Tag: l2

Twenty-three 2.0 tasks for librarians

Posted on by jessamyn

I saw it at Wired and the Chronicle of Higher Education. I read about it on Everything is Miscellaneous. They’re talking about 23 Learning 2.0 Things, a little blog post with a big impact.

The idea is simple and easily explained: “23 Things (or small exercises) that you can do on the web to explore and expand your knowledge of the Internet and Web 2.0.” Helene Blowers is a librarian, or rather the Public Services Technology Director for the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County. The project as outlined is a two month project, so you have about eight weeks to learn about two things a week. Best of all, it’s all available on the web, via an easy to read and understand hyperlinked blog, so you can try it out at your organization. Christine MacKensie, the director of the Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne, Australia (who did a four month version of the program) makes a great point in the Wired Article “The last thing we want is for people to come into our libraries and ask about Flickr or Second Life and be met with a blank look…. And they certainly won’t now.”

My two Australian talks

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m making use of the wifi here at the Convention Center to make sure my talks are online. Both have been updated, these versions are shorter than similar versions I’ve given before. Thanks to everyone at the LocLib conference for your hospitality, attention and collegiality.

I’ll take Manhattan!

Posted on by jessamyn

I gave a two hour talk and a two hour workshop of sorts at that Manahttan Public Library in Manhattan, Kansas on Monday. It was rally fun and, I think, well received. I got to talk about all sorts of 2.0 stuff including all my favorite nerdy sites and even got to talk about the scrotum dustup from a few days ago. My talk is online here: Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Librarian 2.0, and why it’s no big deal, seriously. It’s a big expansion of my previous 2.0-ish talk that that I did at NELA last year. Big thanks to Carol Barta for giving me a cozy place to stay at her house and to Fred and Sue for picking me up at the airport and Linda for organizing it all. Also thanks to Donna for organizing the early morning coffee klatsch in “the room” and to everyone else for coming. I’m not much of a morning person, but I was glad to make an exception. I hope to be back in Kansas at least once or twice more this year.

three hours at the library

Posted on by jessamyn

I spent a few hours at the library yesterday, somewhere between three and four. Almost all of this time was spent doing Windows updates to the three semi-public machines. The library got broadband a few months ago and updates were basically impossible before then. So I came in, unlocked the Centurion Guard (quick aside, can anyone tell me if this is really in any way more secure than a good software firewall like Deep Freeze if you’re just using the machines as PACs?) and did the updates which involved downloading the updater, doing an express install of the most urgent updates, and then doing a more complete install of the 53 updates that had been made available since the last update.

I also installed Firefox on the exec and patron-facing profiles, did some helpful configging of it, taught the librarian how it was different (tabs!), and hid Internet Explorer as much as I could without uninstalling it since I still need it for more Windows Updates! While all these downloads were happening, I ordered a $40 wireless router, replaced the “you can not IM here” sign with one that said “Use Meebo for IM” and explained to the librarian how Meebo worked, and even used it to IM with someone the librarian already knew, who happens to be a local buddy of mine.

Since the downloads were still going on, I gave the librarian and the trustee I was working with a pep talk about the importance of having a website and my firm assessment that once we built a little website, most of the maintenance and updating could be done by them. The library was a little hub of activity the entire evening. 1,300 people live in the town and probably twenty of them came into the library in a three hour period. I got introduced to almost all of them.

Nothing else really to add here except that a lot of this work just fell under the heading of 1) good advice and 2) deferred maintenance. Neither of them always seems like the best way of spending your limited time and money. Yet at the same time, the whole “getting to yes” part of library tecnology may be, at the end of the day, the most important part of a solid technology foundation.