Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton-Jan

CIL2010: Virtual Learning & Training

Meredith Farkas started this session and talked about Web 2.0 ideas in the classroom.  It is the age of participation.  We can learn so much not just from professors but from the students and back and forth sharing.  The teacher is more of a facilitator (social constructivism).  It’s about reflections & teaching each other.

The core of Farkas’s classroom for her SLIS class at San Jose State University is a blog.  Blogs are a familiar medium.  42% of bloggers are aged 18-34.  It’s a great way for faculty to communicate with students.  It is also fantastic for community-building.  The students get involved more than she’s seen in any other online class.  Building an online learning community helps to get students used to writing in public — when her students write their blog posts, it’s publicly-visible and the world can see it.

Joan Petit talked about blogging at the American University of Cairo in Egypt.  She did her presentation using Prezi instead of PowerPoint and it was an interesting experience, though I can’t say it was easy to read…. English is not the first language for most students.  They had some bad experiences with students not being able to complete the basic skills required for searching and finding information.  They had been using WebCT but switched over to using a wiki.  They switched their information literacy class from being focused on the grade to being pass/fail and all it took to pass was to show up to class & participate in each in-class weekly activity.  They had the students set up blogs with the theory that if their writing was visible to each other, the students would work harder.  There was an additional challenge that the culture in Egypt was quite repressive, bloggers were regularly jailed, and people did not have the same blogging culture as they do here.  Instructors would comply if students requested that their blogs be private and visible to the instructor only.  Students had a variety of involvement and effort put into their various sites.  The technology was a challenge too.  Students didn’t understand how the technology worked (some of them created a whole new blog each week instead of just creating a new entry in the existing blog).  Some of the teachers didn’t understand how RSS worked and were thereby unable to take full advantage of monitoring their students new posts.  Lessons learned: Looking good on paper isn’t good enough.  Take advantage of key moments.  Own your disasters.  Define success before starting.  The most exciting technology isn’t always the best for the users.  Hasty ideas can sometimes work well — if this project had gone through a committee it never would have gone through.

cil2010, computers in libraries

CIL2010: SOPAC 2.1: Digital Strategy for the New Library

This was a presentation from John Blyberg from Darien Library in Connecticut.  What is SOPAC?  It’s a social OPAC built on the Drupal content management system.  The impetus behind SOPAC was to take a best of breed content management system that was open source and merge it with the catalog.

John says: “You may have the best website in the world, but when your user click on Catalog–BOOM, they’re in the ghetto.”

Ann Arbor wanted to create an online persona and identity connected with the library.
Three libraries currently running SOPAC are Darien Library, Ann Arbor District Library, and the Palos Verdes Library District. Newport Beach Public Library and the SAILS Library Network in Massachusetts are both mid-integration with SOPAC.

With SOPAC, all online activities with the library are conducted through DRUPAL.  SOPAC invokes two software libraries: LOCUM & Insurge.  It runs with SQL and Sphinx.

SOPAC development is user experience driven.  It is built for end users, not librarians.  They wanted a catalog that would be friendly to their users.  Users don’t care about the little stuff librarians do, all they want is to find materials in an environment that doesn’t make them feel stupid.  The catalog should look really nice.

Tagging in SOPAC is key.  The community tags items which changes the ability for everyone else to find things.  That element was a key change from SOPAC 1 to SOPAC 2.  They also use tagging to provide staff favorites.  It is a dynamic list that lets you sort the list in many ways.  They also use “better than the book” as a tag to mark movies that were better than the books they were based on.  Darien does a program called “Meet us on Main Street.”  It’s a readers advisory session where librarians recommend books that are coming out, favorite titles and subjects, etc.  They now keep a list of all of the books using tagging in the catalog.  One of their librarians needed to create a booklist (Middlesex autobiography), and simply asked the entire staff to help build the list, each person contributing one or two titles.

SOPAC does reviews and ratings. SOPAC 2.1 has a new design for the item record page.  It includes the reviews, summaries, ratings, location (called “where to find it”) and more right there on the record page in a very clean interface.

SOPAC can sort by most popular this week & most popular this month since it can tap into circulation data.  SOPAC lets you sort by top-rated items.

SOPAC offers a MyLibrary page within your account, showing your recent ratings, reviews, tags, and saved searches (which have RSS output), etc.  You can actually place holds right from the link in your RSS reader.  They are also working on an auto-hold feature which sounds freaking awesome.  If you want to place a hold on anything in a particular category no matter what it will auto-place it with no intervention from the patron whatsoever.

As an open source project, SOPAC is a portable piece of software.  If you can develop something new that’s neat (e.g. SAILS has created a carousel book cover widget), then that gets shared back with the community as a whole.  The sky is the limit as far as the potential for mash-ups with SOPAC’s data.

Drupal lets you use taxonomy to put SOPAC content anywhere in your site.  You don’t have to find the cover images or URLs, it brings in Syndetics information, brings in the MARC record and the circulation data about availability.  jquery is an Ajax library that lets you do a lot of things like creating carousel images, set up a book shelf, an iTunes like cover-flow, anything.  These are all things SOPAC developers are actively playing with.  They just have to find a way to integrate it into the user experience.

SOPAC also allows you to track items that have just been returned.  They have a display on the website that shows recently returned items.  It updates every 10 seconds, and eliminates anything that’s on hold for someone else.  They have the data displayed on LCD screens in the library.  So people can come up and say to the circ desk staff that they want one of the recently returned books that they just saw on the LCD display.

They also have an LCD display showing new items, and another showing most popular fiction.  All of this is based on circulation data and SOPAC functionality.

SOPAC 2.1 next steps:

• Twitter integration. They want to send out newly-posted reviews, updates, events, and overdue notices via Twitter. They also want to let users send the library Tweets with item requests and feedback. They already have it set up so anytime a staff member changes the website, that URL automatically goes out on Twitter.
• SMS and phone integration for the same functions above.
• Organic groups – They want to incorporate the organic groups module that Drupal offers so that users can generate user groups on the fly based on their interests.
• Customer Relationship Management – They want to build profiles of what users do at the library (what they check out, what types of reference questions they ask, what comments they leave, etc.). John acknowledges the privacy issues inherent in such a pursuit, but wants to let people’s interests connect them to other people using the library’s services

SOPAC is looking at developing an iPhone app and Android app. This would let users see their account & the catalog from their mobile devices, just as they do on the computer. They also are looking at distributed self-check…letting users take a photo of the barcode on a book and checking it out to themselves.

A question was asked about vendors blocking them in the future. John said it’s possible, but they will do whatever they can to work around it.

A question was asked about the privacy issues with their newer developments. John’s response was that they are mindful of it, but they won’t let privacy fears hamstring their development of features that users want.

A question was asked about what vendors it currently works with: Innovative Interfaces, Symphony, Libre, Koha, and several other libraries are looking at other ILS connectors.

A question was asked about how many people are working on the code. 5 main developers but there are about 10 people working on the code.

A question was asked about the staff time necessary to get it going. John says you need somewhere who has knowledge of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

A question was asked about server requirements. He said it would run on Linux, a Mac, but he doesn’t know about Windows.

A question was asked about why they are pursuing an iPhone app. John says they’re looking at both Android & iPhone.

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CIL2010: LMS: What’s Out There & How to Decide

The hashtag for the session is #lms if you want to follow what was said on Twitter about the session.

Lori Reed started the session. Lori works for the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenberg County and needed to find a way to provide online training and manage overall learning for her library’s staff. Lori’s current LMS was working fairly well, but did not include eLearning. You could look at the roster all printed out. There is a centralized number that people can call to cancel if they’re unable to attend. They have mandatory customer service training and Lori can run a report to see who has and has not attended.

They decided to move from an LMS (Learning Management System) to an LCMS (Learning Content Management System) called Luminex. An LCMS allows you to reuse content. It lets learning developers crate, store, reuse, and manage. It lets you deliver small units of learning content and assets called learning objects. The system provides a WYSIWYG editor letting you develop content, images, text, allow comments, and organize the class in a hierarchical manner.

To implement an LMS or LCMS, develop a team. Start by talking with IT & the other stakeholders. Talk to the target audience for your learning – what do they want? Narrow your focus, conduct research, and contact vendors. You’ll most likely need to prep an RFP, select finalists, hold demos, test systems over and over, negotiate for pricing and terms, and make a final selection. You will need to decide what your goals are — are you wanting to provide eLearning or just track training? Make sure that you have a valid “business case” that you can present to managers. Decide what your must-have items are: a portal, branding, mobile options, adaptive, assessments, or the ability to create your own content. Find out if IT can host and support your project or if you need to pay for outside hosting. Lori recommends that people who need info about learning systems should join the ALA Learning Roundtable listserv (you don’t need to be a member to join).
Mistakes not to make:

• Don’t underestimate the politics involved
• Keep the steps in the process straight
• Don’t underestimate the resources needed to run an LMS
• Don’t confuse content authoring tool selection with LMS selection
• Involve stakeholders early in the decision
• Fully test the product in the learner environment — not just “your computer”

________________________

Chad Mairn then presented on some of the techie things you can do to make your class pages in the LMS more interactive and interesting for the learners.

Conduct a search for content, which builds a feed for that search with Feed2JS, then copy the RSS URL into a website so people can see what’s new in a particular field or subject. A lot of LMSs allow for search alerts too.

If you have a specific resource you want to link to, make sure that you copy the persistent link (usually somewhere on the webpage itself), and add the link to the online course.

Include Meebo widgets in your LMS class pages too.

With a mashup, you can use Yahoo Pipes to combine several different feeds into one RSS-generated display.

Create generic course accounts in different database vendors. Then he saves a list of articles & resources for that particular course, and gives the log-in information to students so they can log-in and automatically see that resources list.

Add a proactive chat window that pops up on any webpage after a set amount of time (e.g. 60 seconds). They use their statewide virtual reference system for this.

Provide multiple contact points: Google Voice, Skype, Google Talk, Twitter DM, Meebo, Vivox Voice on Facebook.

Use computer/desktop sharing!@ Use web-based software like Yuuguu or LogMeIn Express to screen-share and control a student desktop. On your end you log in and create a session, then give the session URL to the student to click on to start the session.

Create screencasts with tools like Screentoaster, Jing, Screencast-o-matic, CaptureFox (a Firefox add-on).

Chad’s library uses Angel, which was just bought out by Blackboard. His library also uses LibGuides.

In any LMS, you can request to be an authenticated guest in a course.

Chad recommends creating a library repository which includes course e-reserves.

Someone asked about using Moodle and Lori answered that Moodle does have to be installed on a server. She used the library’s GoDaddy account, which has a one-click installation for Moodle and gives you a log-in and password to start with. But with Moodle you have to build the LMS from the ground up – there’s no automatic shell yet.

cil2010, computers in libraries

CIL2010: Paul Holdengraber interview with David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States

Ferriero is the Archivist of the United States, has worked at academic institutions for most of his career, but also worked at NYPL for 5 years.  In fact, he used to be Holdengraber’s boss.

There are 44 facilities in the archive.  Ferriero is “the highest ranking librarian in the administration…nay, the only librarian in the administration.”  Holdengraber replied “well, we can change that.”

His job has had a big focus on declassification since he started.  Here’s how he got the job: He received a phone call from the White House offering him the job of the Archivist of the United States, thought about it over the weekend, and someone from Obama’s transition team came out to meet with him and said that Obama wanted someone who was excited about change and technology, who thought outside of the box.  The Obama administration excited him, and when they called him back in June, they said “The President is in Saudi Arabia and is thinking about you and wants you to be the Archivist of the United States.”

Obama has given Ferriero two new missions for the Archive.  The first mission is the open government initiative.  The Obama administration is requiring all agencies to move toward the open government initiative with three pillars in mind: transparency, collaboration, and participation.  The approach is to move with a groundswell of talent and ideas from the ground up through the different agencies.  He’s thinking about how they process and make available their collections.  A big part of that has been through social media, including his own blog, through which he shares info on what they are doing in his agencies.  There was some concern when he was appointed because he is a librarian and not an archivist.

400 million pages that need to be declassified.  Holdengraber asked how he is approaching the project.  Everything needs to be declassified with the sole exception of national security.  There are 250 agencies in the federal government with 2400 different classification guides on what remains classified and what doesn’t.  Those guides are supposed to be revised every 5 years, but half of them don’t meet that standard.  “We have a flawed classification system.  Those of you who have dealt with a FOIA request know that.”  This has included using technology to expedite the process.

Holdengraber asked what kind of direction the Obama administration has given the Archives, vs. other previous administration.  You can’t have open government without good records.  This means ensuring that the records are being prepared to be migrated through various technologies.  It also means that when IT systems are being developed in each agency, that records are given immediate consideration and aren’t an afterthought.  The Chief Information Officers from each agency and the Records Management Officers from each agency have never met together as a group.  Ferriero has started having those two groups meet which has created more communication and forward movement.

The first National Archivist in FDR’s administration naturally told all of the different agencies to begin to deposit their records in the national archive.  They basically ignored him.  FDR had a cabinet meeting where he told the agency heads “You will deposit your records in the national archive.”  We’re now at a similar junction.  Many agencies have developed & purchased their own systems and technologies and are all doing different things.  There needs to be unity.

Holdengraber presented a quote from Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones: “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church that belongs to God and the public library that belongs to you.  The public library is the great equalizer.”

The Archive is doing a lot for education and children.  They are currently doing a website redesign with the K-12 community in mind, are opening an exhibit on the Civil War which will also have an online version.  “Getting kids excited about the records is a way to teach about American history but also about citizenship.”  There are many tours, Ferriero meets with classes and teachers, and he encourages them to write letters to Obama.

Ferriero has not met Obama yet.  “It’s nice having a boss down the street, but not in my face.” (*crowd explodes*).

Holdengraber asked what Ferriero is doing with staff to motivate them and guide their work.  Ferriero  is currently doing a tour of all 44 facilities and finding out what the issues are from the staff.  He has had a 77% participation rate in a survey he created to find out how things are going and what needs changing.  He saw that one of his staff members was posting on Facebook about “Why should I participate in this survey?” and so he friended that person and started the conversation asking the employee to give him a chance.

In a Provost speech that Ferriero gave,entitled “Losing Our Memory.”  The Provost had said: “In the digital environment, everything is saved, but little is preserved.”  In Ferriero’s speech, he said: “Clearly we need to save better and preserve more, and not the other way around.”  Since 1996 Presidential Records Act, Email has been recognized as a record. On the Federal side, email is still not recognized as a valid record.  He doesn’t think we’re saving what we need to save, and therefore losing valuable records.

Ferriero has a problem with sites like Ancestry.com and Google Books, with whom the Archive has partnerships.  They have created standard languages that locks up the content for a specified period of time (5 years for Ancestry & longer for Google).  From the Archive’s perspective these are public records.  Ferriero is concerned about locking federal documents up.  If he had his way, everything in the Archive would be digitized.  They are 2 years away from their contract renewal with Ancestry.com and have to decide what they’re going to do — keep it or not?

Ferriero does a lot online but says “There is something aesthetic about print on page that is not, for me, been replaced electronically.”  He says “Wikipedia is my favorite tool and Google is my first line of defense.”

He is currently reading Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.  Just before that he read a book about Walt Whitman and his siblings.  The author used Whitman’s wife’s letters to Whitman, which points a picture of her which hasn’t really existed until now because her letters have never been used before in scholarship.

Holdengraber asked what Ferriero’s greatest worry is.  The answer is “electronic records.”  It’s the most visible and expensive thing that the Archive has to get right.  The biggest joy?  Getting to know the staff and looking at the collection itself.

Holdengraber asked what recommendation Ferriero would have for librarians to do, to pay attention to books.  He said “You need to push your supervisors.  Look for opportunities to get involved and get your ideas out there.  The folks at the top need to be pushed.  I’m a guy at the top who is being pushed by my staff, and that’s the only way we’re going to be able to do what we’re supposed to be doing.”

Holdengraber asked Ferriero what he looks for in hiring choices.  He said that his best hiring choice was Josh Greenberg (?) was his Director of Digital Strategies at NYPL.  He learned so much from Greenberg, so many different ideas and truly a new way of looking at the world.

The directorship of NYPL is currently open, so Holdengraber asked Ferriero what his next job will be.  In a NYT article, Ferriero said that his only next job could be at the Vatican…and not at the library

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CIL2010: Digital Manager Sound Off

This session is about people who manage the digital aspects of library services.  We all have different titles: David is the Digital Branch and Services Manager, I’m the Digital Futures Manager, Bobbi is the Digital Branch Manager, and Matt is the Library Innovation and Technology Manager for Boulder Public Library.

We all spend a lot of time in meetings.  We do a lot of communication and acting as liaisons between IT and the rest of the staff.  Groups & teams often want the techie present at their groups just in case a technology issue comes up.  We spend a lot of time on project management, doing initial planning and then passing the work and projects off to other parts of the organization.  We all deal with the people stuff while the techies deal with the techie stuff.

All four of us didn’t start off in technology and had very little formal training on digital services, web design, or technology in general.  We all learned on the job.

A question was asked about whether we design the digital spaces like the physical spaces.  I answered that I was explicitly told to make our digital presence match up to the quality and branding of our physical spaces.  David’s director told him to think about making connections from the physical to the digital and using the digital space as a supplement to what you can achieve in the physical space.  Bobbi says that there are big differences in the image put across by their buildings and their website.  Her library is so diverse that it’s hard to make the digital match the physical.  Matt talked about inheriting web presences from previous managers. In the shorter term, he’s trying to bring together the various disparate web presences.

Who edits the content on the website?  Matt does some content editing on the overall look & feel, the Facebook page, and spends more time recommending best practices.  Bobbi’s library’s website is still under the marketing department, but with the new site there will be content creators from other departments.  I don’t create any content, but set up best practices and get a baseline amount of content going to show proof of concept.  Our library has dozens of different content owners who edit their own content.  David’s library also has a distributed method of content creation.  David has a weekly video blog and tries to add other content to the website weekly too.  He wants to set a good example for the other staff to model.

Question about archiving email and other records: David’s library doesn’t do that.  My library does require archiving of our online content, including content we’ve taken down, and Matt’s library is looking at the same issue.  We all agree it’s hard!

Question about how much time we take to build communities or researching trends.  Matt invests a good amount of time in this, Bobbi wishes she had more time, I wish I had more time, and David does too.

cil2010, computers in libraries

CIL2010: Analyzing, Evaluating, and Communicating the Value of Web Presence
Amanda Clay Powers & Michael Porter

Michael started by saying: Don’t let “that’s the way we’ve always done it” or “we’re too busy” kill our libraries.

Return on investment for social media: what is it, what it is for libraries, and why you should care.  Michael recommended a website from Oliver Blanchard: Social Media ROI: http://smroi.net.  Having a social media presence nowadays is merely the equivalent of being listed in the yellow pages.  Social media is just a tool.  They are not a silver bullet.  You have to use them effectively.  At the same time, you do get results from these sites.  Michael showed a video for “Socialnomics” showing the ROI on social media, statistics for social media use, business success stories, and that companies using social media have better profits and revenues.  Free and low-cost marketing naturally has a higher margin of return on investment.  Many libraries see ROI as a term of “corporate fear.”  For libraries, ROI is not a matter of money or earned profits.  Michael has a ton of resources listed in his slides on calculating and researching ROIs, which will be in his presentation on Slideshare later.  Michael says there is nothing wrong with analysis and the metrics are out there to grab if you take the time.

Amanda Clay Powers now gets into the nitty gritty.   She shows the analytics page for a Facebook Page.  You can download the data and manipulate it any way you want.  She showed an example of a library rave (yes, they had a rave) with photos that they posted to Facebook – and they got good responses to that content: higher page views, photo views.  Amanda asks us to take a step back and think about what the target is for the library’s participation in these spaces.  What is the data good for?  What is the real value of assessment?  Is it about convincing people that these spaces are a good idea or are we beyond that now?  It’s about building relationships, Amanda says.  Get your unique and rare resources noticed!  Use Twitter to promote these and share the content from them.  Are you being re-tweeted?  What gets “liked”?  What provokes comment?  Who’s engaging with you? Who is doing it and why?  What are you doing that is “sticky”?  Amanda encourages us to create our own assessment tools, not a cookie cutter idea of what others think is important.  Engagement is interesting, page views are not.

cil2010, computers in libraries

CIL2010: Website Redesign: A Public Library Website Redesign: (aka The Trip to Hades & Back)

This was my second session at CIL2010.  I spoke about our library’s website redesign, which is still in process, and my recommendations for people managing or taking part in a website redesign process.  You can view my slides below.  Please leave your own comments on website redesigns on this post as well – I’m thrilled to get additional ideas from my community of readers.

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CIL2010: Website Redesign: Georgetown University
Kristina Bobe, Stephen Fernie, Shian-Chih Chang, & William Wheeler from Georgetown University

Their new design was user-centered, not staff-centered.  They wanted to create a design that helped users help themselves.  How can I get help?  What hours are you open?  Simple questions.  Focusing on a process with users as the focus was a change for the library.

Master Task List: Know your users.  How are they searching?  What do they want to find?  They did some simple user task analysis by writing down questions that people had, what content was on the website, on little pieces of paper and tacking it up on a bulletin board.  They came up with a master task list that helped them develop the website’s new navigation.  Then staff looked at the map of content and figured out where things were missing or where they were misplaced.

Usability: They asked many students the various questions for sample invented tasks (e.g. “You have an assignment on Ghana.  Where do you start?”)  They tracked the clicks users made, and asked them why they clicked there and what they expected to find there.  What they found was information about how users think about link naming and the location of links.  They tested it on a group, refined their content, and re-tested it.  They went through 10-12 iterations of testing throughout a 19 month redesign process.  Also, they were happy to have hard evidence about what users want and how they think.  That helped to settle some of the battles over the website among the staff.

Content Management: They chose Drupal for their CMS.  Drupal is extremely flexible with open source advantages and an active development community.  There is a lot of customization that needs to take place with Drupal.  Their site is running 30 different modules, which makes implementing new things challenging sometimes.

Subject Guides: They chose to use LibData for their subject guide management system.   It’s built on Apache, MySQL, and PHP.  Previous subject guides were managed in ColdFusion and were not very flexible or importable.  They wanted a new system that was easy for the librarians to manage and had exportable data.  They wanted something with an accessible database back-end.  They made the guides more visible from the homepage as well with multiple pathways based on user need — not category of resource.

Communication: They created a wiki for communication about the website redesign.  It enabled documentation and communication on and off campus, replacing three different other intranet sites/services.  People were used to doing things their own way and needed constant reminders that things were on the wiki.  There was also the feeling among staff that they were fatigued by having one more place to check for something.  Just make decisions about technology and go forward.  Task analysis is fundamentally important.  Task analysis should not be guesswork and should not be anecdotally based.  You need to communicate with people both in-person and via online means.  They feel overall that they made an important step forward but they’ve illuminated some more future needs as well as a result.

CIL2010, computers in libraries

CIL2010: Organization 2.0

Meredith Farkas presented about problems libraries have with implementing 2.0-style projects due to cultural or other issues.

What is the problem with implementing social software at the library?  A lot of libraries go into spaces where our users are because we want to be there with them, but we don’t do it well and we embarrass ourselves.  Many people treat technology like it’s free like beer but it is really free like kittens…they take maintenance, ongoing effort, and staff time.  If you have one person alone who is managing technology for the library, then you’re in a bad space.  If that person gets hit by a bus then no one else can take it over and the library is in big trouble.  Just doing the hot new thing for the sake of it is not helpful and does not serve our users best.  It’s not like some of our job duties get taken away — we’re just expected to do more with the same amount of time and money.  There is also the problem of a new technology being hot and sexy, but once you have to actually maintain them they lose their sexiness.  Meredith noted the large quantity of 2.0 graveyards – blogs that haven’t been updated since 2005.

Why does social software fail?  The use of social software is not seen as furthering the library’s mission.  It’s treated as someone’s pet project.  It’s not planned for strategically like other technologies.  Once the newness wears off, people are less motivated to contribute.  Staff are not given time to work on social software.

Library 2.0 is a state of mind.  We need to work to meet changing user needs.  We need to trust our users.  We need to get rid of the culture of perfect.  We need to be aware of emerging technologies and opportunities.  We need to look beyond our library niche world for applications, opportunities, and inspiration.

Tips for Building Organization 2.0: Know your users.  Treat technologies as tools.  What do your users need?  What does your staff need?  The need should come before the tool.  She gave the example of setting up RSS feeds by subject for different departments’ materials in the catalog.  Put links to our collections in Wikipedia on pages that reference your unique information and collections.  Add your original photos and other images to Flickr.  The development of library services should be an iterative process, a perpetual beta.  Be agile and don’t get attached to the current version of any given project.  Be brutal and cut what you have to cut.  Realize that great ideas can come from anyone anywhere.  Nurture talent in the organization by encouraging suggestions and innovation and recognizing the achievements of the staff…no matter their position..  Time is a big issue too – we need to give staff time for creative endeavors. Encourage network building.  Meredith treats Facebook like her electronic rolodex. Query the hive for information, feedback, and participation.  Be transparent – have a library suggestion blog and let users, staff, and others make suggestions and comment freely, openly, and transparently.  Have a relevant staff person answer the question (not a marketing person!).  Finally, devote time to all of this.  You might need to create new positions at your library.  You might need an emerging technologies librarian.

cil2010, computers in libraries

CIL2010: Black Ops Ninja-Style Technology Projects

This session was a panel presentation on how to quickly implement technology projects with covert, black-ops, ninja-style approaches.  The panelists included myself, Amanda Etches-Johnson, and John Blyberg.

The session has its own hashtag, #CILninjas, with a live-stream of comments and questions which is worth perusing for your own enjoyment and edification   Update: Our hashtag for the session was a trending topic on Twitter during our presentation and for a little while after.  Wow!!!  The power of Twit-brarians!

So, without further ado, the tips:

John – Getting people on board by finding key advocates and embedding them throughout the library organization as cheerleaders.
Amanda – Stick to project goals that fulfill your library’s mission and goals.
Sarah - Blend into the environment and sneak up on people, ninja-style. Sometimes you can make some changes without anyone really noticing.  Or you can sneak a project through. Slowly introduce your idea through covert emails, mentions at meetings, and then when you announce your project it won’t seem so foreign or inconceivable to people.  People respond better to the familiar, even if it is something they’ve only heard one other time.  Example: adding circulation contact links in the catalog on the My Account pages.
John - Have a vision in your mind that you can help people be passionate about (oftentimes because what is there is not passion-inspiring).  He gave the example of SOPAC implementation at Ann Arbor District Library.
Amanda – Follow evidence-based practice. Start with a literature search and ask your colleagues what their experiences are.  If there isn’t evidence to support what you want to do, don’t give up, but at least then share what you have done with others so that there is now information for others to use to support their projects.
Sarah – Avoid collateral damage.  Don’t step on any toes power-wise.  Don’t hurt anyone else’s unit, or staffing, without their say-so.  Involve everyone who needs to be involved early on.  Get users involved early.  Let them help define the project’s goals, you help them with the how.  Respect the knowledge and insights of your coworkers.
John – Answering a question about what if you fail with your project?  Deploy like a fire jumper.  You drop in and you hold an area.  If you’re not committed to devoting all of the resources necessary to make your project a success, there’s no point in doing it.  But it’s okay if you fail.  You learn from failures.  “People learn from a legacy of failure.”  If you are wrong about a project, admit your mistake and analyze why you couldn’t make something work through a post-mortem.  Was it because the idea was bad?  Was it because there weren’t enough staffing resources involved?  Apply those lessons for the next time you want to try something out.
Amanda – Don’t focus on the small, inconsequential items.  Use a team-based approach for decision-making.Teams can focuso n smallerr
Sarah - Answering a question about pushing forward on something without asking for permsision vs. getting stakeholders on board early: It’s a judgement call.  If you know from experience that their objections will not be based on fear instead of reality, then push ahead.  My tip: Trust and follow your instincts.  If it sounds like a good idea to you, believe in your instincts.  You’re not stupid.  If you’ve done research and thought about it, it’s likely a good idea.  Example: We had a really junky horrible graphic design for our new website that a paid designer produced (paid well).  It was crap.  But we paid for it.  Our new web librarian, Nate Hill, came in and on his second day showed me a mock-up for a new design he’d done just as an exercise.  It was head & shoulders above what we had from the designers.  My instincts said to use the new design, and we did, and it paid off.
John – Know when to quit.  It’s not about what you’ve put into it, it’s about what you get out of it.  It’s important to not dig your heels into a bad project when you know it’s bad.  Question from audience: sometimes it’s okay to implement a stupid project just to show that it’s a stupid idea.  Use your judgment about when to implement something.  It may undermine trust in your expertise or projects in the future.
John – Win over the hearts and minds of your users.  Give people stability so they can do their jobs at the end of the day.  If what you’ve created is not rock-solid, don’t do it.  We need to move from a culture of reaction to a culture of innovation.  If there are problems, solve them at the root so that it doesn’t plague you moving into the future.  Figure out why it’s a chronic issue and how to fix it.  Be high profile about being “the fixer” who makes their lives easier.

Question: How do you say no without offending them?  Ask them to do some research and show there is a user need and ability to support the project.  Oftentimes that will end in the project dying out anyway.  Make sure that the person suggesting the idea has some personal investment in the project and is willing to put in time and effort to support it.  Otherwise they’re telling you what to do, and that’s not a recipe for success.  Amanda will often paper-prototype the website requests she gets and tests it to see if it would or would not fly.

Comment: Don’t show all of your cards.  Keep some of the basic suggestions in reserve so that stakeholders can make the suggestion themselves and sound like they have had a contribution to the project.

Comment: There are positive ways to say no.

cil2010, computers in libraries