Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

Speed Technology Dating

Patrick Sweeney, Toby Greenwalt, and Jeremy Snell

• Trello – Web app and native app versions, project management and organization. Good tool for working collaboratively with others.
• LogMeIn – remote desktop sharing tool, small little software download. Useful for remotely accessing your own computer or other people’s to do tech support, and can do on Android and iOS devices.
• Library Box – a digital library in a box, open on a wifi network. Toby suggested it would be cool to put one of these in the little pop-up libraries that are sprouting up in libraries all over the place.
• Tumblr site – The Kid Should See This – videos, demos, science, technology, art…good curated portal for interesting kid stuff
• Air Video – iOS only, but if you’re running a video server on a network you can browse and view the videos on any iOS device.  The file formats that iOS doesn’t support luckily are converted by Air Video on the fly…that’s pretty nice!
• Join Me Viewer – allows you to share your screens over the web. Get everybody looking at the same screen, up to 250 users seeing your screen. Good training tool.  Available on almost any device, including mobile. Free, with a paid version ($149) that lets you do a little bit more.
• Every Block – Started as a crime map Google Maps mash-up in Chicago. Now has a ton more data. Community events, real estate transactions, message board, crime stats, inspection data, etc. Available in 19 different cities so far.
• Tackk.com – Founded on the idea of fliers, websites that expire.  Can create a very simple print-friendly display for an event coming up.  Good for doing some good graphics and event pages for your library events.  Can sign up for a free account and customize your URLs, and set expiration dates on the pages too.
• TurntableFM / RollingFM – you can upload music, select from music already provided, start your own DJ party in these little virtual rooms, avatars, can vote DJs up and down,
•  Nextdoor – Another neighborhood tool. This site lets you define your own community’s boundaries, nothing pre-defined.  Community bulletin board, 36 cities so far, still in a beta phase.
• Wallwisher – Can post name, links to images and webpages, kind of a “tell us what you think” feedback tool.  A good way to get community feedback on what you’re doing.  Many uses in education as well.  You can set it so you can pre-moderate the posts if you’re worried about naughty things showing up.
• Sphero – Little rolly ball toy that you can control with your smartphone. You could roll one of these little things up to people you want to engage with—maybe an easier way to approach people than walking up to them.  Attracts attention, people want to talk and know about it.  A great way to break the ice with kids and teens.
• Art.sy – art info, fun to browse through, good for kids, can highlight connection between elements of a collection
• Snaggy – Screen capture and annotation tool.  Take your screenshot, then go to Snag.gy and paste it in to the browser-based editing tool, edit it, and then save/share/send a link to it to others.  Way faster than desktop tools.
• Liquid Space – Have patrons reserve space online (e.g. meeting rooms). Sends you, as the library, a notification that someone has reserved a room for a specific time.  Helps advertise that you have meeting rooms too.
• Noon Pacific – An email newsletter.  Weekly at noon Pacific time you get a playlist of five songs they’ve chosen from music blogs in the last week.
• CopyPasteCharacter.com – Diacritics and weird symbols you can copy and paste into your documents.  You can toggle between HTML and non-HTML.
• Barnes & Noble Nooks – will train staff, let you circ one copy of one title on six devices simultaneously.
• Oyster – a streaming eBook service that just started up, trying to launch by the end of the year.
• The Noun Project – beautiful icons for just about anything you can think of.  (Sarah’s note: I LOVE THIS SITE! You can make custom t-shirts with icons you want too. I’ve done this as a gift and made one for myself – too fun!)
• SifteoCubes – you get 6 cubes in a box, you can play games, early literacy teaching,
• Raspberry Pi – a tiny little circuit board that is a full-fledged computer with a video port, an audio out, and USB connectors.  They’re cheap ($25-$35).  They’re designed by this non-profit to get kids learning how to program.
• Patch – Different small towns and areas have Patch sites, local reporters who write about what’s going on nearby.  Users can comment, submit announcements, events, photos, etc.
• Show Me – app for iPad or tablet that lets you record tutorials by just drawing on the screen and it will record your audio as well.   You can upload the video then to the Show Me website and share it with your library folks.
• Makey Makey – circuit board that connects to your computer through USB and comes with a set of alligator clips. Maps keyboard commands to points on the card.  Can conduct electricity through it and basically turn anything into an input device for your computer.  $39.
• GovTrack.us – Tracking information about federal and state government legislation.  Much better than Thomas.  Screen-scrapes other government sites and mashes it all up together on one page, instead of a whole bunch of smaller pages and PDFs as you often find on other government info sites.
• Tablets – Everybody has their own version of tablets and people are using these creatively in libraries.  Roaming reference, book review sharing in the stacks (Sarah’s additions: animated and rotating electronic signage, tablet storytimes.)
• Lightt – iOS only, “Instagram for video.”  Each video is only allowed to be 10 seconds.  Not a lot of people on it right now.
• Rally.org – crowd-sourced fundraising tool like Kickstarter or Indigogo.  It does all the payment processing like the others do, but they do their own payment processing so it’s cheaper (4.5% flat).  Indigogo has two different pricing structures, both of which are higher.  Same with Kickstarter.  EveryLibrary is using this for their fundraising site.
• LoudSauce – specifically to raise funding for advertising and marketing (interesting!)

50 Great Mobile Apps for Libraries

Richard Le and Tom Duffy

You can get a list of all of the apps from the presentation at the mobile page: http://50apps.weebly.com

46% of American adults own smart phones.  By 2016, 10 billion will be in use worldwide.  By the year 2013 there will be 81.4 billion apps.  The average download of apps per device is 51.  The average time spent on apps per day is 81 minutes (HOLY MOTHER—THAT’S A LOT).  This changes the landscape of our information environment.  People are using their smart phones to check local weather, find local businesses, get information, check sports scores, get traffic info, coupons, and info about their local community.  Americans are working harder—but on their own time, taking their work home.  80% of people continue to work after leaving the office.  68% check email before 8am in the morning, and 50% of them check their work email while they’re still in bed (GUILTY AS CHARGED).  Apps have changed the way we search for and access information.  The mobile platform is the preferred way to access information on the go.  We can integrate information and add value to our work with better and richer content.  Most of the apps featured today are free. Richard recommends the Android apps.  Tom recommends the iOS apps.

iOS apps

1. Wolfram Alpha – excellent for information and comparative data
2. Reference USA (for iPad only)
3. Farlex – pretty cool dictionary with audio pronunciation
4. DuckDuckGo (browser that doesn’t track your history, no filter, awesome)
5. Article Search – searches Google Scholar, JSTOR, etc.
6. Job Search
7. iReader
8. Epicurious – recipes and shopping lists
9. Cam-Dictionary – translates text on the fly from one language to another, also with audio pronunciation

10. Shazam – love this app for identifying music

11. RedLaser – owned by eBay, lets you scan a barcode and find the item online quickly with both places to buy it or check it out from the library (for reals, the library is listed—nice!)

12. TurboScan – $1.99

13. OverDrive – recommends it for audio books especially

14. Kindle – great user interface (yep)

15. Moo, Baa, La la la! – kids book with good animation

16. PopOut! Peter – can click the word and hear it spoken, or read it yourself.  Highlights the words as they’re read.

17. iTunes U – university level education for free. Yays!

18. Khan Academy – video tutoring that lets you browse by subject, app comes for the iPad too

19. Mango languages – ESL classes & other language classes

20. Biblion

21. GoodReads – just like the  website, in other words awesome

22. AppAdvice – recommended apps

23. Apps Gone Free – a list of apps that used to cost money but are free now

24. Library Books – hook it up to your library, works with a lot of library systems, shows you your loan history, checked out items, etc.

25. Nimbulist – simple note-taking app

Android apps

26. Merrian-Webster – does offer audio pronunciations

27. Dictionary.com – shows popular and local trending searches, includes a thesaurus and spelling suggestion

28. Urban Dictionary – 6.5 million definitions

29. White & Yellow Pages

30. YP – also gives you local deals and events

31. AccessMyLibrary – Gale databases

32. Loclaicious – searching nearby business and points of interest with maps to the place

33. Merck PTE HD – periodic table of the elements

34. CamScanner – Turns your smart phone’s camera into a fax machine, copier, and scanner.  You can share what you scan.

35. Google Goggles – Search for stuff by taking a photo, works for artwork, barcodes, products, popular images, etc.  Also will translate text in French, Italian, and Spanish.  Also works really well on headshots of people—don’t know who someone is? Take their photo and Google Goggle stalk the crap out of them

36. Google Translate – translates text between 64 languages.  Can translate by speaking in 17 languages.

37. AllRecipes – can mix and match by what ingredients you have and limit by cooking time, has nutritional info as well

38. BigOven – Searches 250,000 recipes, and gives you ideas to use up leftovers

39. Holy Bible – Comprehensive database of all of the popular translations and versions, includes an audio version as well

40. TripAdvisor – quick city guide for travelers, works offline (yays!)

41. Congress – facts about lawmakers and bills, see how your local representatives vote

42. Recalls.gov – product recalls, can scan product barcodes or search by name

43. FirstAid – from the American Red Cross with step by step instructions and training videos

44. WebMD – quick medical and health information, find local doctors and hospitals

45. Fooducate – can scan the barcode and see what ingredients are in it, highlighting both the good and the bad and giving you healthier alternatives

46. ShopSavvy – scan and find the best online and local prices.  Can use it for another way too—scan books and create reading lists you can email to yourself or your patrons.

47. Bloomberg – finance news and data, stock tracking, etc.

48. Relief Central – world facts about 266 countries including disaster guides, Medline citations, etc.

49. World Factbook – CIA World Factbook mobile style

50. SportsTab – assess scores, news, and team info

Richard and Tom also did an en masse Bump session at the end with any interested attendees – with one smart phone fist bump transferring all the apps from their session in one go to each person.  AWESOME IDEA.

Marketing on the Edge

Ben Bizzle and Meloney Dunlap

Ben is the Director of Technology & Meloney is the graphic designer for the Craigshead County Jonesboro Public Library in Arkansas.  They started the presentation by showing the video they did for the 50 state salute to banned books.

Ben spoke first.  They get asked a lot how they get away with the marketing they do.  It’s been a process of about four years where they started revolutionizing the whole library, when 4 new staff started at the same time.  The first year they worked on their physical infrastructure – electricity, network, etc.  Then they completely redesigned their library website, which was (admittedly) pretty darn bad.  They didn’t want to be perceived as a building with books in it anymore, but as an information gateway and a portal.  They had to change their metrics of success – just counting the people coming through the doors is not an accurate reflection of a library’s impact on the community.  We give stuff away for free, but people will still go somewhere else and pay for the same thing. Why?  We have a barrier to entry for most of our services.  That’s ridiculous.  At their library they don’t chase trends, they build platforms.  Then they started a comedy video series about a fictional library called the Crooked Valley Regional Library: http://youtube.com/publiclibrary1  It’s quite hilarious – highly recommend it.  They pushed hard a couple of years back on mobile services.  The library then invested in a PR and Arts department, including Meloney as the graphic designer.

Meloney continued the presentation by talking about how they didn’t really have a brand or logo before the website.  Now, everything in their building and that leaves their building has their logo on it.  Tips on doing good graphic design.  Always plan ahead of time, even if it’s just a quick sketch.  Choose only 2-3 fonts for any piece.  White space is your friend.  Limit the number of colors you use.  Have consistency in everything you produce.  She recommends Microsoft Publisher, and Adobe Photoshop Elements.  She hasn’t used LibraryAware yet, but says it’s worth looking at.  Sites to get stock images and fonts from: Shutterstock, Tuts+, dafont.com, and istockphoto.

Ben then discussed their billboards that they’ve done in their community.  At the head of the recession they did a “Save money at your public library” campaign.  They thought they’d play off the credit card ads (your library card: what’s in your wallet).  The lawyers were concerned that they’d potentially end up in court over copyright infringement.  So they passed on that idea.  They have a creative team – with combative meetings.  “No, that sucks” is the most commonly used phrase at their meetings.  They threw out ideas for the billboards – 20 ideas per person.  Their “Spoiler Alert! Dumbledore dies on page 596.” billboard got some negative reaction, but also ended up on the front pages of reddit, imgur, icanhazcheezburger, etc.  SomethingAwful.com made a Photoshop thread of their billboard which people could remix and add their own messages to.  Hundreds were made.  They’ve also done some Facebook covers that went over well.  The one they did as a parody of Pulp Fiction had a printed copy that was signed by Samuel L Jackson.  Their Fight Club parody video (book club) got mentioned by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club.  They’ve done some events campaigns as well – all with the same someecards look and feel.  They also put a card at the end of every stack in the library, representative of the subject in that stack.  Example: “50 Shades of Bacon” for the cookbook section.  Results?  Overdrive checkouts increased by 150% from 2011 to 2012.  Freegal downloads increased by 73% with a 97% increase in patrons using the service.  There are 110% more visits to their mobile website by 102% more people.  100% increase in foot traffic in 4 years.  40% increase in library cards issued in 4 years.  Concert attendance doubled to 400 in one year.  There was also a 50% increase in Children’s Summer Reading Club registrations.  Stats validate their success.

People are not thinking about their public library.  They want to sell the sizzle, not the steak, but deliver a damn good steak.  They don’t promote specific resources in their campaigns—they keep them general to just make people think about the library.  Once they have their attention, then people will check out the library and figure out what’s useful for them.  People want to be entertained—don’t be a boring place.  They want one person talk to another person about the public library…word of mouth marketing.  They love what they do and have passion for their library.  You can change things in your community if you are willing to take a risk.

Advertising isn’t about making you agree.  It’s about making you never forget what you just saw.

Innovative, Awesome Services & Spaces

Tim Donahue, Jeroen de Boer, and Keimpe de Heer

De Boer and de Heer talked about a project in the Netherlands they’ve been working on.  The Stichting Bibliotheken Midden-Frysln and Extelligentsia developed a SocialMediaCaster interactive touchscreen kiosk with an RFID reader etc. that connects what’s in the library with students’ social content and social lives online.  Students can bring any library item up to the kiosk and it’s scanned and then other relevant resources, including social media content, comes up on the screen.  This is greatly helpful for research projects for the students.  They connected to the school’s curriculum and took assessment criteria into account for media literacy.  The SMC system connects catalogs of the local school library with other library catalogs nearby.  SMC also displays social media content.  They’re connected to Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, and many others.  Version 2 has a new data source adaptor to let them connect to the National Library in the Netherlands.  This enables searches through all the catalogs through all the libraries in the Netherlands.  They also developed ExplorApp, a mobile version.  They just launched The Library of Things which they’re looking for other libraries to collaborate on.  The ExplorApp demonstrates this concept – it’s meant for use both inside and outside the library.

Donahue talked about work that he’s done at Montana State University.  There is a diagram of the library building, with stacks of the libraries and read-outs of stacks and the subjects contained within.  You can mouse on different floors, and find the whole map of the library’s contents.  You can also search for a particular subject, and the library map will light up the stacks with the relevant books.  He used Flash, InDesign, and Adobe Illustrator.  He animated each stack as a button with basic mouse-over functionality (Sarah’s note: Flash…….noooooooooo!).  This helps you for library space planning and redesign, training new staff and student workers, familiarizing students with the extent of the library’s collections.  They can also show off “the library” virtually when at outreach events.  One of the issues is that collections shift and books move, and as that happens this would have to be redone.  They’ve also added QR codes to the endcaps of all of the stacks that gives a specific even further break-down of subjects in that stack.

Sensible Library Website Development

Amanda Etches

Why do we have library websites?  Teaching, posting things, a way to access resources and services, allowing access to the catalog and online resources, to help, etc.  Amanda says that while we are all unique little snowflakes, we aren’t that unique in our motivations for having websites.  How do those similar goals and motivations help us share and collaborate a little more for website design.

Scope

Scope refers to the parameters of a project.  Whether you’re building a brand new website or redesigning, you need to define the scope of the site.  It’s a mistake to assume that a redesigned site is going to include the same type and information as the existing site.  Most library websites are like junk drawers—everything you could possibly want to know about the library.  We put everything we can think of on the site just in case someone might need to know it.  Amanda is a fan of the smaller is better approach.  Less is less.  If you consider the signal:noise ratio of your website is important.  The pages people aren’t using are a whole lot of noise that detracts from the pages that people want and need to access.  How much of your content represents your needs vs. your library user’s needs?  It’s better for half of your website to be amazing than for your entire website to be bland.  Another way to think about it is like a pyramid.  The necessary information is the base of the pyramid.  As you move up you get to destination pages – things like library-created contact, basic interactivity.  Above that you see participatory activity, user-created content.  And at the top you see the library website as a community portal.  Amanda highlighted http://influx.us/onepager – a template for a single page library website.  Most of the high use content on a library website can fit onto one page.  You can download the code and play with it yourself.  J  Yays!  The notion of less is less – aiming for less content is a good thing, but how do you start scoping your site in this way?  The first is that you should really design for mobile devices first…not only because of the ubiquity of mobile devices, but if you design for mobile you have to work harder and pare back to what you and your users think of as essential functionality.  “If we wouldn’t put it on our mobile version, why would we put it on our regular website?”  Recommended book: Mobile First.  Focus on users’ critical tasks.  What are those critical tasks?  How do you determine your critical tasks? Ask your users through a survey – what are the top 3 reasons you visit the site? Use a heatmapping application on your homepage to see what the top things are that users click on.  Don’t ask staff – anecdotal evidence from staff does not equal real data.

Content

The kind of reading that happens online is functional reading.  People skim and scan pages.  They don’t read top to bottom.  Being confronted with large amounts of text on a screen doesn’t work.  Remove unnecessary words.  Change the way you think about your website as an FAQ.  It shouldn’t be a junk drawer – but a place to find answers to the most frequently asked questions and desired tasks.  Think about your website as information not documents.  Adopt the inverted pyramid style for your website copy – People will look at the top and lose interest as they go down.  Bold text to make it stand out.  Break up text into chunks with headers.  Make your web copy conversational – build content with functional reading in mind that includes a conversational and personal tone.  Treat your website like a conversation between you and your users.  Don’t write in the passive voice.  Write in the active voice (fewer words result, too!).  If you write in the passive voice, you seem authoritative and stuffy and unfriendly.  If your library is supposed to be conversational, use the words we and you, not library and user.

Navigation

Redesigning navigation is not an easy process.  Navigation can make or break a website.  Read Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think.  There are general practices in web design we can draw from.  Navigation needs to tell people the site name, page name, where on the site they are, where they can go next, and how they can search.  Salt Lake City Public Library’s website is a good example of excellent navigation.  Vancouver Public Library is another good example (Sarah’s note: I actually don’t dig on this website very much, but maybe it’s just me).  Airbnb is a site Amanda likes in terms of navigation and interaction design.   Apple.com also very easy to navigate.  Match up your labels to your page names.  Don’t disorient your users.  Your navigation is not your org chart.  Your users don’t care about your org chart. It’s not something they think about, so don’t design your site around your org chart.  It’s not intuitive to your users.  And finally – death to “click here.”  (Sarah’s note: HELL TO THE YES.)

Testing

Lack of information is at the root of all bad design decisions.  Make design decisions based on information and data.  It is an extremely enlightening experience.  The insights you gain from watching people use your site can’t be found any other way.  Usability testing in five words: watch people use your website.  You can gain more information and data on usability from watching people interact with it than you can from reading every usability textbook ever written.  We are not our patrons.  We are different than those who use our sites.  Don’t test your staff.  You do need to test with library users, not staff.  Five testers is enough for anything.  Once you go over five you start to see a lot of repetition.  There’s no such thing as a usability test that’s too small.  There is such a thing as one that’s too big.  Make a comprehensive list of all the things you want to test, and chunk it out into 3 things at a time, which you can test with different small groups.  Test early and test often.  Make iterative changes constantly instead of giant big website designs.  Script your usability testing – giving testers even slightly different instructions can affect the results dramatically.  A script allows you as the tester to concentrate on the test and the tester.  In the script: an introduction to you, your role, their role; be clear about the purpose of the test; provide testers an outline of what they’ll be doing and how long it will take; give them a printed copy of the tasks you’ll be asking them to do; ensure that the testers know that they’re not the ones being tested—it’s the site being tested.  Write your scenarios carefully.  If you’re testing your library databases page, don’t phrase it in library-ese.  Use common language that people would actually use, and that doesn’t give them the right path or answer in the question itself.

UX and Accessibility

Frank Cervone

There is a fundamental union of usability and experience design and accessibility.  Our websites have to be accessible legally, and implementing good user experience design often goes hand in hand with accessibility naturally.  Thinking about design – Understand the underlying problem before attempting to solve it.  Don’t hurt anyone.  Make things simple and intuitive. Acknowledge that the user is not like you (Sarah’s note: WORD).  Have empathy.  When people come to our websites, it’s not a learning moment.  Give them what they want the way they want it.  Things to think about in relation to design: Visibility.  Just because something is really good in one particular context doesn’t mean it’s good in the overall system.  All attributes of an object indicate how to use something.  Feedback.  We need to inform users about what has been or needs to be done—through feedback mechanisms like sound, highlighting, and animation.  Constraints.  Restrict the possible actions that can be performed to help prevent selecting incorrect options.  Mapping.  As we’re mapping experiences we want people to have, we need to do so in a logical manner.  Consistency.  Interfaces need similar operations and similar elements for similar tasks.  Consistent interfaces are easier to learn and easier to use.

So, why accessibility? It’s the right thing to do.  And the Americans with Disabilities Act Title III prohibits discrimination against an individual.  This includes all resources we provide, physically and virtually.  The 2008 ADA Amendments Act also requires providing assistance for major life activities: seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, etc.  This means that we need to think about the varying types of disabilities people have and how we provide accommodation for those.  Most often we think of visual impairments in terms of websites, but others we need to consider are cognitive learning, auditory, motor, physical, and speech disabilities.  17% of the population has some type of disability in the U.S.  So what is a reasonable accommodation, which is what the ADA requires us to provide.  Either an adjustment or an auxiliary aide.  Neither of these things should cause a fundamental alteration in the nature or core function of a program or service.  Additionally, it should not impose an undue financial or administrative burden to the institution.

So where does this take us?  To universal design.  Universal design came out of architecture.  The fundamental principles are equitable use, flexibility in use, simple and intuitive, perceptible information, toleration for error, low physical effort, and size and space for approach and use.

One big easy thing to do on websites—all objects (videos and images) have some sort of text equivalent that is meaningful.  Graphics must have alt tags and graphics used only for positioning should be labeled with alt=” “. (quote, space, quote).  (Sarah’s note: Everyone forgets to do that last thing…)

The phrase “click here” is meaningless, and particularly troublesome when moving through a page by tabbing.  The best practice is similar considerations to those of the alt tags—text should be meaningful.  You need to express clearly where the link will go or what will happen after selection.

Using only indentation (reformatting may remove indentations) or color (color blindness) alone is not sufficient to convey meaning.  Don’t rely on indicating required fields in a form by making them bold.  Explicitly state that required fields are required.

Provide skip links.  Skip links allow assistive software to skip through repeated menus.

Use logical layouts in forms.  Form questions need to have input fields on the same line as the input itself.  Place labels consistently on the same side of the input field.  Explicitly identify what information is required.  Make the word “Required” part of the label for each mandatory field.

Other points to consider: specify column header rows in tables, use styles in documents (short titles in headings, heading styles in the correct order), use simple table structure (avoid using blank cells for formatting, avoid repeated blank characters, structure layout tables for easy navigation), avoid image watermarks, and include closed captions for any audio.

Don’t overuse access keys, which creates conflicts.  This can conflict with assistive technology.  Users are often very familiar with these shortcuts.  Don’t change it up on them.

Check for color contrast: http://www.accesskeys.org/tools/color-contrast.html

Accessibility checker: http://wave.webaim.org

Microsoft has some good documentation on making PowerPoint presentations and Word documents accessible.

WGBH developed a tool called Magpie to close caption audio and video.

Purdue University-Calumet also has an extensive web accessibility website: http://web.purduecal.edu/webaccessibility

In response to pleas from many of you, I’m extending the deadline for the Shit Librarians Say video contest to October 1st! Read more on the contest here.

It’s time for a contest!  It came to my attention today that in the entire vast universe of “Shit People Say” videos, there is no Shit Librarians Say video yet.   Well there is, but it’s this one dude saying “shhh” over and over.  We can do better than that people!

I’m going to make a Shit Librarians Say video, crowd-sourced from content y’all send me.  Send me a video clip, or clips, of you or your library staff saying stereotypical things library folks say (there are plenty) and email me the clip or a link to it somewhere at librarianinblack [at] gmail [dot] com.  I’ll cut the best entries together and hopefully we’ll have something hilarious.

Two rules:

1. Sound quality has to be good.  I don’t want to spend time fixing your crap audio.
2. Send it to me by Friday, September 21st.

If you are unfamiliar with the “Shit People Say” internet meme, read up on it here. It started with Shit Girls Say and now there are thousands, including my top three: Shit Hipsters Say, Shit Gamers Say to Their Girlfriends, and Shit Vegans Say.

If you don’t want to submit a video, but have a cute idea for an entry, submit it as a comment to this post.  And the rest of you, feel free to steal shamelessly from the comments

And I’m going to type SHIT one more time just in case I didn’t trip your internet filters yet. Screw you, filters.

I want to break up with eBooks. Don’t get me wrong, eBooks is dead sexy and great arm candy at parties, as well as a magnet for attention and memorable experiences. But man…eBooks makes for a crap boyfriend. This relationship is as dysfunctional as it gets. And I’m too old and jaded to put up with dysfunction. I need a smoldering hot boyfriend who is a wildcat in the bedroom but kisses gently, is unfailingly honest and kind, and sends me cute messages during the day. And that ain’t eBooks.

eBooks is to libraries what that awful boyfriend (or girlfriend) was to you. Think about it. And when I say “eBooks” I mean the whole messed up situation–the copyright nightmares, the publishers, the fragmented formats, the ridiculous terms of service, the device incompatibility, the third-party aggregation companies libraries do business with–all of it. eBooks is the guy who takes advantage of your good nature and generosity only to exploit every last weakness you have for his own personal gain. The guy your family loved the first time they met him, who swept you off your feet, but who everyone came to regard as that unwanted interloper who would never leave. Well, my friends, it’s time to boot eBooks’ ass to the curb. There are better boyfriends to be had.

eBooks ignores you
eBooks totally ignores everything you say. We in libraries have not been included at the table for negotiations on digital copyright, terms of service, licensing conditions, technology integration, none of it. And yes, that stinks. And yes, we’ve complained about it enough. We haven’t been heard largely because we’ve been too polite and too quiet for too long. It’s our fault. We removed ourselves from the equation by not being more proactive as a profession through the professional organizations and lobbyists we expect to speak for us. But even now that some of us are getting louder and angrier, we’re still being ignored by the entire eBooks industry, with very few exceptions (hi Gluejar, you guys rock). So my opinion is that we should walk away and take our fuck-me heels with us. That’s what our moms would tell us to do.

eBooks drew you in with wine and roses, but now makes you fetch him beer and Cheetos
Remember how tantalizing eBooks seemed several years ago? How sexy, how intoxicating? Everything seemed perfect because we were caught up in the glossy image of our desires…not the reality standing in front of us. eBooks…in…the…library! Holy ceiling cat!!!11one! We were like kids on our first trip to the candy store.

Now, eBooks’ idea of a date is ordering a cheese pizza from the cardboard pizza joint down the street. Maybe he’ll turn on some bromance comedy on Netflix, but more than likely he’ll play Skyrim by himself for hours, ask for a beer, and tell you to get lost. For your birthday eBooks might actually put toppings on the pizza (think Penguin’s misguided experiment at NYPL with embargoed popular titles) and buy a bottle of $5 wine. And he expects you to be grateful…after all, hey…toppings! For libraries, our crappy pizza is our crappy eBooks selection. We can’t buy from most of the major publishers, and even for those we can buy from we have extreme restrictions or highly inflated costs. And our attention negligent boyfriend’s actions, in eBooks’ case, are the lack of development of usable download processes, fair-use-friendly terms of use, and privacy options in keeping with libraries’ professional values and ethics. In short–dude…the dates are terrible and yet we keep going on them, hoping that maybe we’ll go somewhere nice eventually. Please, darling. We know better.

eBooks slept with your sister
Remember how eBooks said he could only do so much for you, that he just didn’t have the emotional capacity to truly love but that for you, he was going to try? Yeah, and then he went and slept with your sister. Likewise, eBooks slept with consumers and gave them what eBooks never gave us as libraries–full selection, right-quick downloads, and sharing rights. We got no love at all, but our prettier sister, the consumer, got a better deal. Still not everything, as she also has to put up with restrictive DRM, licensing and not owning, and privacy violations…but in the end she stole our man and our man went willingly. Of course, he still texts us now and again to make sure we’re still interested–hinting that he might come back to us with the same relationship agreement our sister got. Yeah, right.

eBooks says you’ll move in together, but you never do
You’ve wanted to wake up next to someone awesome for a long time–and eBooks keeps promising it will happen. But his playboy nature always wins out–he still wants his own place. Likewise, publishers continually feed libraries the line that they’re “experimenting with different models” and “hope to continue to work positively with libraries in the digital space.” Uh huh.  Libraries and eBooks aren’t shacking up anytime soon, not for real…not as long as publishers continue to falsely view us as a threat instead of a partner.

I feel that we in libraries are actually doing a disservice by offering what’s “barely good enough.” We give people the false impression that they can get their eBooks through their libraries. How many libraries are upfront with information about how we can’t/don’t offer books from the most popular publishers? How many libraries are upfront with the limited formats people can get on their devices of choice? Instead, most libraries tout their subscription to a single eBook service like it’s the second coming. We say “we have eBooks!” and “they work on most devices!” without listing the caveats, perhaps hoping that people won’t notice until they’re already chest deep in the browsing or download process and only then see what the limitations are. Why in hell are we covering for a bad situation? Who gains from us putting the happy face on the dismal eBook situation in libraries? It’s certainly not libraries–we haven’t gained shit. It’s certainly not our users–in fact, they’re the biggest losers. It’s the publishers who gain–who choose to license to libraries under any terms whatsoever (they get our money and we accept crappy prices and use limitations). And it’s the middleman companies who gain–who whore themselves out for the highest profit, lying to both sides by telling the publishers that libraries are screwing them and the libraries that the publishers are the ones doing the screwing. Walk away, my friend. Walk away.

I’m out.
So that’s it folks. eBooks and I are done. eBooks in libraries are a non-starter, their path has been set for the foreseeable future, and their future is determined by people who are not us. Not by the people who love books, who believe in their power to change lives, but by those who produce them for profit. No, not by the authors (as we all know, they see far too little profit for their labors), but by the publishers…the, until recently, necessary middlemen in the process between creators and consumers. Now that they’re not necessary to the process anymore, largely due to their inflexibility and inability to change in the face of rapidly shifting market conditions, they have attempted to salvage their failing business model with high prices, limited licensing policies, and technology so locked down that it remains impenetrable to many people.

If I hear one more publisher talk about “increasing friction,” I am going to punch that publisher in the face with a pair of book-shaped brass knuckles and discuss the option of dramatically increasing friction cheese-grater-style somewhere else on their physique. Don’t push me Penguin.

Publishers have painted themselves into a corner, a corner that will eventually eat them alive. But until that happens, until the market shakes out, there is little libraries can do that is in keeping with our core ethics and values.

For a decade now I have been speaking, writing, and advocating on a local, national, and international level for positive eBooks integration and implementation in libraries. I’ve spoken to technologists, educators, publishers, librarians, authors, lawyers, and legislators. I’ve been frustrated by how long it took everyone to start paying attention, but at long last in the past year or two people are finally listening. Everyone on “the right side,” insofar as I see it, agrees that the DMCA needs to be radically revised, that copyright exemptions need to be extended for libraries into the digital domain, but no one has the power or political clout to override the lobbyists’ dollar signs in the capitol. So, what are we left with as librarians in our role to advocate for our communities’ needs? Nada, zilch, zero, zip.

At our recent regional library consortium meeting, I said I wouldn’t give more money to OverDrive, beyond the bare minimum that the consortium’s contract required of us, and only until we can legally terminate our contract–at which point I personally want out of OverDrive.  The title selection is awful and getting only more so month by month, their policies are restrictive, and their business practices are unethical–including trading away core librarian values (user data privacy, no commercial endorsements).  I’m not going to give any money to 3M or Baker & Taylor either unless things change on their end, just for the record.

Yes–our residents want eBooks. But does that mean that we trade away our core values and ethics to provide anything, under any terms? Does it mean that we spend our residents’ limited tax dollars on sub-par products with sub-par usage terms and no ownership or longevity guarantees? Or is the fact that people want eBooks from their libraries and we can’t get them going to turn out to be enough reason to stop the madness and engage in a massive national boycott of the societal conflagration that we are faced with for the future of digital information?

So why keep up the ruse that eBooks are in libraries and all is awesome? Why continue the whitewashing? I’m personally done with the whitewashing. I’ll continue to support positive steps toward eBook independence like Open Library, Gluejar, the Hathi Trust, DPLA, Project Gutenberg, and projects like those undertaken at the Douglas County Public Library and Califa. However, I’m finished promoting an inferior eBook product to our patrons. I’m finished throwing good money after bad money. And I’m finished trying to pointlessly advocate for change when change has to come from places waaaaaaay above my influence level or pay grade.

eBooks, you shitty boyfriend you…you are dead to me.  I will tolerate your continued existence, but will pay you no mind.  You don’t deserve a single byte of my brain’s bandwidth.

So what now? I plan on turning my attentions to the next frontiers of music and video content–places where we just may be able to effect some positive change before things go to hell in a handbasket yet again. Multimedia library licensing situations are even more early-stage than those which we face with eBooks. And so perhaps there is still hope. Do I plan to single-handedly take on the RIAA or the MPAA? No, that would be simpering idiocy. What I do plan to do is to seek out and reward publishers, aggregators, and creators who are willing to distribute their content under terms favorable to both them and to library communities, including insisting on DRM-free content. Yes, this most likely means a lack of popular content–but most of us have zero for popular digital content for music or movies today, at least legally. At least this way we’re offering something to our users, likely content they wouldn’t stumble across on iTunes or Netflix, and we’re rewarding business models that work for us…not against us. Models that work for our users, not against them. And that, my friends, is what we are supposed to do as librarians.

So, to close–fuck eBooks. I’m off to get myself the boyfriend I deserve.

Someone trying to contract with me to give a keynote in a very cool country (*fingers crossed*) today asked me how many talks/classes/keynotes I’ve given in my career.  I realized I had no idea.  I went back and counted.

I’ve spoken at 207 various events since I started in mid-2002.  That’s an average of 20 or so a year.  And given that the first few years were very slow, you can see how that works out to a lot more than that in the last few years (and indeed my past presentations list demonstrates just that).

People ask me how I do the speaking and the writing and hold down a full time job. I just shrug and make that weird “I don’t know” sound that includes no actual words (sorta like “uh-ah-uh”).  I really don’t know.  I just do it.  I love what I do–and when you’re passionate about something it feels a lot less like work.

However…

After reading that count, I feel rather old.  And rather busy.  I would be off to grab a cocktail as consolation for both if I didn’t have a nighttime City Council meeting to attend………Which I love attending– hello City Council

The advice I’d share with newbies on the speaker circuit? Pace yourself for ceiling cat’s sake.  You won’t go out of style.  Only take what you can realistically accommodate without sacrificing your sleep, your personal life, or your job.  I’m taking a lot fewer gigs, especially traveling ones, nowadays largely in an attempt to reinvigorate my personal life (here’s hoping) and to have more mental space to devote to being a new director.  So if you’re out there speaking…just be real with yourself, your loved ones, and your employer.  You’ll find a balance as long as you’re consciously thinking about it.  We can’t all be Stephen Abram and fly from place to place being super smart all the time