A Passion For ‘Puters

Bobbi and I finished up our 4-day workshop on all things Web 2.0 on Friday. I was surprised at how tired I got after each day of teaching, but it was also strangely invigorating, too. The students in the class were really engaged and willing to learn, although there was a lot of complaints about too-full-heads, I think they got some good information out of it and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they do when they get back to their home libraries and get some time to put this stuff into practice!

Becoming 2.0 class hard at work

I’m doing a bit of “audience testing” - if you all could request specific information in a book about collaboration 2.0 - anything at all - what would you like to see? I’m not promising I’ll include everything (it’s more of a booklet than a book so space is limited…), but I’d love to hear what you all are interested in and what would make you think this is a non-pass-upable bit of reading!

You all might know that I’m the Information Technology Manager for the Missouri River Regional Library. This means that I work behind the scenes a lot, making sure that computers are working, networked bits are flowing and that everyone has the technology they need to do their jobs. I also spend some time working on the PCC desk, our public computer service point, but that’s about the only interaction I get with patrons. Until today. We are pretty seriously short staffed, so when an email went out asking for help in the circulation department, I volunteered for a 2 hour shift. I have to say that I’m really glad I did.
I’ve worked circulation before - for a few minutes at a time and about 4 times over the past 10 years - so it’s been rare and short. Getting 2 solid hours to see the kinds of questions they get, the sort of needs they have and to actually talk to patrons who are using the technology I provide is pretty cool. I’m also doing a bit of dual-training. The Circ manager is working with me and is being incredibly patient as she’s training me, but she’s also picking my brain about various tricks she would like to use with our new Gmail interface to mail, so I’m training her on the use of our new email system, too! This is something I may try to do far more often - it’s been a great way to get me out of my all-computers-all-the-time rut (though I’ve been working on my Web 2.0 presentation in between patrons…) and into the main life of the library!

Engaged Learning has a series - just wrapping up this week - on 15 common objections to social sites and media in the workplace. There are LOTS of things that I’ve heard from folks and some great ways to combat those ideas. He’s encouraged comments on each of the objections, too, so you can scan through and get an idea of how other people would approach the same problem. Read through these and be armed next time someone tells you that blogs have nothing to do with training or that allowing access to Facebook will cause all employees to spend all their time socializing instead of working!
These are geared toward corporate environments - but some of the ideas may work well for schools, which do a lot of banning of social sites. Either way, it’s worth a read and being better prepared to handle objections is never a bad thing!

Tuesday is my “desk day”. This means that on most Tuesdays, I don’t even turn on my computer in my office… I get in around 8ish, open the PCC (count money, turn on computers, wipe down monitors/keyboards/mice, pick up trash left by yesterday’s patrons and get the desk machine ready for the day), check on backups and network traffic and spend some quality time with my co-workers in the smoking lounge (a corner of our driveway as far away from the building as they can put us…) before the patrons start to come in at 9am. This morning, I also went to our ILL librarian to check out why she couldn’t print from OCLC’s web page. I found a JavaScript error on the page and Nikki (my intrepid Computer Support Guru) forwarded it on to our Tech Services Manager to then forward on to OCLC. After that, I dealt with the influx of patrons at 9am, then joined Nikki at her desk to discuss the trouble ticket issues that have come in since yesterday. After giving her some advice on fixing email issues that have cropped up overnight (I hate Exchange mail, I can’t wait until I can offload that duty to Google…), I head back to the PCC desk to check on the patrons and check my email and FriendFeed “friends” tab.
After reading through all that (and seeing the flood of fixed trouble tickets from Nikki - Yeah! Our board report and stats this month are gonna look good!!), I head to Google Reader to catch up on the blogosphere. Hmmm, lots of “day in the life” posts. Interesting…
One of the things I read about in my blog reading was the fact that Facebook now has “blog networks“. I installed the application and started adding blogs to my network. That was fun and killed some time until Nikki came out to take over the desk duties at 10:00.
After she relieved me on the desk, I answered a few emails, ordered a part for a projector, met with my boss (who totally made fun of the audio quality of my laptop on Uncontrolled Vocabulary last Wednesday, while I totally missed an opportunity to ask him for a raise so I could get a new laptop with better audio inputs…), and ate lunch. By noon, I was back on the PCC Desk.
I checked my email again, collated and counted numerous print jobs from the 30 computers that share our PCC printer, and looked for (and sorta found) a few classes for kids that I could steal borrow from kind folks on the Internet. I’ll try to have a full roster of classes for our Children’s programming coordinator by Thursday, but I’m having issues finding good quality “homework help” type of classes on the ‘net. Anyone out there got some they’d like to share?
At 2:00pm, my desk duties for the day were over!
Today, I did stick around long enough to turn on my desk computer. After it booted up, I checked email again, opened Twhirl to check on my FF friends and got to work. I responded to a vendor email about a possible new PC Reservation system, which promptly turned into a phone call when the sales rep called me because she had questions, and made arrangements to visit our library’s branch either tomorrow or Thursday to look into video projection issues they are having. I started to work on Ghosting the newest version of our OPACs, but realized I was missing a rather crucial hardware component, so I’ll be running to Best Buy this evening on my way to the library softball team’s game. Since that didn’t work out for me, I decided to upgrade our Wordpress installation that runs our library’s blog. That worked just fine, and it might have fixed some of the issues Bobbi’s been having with tags and categories. I’ll find out for sure tomorrow, when she gets in to work.
I took off today at 4pm so I could pick my son up from the hospital at which he volunteers and headed home for the day. Now I’m finishing up this post and then I’ll be heading to Best Buy, Barnes & Noble (for a Venti White Chocolate Mocha Frappacino - perfect baseball watching refreshment) and then to cheer on our library’s softball team (Dewey Decimators are sooooo gonna win tonight!) before heading back home to get some sleep!
More tomorrow…

Ok, not a terribly descriptive title, but I’m at my computer at 6:45am local time, going over my schedule and trying to access my library’s email and getting a bit “eeked” out over both. Last night, just before I went to the Facebook meetup (which was great fun - pics later), I got a text saying that our network was down. Checked weather.com - no storms, so I texted the director to let him know. The network came back up within 10 minutes - no harm, no foul. This morning, I pulled up my work email - or attempted to - and discovered that neither server - email or web - is responding. No text has come through saying that the network is down. Oops…
The other “eek” for the day is my schedule:
7am breakfast at Hyatt Regency Grand Ballroom - OCLC Social Networking roundtable - Hyatt Regency Grand Ballroom - OCLC Social Networking roundtable
10:30am LITA Heads of Library Technology Interest Group - Hilton Anaheim — Coronado
12pm EBSCO Public Library Luncheon Confirmation
1:30pm *LITA Top Technology Trends - Hilton Anaheim — California Pavilion D
3:30pm Drupal BoF session
5:30pm OCLC Blogger’s Salon
And all that on 5 hours of sleep. Guess it’s time to text the director again and get my butt down to breakfast!

Whew - I’m exhausted - and I still have one more event before I can crawl into bed! I started off the day with an overview of Public Computing, where I finally got to put a face to Sarah Washburn’s name (of the MaintainIT Project) and then went straight to the Social Software Showcase where I put a bunch more names to faces of people I’ve conversed with online. While the Showcase was fun for it’s intended purpose, the loose organization of it meant that I could spend some time chatting with people about whatever came to mind in between OpenID questions. That was a really rewarding part of it for me. I barely made it (across the street) to my next session - I came into it a bit late… Afterwards was more interesting discussion with people who really got something out of my brief talk. It makes the work put into getting material together and getting up there and talking about it worthwhile.
After my official duties for the conference were done, I met up with the twitter group (we stood in the convention center and yelled out twitter names - clearly confusing the heck out of some folks), but just to put more faces to names, I had to get back to the hotel to eat and write up my day. We did get to do some quality chatting and “getting to know you” sort of stuff while waiting for everyone to appear, though, so it was totally worth it to show up. I wish I could have justified staying, but home folks needed to be called and blog posts needed to be posted…
I’ve eaten, written up my posts and am ready to rest for a bit before heading to the Facebook Librarians meetup at 11pm. Tomorrow, I have a 7am breakfast with OCLC and a pretty full day after that, so it should be interesting! I’ll do more writing tomorrow!

This was more of a traditional session than my first one - it was a panel (2 academic library folks and me) and we all gave a brief intro to our organization, then discussed the ways in which our IT departments are changing/have changed in response to changing technological realities. Carole and Terry - my co-panelists - gave interesting discussions on how their IT Departments have evolved with the times. Carole’s library began a formal Project Management procedure that sounded quite interesting. Terry’s library reorganized and reformed to improve how they serve their customers. I wish I could be more specific, but I was on the podium and listening, not taking notes and the whole thing was a long time ago…
My presentation was on the Web2.0ification of our library’s IT Department. We have made some changes in how we do our basic functions (offloading some of the work - such as web updates - to non-IT people, outsourcing some functions - hello Google Apps for Domains!, etc.) and we’ve made some changes in the way we think about things like security and privacy (not in a bad, way, though - I promise) in order to facilitate our patrons and staff in their use of Web 2.0 technologies.
We went a bit long and didn’t have much time for questions after, but several people came up after the session ended to chat more about what we were doing - and what was more interesting (at least for me) - what they are doing! The session was a great way to find out what IT departments, in different types of libraries, are doing to react to Web 2.0, greater customer service demands from our staff and opportunities that are coming our way!

This was really fun! We gathered in a room that was WAY too small and proceeded to chat with each other about our various topics. Jason Griffey recorded the whole thing - it’s up at UStream already, with my little intro to my topic, OpenID, at the 13:45 minute mark. I was in the back, so you can’t actually see me, but I’m also a total loudmouth, so you can hear me just fine… My table was not exactly overrun with folks, but I had a steady stream of people asking excellent questions about implementing OpenID for themselves! The two hours FLEW by and I just about talked myself hoarse - which was uncool, seeing as how my second presentation of the conference was just a half hour after the showcase ended…

Once again – I’m blogging without Internet! In my own hotel. Where I’m paying $10 a day for Internet Access. This sucks. Oh well, so far, before the session has started, I’ve gotten a picture of the three lovely ladies leading this session (any alliteration is purely coincidental, don’t flame me in the comments for it). Jessamyn West, Sarah Washburn, and Louis Alcorn are all going to give us tips on Public Computer access in a 2.0 world.
Sarah gave an introduction to the MaintainIT project, going into the cookbooks, the webinars, and the cookbook bookclub. They will be starting “train the trainers” sessions to show trainers how to use the cookbooks to train their staff. She then introduced the other speakers, starting with Jessamyn, then Louise.
Jessamyn’s talk – “6 things you maybe didn’t know about rural technology” – came next. She started with a description of her job, then introduced her talk by saying that she’ll be talking about how to get effective tech into rural libraries – both what works and what doesn’t work.
1. Digital divide “the poor are always with us”
a. Rethink the divide – not just about hardware, also about access & nohow to make use of the network
b. It is real
c. It’s not what it used to be
d. Landscape has changed
e. 23% of Americans have no access at all to the internet/web
2. Donations “hey it’s free”
a. Blessing/curse
b. Open source is not really on the table
c. Based on old ideas of what has value
3. Grants “hey it’s (sort of) free…”
a. Some really help & level the playing field
b. Time limits… “please make yourself obsolete”
c. Hardware/software lock-in
d. Reporting requirement are onerous
4. Tech Education
a. Websites don’t fix this
b. Paper and people are what cost $$$
c. Multiple problems per patron
d. What is a “real” safety net? – figure out the safety net for digital needs as wells as food/medical/etc.
5. Patron Needs
a. Someone in their HOME
i. Encourage them to buy laptops – bring their computers in is almost as good
b. Someone close when they LEARN
c. Someone to help them SHOP
d. Someone to SUMMARIZE
6. What Works
a. 23 Things (LL2.0)
b. Googling error messages
c. Consortia & Leadership
d. Tracking & Counting – as if it counts, because it does
7. Try. Try Again. Advocate. Illustrate. Persevere. Succeed.

Louise Alcorn
Public Computing in a Library 2.0 World
Some rural broadband activism, like in Vermont, but a distrust of consortia, so not much working together
wilboar.lib.ia.us – Overdrive project
Told story of wireless access coming via the state-wide bike tour

Online Tools For Training
• Why Online Training (webinars)
o For participants requires only (mostly) a broadband Internet connection
o Reduces lost staff time due to travel
o Can “send” more staff to training
o For trainer/host, no need to worry about location issues
• Web conferencing services
o Horizon Wimba’s Live Classroom www.wimba.com

And at that point, my laptop went into hibernation. Louise continued discussing various other training/web conferencing services, then they took a few questions. I don’t remember exactly what was asked – sorry! The presentations are up at http://librarian.net/talks/ala if you are interested in checking out more about what these talented ladies are doing!