Citegeist

New at ALA TechSource: Darien Library, One Year Later

// February 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Libraries, librarians

Darien Library has long been known for its “extreme customer service” and for making every Darien experience the best that it can be. When the proposal to expand the old library building fell through, administrators Louise Berry and Alan Kirk Gray applied these same principles to dreaming Darien Library all up again. The resulting new building opened in January 2009 to much fanfare and many awards, including being featured on the cover of Library Journal’s Design Issue. I spoke recently with Darien’s John Blyberg and Gretchen Caserotti and asked them to reflect on the past year and on what lies ahead for this Connecticut public library.

Read more.

On Writing The Darien Statements

// April 3rd, 2009 // 12 Comments » // Conferences, Libraries, librarians

Photo by Michael Porter

Following the “Not-Quite-Summit on the Future of Libraries” event at Darien Library, John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill, and I spent a day in John’s office (literally) drawing out the ideas that had sprouted there.  Our intention was to spend a day writing a Thing that expressed our concern and hope for the future of libraries, regardless of library type or community served.  We spent the next week in a three-person unconference, the product of which is now posted to John’s blog.  It was an amazing, enriching, exhausting experience,  forming interstices in our attendance at the Computers in Libraries 2009 conference.

We hope that the statements we’ve crafted on our future spark conversation to move us forward in a positive way.  There is a groundswell of passion and interest that we in our profession must harness, lest we become irrelevant in a rapidly-changing world.  A big thank you from the three of us to all the librarians who have been publicly writing and thinking about the future of libraries. I hope we channeled your thoughts with respect.

My own personal response to what we have written involves the concept of openness.  We already embrace “open source,” “open access,” “open space technology,” the “open library“; the openness I want us to espouse is not only related to libraries and our profession but to all of us as human beings. I believe we are on the cusp of an historic, societal change that libraries can push forward, be a part of, and preserve.

Openness requires us to trust instinctively, and to be open and honest with those around us.  Openness grows trust; trust grows connection; connection enables us to grow as people.  Conversely, hurt and hatred sever connection; lack of connection breeds mistrust; mistrust causes us to close ourselves off from each other. If we are closed, we do not grow.  For librarians to grow, and concomitantly, for our libraries to grow, we must throw the doors open: we can no longer afford to live in silos, whether it’s the silo of our individual or departmental expertise; the silos of data that comprise many library systems; the silo of a single library among institutions with similar missions; or the silo of libraries in the universe of other entities that gather and provide information.

Photo by Cindi Trainor

A quick note on collaboration:  John, Kathryn, and I used email, google chat, meebo, EtherPad, cameras, a whiteboard, flickr, an iPhone, iTalk, and Skype to do this.  Grateful that there were so many tools to get the job done, and grateful to John and Kathryn for their hard work and friendship.

The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians, at Blyberg.net
On Writing the Darien Statements, by Kathryn Greenhill

In the Foothills: A Not-Quite-Summit on the Future of Libraries

// March 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Conferences, Libraries

John Blyberg writes:

ch-ch-ch-changes by twcollins (CC:by-nc-nd2.0)

At many Library conferences these days, we focus on technology so intensely that often we forget to consider the larger work for which technology is just a tool. And perhaps not the most important tool.

Yet, information technology has proliferated and become “humanized” over the last dozen years to the extent that we are now in the midst of revolutionary change. Some even see that change as a threat to the existence of libraries.

As information professionals, we occupy a significant amount of space at the epicenter of that change–but how are we really doing? Are we helping to direct that change or merely responding to it? Are we leveraging change, or simply managing it? As the world of information production and consumption undergoes a complete transformation, how is our place in society affected and what are our responsibilities? How do we justify our existence?

Please join us on Thursday, March 26th at the Darien Library for a conversation with John Berry (Editor-at-large, Library Journal, New York, NY) and Kathryn Greenhill (Emerging Technologies Specialist, Murdoch University Library, Perth Western Australia) about revolutionary change, youth, service, and civic responsibility, and the future of libraries.

Come prepared to participate in group discussion following both speakers. In fact, come prepared to help sketch out the role librarians should play in defining the future of libraries.

Coffee and bagels will be served at 9:00 and we will begin the program at 9:30. Lunch will also be served and we will go until we’ve exhasted the topic (around 5:00).

Attendance is free, but please sign up using the wiki.

TechSource Post on DrupalCamp09

// March 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Conferences, Libraries, Library Systems, Web Stuff, librarians

the instigators

Originally uploaded by cindiann

I have a new post at ALA TechSource about my trip at the end of February to Darien Library:

Drupal is hard. It has its own vocabulary. Its potential is so wide open that it is literally possible to do nearly anything with it, and while this idea is greatly liberating, it is also sort of paralyzing: Where do I start? What modules do I need? What can I DO with this thing?

But the way I see it, the fact that Drupal has a steep learning curve is no excuse. There’s no question that Drupal has a steep learning curve, or that it can be messy and complex to implement, but its potential is too great for libraries to ignore. There is also no question that we can do it.

Read the entire post.

Now, for your enjoyment

// September 2nd, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Libraries, Library Systems, Web Stuff

Not that you don’t have plenty of things to read and do, but in case you have missed me in your reader, here are a few things that have caught my eye over the last few weeks while being completely buried at work, at home and with extracurricular libraryland activities.

I do believe in you, little guy!

Take a few minutes to watch this fifth grader give an amazing and moving kickoff speech for the Dallas public schools 2008-2009 school year.

If your browser could read your mind

Mozilla labs introduces Ubiquity, an add-on to the Firefox web browser that puts web content at your fingertips. I’ve installed this and replicated the first, simple email example. I can’t wait to dig in and do more. NB: the thought of Ubiquity and Zotero working together makes my head all asplody. Watch this short video for more:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Last but not least… a new day dawns at Darien

On September 1, Darien Library in Connecticut unveiled a new website and integrated library catalog. SOPAC 2.0 is open source, is built using the Drupal content management system, and is a seamless experience allowing library users–any user, you included, Dear Reader–to rate items, write reviews, and add tags. One thing that library websites, particularly academic library websites, have been missing is the Amazon-like unity of interface that allows one to view hours, contact a librarian and search for your favorite book without a bewildering array of constantly-changing interfaces. SOPAC is it. Kudos to John Blyberg and the Darien crew for dreaming it all up again, and doing it big. It’s a huge step closer to where libraries should be on the web today.

Read more about SOPAC at Library Journal, read what John has to say about it, or listen to a recent Talis podcast conversation with John.

As for me, I’m off to bed for some much-needed sleep, then I’m going back to being buried for at least six more weeks.

John Blyberg: will you marry me?

// June 27th, 2007 // No Comments » // Libraries, Web Stuff

I visited John Blyberg’s blog this afternoon so that I could properly cite a post of his I wanted to quote from. His latest post, “Wrong Song, Michael Gorman” is an elegant and gentle rebuttal to the latest episode of Gormangate, another two-part “post” at Britannica’s blog titled “The Siren Song of the Internet.”

In it, Blyberg asserts that, in the online world, “Apples can sometimes taste like pomegranates, where the down escalator often goes up” and that “…it’s not all naked chaos. There is a self-governing pattern of information exchange that arranges itself fractally into representations of [...] much larger truth[s] [...] about the nature of humanity,” presenting “themselves for only a brief moment before they dissolve into another.”

Wow. Blyberg turns the metaphor of a siren song back onto Gorman, suggesting that Gorman is Ulysses, lashed to the mast, with wax in his ears to ward against the song. Blyberg further extends Gorman’s own metaphor by referring to a Wallace Stevens poem that elucidates perfectly the ever-changing and ultimately human nature of the bits of ourselves that we leave online and of those whom we seek out.

I jest, of course, with my title, but I am blown away, here, by the thoughtfulness and eloquence of Blyberg’s words.

First the need, then the tool

// June 27th, 2007 // 3 Comments » // Libraries, Library Systems, Web Stuff

In his post “My ALA Baggage,” John Blyberg says:

There is a fairly severe disconnect between what the 2.0 pundits say (among whom I count myself), and what is really happening. Your library may have, for instance, a Flickr account, IM reference, a bloglines blog, delicious bookmarks, whatever. But are they truly embedded into the way your institution works? In almost every case, this approach seems like throwing seeds into the air, letting them land where they may. I think it’s time to start talking about how we arrange these components into a more suitable constellation of services. These technical elements of L2 must be aligned along our institutions’ field of influence and expertise so that the seams don’t show. Seams send the wrong message, they say we’re being disingenuous and sloppy. In effect, poorly implemented technology amounts to spamming our users and staff with “new features.”

Yes, yes, yes! I think that librarians are still struggling to see how 2.0 technologies can be worked into the tapestry of services that they currently offer. First and foremost, this is an education issue. Thinking “We need a wiki!” is fundamentally a different thought than “We need a tool with which our electronic resources librarians can build an ERMS, because the ‘electronic file cabinet’ approach is not working and we cannot afford Verde or 360,” or “we have many events and no good way to publicize and receive feedback about them.” I suppose this is where Blyberg’s technologists come in (of whom, he intones, there are very few in libraries)–in this scenario, the technologist would hear the need for a home-grown ERMS and think that perhaps a wiki would suffice until money comes flowing in. If librarians made a point of learning about web 2.0 technologies, some of the leaps required to get from need to tool (even experimental tool) could be made without having a technologist on board.

I’m very pleased that our library is doing Learning 2.0. In fact, I’m so jazzed about this, I can’t even tell you. The librarians that work in my organization are ripe for this kind of training, and I expect that once they follow the lessons and learn about the real life applications of blogs, wikis, flickr, tags, podcasts and all the other great stuff we’ll be covering, that they will be better equipped to see not how we can be “EKU Libraries 2.0″ but how we can transform our services to include interactive content that takes advantage of web 2.0 tools.