Jessica the Cool Librarian has started a new group blog to discuss library matters (and related topics) as a community. I’ve joined on as one of the moderators, and as a mod, I encourage anyone and everyone to sign up and start posting and commenting. Behold, Library Talk!
I recently upgraded my laptop’s operating system from Ubuntu’s “Dapper Drake” release to the latest release, “Edgy Eft.” The upgrade went more smoothly than the last time I upgraded (from “Breezy Badger” to “Dapper Drake”), when I had quite a few problems. I’m not anywhere close to being a topnotch Linux guy, so when I have problems with my system, I jump onto the Ubuntu discussion forums and ask for help. I usually get a quick response to my questions, and the people who have given me help have always been patient with me and my bumbling computer ways. And if the forums aren’t enough, there’s also an Ubuntu wiki, IRC channels, mailing lists, and local community groups. There are also multiple blogs where I can get news about Ubuntu and its continual development. On top of all this, any Ubuntu user can contribute ideas for how Ubuntu develops, what features and products it will have, what changes will be made.
The Ubuntu community is an open community, where anyone can participate, get questions answered, give suggestions and requests, and see how decisions are made, with many, many access points for participation. How many libraries and library associations are like this?
Linux is an open source operating system. Not only can anyone participate in Linux communities, anyone can change the programming, tweak it, which is why there are so many different distributions. Firefox is open source, too. Anyone can make an extension or theme for Firefox. WordPress is also open source, and it’s “easy to hack” (as Maire Kruppa said at Internet Librarian). Anyone can make a plugin or theme for WordPress. To quote the WordPress site, “You are also free to do whatever you like with the WordPress code, extend it or modify in any way or use it for commercial projects without any licensing fees.” The communities for Linux, Firefox, and WordPress share and spread these hacks. They make it easy for anyone to share tweaks, programs, extensions, plugins, and themes they’ve developed. How many libraries and library associations do this with their products and services?
Ubuntu’s latest release came out a couple of weeks ago. The developers (and community) are already working on the next release (”Feisty Fawn”), which is scheduled to come out in 6 months. Firefox and WordPress also release frequent upgrades. These upgrades are free (as in speech and as in beer) to all users and are announced with fanfare, not just to their communities but to the world at large. When new releases come out, people in the communities are excited, eager to start using the upgrades, even when there are glitches and bugs. How many libraries and library associations can say this about their products and services?
What if…? What if libraries offered:
Are there any good reasons why libraries aren’t doing this right this second?
Karen G. Schneider wasn’t at Internet Librarian, so I still haven’t gotten a chance to meet her in person. That makes me sad. But she made a video and posted it on YouTube, sending a greeting to a bunch of IL bloggers, including myself! That makes me very happy.
I’ve been blogging for 5 years now, and I’ve only just started to really think about why. No, that’s not entirely right. In 2001, you didn’t need a good reason to blog. In 2006, I think you do, and with the premiere of MPOW’s blogs, I’ve been thinking about my reasons and the reasons for libraries to blog. Allow me to elaborate. (Or bail out now and go read someone else’s blog.)
I originally started blogging because…well, because I had friends with blogs who were egging me on to start a blog myself. I’d been wanting a website of my own, having no less vanity than most people you’d meet (and a finger or two more at certain times of the year). I wanted to post poetry and prose I was writing at the time (or, more often the case, planning to write at some point), which meant a website with changing content. Blogs were the easiest way to do that, so I got my own domain (www.goblin-cartoons.com, and the reason why I chose that name is a whole nother not very interesting story), signed up with free, not-yet-owned-by-the-Google-Monster Blogger, and gave the whole thing a go.
Flash forward to today and look at all the tools we have to create and manage dynamic content on the internet: blogs, wikis, mashups, etc. We’re positively swimming in dynamic content! If you know your onions, you use the right tool for the job.
So, why keep up a blog? What’s a blog good for that other tools aren’t?
I don’t write much poetry these days, but over the years I’ve found that I like writing short rants and raves, ponderings, narrative sketches, feuilletons. A blog is berries for that–but you could do that with a wiki, too, right? Where blogs really shine is in the pairing of posts and comments. Like peanut butter and jelly, blog posts and comments are a delicious and delightful combination, and one is not nearly as good without the other. When you have blog posts and comments, you don’t just get to publish your blatherings, you get feedback from friends and strangers. You get conversations. Ephemeral, yet archived and preserved for posterity, conversations. I’m something of a nut for conversations. And you get these posts and conversations delivered in a hot-off-the-presses fashion. When a blog is updated, it’s immediately obvious. “This just in: Josh has more to say about Library 2.0! Wait, we’ve got another update: someone’s commented on yesterday’s rant, calling Josh a lamebrained gasbag!” Being impatient, I’m a fan of immediacy, too.
What does this mean for libraries? Blogs are immediate conversations between the library and the public, ephemeral but preserved. Wow! You can have conversations with your public face-to-face, over the telephone, through snailmail and email and instant messaging. With blogs, you can have conversations that are preserved and on display, immediate and eternal, like a fly in amber.
And what does this mean for me? I get to have immediate, ephemeral, preserved conversations with friends, with family, with fellow librarians who I’ve never met face-to-face. It’s something I love to do, and blogs are the tops for that.
So here I am, saying my piece. Anyone want to join in on the conversation? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Last night, I went to a “Wikipedia meetup” organized by Brenda Hough and attended by Erica Reynolds, Dave King and a bunch of other smart library types. So many good questions were asked, so many good points were raised, it’s going to take me some time to talk about everything I want to talk about here. But I’ll do my goshdarndest to get it all out. Eventually.
I should at least note, though, that Free State in Lawrence makes a bloody good stout. I’d forgotten just how good their oatmeal stout is, but it went down dark and smooth and really hit the spot. Yum.
John Blyberg has more thoughts about the Lawrence anti-library piece.
He’s got a point: we should be listening to what people like Mark Hirschey have to say, even if their conclusions are completely off. That being said, the library can’t be all things to all people, and some folks will never be on our side. So, let’s be aggressive and enthusiastic in showing the library as a growing, changing, relevant and important place. Let’s sell the library to the negative people who want to be positive about the library, and let’s show up the negative people who simply don’t want us to succeed in what we’re doing.
At this point, I’m sure everyone who reads this blog is aware of the opinion piece “Libraries are limited, obsolete” in the Lawrence, KS, Journal-World. The piece breaks my heart and angers my soul. But, honestly, talking about it in blogs doesn’t really do much good. (It’s not “strategic,” to quote Karen G. Schneider.) This isn’t really something library employees need to be talking about with each other, because none of us believe it. This is something we need to be talking about with library users, and more importantly with non-library users. Through word and deed, we need to show the Mark Hirscheys of the world that they’re wrong, show them that libraries are neither limited nor obsolete.
But what librarians can talk about with each other (as well as with our users) is how we can make sure libraries remain unlimited and relevant. Michael Stephens has made a great contribution to this conversation with his blog post “Ten Things I Know About Libraries in 2006.”
MPOW is working extremely hard to remain relevant and essential, and to bring our community in. Our Youth Services staff went nuts with outreach for our Summer Reading Program, visiting each and every school in our community (some of them multiple times) and standing outside of supermarkets and shopping centers. And we increased the number of participants in the program from last year by more than 75%! We just started four public blogs that allow for patrons to make comments and we’re working on a wiki that will do the same. I’m working with a coworker to develop a patootie-kickin’ curriculum for computer instruction, both introductory classes and more advanced classes on blogs and wikis. We’re looking into getting a Flickr account for the library, we’re using IM for professional communication (and for IM reference in the not-too-distant future), and, most importantly, we’re looking to our patrons when working on improving our collection development, our programming, and our general functionality. We’re getting better at keeping an eye on new trends and sharing our stories.
It’s a never-ending journey, but it’s not a journey we can afford to make quietly or alone. We need to publish our travelogues and invite our patrons to come along with us on this trip.
UPDATE: I just found out that Sarah Houghton-Jan (who also wrote eloquently about this, and I should’ve mentioned that above) and Michael Stephens have collaborated on a letter to the editor of the Journal-World. Hot diggity!
I’m back home after NEST. It was a good conference day, all told. Besides Pattie’s talk about seniors, we got Rachel Singer Gordon, who is quite droll and engaging, talking about different generations (Veterans, Baby Boomers, Gen X’ers, and Millennials) working together. And I sat on a panel with Rachel, Pattie, and Melissa Batson (who works with my buddy Gregg), talking about the problems and successes in working with younger and older librarians. Luckily, Kansas librarians are a feisty bunch, so the pressure was off of us on the panel, as many of the other librarians did most of the talking, while Rachel did her Phil Donahue and walked around the room with a microphone. And I still got to give my rant about why the MLS/no-MLS divide is frustrating and dopey.
Later in the day, we had small group discussion sessions. Some really good ideas were exchanged (and necessary venting was…vented). I think small discussion sessions, formal or informal, are an absolute must for any library conference. Without the conversations and community-building, conferences are too much like school…without the great social side that makes school so much fun.
Kudos to Mickey Coalwell and the other NEST planners who put together a nice conference, cozy but energetic.
Jessica the Cool Librarian is closing down her Library Talk forum due to lack of participation. I feel bad about this because I’ve been meaning to register there and start posting, but I simply kept forgetting about it. The thing is, I quite like bulletin board forums. I’m a member of some others (not library-related) and find them to be quite good in terms of facilitating conversations between many participants. Much better than, say, email lists, which I am not a fan of.
I told her I’d try to think of some other ways of building a web community for librarians, a platform that lends itself well to fostering conversations. If anyone else has any bright ideas, she and I would love to hear them.
My supervisor, the branch manager, is very very cool and a great boss for any number of reasons, but one of the reasons is that she’s very supportive of my efforts to bring current tech into common use at the library. However, she is admittedly easily overwhelmed by a lot of new tech. Bringing in blogs, wikis and so on brings a “scared bunny” look to her face, even as she encourages me to keep doing what I’m doing.
Although she got an invite for Google Talk last week, she only set herself up for IM today. She was very nervous about it. To her credit, the first thing she did was log on and then start reading Google’s help pages. (I quickly congratulated her for R-ing The FM.) And soon after, she and I were chatting on IM while she also chatted with one of our coworkers at the Main library. She transferred a file to me via IM and said, “This is really keen!” We discussed ways that we could use IM, and how some ideas she had might be better executed through email or on a blog. “So many choices!” she said. I beamed. I was so happy and proud.
And then, towards the end of my work day, I briefly chatted with far-off Laura. It was great to converse with another librarian who I’ve yet to meet face-to-face. I really felt like a member of some Invisible College.
