they cannot control? We pay lip service to this tragedy — then look away fast. As a library administrator, I hear the public express annoyance more often than not: “What are they doing in here?” “Can’t you control them?” Annoyance is the cousin of arrogance, not shame.

We will let Ophelia and the others stay with us and we will be firm but kind. We will wait for America to wake up and deal with its Ophelias directly, deliberately, and compassionately. In the meantime, our patrons will continue to complain about her and the others who seek shelter with us. Yes, we know, we say to them; we hear you loud and clear. Be patient, please, we are doing the best we can. Are you? ”

Chip Ward recently retired as the assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library System to devote more time to political activism and writing. He has led several successful campaigns to make polluters accountable and to stop nuclear utilities from turning the Great Basin Desert into a radioactive sacrifice zone. His books, Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land, encourage others to embrace their roles as citizens and to act now to restore a democratic culture to America.

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Check out these libraries! Can you imagine actually being in one? They are amazing. UPDATE: I have recently had difficulty seeing their page, they might be having problems. If you can’t see that page, you can look for the same pictures here on an art works for sale site. Look for ones labeled biblioteca for the libraries. The rest are pretty gorgeous too!

~Susan Mellott

p.s. don’t let the name of the article fool you, it is sort of a joke.

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Just for fun, I created an old-fashioned card catalog card for the book I had downloaded from baen.com/library using John Blyberg’s card catalog generator. You have to enter the data by hand (I copied the information from Amazon.com) but it makes a really fun graphic. With some programming, you can make a mashup that uses this. A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

Sean Robinson (my husband and head of IT Technology at the ACPL) created this book wall called Books we added to the catalog yesterday combining the new material checked in each day at the ACPL (Allen County Public Library) with data from Amazon. It shows pictures of the actual book covers for each book and if you click on a book cover, it will show you an old-fashioned card catalog for that book and information on it from Amazon (if the book is brand new, it doesn’t necessarily have review info yet).

Then you can click on “Look this up in our catalog” to see the ACPL card catalog information on that book like how many copies there are and if they are available and where they are located and do all sorts of neat things like add it to your list or put it on hold. You can also find more books by that author, more books with those topics or browse nearby call numbers (books that would be on the library shelf with this book).

Go check it out and play around with it. It is a great example of how you can combine Web 2.0 tools to create something new and exciting and useful.

For this and more innovative ways the Allen County Public Library uses Web 2.0, visit their Library 2.0 site: ACPLib2.0. ACPL Rules!

~Susan Mellott

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Per the World Public Library website: “July 4th to August 4th Download Your Selections From 500,000+ eBooks for Free.”

According to their site: “Hosted in World Public Library’s multi-terabyte server network is the world’s largest digital archive of PDF ebooks and edocuments.  Our collection hosts more than 500,000+ PDF ebooks and edocuments.  As a member you will have complete access to the entire collection.  Our collection is constantly growing and our projection is to reach 600,000 by fall of 2008″

Here is a link to their Facts, Questions and Answers page. According to their price sheet, it is $8.95 per year to become a member, or $2/year per FTE institutional rate (for public librarie, priced per number of cardholders - which could possibly be adjusted).

I downloaded the Northwind Trilogy by David Drake and Bedlam Boyz by Ellen Guon to check it out.  It downloaded quickly and I was able to save it to my hard-drive to read.  I did go to the public access page to do a search and got an error message, but I could browse collections and download from home page without any problems.  And I just did a search using the member search on the home page and it worked for me (but I couldn’t download), although I couldn’t really find anything I was looking for .

Another thing of note is that on the Baen Books site, they have a free library also of a selection of their books you can download in several different formats for free.  Both Ellen Guon and David Drake have free downloads of several of their books as well as many other authors.  I downloaded Sunrise Alley by Catherine Asaro in a very nice html format.

And of course, a search for free ebooks through Google turns up several more sites that I didn’t check out.  You can though!

So go “check it out”!

~Susan Mellott

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This was originally written to update my “About Me” page. But it turned into this. These are the posts that prompted this post - MLS and Library Technology, a post on Why require an MLS for library technologist about a post on code4lib regarding an MLS degree for library technology postings (which unfortunately is currently unavailable since all code4lib.org sites are down). And here is an interesting post about an opposite perspective called I Didn’t Get an MLS to do That and another about the MLS degree in general called The Embattled MLS in the Library Journal. Which begs another question about whether or not an IT degree should be a requirement for librarians. But that is a post for another day. Anyway…

I said I am a coder. But it is better to say I was a coder. I did love to code. But honestly, I’ve gotten less interested in it since I’ve retired. What I really love to do is to listen to what people want to do and then translate that into something that solves their problem and/or enhances their technology environment.

For as long as I worked, I was what was known as a Programmer/Analyst. That means that the majority of my time was spent conducting client interviews, learning the ir processes, creating client/IT teams to discuss what the goal is and then doing a lot of analysis and design to get to where they want to go. The coding, although fun, is the easy part.

I had to take a concept that someone had and translate it into something functional that transcends their original thought and turns it into a working, creative, useful application. You might not realize what this involves. Most of the time, people don’t know exactly what they want, they just know they want it. This is actually the best scenario. It is really harder when people think they know how to design what they want. There is a reason why there are special IT analysts/architects. We spent a lot of time and have a lot of experience designing technology solutions.

Just as people are experts in their own field such as financial organizations or non-profits or libraries, so are IT analysts experts at translating what someone else does into a technology based solution. And just as I could not tell you the formulas for calculating statistical risks for life insurance, neither would a risk assessor know how to take what they do and make it user-friendly and technologically innovative.

I think one of the problems organizations are having with going Web 2.0, is that they don’t recognize that they need a person who can look at their processes and design a Web 2.0 solution. I’ve done that for many, many years and I really find it surprising that other organizations (such as libraries) that say they are wanting to have an online presence and to go Web 2.0, don’t even seem to realize the need for someone with those skills.

I worked with various functions in life insurance most of my IT life. And I have little to no background in life insurance. It is not my field. But it never needed to be, nor should it have been. There were ample experts in all facets of life insurance that could determine the formulas needed and the results expected, and could take me through the processes. My expertise was knowing how to listen to what people want, to learn how they currently do it and to design a technologically progressive solution that goes beyond what they envisioned and yet still satisfies everyone and is not intimidating. It’s really a very complex job.

I have to confess, I find it funny (sad) that the IT positions for libraries all seem to require an MLS (master of library science) degree. That makes no sense to me. There are plenty of people with library skills and knowledge already in a library. What is lacking is anyone who is able to look at the processes from an IT design perspective and to pull all the areas and processes together into one, creative, innovative and functional design.

I also hear the arguments that you can’t talk to a librarian or understand a librarian unless you have an MLS. How can that make sense? I’ve talked to actuaries and lawyers and accountants and life risk assessors and all sorts of people with their own expertise and language and ways of thinking. Why would a librarian or academic or anyone else be any different? I’m not stupid. I think I can grasp how most jobs and functions work and I think I can talk to most kinds of people and be understood and understand them. And I know how to create a team that includes expertise from all areas so that everyone contributes in ways only they, with their knowledge, can.

Next time your or your organization are thinking about hiring an IT person, think about what you are trying to accomplish and what needs you have that you don’t have internally already. Then look for someone who can determine where you are, where you are going and how to get there in a way that includes everyone and appreciates their expertise while contributing their own expertise. Be understanding of each other and teach each other. Then sit back, let go of the reins and see how far you can go.

~Susan Mellott

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So politics and the presidential campaign is going 2.0. While I am certainly a strong proponent of this, it does raise the question that this is slanted towards the technologically advanced and/or those who have the means and knowledge to use the Web 2.0 technology. This potentially excludes large segments of the population. Many people who were not raised in the era of computers and PCs do not understand even what is available, much yet how to use it. This would seem to greatly lean towards and garner a younger audience then. And those who are older who do know the technology are probably those who work in technology and/or have had access to and knowledge of all the new Web 2.0 technology. Therefore, this would encompass a primarily white-collar, upper-class population and exclude those who have not had the means or did not work with technology.

I think this is one area where our school system and our libraries play a huge role. Our schools need to provide training and funding for every student to learn and be able to apply technology. And our libraries especially, can educate and enable everyone, regardless of age, ability or economic status. I think this is a direction that libraries need to go and I think they need to get the funding to do it. I don’t know that I think the libraries are where the sole responsibility for this lies, nor do I even know if they are necessarily the places that should take this responsibility ultimately. But I do know that if the Public Libraries don’t do it, there will be a large portion of the population that will be left behind.

I cannot think of a public organization / facility that could come anywhere near the ability that libraries have to reach and educate the public and to provide access for all people. I know what a difference it has made to have public computers in the libraries and when I see someone who probably isn’t sure where they will be sleeping that night, come in and sit down at a computer and and be the equal of anyone else, I am proud of what our libraries can give and this is something that I think we all need to encourage and promote and consider when funding is needed for our public libraries.

I find it interesting that of any or all of the public institutions that we have created, I can really only think of libraries as one that has the capacity to serve the entire public in so very many ways, regardless of age, means, ability or any differentiating quality.

And the only problem that someone might run into with using a library is that they have difficulty getting to the nearest branch. So I think it is very important for libraries to keep their small neighborhood branches, including (especially) those in poorer areas since they can serve a population that perhaps can’t easily get farther than they can walk. I do worry that the tendency may be to improve the branches in the richer areas and neglect the ones in the poorer areas, especially since the richer branches may be more used. But the poorer ones may be more valuable. Actually, I remember when the bookmobile used to come down our street. They are no longer running and I think that is a mistake. But this is fuel for another post
Anyway, along the digital divide lines, here is a post from the PBS.org teachers blog where after a June debate, the political candidates were asked about this. Here is a quote from that post “After the event, I had a chance to speak with four of the candidates about their perceptions about the digital divide and the role schools might play in bridging it. The lesson learned: it’s hard to get more than a sound bite when the candidates are in spin mode.” And here is a link to this very interesting post.

~Susie

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I have created my first YouTube video and it is of the community of Fort Wayne streaming into the Allen County Public Library for their fabulous Harry Potter Release party that was held 7/20/2007 from 9pm to post-midnight (at which time the lucky lottery winners could check out 1 of 200 copies of the final Harry Potter book).

It is a very sped up version of part of the people entering the ACPL when the doors opened at 9pm. The actual time it took just for the people who were waiting for the doors to open to get in was 10 minutes. I can’t imagine how many people that must have been.

Fortunately there were a lot of activities taking place on the Library Plaza (they started at 8pm) as well as inside. There was a band playing, games for the kids including the spiderweb maze, potions classes, costume shows and I believe there was even Potter Bingo.

ACPL, the community of Fort Wayne thanks you for all you do.

This is a pretty poor video, but it is my first one so I am sure I will get better. Anyway, enjoy!

People entering the ACPL at 9pm 7/20/2007 for the Harry Potter Release Party

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3nxu7Oaduw]
~Susie

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