Any bad library experience is a blow, but especially so with interlibrary loan: I personally think the ability to freely lend library items across the country is one of our greatest strengths, and one definite thing that sets us apart from other local groups and for-profit organizations.

And honestly, I always get a bizarre little thrill when someone calls to request a book. I like knowing I can pull a book from the shelf, print a hold slip, and put that book on the hold shelf. Then, another staff member will continue to forward that book on to the patron, be it a local patron or someone in another state. Dorky, I know, but I like that sense of being part of a system.

But back to the comments: unfortunately, everything cited is (or can be) true. Requests can take time to fill. Books do go missing. Most ILSs don’t provide an easy way to communicate problems upstream. Sometimes, the best a local staff person can do is mark their local copy missing and hope the request is filled by another library.

But that shouldn’t be the best we can do. To capitalize on our unique network, and to compete with modern options like NetFlix, any new system (software and people) should be designed to optimize interlibrary loan, not just allow for it. Massachusetts is at least lucky that we have a (mostly-)state-wide catalog, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

Upgrading SwissArmyLibrarian.net
The upgrade went fairly smoothly, and I think this website is operating normally. If you seen anything different or wrong, please let me know in the comments.

A few backend issues still need to be dealt with. For some reason, the comment admin screen is not displaying comments. If I search for them, they appear, but when I click the Show All Comments I get a “No results found” message. Odd. And, I’m having trouble with the ftp settings. Which should be fairly straight-forward, so I’ll keep trying.

Beyond these issues, I’m also still getting used to the new look and design of the admin interface. I’d heard it was very different (and not necessarily better), so I was prepared. Even with accounting for bias, I do think I like the old version better, but we’ll see.

The upgrade itself went smoothly. Wordpress makes is pretty easy, with their upgrade instructions. It really was as easy as the directions indicate, despite me making a few mistakes along the way (hurray for backups).

Upgrading ChelmsfordLibrary.org/blog
However, I must say that it was not as easy as upgrading my library’s blog. Our website is hosted at Bluehost.com, which offers many web services and programs pre-installed through Fantastico. I know Fantastico has some issue, but it sure does make upgrades like this easier. What took me a few hours to do on my own for swissarmylibrarian.net took perhaps ten minutes through Bluehost (and I didn’t see the problem with comments and ftp settings).

I don’t want make a sales pitch for them, but if a library is looking for a place to host their website, we’ve been very happy. It’s cheap (something like $7 a month), their tech support has been great, and so much software comes preinstalled that it’s easy to manage and try out new web tools without having to do all the installations yourself.

But if you are a library looking for web hosting, definitely check out LISHost.org. They specialize in hosting library websites, offer a lot of the extras, and will also help design a website.

Help Build a Library Q&A Custom Search
A post on the Library 2.0 Ning group mentioned a project to create a Google custom search engine of just reference questions from libraries. If your library does this, be sure to add it to the list - the more data it can search, the more useful it will be.

“The Oracle Collective”
An article in this week’s New York Times Magazine talks about asking questions on the internet, and a few services that provide answers (Yahoo Answers, Ask.com, etc). It’s an interesting article, and the recommendations at the end are worth reading. Via LISNews.

I Get By With A Little Help From MeFi
No roundup of ask-a-question resources is complete with mentioning Ask MetaFilter. MetaFilter, a.k.a. MeFi, is a community blog to which interesting websites are posted (essentially “filtering” the internet for the rest of us). In Ask MeFi, volunteers from the community provide answers to questions asked by site visitors.

Internet Public Library Reference Desk
Staffed by librarians and library students, the Internet Public Library is always a reliable source for answers. Their list of frequently asked questions isn’t as fancy as some, but it still gets the job done. (And in the interest full disclosure, I volunteered with the IPL when I was in library school.)

Surely There Is A Wiki…
Very similar to Yahoo Answers and Ask MeFi in principle is WikiAnswers. As a wiki, anyone can ask or answer a questions, and also edit existing answers. The format of a single answer can be easier that reading lots of individual replies from different people, but here you can also view the discussion of the answer. Part of Answers.com.

I know lots of individual libraries are doing this too, and some are twittering their reference questions. If you know of other good sources to ask questions online and search through answers, please share.

I don’t mean the library collection. I mean patrons using the friendly and easy-going atmosphere of the library as a safe place to either leave things, store things, or transfer things to someone else.

So far this week, I have been involved in the following situations:

• A patron who routinely leaves her notebook and text books at the library. She knows we clean up each night and hold things like this at the lost-and-found at the desk, in case someone comes to claim them. She said she knows they are safe, and it’s easier than her lugging it all home each night
• A patron who emailed me important files from his home computer, because he was sending it out for service and didn’t want to lose them (I won’t even try to explain that he could have emailed them to himself instead of me, not to mention backing up to disk)
• A patron who uses the library as a drop-off point: for instance, if she needs to get some documents to someone else, and they can’t meet personally, she’ll leave them at the desk with that person’s name on them and tell the other person to pick them up at the library

It says a lot that people not only trust the library like this, but also think of us in these situations. That’s being an important part of the community.

But it’s also annoying, you know? The library cannot take responsibility for these items, so it worries me that people rely on good natures and good fortunes. I could understand if we had public lockers for these purposes, but we don’t (then there are the stories of library lockers being used for drug deals and who knows what all).

All of these exchanges involve staff time, which is another concern. A few times a month is no big deal, but if more people routinely use the library to store their personal property, or to pass along items to other people - or worse, as daycare until their child can be picked up by someone else - this kind of thing could easily get overwhelming.

Or am I wrong? Should libraries do whatever patrons ask of us, and make it part of our mission to offer this kind of service? I fully support the idea of library as community center, so perhaps. It just seems something like this needs to be decided deliberately, and not just be some patrons getting special treatment on the sly.

I mean, I read a lot of library books, and also watch a lot of our DVDs. Popular materials are a valuable core library offering, but my own personal entertainment doesn’t feel like it should count as library use.

So I was happy that I was able to use the library for a bit of research and practical knowledge (and just a little bit embarrassed that using the library wasn’t my own idea).

A friend of mine gave me an old wooden rocking chair a few years ago, which was in pretty rough shape. I’d always meant to fix it up, but doing it right would have entailed recaning the seat. I’d put it off and put it off, but a few weeks ago I finally got around to starting the project.

Since I had to buy some caning supplies, and hopefully learn how to do it, I went to a chair store that did this kind of work. While talking to the guy there, he suggested I use The Complete Guide to Chair Caning as a guide. He went on to suggest that, instead of buying it, I should try to get it from the library - and then he asked if I ever go to the library. That led to a nice little discussion about the benefit of libraries, but it also left me feeling a little sheepish that I hadn’t already checked to see if my library had something that would help me with this project.

The next day I searched our catalog, and ended up requesting the book from another library in our consortium. After consulting the book, and a few days of work, I was able to fix up the chair’s seat, good as new (check out my progress).

For whatever reason, getting this book from the library and finishing this project is such a more rewarding and positive library experience than DVDs or audio books. I don’t mean to detract at all from popular materials, and perhaps I’m kind of biased being a reference librarian, but hooray for non-fiction. I’d forgotten how good it feels to be a library patron.

(and as a completely unnecessary sidenote, some of my other “research” was caught on video. At this year’s Westford Strawberry Festival, a woman was doing seat caning demonstrations. I probably watched her and asked questions for a good half-hour, and was so engrossed that I never even noticed the video camera five feet away from me. I’m the headless one in the gray shirt, about 0:54 seconds into it:

I know, I’m a dork.)

A patron came to the desk asking for help with YouTube. He’s one of our regulars, and has a bit of a compulsive personality. He’s also a big fan of The Doors: he’s working on a book, buys whatever merchandise he can from eBay, and watches any related video on YouTube - or rather, tries to.

One day, he came to the desk and said:

When I search for “the doors” on YouTube, there are over 79,000 videos. However, It only shows the first 50 pages of search results, which is only the first 500 videos. How can I watch the rest?

I had never clicked this far into any search returns in my life. So I tried it out, and sure enough, he was right. I played a bit, but couldn’t find any way to get past this barrier to the rest of the videos.

I searched their Help Center with no success, and so sent in the question via their Contact Form. I also searched the general internet, but couldn’t find anything relating to this issue.

This was on April 25th, 2008. So far, I haven’t heard anything back from YouTube or Google. I resubmitted the question a couple weeks later, but again, no response.

I’ve played with this search limit again recently, and it looks like now YouTube cuts off the returned videos in the 540’s, which is on page 28. The pagination shows out to page 31, and implies there is more, but when you click beyond page 28 the pagination and video numbering starts over at 1.

I can understand the technical limitations and the necessity of an upper cap on returned search matches. But with no explanation or message that there is a limit, and this confusing/resetting pagination, this patron feels YouTube is teasing him personally, and cheating him out of these other 78,500+ videos.

Does anyone have an answer I can pass on to the patron? Thanks.

• Forty $1,000 bills
• Piece of bacon
• Credit cards
• Valuable baseball cards
• A diamond ring

I’m sure most libraries have a collection of odd things, too - just this week I found a Pokémon card (in a book about dealing with bullying). I tend to use receipts myself, or whatever random scrap of paper is handy at the time. Perhaps there should be a Where’s George?-like program for bookmarks, too.

In the course of discussion this weekend, I found myself focusing on one of my favorite elements, shared content. There is much more to Library 2.0 (and Web 2.0) than this, but it’s a big part of it. By “shared content,” I mean being able to display on one website content that originated (and is hosted by) another website.

On a lot of popular websites (like YouTube), there will be links to “embed this video” or “get our widget” or whatnot, and that’s what I’m talking about. It’s an easy way to make your own website more useful and interesting, but it also opens up all kinds of possibilities. You don’t necessarily need to know anything about file formats, ftp’ing, or even HTML coding - all you need to know is how to copy/paste.

So, here’s a bit of roundup of common types of embedded content, and a few ideas for using them to supplement what you’re already offering on your website. The possibilities are really only limited by your creativity, so please share if you have ideas better than mine (and I’m sure you do).

Adding Movies and Video Clips
There’s lots of websites that can host videos, but YouTube is the most common. Whenever you view a video on YouTube, you’ll see a box titled “Embed” with some code in it. The code usually looks like this:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/9FQzhtIJXJM&hl=en”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/9FQzhtIJXJM&hl=en” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

You don’t need to know what any of that means. You just need to copy/paste it into your own HTML page or blog post, and a happy little video will be displayed on your webpage (the video still “lives” on the YouTube server, and you’re just displaying it on your webpage), like this:

Ideas for using this:

• Book Reviews, like StoryTubes
• Library Tour, or a tour of historical sites around your community
• A Teen Movie Making club
• Staff introductions (I know, it’ll never happen…)
• Training on using library resources

Fun With Photographs
Again, lots of websites do this, but flickr is one of the most popular photo hosting services (it does video now, too). Instead of storing photographs on your own server, you can upload them to your flickr account and take advantage of the other tools flickr offers.

You can embed individual images (flickr gives you a choice of sizes, and provides the code for embedding it), or you can embed a slideshow or flickr “badge.” These two are nice because after you put the code in, it can be set to automatically show your newest pictures. I use a flickr badge in navigation bar on the right, and my library also uses it to display historical photos and photos of our childrens room mural. Here’s a sample of photos I have taken and tagged “Maine:”

More of herzogbr’s stuff tagged with maine on www.flickr.com

Ideas for using this:

• Library Tour
• Photos of patrons
• Photos of a library or town events
• Staff introductions
• Highlight a collection, such as historical photographs
• Display other peoples’ photos of your library or community via a flickr pool or a badge and tags

What’s the feed, Kenneth?
Lots of Library 2.0 tools offer on RSS feeds. These can be grabbed and displayed on your website, no matter where they come from. One simple tool that converts an RSS feed to code you can embed on your website is Feed2JS - you just give it the feed, and it gives you the code. It also gives you some control over the formatting, too, which is nice. My library uses this to embed our three most recent blog posts onto the library’s homepage - same content, different places.

Another fun set of feed tools let you mix multiple feeds into a single feed. So, if you wanted to get news from CNN, NPR and the BBC, or photos from different family members, you could combine them into a single feed and it makes keeping up easier. My favorite tools for this are FeedBlendr and FeedBurner - just enter the feeds you want to blend, and they produce a single feed for you. This can then be run through Feed2JS to embed on your website, and FeedBlendr also offers tips for using it.
Ideas for using this:

• Promote your library blog on other webpages
• Display blog posts with certain tags on related webpages
• Display community news (especially headlines from your local paper)
• Promote community connections by displaying feeds from patrons’ blogs, photo streams, or other sources

Make subject guides dynamic
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website. It lets you “bookmark” websites into your account, which then can be used by you or other people. Del.icio.us lets you tag the websites as you bookmark them, which means that can be organized using your own structured vocabulary.

This is perfect for libraries that maintain online subject guides. It is much easier to add a website to del.icio.us and tag/describe it on the fly than it is to add it to a webpage by HTML. And when you do use a structured vocabulary for your tags, these new websites showing up on your library subject guides is automatic. It’s also nice that multiple computers can add bookmarks to your account, so other staff can be adding websites whenever they see them. Read more about how to use del.icio.us for library subject guides on a previous post.
Ideas for using this:

• Library subject guides
• Staff favorites, or recently added websites
• Websites tagged with community words

Embedding fun features and communication tools
Once you start looking for them, you’ll find lots of websites offering to embed their content on your website. This is a great was to encourage interaction and involvement, but the utility of the content must be evaluated - don’t just embed things because you can.
Ideas for using this:

• Local weather, from the Weather Channel
• Polls and Quizzes, to see how patrons feel about an issue or just solicit input (flexipoll.com is one option)
• Online chat, to ask a librarian a question or have a discussion (MeeboMe is one option)
• Games, perhaps for a game club, to illustrated an article or collection, or just for fun (everyflashgame.com is one option)
• Book information, to show new additions or a special collection (LibraryThing.com is one option)

Like I said, the possibilities of this are endless. The goodwill and usefulness can be immeasurable, too, but there are a few drawbacks. First, since this content is coming from other servers, it can be unavailable at times (or worse, go away forever without warning). Also, if you’re displaying the content of other people, you can’t control what they will say or do. This is why it is important to grab feeds only from trusted sources, or embed specific videos or photos, so you’re sure of what you’re getting.

And certainly, don’t be afraid to just try something to see how it works. That’s usually the best way to learn, and the best way to show people what is possible.

Patron: Hello, do you, I, have you got, um, wifey, at the library?
Me: Ah, I’m sorry, could you repeat that please?
Patron: Is wifey, at the library?
Me: Well, I don’t know, but if you describe her, I can walk around and look for her.
Patron: What?
Me: We don’t have a paging system, so I’ll have to walk around to check and see if she’s here.
Patron: She? No, I mean wifey. For my computer. Can I use wifey access at the library?
Me: [pause] Oh, yes, we do have wi-fi access here…

…and I went on to describe what we offer. The patron wasn’t nearly as entertained by this misunderstanding as I was - in fact, I think he thought I was an idiot. Oh well; at least we eventually straightened it out.

When he came in later that day, I was able to help him connect his laptop to the library’s wireless network, so that may have restored his faith in librarian competency.

Regardless, I’m going to take advantage of Jessamyn’s incredibly timely post about better publicizing library services (not to mention linking to them so patrons can find local wireless access when the library is closed).

I’m writing today from the NELA-ITS Spring 2008 workshop. The handouts are available below, so I’ll just be annotating with a few points throughout the day, and also trying to add pictures to flickr.

Here are the handouts, that were provided to all attendees on a flash drive:

• Library-Wide IT Proficiency Workshop Overview [pdf, 9kb]
• Library-Wide IT Proficiency Workshop Presentation [pps, 4mb]

Part I
Overview of the National Agriculture Library, and the services they offer. Being a national library, they are a resource for everyone, so check them out.

Library-Wide IT Proficiencies

• Why are IT proficiencies important? It’s important to get IT support right the first time with the end-user, so front-line staff need to feel comfortable in both doing the support and managing expectations (we cannot “fix the internet”).
• Keys to success Enable non-IT staff, excellent communications, understand end-users (needs, vocabulary and skills), know where knowledge or information lies within the organization, don’t get stressed - we’re all working towards the same goal
• Get to know your users Know their generation, but get past stereotypes - teach based on how different generations learn
• Expect things to change Technology will change, staff and users needs and skills will change - must expect change and be flexible to accommodate it
• Listen to end-users Meet with end-users in a non-threatening way to learn directly from them what they need (although it might be delicate, focus on what is wrong, because no one is happy with IT), and work to get ongoing feedback

Part II
Roadmap to creating an IT-Savvy Library Staff

• Technology Core Competencies Abilities, knowledge and skill required to do the job - can be itemized based on areas or tasks, such as “printer & copier,” “operating system,” “email,” etc.
• Types Can be task-based (skill: refill printer paper) or descriptive (knowledge: know how to surf the internet)
• Get involvement from everyone Everyone should be involved in defining them and what is needed to achieve them (management, professional staff, front-line staff, etc)
• Plan implementation Everyone knows what’s happening and what to expect, and how competencies can be met
• Resources
  • WebJunction
  • Technology Competencies for Libraries in North Carolina [pdf]
  • Public Library of Charlotte and Mechlenburg County’s Information Technology Core Competencies
  • Technology competencies and training for libraries, by Sarah Houghton-Jan/ALA TechSource
  • David Lee King’s Basic Competencies
• Why have them? Promote customer service, increase motivation, address fear/threats of technology or people with limited skills (and don’t be afraid of providing incentives and praise)
• IT Liaison Program Designate one person from each department to be the lead liaison with the IT department - hopefully someone interested in IT, to be the first point of contact
• Ideas for training Experts in the library leading sessions, creating fact sheets (your own knowledge base), online training/webinars (free and fee), weekly tips. mentoring programs, regional trainers, keep track of what library staff don’t know (FAQs)
• Topics for training Evolving technologies, real-world issues (spam, phishing, flash drives, etc), tour the library website, Google labs, digital rights management, RSS, media formats (flash, audio, interactivity, etc), hardware petting zoo (new gadgets, gizmos and games)