The Civil Librarian

Starting in a Bind?

2010-03-08T08:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, David Siders of the Stockton Record published a well-written piece about the new City Librarian (that's me!) for the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library. The piece was titled, "Starting in a Bind". The "bind" refers to our current budget concerns which are very real. However, after one week on the job here, I can't help but feel optimistic. Why? Well, the current Library budget is down 20% from last year and staffing at the Library is down 34% in the same period. And that's a reason for optimism, you ask? Of course not. But! I am so, so impressed with the staff here at the Library. The level of enthusiasm and love these folks show for their work is inspiring. Sure these are difficult times financially but, as the old saying goes, "this, to, shall pass". In the meantime, the staff here aren't just going through the motions while hanging their heads low. People are excited about providing wonder library service to their communities. The Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library is an exciting place to be right now!

A New Beginning

2010-03-01T17:34:00.000-08:00

It's been a long one but I'm now wrapping up my first full day on the job as the City Librarian for the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library! This workday started like they all will for the foreseeable future: with a 45 minute drive from Sacramento south to Stockton through California's Central Valley (I have a feeling I'm going to be one of Stockton's biggest audio book customers!) followed by a couple of hours of orientation with the City of Stockton before I finally made it to the Library for real.

Having finally made it to my office, I met several very friendly and enthusiastic Library People, had a chance to catch my breath, and then the day started in earnest. I've been in meetings essentially for the past four hours! And judging by my calendar (it is seriously filling up FAST!), there will be lots more to come. I'm not a meeting hater, though; I am anxious to become familiar with the ins and outs of this library and this community and talking with those who have been here a while is the best way to do that!

The rest of this week has me meeting with plenty of folks from the branches, folks from other City divisions, and getting deep into planning for next year's budget. I'm looking forward to learning a ton and contributing in every way I can to this excellent library system!

Hello, Goodbye

2010-02-24T14:40:00.000-08:00

So it's here at last: my final day as an employee at Sacramento Public Library. The past three years have been super cool, tons of fun, and a wonderful learning experience so I'm kind of sad but I'm also very, very excited about what lies ahead. This coming Monday, I start work as the City Librarian for the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library!

Even though my job at SPL afforded me the opportunity to participate in an extremely diverse range of activities (personnel, budget, policy/procedure development, construction/renovation projects, staff development, digitization, etc.), the most enjoyable part of the work was easily the people with whom I've worked. SPL is lucky to have so many fun, creative, and enthusiastic people who are committed to the highest level of service to the community. I love that and have had such a good time with so many people here.

Luckily for me, I've heard from several of the folks I know who are past Stockton-San Joaquin County employees that my new place of employment is just as fun and enthusiastic a place to work! So, while it is sad to say 'good-bye' to old friends, it fills me with anticipation knowing that I'm walking into such a positive organization where I'll make many new friends with whom I'll work to continue the tradition of outstanding Stockton-San Joaquin County libraries!

Library Day in the Life 4

2010-01-25T13:45:00.000-08:00

It's that time again. Bobbi Newman's semi-annual mass blogging event, Library Day in the Life, is on for the fourth round. I participated in the first and third rounds, watching from the sidelines for round 2. This time, I'm participating again but only via my Twitter account. Per Bobbi's suggestion, I'll compile all of my tweets for #libraryday4 at the end of the week. Maybe it will be interesting to see what trends emerge from a week of tweeting about my
Sacramento Public Librar y-related activities.

Welcome to the Library

2009-12-02T10:42:00.000-08:00

Sacramento Public Library is lucky to employ some very creative and enthusiastic folks. Many of us are now exploring the possibilites presented by the use of video and I'd like to share a couple of cool examples.

First, Branch Supevisor Vicki Rondeau and the staff at the South Natomas Library used a Flip to create this very simple but fun video welcoming her community of users to the branch:

Vicki told me that this was just her first attempt at playing with the camera to see what it could do but I think this video is a great example of a simple orientation that any library could include on their website. I'm going to encourage Vicki to post this video to the South Natomas page of the SPL site.

And, at the nearby North Natomas Library, a teen volunteer was so excited about the branch's impending move into a brand new building that they shot this fun "before and after" video reminiscing about the old branch (housed in a couple of rooms in a high school) and showing off the interior of the new branch, too. I especially love the shot filmed while the teen sprinted alongside the beautiful bank of windows. Too cool!

Look for more cool videos on the SPL site as we put together short orientations to library services in several languages spoken around our community and some instructional screencasts, too.

The Way Back Machine

2009-11-11T17:19:00.000-08:00

So how did I spend Veteran's Day? Not terribly productively, I'm afraid. I did think a bit about some of the guys I spent time with in Iraq in 2003 but I didn't dwell on it. Instead, I kind of wasted time. I happened across a website yesterday called Internet Archive and came back today to see what I might find. This site has the potential to suck a lot of time from the aimless web surfer.

According the the website, Internet Archive is "building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public." In short, while the site provides access to a lot of cool stuff, the best part for me is what they call the "Way Back Machine"; it's a search that lets you see archived versions of websites. They claim to have 150 billion pages archived! Awesome.

So, I poked around a little and came up with a few interesting tidbits. Here's Google while they were still in beta on December 12, 1998:

I guess all search engines had to have exclamation points in the nineties. And did you know that the original URL was google.stanford.edu? I guess all the big search engines had to come from Stanford, too. Did you ever bookmark akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo? If so, you might have seen something like this site from October, 1996, two years after the company was founded:

I guess that was pretty high tech 13 years ago but it looks downright amateurish today. Though to be fair, both Google and Yahoo have remained relatively true to their earlier visions. Interesting how they've managed to simply rework something that worked to remain relevant without completely changing.

For a site that has completely retooled itself since the mid-nineties, take a look at this, from December, 1996:

Wow! I guess there really wasn't much focus on web design back then. This makes me marvel, really, at how quickly the field of web design has developed. Another interesting aspect of the archives is looking at how often a site was updated. On the White House site, 2004 had many, many more updates than 2003 or 2005. One might guess that that was a result of the presidential election.

I won't try to make too much sense, though, about how this site might actually have some intellectual value because I'm not a historian in any sense of the word. But it is fun poking around. I took a look at some of the old websites from libraries where I've worked and let me tell you we had some ugly ones!

Cleopatra's Sister

2009-11-09T12:25:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend I reminded myself why I think Penelope Lively is the best author of whom many Americans have never heard. As an aside, the link above points toward Lively's Wikipedia entry; you can take a look at her official homepage, too, but she's a vastly better writer than she is at appreciating good web design. So, with apologies to Ms. Lively for that criticism, I just read her 1993 novel Cleopatra's Sister after remembering how much I absolutely loved her 1987 Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger (which I've read twice and listened to once).

Similar to Moon Tiger in that both novels feature very independent, female British journalists who visits north Africa and experience intense and unexpected love affairs, Cleopatra's Sister differs from the earlier novel in every other way. From a structural and narrative standpoint, Moon Tiger is more complex moving forward and back in time over several decades while recounting the protagonists memories from the perspective of several different characters. Cleopatra's Sister is a simple third person narrative describing events over the course of several days as they occur.

Basics aside, Lively demonstrates in Cleopatra's Sister her facility for telling a story both in a manner that reads very quickly while also providing fascinating and believable insights into the characters about whom she writes. Told essentially as two novels in one, the first half of the story represents character development of the two protagonists as revealed through their earlier, failed attempts at meaningful relationships. While the detail is impressive and the opportunity to understand these people, Lucy Faulkner and Howard Beamish, through the intimate details of their lives is engrossing, the first half of the novel does nothing to prepare the reader for the abrupt pace of the story in the second half.

Fundamentally a thriller, the remainder of the novel recounts the treatment of Lucy, Howard, and a plane of travelers as they are taken hostage after an emergency landing in a ficticious African country experiencing severe civil unrest. It is within this context that Lucy and Howard meet and fall in love. And it is within this context that the primary theme of Lively's novel is understood.

Cleopatra's Sister opens with the line: "Howard Beamish became a paleontologist because of a rise in the interest rate when he was six years old". Throughout the novel, the reader experiences the utter randomness of life. Similar to the psychotic Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men as he demands that a store owner "call" his own fate by guessing heads or tails on a flipped coin that has "been traveling twenty-two years to get here", the characters in Cleopatra's Sister experience entire lives that have developed not from careful planning but only due to one chance event after another. Ultimately not as brilliant as Moon Tiger, Cleopatra's Sister is still a wonderful read that would make for a fantastic book club selection, as well.

Under the Dome!

2009-11-04T11:54:00.000-08:00

I admit to loving Stephen King. I don't care; I'm not ashamed of my horror-geekiness. And this is too cool:

A movie preview for a book! Under the Dome will be out on November 12th and I'm number two on my library's request list. Book review coming shortly thereafter...

m-libraries @ Internet Librarian 2009

2009-10-27T17:15:00.001-07:00

A couple of the workshops I attended today dealt with what has become a very hot topic of late: mobile site design for your library.

Should your library have one? Well, according to one speaker today, mobile devices will be the world's primary method for accessing the Internet in 2020. Unless you really believe that your local community is not going to ride that wave, the answer is yes, your library needs to start thinking about a mobile site. And studies have demonstrated that a successful user experience on your site is positively correlated with having a site that is designed specifically to be accessed on mobile devices. You need one.

What should be on your mobile site? Not everything that exists on your "normal" site. That's the short answer. As explained in one of the sessions, mobile sites shouldn't be designed for browsing; the reality of Internet browsing on mobile devices today doesn't support a lot of browsing. Thinking about your mobile site from a transactional standpoint makes sense. You users will want to find library hours, check their account, search for a book, get directions. Another study cited in one of today's sessions explained that 75% of users are willing to wait no more than 8 seconds for a page to load. 1 in 5 will wait 20 seconds. What does this say about what you have on your mobile site? It says include as few graphics as possible. Do everything you can to speed up the load time. And, for that matter, because the screens are so small, a bunch of text will look very dense; use brief sentences.

How do you design your mobile site? There are so many different platforms from which users are accessing the Internet on mobile devices that it's extremely difficult to design in such a way that your site will render the same on each device. This fact reinforces the need to stick with a simple design; the less complexity, the greater the likelihood of consistent rendering across platforms. But the diversity of platforms in use also suggests that you get feedback from your users when you're planning your design. Find out what they're using so you don't just focus on a design that works great on an iPhone but leaves 95% (or more) of your users dissatisfied with your shiny new mobile site.

The Future of Libraries and “Micro Interactions” @ Internet Librarian 2009

2009-10-26T18:01:00.001-07:00

I went to three workshops today and two of them were great. The third, it was alright. That's OK, though; there are always a few sessions that don't turn out to be as interesting as you'd thought they'd be. The first session of the morning was "Digital Library Landscape" by OCLC's Roy Tennant. As Roy explained, the time constraints of these sessions don't allow for a real in-depth investigation of any one issue affecting libraries so, for that reason, Roy presented the "30,000 foot" view of what's happening in libraries today. And it wasn't pretty either. He started with a slide that read, "Libraries are in imminent danger". What is that danger? Pointing to a 2005 study titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources, Tennant explained that the vast, and I do mean VAST, majority of people think automatically and almost solely of books when they think of the library. Beside the point that library folk know how inaccurate this perception is, what's the big deal if this is how we're perceived? Well, considering the rate at which books are being digitized and advances are being made in the development of electronic readers that folks can use to download books in their own home, our users' perceptions are apt to start at "the library is all about books" and end at "what do I need the library for, I can get any book I need without leaving the house". That's a bad situation. In fact, Tennant put it pretty bluntly himself when he said that "the value of libraries to society decreases as easy access to information increases".

And the fact remains that we are a few years away yet from the experience of really getting any book we want delivered automatically via the Internet onto a reading device that delivers a pleasant experience. However, right now there are tons of reasonable online experiences related to finding books but we all know that our library catalogs are not one of those reasonable experiences. Our catalogs stink compared to what folks get from non-library book searches (e.g. Amazon). Tennant said that our OPACs are nothing but a card catalog card on a screen. True enough. As an example of what he called the SOPAC (that's Social OPAC), Tennant showed the Darien Library catalog and emphasized the importance of including every opportunity possible in the OPACs for allowing customer participation of informal metadata. Allow and encourage ratings, reviews (also known as comments), and tags. And just as important, if not more so than creating a library catalog that encourages participation in the development of the library on the part of the users are our efforts (the one's we should be making, anyway) at "becoming essential in the new ecology"; inserting ourselves into the lives that our users are living outside of the library. We should syndicate our content so it the users don't have to come to us as often.

Of course, what we aren't trying to do is keep our users from visiting us which raises another point that Tennant emphasized. We should "be the place where stuff happens". We are always going to have books (and music and movies and magazines and…) but, if Tennant is right and we are going to lose a big share of our market on books, we need to do something. While Tennant didn't tell us what it is that we need to do specifically, he issued a good starting point: "You have to solve their problems. Once you solve their problems, you solve yours." So, the big question is what problems do we need to solve for public library users? I certainly don't have the answer but I sure intend to use this question as a method of framing my thinking when working on service improvements.

The second excellent workshop I attended today was "Micro Interactions, Conversations, and Customers" with David Lee King, Julie Strange, and Amy Kearns. For the most part, this session was another discussion of the utility of Twitter (though not entirely exclusively of other social networking tools) in libraries but the real message was more about the philosophy behind using social networking tools as additional routes for customer engagement rather than focusing on the tools themselves. Basically, to use David's term, a micro interaction happens anytime a library representative talks to a customer via website comments, wall posts, tweets, IM's, status updates, or even when we retweet something that might be of interest to other customers. As guidelines for jumping in and using these tools to foster micro interactions, David gave a several pointers; here's a few:

Say what's in your head – Don't worry about what you have to say; if you're thinking it (within reason!) and feel like sharing it, somebody will find it useful. Libraries' online presences really shouldn't be stuffy and formal. Speak in an authentic voice and you'll get authentic responses.
You have to give to get – This is the bottom line. If you don't add to the conversation, nobody is going to pay attention. Find something to say!
Ask and ye shall receive – Much like Bobbi Newman mentioned in an earlier session, a strong social network of likeminded professionals is an incredible resource. Develop your network and ask these folks your questions; they'll answer!

Amy and Julie followed David and talked more specifically about using Twitter to connect with your users. I found their three C's of Twitter, connections, collaborations, and conversations, to be useful in answering the questions of your library peers who don't understand the value that Twitter brings to the customer development table. With Twitter (and Facebook , Flickr, FriendFeed, etc.) we can create more "real" relationships with users (some of whom are and some of whom aren't frequent face-to-face visitors) by working with them to answer questions, solve problems, and just talk about what's going on in the community. Amy and Julie also mentioned Twitter's potential for "harnessing the hive" or crowdsourcing when you have a question. With Bobbi, David, and Amy and Julie zeroing in on this idea, it seems clear that Twitter is establishing itself as a tool we can all take advantage of for problem solving if we develop strong networks.

Internet Librarian 2009 Pre-conference Day 2

2009-10-25T17:43:00.001-07:00

I took it easy on the second day of the Internet Librarian pre-conference. I started the day with an awesome, fog-filled jog in Pacific Grove, and then visited the Monterey Public Library to get my official library card. I am an avowed library tourist so I get a card from the local library wherever I go in California (the public libraries might all be broke here but at least you can get a card anywhere in the state if you're a resident!). I will say that the customer service I received at the library was really quite excellent, which is always nice to see.

I only attended one workshop today but it was a good one: "Twitter: Enabling Customer Conversations" with Michael Sauers and Christa Burns from the Nebraska Library Commission and David Lee King from the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library. While the workshop was intended primarily for folks very new to Twitter, and thus provided some information with which I was already familiar, there was some good, new information, too. And listening to three different perspectives on the use of Twitter in libraries was just plain interesting.

Among the Twitter-related websites and platforms that were discussed, Hootsuite looks good (I actually have an account already but I have no idea when I signed up or what my log-in info is…) as a platform for Twitter because, while offering a lot of the robust features of the more well known Tweetdeck, it is entirely web-based meaning that those of us who can't download applications to our work computers (probably most of us?) can still use Hootsuite at work without a problem! One of the coolest features in Hootsuite is the ability to track click-through statistics on URL's included in tweets. I see a lot of use for this as Sacramento Public Library's Twitter account often features links to items in our catalog; knowing how effective this approach is would obviously be a good thing. Tweetstats is website that you can use to very easily generate some colorful graphic displays of your Twitter usage. Kind of fun to see the patterns of my usage. Another website, Tweetreach, is also potentially useful in tracking the effectiveness of specific tweets. The site will tell you how many people saw a given tweet, URL, or hashtag. I can see using this site as a means for evaluating the effectiveness of different types of tweets from the library. That is, are followers more likely to retweet a program announcement or a book recommendation?

David Lee King had some interesting comments about, too, about measuring the success of your library's Twitter presence. Most importantly, he said, was the need to plan your strategy before you even start using Twitter as a formal method for representing your library online. Beyond that careful planning, though, he also mentioned four different categories worth measuring once you've started:

Raw numbers – just tracking the numbers of folks you're following and how many are following you. Look for trends and think about what might be behind any trends you see. For example, if there was a sudden increase in the number of followers you attracted one month, try to correlate that growth with something else. That information will be useful developing a strategy to continue to grow your follower base.
Interactions – How often are the library's tweets being retweeted by followers? How often are followers direct messaging the library account? These are good indications of the value the community is finding in your message and the value they find in your organization. Again, pay attention to those retweets in order to determine what kinds of messages resonate with the community. Then keep talking about those things!
Sentiment – Another way for evaluating your library's value to the community is through measuring the sentiment of tweets about the library. There are tools out there that will help you to analyze how positive or negative the comments are that people are making about your library on Twitter. Here is a link to an article that reviews five such analyzers.
Stories – This is just anecdotal measurement. Keep track of the interactions with customers via Twitter that have really had a positive impact for those customers and include these stories in your reports to administration, to the Board, to the Foundation, to the local press, to whomever ought to know the positive and innovative things your library is doing!

Tomorrow marks the "real" start of the conference and I am looking forward to it!

Internet Librarian 2009 Pre-conference Thoughts

2009-10-24T19:33:00.001-07:00

Today was a great warm-up for the next several day's worth of library geek-out at Internet Librarian 2009! First I attended LibCamp Monterey at the Monterey Public Library and then a workshop on time management with Bobbi Newman and Brenda Hough. I also got to meet some cool people face to face (like Bobbi) who I've "known" via Twitter and Facebook but with whom now I'm enjoying the opportunity to actually get to know a little better. In fact, I also met several interesting folks for the first time today; I hope the rest of the conference is filled with as many interesting new people!

While I heard many thought provoking ideas and comments today, maybe my favorite take away from the day's sessions was a rather prosaic one. I think it was Brenda in my second workshop today who mentioned that there are three "stages" to time management:

Planning
In the Moment
Reflection

I like very much the idea of consciously including reflection as part of the process of any project, task, or experience. Perhaps this idea is attractive because it articulates for me something I already do but about which I wasn't aware. I think the reason I've taken to blogging in general is because it provides an impetus for me to reflect on ideas that interest me in some way. As I think through these ideas to the degree necessary to write a few coherent paragraphs, it helps me to internalize what I've learned. And I think taking the time to reflect on what I experience at professional conferences is the only way to really ensure I take something back to my job with me when I return (though I'd be happy to stay right here in Monterey if there were any way I could manage it!). So count a new dedication to be more thoughtful about my experiences as a first Internet Librarian benefit.

There were a few other tidbits from Bobbi and Brenda's session that I'm looking forward to trying out when I get home as methods for increasing my productivity, too. A potentially big one for me is the concept of just completely shutting down my beloved Outlook but for a two or three designated times a day. The idea here is that the little bell alerting me to a new incoming email will cease to pull my attention away from whatever project on which I'm working. But here's the problem: I love the little bell. I'm seriously like Pavlov's dog about the little bell. It isn't rare that I'll be walking away from my desk, here the little bell, and sit right back down to read whatever "urgent" message has just arrived. Seriously, I can see the point of the suggestion that I eliminate this distraction from my attention and I want to give it a try. I can already tell it won't be easy though; as I write this post, every time a Tweetdeck pop-up appears on my screen telling me that a new #IL2009 tweet was posted, I'm switching over to see what somebody had to say. If this post seems a little disjointed, now you know why. I guess that ought to be a lesson for me?

Bobbi said something else in the workshop that I found very interesting. As part of discussion about the merits of social networking in the workplace (not everyone in the session was convinced of the positive aspects of this), she said, essentially, that when you hire someone today, you're also hiring the collective expertise of everyone in their social network. In short, the argument I heard Bobbi making was that being part of a robust social network of professionals increases our value to our organizations as individuals. That's a really interesting concept that I need to think about a little more.

LibCamp Monterey, too, was a great time. Basically, it was just about twenty librarians (from all manner of libraries – public, academic, corporate, medical, law) having a conversation that flowed from one topic to the next for three hours. We touched on the idea of emerging technology librarians (shouldn't we *all* be following emerging technologies?), customers' expectation of librarians versus our perceptions of ourselves and the roles of different library employees, libraries as community "living rooms", concepts of roving reference, and the importance of being as transparent as possible in decision-making both to our users and to the members of the organization. That wasn't all of it but really just a sample. Perhaps one of the more striking comments from that session was that, as different as libraries are from one another (a corporate library is very much not a public library), we shared remarkably similar concerns, interests, etc.

Right now, as I should at a professional conference, I feel very energized about my profession and am looking forward to building on that enthusiasm over the next several days.

Internet Librarian 2009, Here I Come

2009-10-19T12:27:00.000-07:00

I'm finally making it to Internet Librarian! This conference has been on my must-see list since I became a librarian and, finally, I'm going to get there. Just because I'm super excited and I leave for Monterey in only 100 hours or so, I want to give a run-down of the workshops I plan on attending while there:

Saturday
*Library Camp Monterey @ Monterey Public Library

*Technology Strategy Planning

Sunday
*Technology Grants for Libraries

Monday
* Digital Library Landscape

* Digitizing in Action
Both of these workshops ought to be helpful now that SPL's Sacramento Room is in the very early stages of a digitization project.

* Micro Interactions, Conversation, & Customers
This will be my first presentation by David Lee King so I'm looking forward to that! With SPL really trying to engage our customers in this fashion, I hope to get some great ideas in this workshop. On a side note, while looking up the URL to King's blog, I just noticed how much my blog photo looks like his. That's kind of weird.

* 2.0 Too: Web Services for Underfunded Libraries

* Marketing Digital Collections
Even though this will be the fifth workshop of the day (that's a lot!), this should be really helpful as I try to make accessible our newly digitized materials.

Tuesday
* Dreaming, Designing, & Using Mobile Library Platforms
SPL recently launched our first iteration of our mobile site based, in part, on the Skokie Library mobile site. Skokie's R. Toby Greenwalt will be at this session and I'm looking forward to what he has to say.

* Putting Your Library on a Mobile Phone

One of the presenters at this workshop is Greg Carpenter of Boopsie. We are looking at Boopsie as a potential resource for our mobile catalog so I'm very interested in attending this workshop.

* Mobile Marketing

Now that we've launched our mobile site, I've been thinking a lot about how to both market the new site and use the site to market to new audiences. Hopefully I'll learn a little about both topics here.

Wednesday
* Every Library Should Have a Sandbox to Play In

SPL's recent 27 Things program demonstrated that our staff is interested in trying new things. I'm hoping to get some ideas about how to institutionalize our organizational learning here.

* Persuasion, Influence & Innovative Ideas

Piggybacking of the previous workshop, new ideas often meet with a lot of opposition and I'd like to learn how to better deal with that in this workshop.

* 23 Things for Communities

I've already decided that SPL *really* needs to host a public version of the 23 Things so I am *really* excited to see this topic as an option. And I'm looking forward to seeing the Librarian By Day present, too.

I'll be blogging about much of what I see and hear at the conference so, if you're interested, come back and see how the conference goes.

Why Should a Library Use Twitter? Because the Customers Are!

2009-10-14T18:10:00.001-07:00

I've mentioned before how much fun I'm having participating in the development of Sacramento Public Library's online presence (largely via our Twitter and Facebook accounts) and something just happened that only reinforces my belief in social networking as a boon to our efforts both to broaden and make more meaningful our contact with our library users. At the end of the day today, I was browsing through the latest results from the RSS feed from my Twitter search for the word "library" within 25 miles of Sacramento. I came across this tweet from @brownthumbmama:

"Email fr library: books are in! Go to library: closed today for staff training. #FAIL"

Yes, it's true, the Library was closed for our annual Staff Training day. We did our best to notify folks in advance via signage, our website, and postings both on Twitter and Facebook. Nonetheless, not everyone got the message and we had at least one disappointed customer. Not cool! In the best tradition of using Twitter to engage our customers, I responded with an apology that @brownthumbmama kindly retweeted. Nice. Even nicer, though, was what I discovered when I clicked through to her profile, saw the link to her blog and was treated by this absolutely awesome tribute presumably referring to Sacramento Public Library! Even the comments on the post left by other readers are positive about the Library.

Besides the pleasure of seeing the community's fondness for the Library on display, I love this because it gives credence to the notion that its important for the Library to work at developing our online presence. There are lots of folks "out there" online talking about us; by participating in those discussions we learn more about our users while having the opportunity to respond within the online network of library users when someone has a less-than-perfect library experience.

Staff Learning @ the Library

2009-10-14T16:00:00.001-07:00

Sacramento Public Library held its annual Staff Training Day today and it was a great time! Folks from 27 branches across the county as well as all of our important support departments came together at the Central Library to meet, eat, hear an exciting keynote from our new Library Director Rivk ah Sass, and most importantly, learn from one another in an impressive series of workshops throughout the day. Workshop topics ran the gamut from computer and database training sessions, customer service-related courses, retirement planning, programming ideas, project management skills, supervision techniques, volunteer coordinating, ergonomics, and my favorite, the technology petting zoo!

Judging by the turnout, I wasn't the only one who loved the petting zoo, either! Check out the turnout in this shot:

SPL's Digital Services Library Megan Wong put together an exciting session that let people get their hands on a wide variety of tech toys. There were digital cameras, flip video cameras, a Skype set-up, a magic jack, a netbook, an iPod Touch, a Kindle and a Sony eReader, Guitar Hero, Nintendo DSI's, a Wii, and even a robotic lawn mower (though I'm not sure how that one figures into the library setting)! I was really excited to see the enthusiasm that exists at the Library for learning about new technologies as evidenced by the turnout for this program; even more impressive to me, though, was how familiar so many of the attendees were with most of what we had to offer. The staff at SPL are really a pretty tech savvy bunch!

Sacramento Public Goes Mobile

2009-09-29T14:10:00.000-07:00

A while back, I shared on this blog some of my thoughts about the m-library. The m-library referring to library websites that are specifically designed for use on mobile devices, that is. Since then, Sacramento Public Library's Web Developer, Michael Strange, and Digital Services Librarian, Megan Wong, have been working together to design a mobile friendly site for our customers. Today, they've launched our first go-round; you can check it out on your mobile device simply by pointing your browser to www.saclibrary.org!

For SPL's initial foray into sites designed specifically for mobile devices, we really wanted to keep things simple. Because the variety of mobile platforms (and the physical size of their browsing windows) provide design challenges, our intention was to provide some basic but useful information for library users on the go. To see what I mean, check out the screen shot:

As you can see, the design is very bare bones; all that we've included on the front page are links to our catalog, our databases, and information linking to locations and hours (with mobile friendly Google maps) for all of our branches. There is also a link that dials the Library's centralized telephone reference service, a link adding that number to your phone's contacts, and a link that sends your reference question to our SMS reference service.

The aesthetic design is intentionally sparse as we desired to avoid as much as possible differences in how the site rendered on different phones. I think at this stage of mobile site evolution (with an exception for iPhone users), the expectation on the part of the user is more that functionality be optimized while visual design may not be of primary concern.

Based on feedback we got from our customers (on our Facebook fan page among other places), the ability to renew and place holds on materials was a service that we needed to include. For that reason, the decision was to link from our mobile to site to III's Encore platform rather than the "classic catalog". While neither search engine is optimal for use on mobile devices, Encore actually works much better in this regard. Either way, until we can launch a mobile app similar to what OCLC or DCPL has, this will have to suffice.

It should prove interesting to see what usage patterns look like after a few months of being live. For example, I wonder how many folks will actually choose to access our databases from their phones. However, the good news is that SPL is again responding actively to user demands and making an attempt to remain as relevant as possible in a changing environment. If we discover down the road that some features would be more popular than others on our home page, we can just tweak the design to be more responsive. My approach is that nothing we do is permanent but just the current iteration of an ever evolving product. If you take a look at our site and have any thoughts or suggestions, we would love to hear them. And thanks again to Michael and Megan for fitting this project in between all the other cool stuff you've got going on!

Outreach Automated

2009-09-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

Today was an exciting day for Sacramento Public Library! With the grand opening of the George Sim Community Center, SPL made available to the public our first fully automated library location. Using Distec's GoLibrary product, library users in a part of town that until now did not enjoy convenient access to library materials can now select from 400 titles for children, teens, and adults anytime the community center is open. Take a look at the GoLibrary in action:

As you can see, I didn't film the book actually being dispensed. After the customer chooses the desired title, it takes about 30 seconds for the book to be retrieved; that wouldn't have been a very interesting video. What the video does show, however, is the ease of use for the customer. Choosing between age groups and between genres is a breeze. And it even includes book covers!

SPL is pleased to be only the fourth library system in the country to offer this service and our partners on this project, the City of Sacramento, are so excited that they're already talking about a second GoLibrary in another community center getting ready for renovation. While I can't imagine a time when visiting a "real" library isn't an important part of any community experience, the GoLibrary is a great option for extending our service into neighborhoods without a branch.

Instant Facebook Feedback

2009-09-18T16:19:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I mentioned how pleased I felt with the results Sacramento Public Library is getting using our @saclib Twitter account as a tool for interacting with our users. Today I see the same thing happening on our Facebook fan page:

Within 47 minutes of posing a question about the desirability of using text messages for library notifications, five library users weighed in with their opinion! The effort on the part of the Library to involve customers in decision-making is minimal but the return on that effort is great! We get feedback (almost instantly) from all over the county and we have the opportunity to educate customers on some aspects of our service about which they were unaware. And, best of all, this interaction takes place in a friendly, non-boring "library instruction" kind of setting.

With more than 350 fans getting Facebook updates from SPL already (and gaining a handful of new fans every day - check out the graph!),

the Library is reaching an audience that is wider than ever. What a great opportunity for us to demonstrate to the community that we need to hear their voices as we plan for new services!

Sacramento PL's @saclib Paying Off!

2009-09-14T16:46:00.001-07:00

In checking up on Twitter mentions for Sacramento Public Library's @saclib account, I came across this today:

SPL is just now ramping up our efforts at making use of Twitter as a part of our larger online presence. It is exciting and gratifying to see positive comments like the one above; it tells me we are on the right track and that we're making good use of our tools like our Facebook fan page and Twitter to meet our users where they are with the information they need!

The Digital Business Card

2009-09-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

As part of my ongoing (and growing) fascination with QR codes, I asked the Communications folks at Sacramento Public Library to embed a QR code in my business card; they responded to my somewhat esoteric request wonderfully! Now recipients of my business card will be able to scan the code and easily import my contact information into their phone's contact list! Take a look:

Getting this to work as planned took a little bit of wrangling as the QR code generator I was using was creating codes that scanned well on the monitor but not when printed. I ended up using the generator at QRStuff and got a code that scans pretty well on my Blackjack II Of course, because I did not test QR readers (I prefer the reader from i-nigma) on other phones, I can't say that my business card will scan reliably in all or even most settings. I suppose that I'm acting as SPL's QR code guinea pig in this respect. If you're interested in trying this, too, just search for QR code vcard generators and you'll find several options available.

As we continue to develop ways in which we can use QR codes in the library, we will certainly need to test a variety of generators and readers on several different types of phones. For the time being, though, I'm excited to have added this level of interactivity to my otherwise very static business card.

Where Personal Meets Professional: A Public Management Framework

2009-09-01T12:42:00.001-07:00

Being a manager in a large public library system is a strange job and one that I still haven't gotten completely used to after almost three years in the position. The degree to which my job requires interaction with multiple library departments really exceeds anything required of the folks I supervise: the branch managers. Virtually everything I work on requires coordination with some combination of Finance, Facilities, IT, Communications, Collection Management, Human Resources, Community Services, the Foundation, Youth Services, and/or my two Branch Services peers. Learning to operate in this team-based environment is not necessarily something one learns working in branches. Of course it is true that branch staff are teams unto themselves; however, the level of complexity in management often feels several orders of magnitude higher due to dealing with personalities from such diverse disciplinary backgrounds.

Lately, I've felt this realization starkly. As I mentioned in a previous post, I experience cycles wherein my personal feeling of effectiveness waxes and wanes; I've felt myself on the downside of the cycle recently. Trying to understand what might be the environmental factors leading to my feeling less than effective lately has led me to make some personal connections with some professional reading I've been doing. Currently on my nightstand, among others, is a book titled, "Government Performance: Why Management Matters" by Ingraham, Joyce, and Donahue. In short, the book seeks to provide a model for the "black box" of management that exists between public resources and policy results. Taking a look at the model proffered by the authors and applying that framework to my personal actions, it follows, may be a step towards feeling a more positive energy about my workplace.

According to Ingraham, effective organizational management "is fundamentally dependent on the nature of its administrative infrastructure" (2003, 16). This is not revelatory. However, sketching the outline of a capable management system model and enumerating the characteristics of the structural components is useful. Management capacity, the authors assert, is highest when the system is fully integrated and operating with a results orientation.

Characteristics of integrative management activities include:

Operational coherence
Free communication
Allocation of resources that fosters mutual support among departments

Managing with a results orientation requires:

Clear identification of organizational objectives
Performance measurement (short-term progress toward objectives)
Performance monitoring (long-term progress toward objectives)

The management team that successfully embodies the characteristics above demonstrates:

The ability to understand progress and change course when required
The ability to strike the necessary balances in resource allocation

My view, personally, is that the management team of which I am a part has in place the basic systems to succeed; we have a solid administrative infrastructure. Where we've not succeeded thus far is in achieving truly integrative activities or in agreeing upon a clear "end state". In other words, what does success look like and how do we work together to get there?

Which leads me back to me. As I'm fond of saying, there is no such thing as "the organization" but only the people who comprise it. If I want to feel effective in my work, I need to be doing my part to foster an integrative and results oriented management team. That means approaching each project with an unambiguous definition of what we want to achieve, an open dialog about what each department brings to the project and how we can support one another in the challenges we each face, the establishment of clear measures by which to track our progress, and a long-term commitment to program evaluation.

Drucker, McGregor, and Me

2009-08-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

I go through cycles in my work life in which I experience periods where I feel as though I am successful as a manager and times when I feel less than successful. Just lately, I've been feeling a little on the less successful side; no major debacles at work or anything like that but only a nagging feeling that I'm not having quite as positive effect on the organization as I feel I ought to be having. For purposes of context, I directly supervise 11 librarians and, through them, the operation of 11 different locations or departments comprised of close to 80 employees within a public library system of 27 branches and nearly 350 employees total.

As a student of government management, I have read a fair amount on the subject and, a couple of days ago, I was asked to take a test to determine how my management philosophy compares against McGregor's Theories X and Y. As I'd assumed would be the case, the test indicated that my style of personnel management is pretty far in the direction of Theory Y. What does this mean? In short, Theory Y says that employees:

wish to be self-directed
wish to participate in organization and personal goal-setting
wish to accept increased job variety and responsibility
are motivated in their work by far more than money

These are all, I believe, accurate statements about people in general. However, frankly, I was a little displeased at the extent to which the test rated me as an advocate of Theory Y. In other words, my answers to the test indicated some degree of Theory X management traits. I won't include a bullet-point list of these traits; suffice it to read the list above and assume the opposite for each point. Control, it seems, is the operative word for the Theory X manager.

While I've been mulling over my real or perceived management failings, I've been doing a little research about management philosophy. And what should I find but an article titled, Managing Oneself by the one-and-only Peter Drucker. Drucker, who seems to have been writing about all things management since the Spanish-American War, published this article only a few years back in the Harvard Business Review. As it relates to my earlier comments on management theories X and Y, this article outlines a path by which the manager (me, in this case) can identify personal strengths and weaknesses and react appropriately.

Drucker begins by stating that, even while most of us think we know our own strengths, we are usually wrong. If he's correct, this is an important piece of information; one would agree that having a more accurate picture about oneself would allow for greater success in both managing oneself (hence the title?) and managing within our organizational sphere of influence.

In answer to the question that asks after my personal strengths, Drucker suggests "feedback analysis": the act of writing down my expected outcomes each time I make an important decision or take a key action and revisiting these predictions after a period of time. Done in a comprehensive manner, a pattern of strengths will begin to take shape. It's an interesting concept, I agree; however, a known weakness of my own (lack of patience) leads me to cringe at Drucker's suggestion that such strengths and weaknesses will be revealed after a short period of time such as two or three years.

Nonetheless, I admit to a basic failure to reflect on past actions in the workplace. While I understand the need for evaluation as part of the planning cycle, I also admit that only those decisions that clearly have not worked as planned are those that tend to receive any attention from me in the following months. Let this be a lesson in paying greater attention to the results of all my decisions and actions both as I more fully exercise managerial responsibility and as I seek to better understand my own capacities as a manager.

Tying together what I learned about my managerial philosophy through the McGregor test and what I can learn about myself through Drucker's feedback analysis ought to prove useful. It seems as though paying explicit attention to the assumptions I make about those with whom I work (because I know how I want to view my co-workers and how they want to be viewed) is a practice to which I need to pay more attention. This boils down, I think, to what SPL's former director used to say about giving others the benefit of the doubt: they deserve it. Always assuming good intentions is a great way to build trusting relationships even if it is a hard thing to put into practice 100% of the time. And, to tie McGregor to Drucker, I need to be diligent about reflecting on how my decisions at work actually play out for my colleagues. Doing so will provide me with clues as to how I'm doing in making decisions from a Theory Y point of view.

Screencasting Through Twitter!

2009-08-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

Sacramento Public Library recently began using Twitter as an integral part of how we reach out to our customers. Follow saclib on Twitter to see what we're up to. Because we follow virtually everyone who follows the Library, this method of interacting with our Twitter followers is already paying dividends. A couple of days ago, somebody the Library follows tweeted:

Screenr - Create screencasts and screen recordings the easy way http://ff.im/-6NrN8

I've been toying around with how we might somehow integrate instructional screencasts as part of our developing QR code program at SPL so I followed the link. It turns out that Screenr is an incredibly easy to use service for recording screencasts that can then automatically be tweeted from the Screenr website using your Twitter account. Very cool.

So cool, in fact that I spent the next 30 minutes or so "testing" Screenr and really driving one of my co-workers crazy with my annoying voice overs. Anyway, take a look at a very rough take on how twittering libraries might take advantage of Screenr:

If you watched the screencast, you'll know what I mean when I say this is a rough take but the concept has tremendous potential, I believe. Using short screencasts delivered through Twitter, we can provide useful tips about the Library to folks who have already expressed an interest in our services through their decision to follow us.

Off the top of my head, some other "Here's How at Saclibrary" screencasts might include how to place holds on items, how to subscribe to our RSS feeds, how to use any number of our databases, how to download media, how to subscribe to our Book Bulletin (reader's advisory) selections, even how to log into My Account (not MY account!). There are so many things customers can do in the library that aren't as clear to them as they are to us. This is an exciting new tool to use in making the library a more fun and useful service for our customers.

Know What They Want...and Give It to Them

2009-08-18T13:36:00.000-07:00

A few months back, OCLC released a report called, Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want. I found this to be an interesting read from many perspectives; the fact that library staff have very different expectations from a catalog than our users do isn't surprising though I had not really given this question much prior consideration.

The salient point of this report for me, though, is how our users view the process of obtaining what they want from the library in general. We, as service providers, often think of borrowing items from the library in discrete steps; for example: getting to the library, searching the catalog, locating an item on the shelf, checking out. Thus, we tend to attempt to improve our services in terms of the environmental boundaries we perceive between these steps (we plan as though processes involved in searching the catalog have nothing to do with processes for checking out books).

According to the OCLC report, though, "end users expect a seamless flow from discovery to delivery." Our customers want direct links to online content and they want evaluative information like excerpts and tables of contents from titles accessible in the library catalog. This kind of information is so helpful in deciding whether the title meets their needs before going through the necessary steps to have an item sent from another location and making a trip to the library to check it out and, potentially wasting valuable time.

One way the library can provide this kid of information (beyond the LJ, Kirkus, and PW reviews now popping up in some catalogs) is through taking advantage of the work of others! The Google Books project has made so much content available online that now, many of the books owned by the library have significant sections of their content readily available as exactly the kind of evaluative tool our customers want.

I noticed in a slide presentation David Lee King put together for some library people down in Texas that Ann Arbor District Library is linking to Google Books content from their catalog. This is a great idea that meets the needs of our customers in a very satisfactory way. Because it's fun to toss out ideas like this to the folks with whom I work, I asked Sacramento Public Library's Systems Supervisor Sarah Smith if this was something we could do. What seemed like no more than a few minutes later (she claims it was two hours), SPL's catalog was up and running with the same feature. Take a look at the screen shot:

Quite appropriately, the first item I found in our catalog that had the link to Google Books content was one entitled, "Creating Public Value"! With "value added" services like this one delivered solely by the efforts of awesome librarians like Sarah (as opposed to our sometimes-hard-to-work-with vendors), we are taking one more step across the bridge that separates the experiences of our in-library visitors from our online visitors.

Don’t Leave Home Without It (An eBook, that is)

2009-08-16T14:32:00.001-07:00

A couple of days ago, I complained that I was unable to blog about downloading an eBook to my phone because the data cable I'd ordered had not yet been delivered. Well, I got it yesterday and the wait was worth it (at least in terms of price). I paid less than five dollars including shipping from Amazon while the local AT&T store is asking $19.99! Anyway, I was excited to jump right in and start downloading eBooks to my BlackJack but my excitement quickly faded. For further context, I am talking here about eBooks compatible with the MobiPocket reader. Sacramento Public Library also offers Adobe eBooks but I haven't tried those yet. Here is a rundown of the good and bad of this experience.

The Good

Once you know how to do it, the process of loading an eBook onto your phone is very fast. The actual transfer of the eBook from my PC to my phone took a couple of seconds at most. And, though I've actually added two different books to my phone's library, I have still not used up even half of my available memory. That the books are so small in terms of data size surprised me. I have to admit, as well, that I fully expected to find the activity of reading a book on my phone to be less than enjoyable. Again, though, I was surprised. I read tons of email on my phone and am already used to this format. What's more, navigating through the book, is exceptionally easy. I can use the D-pad to move a page forward or back, I can use the hot-linked table of contents to jump from chapter to chapter, and I can also specify a specific page number to which I want to jump. I can view the text in multiple sizes and in full screen view. The book even reopens to the page I was reading when I closed it last time. All too easy. So now it is simple for me to bring a book along anyplace even to places I wouldn't normally want to carry an actual book. Having a book on my phone is so easy, in fact, I can even read while I'm driving! Well, maybe not, but this is definitely convenient.

The Bad

Allow me to preface my comments on the difficulties I experience by disclosing the fact that I did not read the instructions! But they are not easily noticeable on the website and, who reads lengthy instructions anyway? That said, the experience I had in successfully getting these books onto my phone worries me. I'm neither tech expert nor technophobe; however, I am very comfortable with computers in general and this process was a bit of a challenge. This makes me wonder how many of our customers will be able to manage this on their own. Generally, I don't think a service is all that useful if it is difficult to use. Of course, as I said earlier, once you've got the books on your device, it's great but the getting them there…not so much. My expectation was that I'd "check out" the book I wanted from the Library's catalog, download it to my PC, connect my phone to the PC, and load the book on the phone. Essentially, that is exactly what happens but I experienced several steps in between. In fact, I'm still not sure if I can do this on my PC running XP; I had to use my laptop running Vista to get it to work.

Basically, on my PC, my experience went something like this: downloaded the Mobipocket reader directly to my phone. At this point, I'd like to point out that one expects that downloading software to one's phone would happen from a website that is actually designed to be viewed on a phone. Not so at MobiPocket. I then checked out the book I wanted and plugged in my phone to the PC. I realized there was no way to send the checked out book from "My eAccount" on the library website to my phone so I downloaded the reader to my PC, as well. I downloaded the book to the reader on my PC feeling fully confident that I'd figured it all out. Nope. No matter how many times I tried to open the book in the reader, I was told by my obstinate PC that "The retailer website from which you have downloaded the eBook could not be identified, please re-download the eBook directly from the retailer website". I didn't like this. At this point, I was feeling a blend of emotions that primarily consisted of a desire to give up (which I'm afraid will happen often with our customers) and an overwhelming desire to conquer this annoyance even if it meant smashing my computer. By the way, I still had no way of getting the book from my PC to my phone. Then I noticed tab in the reader on my PC that suggested I add a device to my reader. Ah ha! I plugged my phone into the USB and tried. The reader wanted to know the PID number for the version of MobiPocket Reader I was running on my phone. What? So I dug around in every option I could find on the phone's reader and finally found something called a PID number. At last! But no; sorry. I didn't have the right version of ActiveSync on my computer. So I visited the website suggested by the computer and downloaded. I restarted my computer and again tried to add my phone to the device list in the reader. Sorry again. I still didn't have the right version of ActiveSync. I'm feeling frustrated just retelling this!

I finally decided that maybe my PC was jinxed so I tried on my laptop. This went a bit more smoothly. I knew I had to download the reader to my PC, I knew my PID number, and had the latest "Windows Mobile Device Center" (which is the Vista equivalent to ActiveSync, apparently). Good to go, right? Well, no. When I plugged in my phone and tried to transfer the book to my phone, my computer told me that I need to install the reader on my phone. I am not sure how to describe what I felt at that moment but, instead of doing anything rash, I tried uninstalling the software on my phone. I then plugged back into the laptop, tried to transfer the book, and, voila. The reader on the PC asked if I wanted to install software on my phone, I said "yes", it did, and next thing I know, I've got an eBook on my phone. That's really all there is to it! I hope I'm just a lot dumber than the average user that wants to read books on their phone but I'm not confident of that. This process should be easier.

Oh yeah, about collection of eBooks. I don't know if the library gets to select titles for our MobiPocket collection or if they give us what is available but, in browsing through the collection, it seemed like the majority of the 300+ titles were similar to All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire, Feisty Firefighters, and Close Encounters of the Sexy Kind. This isn't my genre, needless to say. Hopefully the choices will expand…