“I’m a librarian. What I am trying to do is bring all of the world’s knowledge to as many people as want to read it. The idea of using technology is perfect for us.” Brewster Kahle gives a twenty minute talk about free culture and libraries and digitzation at TED.
Tag: talks
My flyby trip to the UP
UP in case you don’t know, stands for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I had been there before, but merely driving through, though I did manage to get my second highest bowling score of all time there (164!). This time I went up to do a half-day talk at the Upper Peninsula Region of Library Cooperation’s annual conference in Marquette, Michigan. I decided to add a few days to my trip since I rarely get to the UP and it’s lovely. Someone from MetaFilter noticed that I was going to be up near Michigan Tech and invited me to do a public talk there, so I got to take a nice drive out to Houghton Michigan and meet some folks there and see the public and MTU libraries. I took a few photos: here is the Portage Lake District Library. I’m still uploading my photos of the MTU archives. Thanks to everyone for showing me around.
My page of notes from the talks is here. I tried to go the extra mile and not just link to keynote and pdf versions of my talks but also hyperlink the specific sites I mentioned so that people could click through to them relatively easily. We’ll see how this goes. One of the things I enjoyed doing was checking out the digital archives that were available online: Keweenaw Digital Archives and the Upper Peninsula Digitization Center Collections. I love this photo for example, with all the people commenting on who the people in the photo actually are. I used this photo in one of my talks.
ARSL conference
I just got back from the Association of Rural and Small libraries conference where I gave a talk about using technology to solve problems in small libraries. I had a great time and I only wish I could have stayed longer because the people at that conference, they are my people. A lot of them are in rural areas with limited or no access to broadband, they have small budgets and often untrained staff and yet they’re being told that all teenagers are “born with a chip” and that technology is moving faster than any one person can keep up with, etc. It’s daunting. Being able to know what “normal” is becomes sort of important as you have to determine what’s appropriate for your library and for your staff.
I think about this specifically in terms of our library organizations and how they determine what normal is versus what end users think is normal. Not to point the finger at ALA too much but it’s not really normal in 2008 for a website redesign to take years. It’s not really normal in 2008 to speak in allcaps when you’re emailing people as the incoming president of your organization. It’s not really normal to have a link to customer service on the main page of your website be a 404. I’m aware that it’s easy to cherrypick little pecadillos like this about an organization that does a lot of things very right. However, I do believe that one of the reasons we have trouble as a profession dealing with technology is that we don’t have an internal sense of what’s right and what’s appropriate technologically-speaking making it hard for us to make informed decisions concerning what technology to purchase or implement in the face of a lot of hype and a lot of pressure.
I’m going to work today at the Kimball Library in Randolph Vermont (I fill in there sometimes) and the librarian-facing part of the Follett OPAC interface is becoming one of my favorite slides. It looks like it was designed for a Windows 95 interface, in fact it probably was, and just never revisted. It’s 2008. People can create a blog on Tumblr that’s 100% accessible and legible and nice looking in less than two minutes. Why do I have to click a 32×32 pixel image of … a raccoon mask? to circulate books. And why can’t we agree on what usable means?
talking trends to New York Librarians
I just got back from my first talk/workshop of the “school year” at NNYLN’s headquarters in Potsdam, New York. I did an expanded version of my VLA web trends talk and got to also plug Firefox and WordPress as decent open source tools. I also got to meet a lot of interesting librarians and take a beautiful drive through northern New York and Vermont. The notes for my talk are here: Web Trends & Whatnot. Getting the word trend in the title means that I get to talk about Rickrolling which is one of the tiredest memes in the Internet universe and yet 1) people there hadn’t heard of it 2) I still think it’s funny because I am (not so) secretly eleven years old.
where we get our information
I’m moving house this week, so I’m living out of my inbox more than usual.
I’ve been getting emails about a Library Hotline article I was quoted in, from my talk at ALA. I gave a presentation with Louise Alcorn as part of the PLA track at ALA. My talk was called “Six Things You Maybe Didn’t Know About Rural Technology” You can see the pdf as well as links to Louise’s presentations on this page, there’s some great stuff about technology for small libraries. It went well and was well-attended.
LH covered it well but they did use this one line “How many of you know that tax forms must be filed online next year? she queried the audience. Many didn’t” What I actually said was that for many libraries they must help patrons GET their tax forms online. Small misquote, no big deal. It’s even possible I misspoke. In any case, I only knew about this when I started getting emails. Often if I post something in error to librarian.net I’ll get a comment about it, maybe two. In this case, I got ten emails within maybe a week or two from librarians asking me about this, and looking for more information about what they thought was a policy they hadn’t heard of. I replied that it was an error and finally wrote to Library Hotline who graciously agreed to print a correction.
This sort of thing always reminds me that in many ways large parts of our profession still rely on print-only sources for at least some of their keeping current. I know that every time I get a copy of Computers in Libraries or School Library Journal I always think “Oh hey I should write about that on librarian.net” and am always sad to not find the content online and linkable.