I’m beginning to become more of a Facebook fan, after many years of wondering why it’s so popular.  It really can be a way to keep connected with friends and colleagues.  And to gather information, as it turns out.

After the delightful symposium at ALA sponsored by OCLC, I have connected with a number of the OCLC folks that I met and got to know.  One of them, Alice, has a new widget on her Facebook page that intrigued me.

It’s called Cite Me.

WorldCat app has just been released on Facebook called CiteMe. Type in a title, author, subject, or isbn and presto! A formatted citation comes up, right in the Facebook environment.

Of course, if you’re looking to do a whole bibliography in a click, staying on the WorldCat.org site is the way to go. You can build a list of all your works and generate your Works Cited page, quickly and easily. But for one or two listings or a quick refresher when you’re posting out–this new Facebook app can’t be beat!

Oh. My. God.  How cool is that???  (And where was that when I was in school??)  I can’t wait to figure out how to coordinate this with the services for the library at MPOW.

I’m back in Minnesota, after a delightful if quick trip to ALA. The OCLC symposium went rather well and it was an honor to be on the dais with Susan, David, and Michael.

It was great to meet up with the WebJunction folks at their reception, which is getting to be the party in town.  (If you haven’t been, you’ve been missing a great time and some amazing food.)  I’m still getting the boa feathers out of my clothes and luggage.  It was an added treat to have dinner with Jennifer Peterson of WebJunction, who has become a friend through our many encounters.  I wish we loved closer!

As if that wasn’t enough of a treat, I went to dinner with David and the OCLC folks to a beautiful restaurant with an amazing view of the city.  The food was delicious and the company was entertaining.

One interesting tidbit about this very swanky restaurant.  Their signature side dish is cream corn, served family style.  Cream corn. Seriously?  The stuff from my Midwestern childhood?  We each had an obligatory spoonful, if only to remind ourselves that we hate cream corn.  One of the dishes was left untouched, leading one of the group to wonder how much of the stuff goes uneaten.

I hope all of you that remain in Anaheim have a wonderful conference!

I’ll be heading to ALA in Anaheim on Thursday and will be part of an OCLC symposium on The Mashed Up Library. It’s on Friday, June 27th from 1:30 to 4:00 at the Anaheim Marriott. I’ll be part of a panel that includes Susan Gibbons from the University of Rochester (no, the other one) and David Lee King.  Michael Schrage, Research fellow at the MIT Sloan Center for Digital Business will be the keynote speaker. We’ll be talking about innovation and mashups and there will be ice cream.  (Yes, that’s a bribe.)

If you’re heading to Anaheim, stop in and say hi!

A few folks have written about Wordle, the new site that creates beautiful word clouds. I just tried one for our new Master in Biostatistics program, and here’s the cloud:

I LOVE this!  I think I’ll make one for each of the majors.  How cool would it look to decorate the library with matted and framed versions of these???

I’m in Aberdeen, South Dakota on Monday, presenting a workshop for the South Dakota State Library Training Institute. I’m presenting a day on Marketing and Library 2.o, and I’m honored and delighted that they asked me to come and work with them!

I’ll be driving to South Dakota, since the airfare from Rochester to Aberdeen cost more than a ticket to London. (Ridiculous.) As a result, I’ll be able to stop by the University of Minnesota-Morris campus on the way home and get to know my compatriots at the library there.

At the end of the month, I’ll be heading to ALA in Anaheim and will be part of an OCLC symposium on The Mashed Up Library. It’s on Friday, June 27th from 1:30 to 4:00 at the Anaheim Marriott. I’ll be part of a panel that includes Susan Gibbons from the University of Rochester (no, the other one) and David Lee King.  Michael Schrage, Research fellow at the MIT Sloan Center for Digital Business will be the keynote speaker. We’ll be talking about innovation and mashups and there will be ice cream. (Always a good reason for attending - a hot afternoon in southern California requires ice cream.)

In July, Aurora and I will be chatting with the folks at the Metropolitan Library System in Burr Ridge, Illinois about Advocacy 2.0 and mashups. We’ll be presenting a morning workshop on July 15th for the librarians.

Actually, I’m honored and delighted that all of these folks thought to ask me to participate in their functions. What fun!

I was lucky enough to have been invited to a conference call that gave a few folks a sneak peek of the new WebJunction site.

It. Is. Amazing.

Think WebJunction meets Facebook meets Flickr meets LinkedIn meets Delicious.  And then some.

The look of the site has been tweaked, which is what you usually get with an updated website.  But the added and improved functionality was what had me excited.  The site will incorporate much of the 2.0 toolbox: tagging, commenting, rating, recommendations by members, social networking.

While I have always been a fan of WebJunction and an advocate on their behalf, I must admit that I tended to visit the site when I needed specific information.  I didn’t tend to hang out on WJ.  This new site design may change all that.  With the added social networking and communication features, the ability to create groups, post photos, query members, get recommendations, see what friends are doing…..I can see this becoming a Librarian’s Facebook.

The site is slated to go live sometime in July.  I really can’t wait.

Kudos to the WebJunction team for creating this!  Great, great work.

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” ~Pogo

A few folks at MPOW were recently looking to book meeting rooms for a recruiting tour of the area. I suggested they contact the local public libraries in the cities they were planning to visit.

Now, I just came from working at the regional consortium, so I’m pretty familiar with the public libraries in the region. I’m also pretty familiar with the library directors. So it came as no real surprise when the person booking the rooms reported that reserving the room at one of the public libraries was “a piece of cake!” The other two libraries in question had hoops through which we were unable to jump: the one required that we hold a library card from their library and the other required that we sign a contract. (As we work for a behemoth organization, anything involving a contract also involves legal council and lots of time.)

I can’t say that any of this is a surprise. The first library in question is one of those places you love to visit. The staff are warm and welcoming, the place is open and colorful, and the director is one of those librarians who is innovative and works very hard to make her library the place that it has become.

The other two can be…..well, prickly.

Now, which library do you suppose my new coworkers have a better feeling about? And how many people are they going to tell about their new swell contact in this particular city? And, once they actually visit the place and see how lovely it is, how many people do you suppose they’re going to refer to that library?

And as for the other two….no amount of marketing will erase cranky and difficult.

Beware of the barriers that you’re erecting to customer service. Are they really necessary? Really?

 I recently started following Gen-Y blogs in an effort to understand where this generation is coming from.  I think I have an idea, but I figured learning from the actual demographic would be better than listening to fellow Boomers make assumptions.  There was an interesting post this week on Our American Shelf Life.  One of the blog’s contributors visited the Boston Public Library and was confronted by the dual realities of her own impatience and the non-immediacy of print resources. 

I found this post particularly interesting in part, of course, because of the library connection.  I also was interested in a number of the telling statements the author made.

It may seem odd, but about two weeks ago I went to theBoston Public Library for the first time in the course of my entire college career. I had been there before as a tourist, but this time I was there with an actual academic purpose.

Wow.  Judging from another post about this author, she’s graduating this year.  It took until her senior year of college to visit the public library.  We obviously have some work to do in reaching this demographic.

Anyway, she needed specific magazine articles for her thesis, and had researched the library’s collection and had determined they had the issues in question. 

I made my way to the library early on a Wednesday morning. I stood in line for 10 minutes while other people requested what they needed. Then, after making my request, I waited another 20 minutes for them to find my magazines. When they came back with the wrong volumes, I waited another 15 minutes for them to find the right ones. I waited for almost an hour! You have to understand, an hour during finals is like an eternity! I could’ve used that hour to sleep, to study for something else, take a nice long shower, you name it, I could’ve been doing that.

It’s unfortunate that it took so long to get the materials she needed - and I wonder why?  I’ve never been to the Boston Public Library and I assume it’s behemoth, so that might be the problem right there, if remote storage is really, well, remote.  She continues (emphasis mine):

Instead I was sitting there, at the Boston Public Library, waiting for someone to bring me the materials I needed from the basement. I couldn’t help but think that if only advertising content was available online like regular magazine content was I wouldn’t be sitting there wasting my precious time. It was then that I realized that as a digital native, I had become accustomed to having any information I wanted a click away and it never took longer than five seconds.

As a digital native the concept of waiting for information is quite foreign to me. Even more foreign, is the concept of having to move myself away from my own computer to get it. As long as I have access to the Internet practically everything is at the tip of my fingers, literally. I guess that’s why the Internet is so convenient and why I have become so impatient.

There’s the crux of the matter.  Back when I was in college (cue old woman in her porch rocker) the idea that you would have to wait a few minutes to retrieve information from the library was normal operating procedure.  You planned extra time in your library visits because you assumed that it would take a bit of time.  And to some extent, the time you spent in the library was in itself enjoyable because of the search.  Wandering through the stacks was half the fun, hoping for that serendipitous discovery that would make your research paper sing.  It’s sad that students today don’t have that same experience.

I’m not sure how to address this issue.  We have a new generation for whom instant is the norm: instant news, instant information, instant communication.  The idea that retrieving information might take a few minutes is something that this generation doesn’t completely understand because it’s something they’ve rarely experienced. 

The reality of storage of materials in a large library is that sometimes getting the stuff takes some time.  So how do we prepare the students/patrons for that fact?  And that it’s OK that it takes a bit of time? 

The folks at the Orange County Library System have done it again. I love these guys; they’re always finding ways to draw people into their web page. You may remember a while back when they created a program that allowed the kids in Florida to build their own snowman.

Now, enter Citricon, Library Defender. It’s not available until May 15th, but I can’t wait to see what they’re developed now!

H/T The Shifted Librarian.

It’s been a whirlwind here at MPOW. While we’re part of a major research university, in many respects we’re a start-up. This presents us with myriad possibilities, and with myriad issues, as well.

I met with my colleagues on the Big Campus this week, and it was terrific to touch base and get to know my peeps. They were all interested in what’s happening on our campus and were very forthcoming in offering assistance, which I gratefully and eagerly accepted. There were also instances of genuine surprise and slight dismay when a few of them realized just what sorts of things we would be needing here - like an automation system. (!)

As I’ve mentioned, we’re the first new campus for the university in 50 or 60 years. In the cases of the other campuses, they were assumed into the university as existing schools with existing libraries.

Things have changed a bit in 50 or 60 years, both in higher education and in the library world. The campuses and their libraries changed as they needed, adopting library automation, adding online databases, offering 2.0 services. Now we come along and need everything in one fell swoop.

Think of it this way - I hand you a key to a building and tell you, “Build a library. Go.” What do you need? Where do you get it? Who will you need to help you? How do you interact with your patrons? What technologies are needed for the students? The researchers? What are the things that would be nice to have and what are the gotta haves?

I’m still sorting through the possibilities.

In the meantime, I’m trying to get as involved as possible. I’m attending meetings and becoming a part of the team. It’s a wonderful opportunity to have the library as an integral part of the design of a curriculum, not just as an afterthought. I’m relishing the planning and the discussion, and am delighted that library services are being considered as essential to the success of the institution.

Stay tuned. Things are getting really fun.