Month: October 2008

Data is from research study done by LRS. First question is, why? ‘cause he’s a web geek – and the fact that there was a lot of great info coming out on blogs and in conferences, however, he wasn’t seeing a lot of “who” was using it – no information on the prevalence of how many are using it. Soon, he’ll get numbers on how successfully we are all using it – but that’s coming in a future study. The study focused on public libraries. Next he talked about the methodology – either survey or observational methods. They decided to use an observational study – actually going to library sites and seeing what they do. They visited 600 sites to conduct the study – lots of time, but perfect response rate, consistent response rates (since they are doing it themselves) and avoiding survey fatigue. There are limitations, as well, however. Hidden technologies were just missed – and the information was a snapshot in time. Both means that they could have missed some tech that was either advertised locally or not present at the time they checked the site. They also couldn’t check intranets for 2.0 tools used.
Sample size was split into 5 population groups (including a special “all Colorado libraries” group). They then had to define just what Library 2.0 was. They used the Wikipedia definition – loosely defined and user-centered change. After that they defined what library 2.0 “tools” were. He then went through the survey process – to make a long story short, they went through a lot of work to create the “pieces of Library 2.0” part.
Pieces of Library 2.0
• Online catalog
• Personalized Library Account
• Blogs/RSS
• Virtual Reference
• Wikis
• Social Networking
• Podcasting
1st point – web/catalog presence – ubiquitous in a 25,000+ pop group, after that it starts to fall off. Under 10,000 pop group had only 73% with a web site. 2nd point – online library cards – many more allow you to log into your library card, fewer allow you to get a library account online. 45% of 100,000+ libraries have online library card signup – surprised the survey takers. 3rd point – blogs/rss feeds – blogs seemed to be different – more in the less than 10,000 pop group than the next 2 groups up the chart. Email & chat reference was also very well represented in the upper ranges, not so much in the under 500,000 people ranges. Social networking isn’t yet into more than a third of any size library group. Under 10,000 libraries – fewer than 2% of those have any social network presence (MySpace, FB or Flickr).
Results – we are still moving forward pretty slowly. Fewer than half of the libraries in the states have anything 2.0. “There are a lot of libraries doing cool things with 2.0 – but it hasn’t reached critical mass yet”.
Early adopters scale – 29 point scale that allowed them to identify early adopter libraries. He then started in on characteristics of early adopter libraries. They tend to have 50% more staffing than libraries that don’t do all this stuff. They also have more funding. Audio/Visual collections are much bigger than non-early adopters – Zeth thought that was telling because it shows that they are innovating all over the place. These libraries are also getting more use – visits and circ stats are higher.
2 ratios that didn’t affect the survey – number of books and number of public access computers. The last one, PCs per capita, was *almost* statistically significant, but not quite.
What this tells Zeth – libraries that are successful are choosing to put resources in Web 2.0 technologies. Next step is to see if it helps *make* them more successful.
Questions
PDF of presentation is at lrs.org blog – they are 2/3 of the way done with the print report.

Project Management: The Prize is in the Process
Helene Blowers – Director of Digital Strategy & Macrina Gilliam – Applications Project Manager from the Columbus Metropolitan Library
Participant introductions – lots of cool people here!
Problems dump – everyone yells out issues they’ve had with projects in the past
Helene – policy, passion & practice
She wrote the book on project management for the Belk Corporation in 1995.
A project is a one-time job that has starting/stopping points, objectives, & defined scope of work.
• Required stuff – time frame, resources & scope
Extremely valuable stuff
o a champion –boss or not, whomever gains the most, will be most supportive
o passion (passion will take your projects really far – farther than project management, really)
• Project managers
o Influence #1 (coordinators – usually not managing people directly – but are influencers)
o Look beyond managers (managers do not have to manage all the projects)
o Communication skills
o Leadership potential
• Strategies are not projects and strategies aren’t projects – if the project doesn’t fit in with the organization’s strategies, why do it?
• 3 questions to answer in a project scope doc – what are we doing? Who is doing it? When are we doing it? And Why are we doing it?
• PM constraints – balancing constraints of time, resources, & scope
Slides will be posted on librarybytes.com
Macrina – Columbus Metropolitan Library’s Project Management Life Cycle
Hand-outs that detail the process they use, best practices and checklists of project tasks from their library
Project Management Life Cycle
o Initiate
o Plan
o Execute
o Close
Typical Roles
o Project Sponsor
o Process Owner/Product Owner
o Project Manager
o IT Advisor
o Subject Matter Expert (SMEs)
o “Blue Zone” – project support resources (Marketing, property management staff to help move stuff, etc.) – communicate early with these folks to let them know what they will need to do and can schedule your project and possibly think of things you haven’t thought of
We don’t manage projects, we manage initiatives – Helene speaking of an old job
Project management should be understood throughout the entire organization
10 phases divided among the 4 processes of the life cycle – and opportunities to communicate come through many of them
o Discovery-Prototyping-Beta phase
o Iterative development saves time later
o Increases input and buy-in
o Higher quality result
o let go of being perfect
“Librarians don’t really have the concept of ‘quick & dirty’ do we?” – Mary Auckland
Added a final phase to the process cycle – transitioning project results to the process owner so that there is a “person in charge” and the project’s result continues (web site (content manager type), self-check (circ manager or worker), IM reference (ref staff or manager)) and that the opportunities, user needs and improvement needs are monitored in an ongoing way.
Helene – process owners/project managers (9 people who are blue zone “folks”) meet every Friday to discuss resource shifting and project needs – total buy-in from all throughout the organization. The “blue zone” gets rid of info silos and lets cross-departmental communication happen easily.
http://cmlpresentations.pbwiki.com – handouts and info from slides
Amanda Etches-Johnson – One Person Project Management
Slides – http://blogwithoutalibrary.net/talk/il2008/pm.pdf
Handout – http://blogwithoutalibrary.net/talk/il2008/pm_handout.pdf
Went to a project management workshop in Feb to help her with her upcoming web redesign project and it changed her life – got lots of great info but realized that as a one-person team only uses parts of the process.
She discussed project management at her library – there are a lot of projects going on at her library and varying levels of PM training with no enterprise PM framework in place (yet). They just named a new special projects librarian and Amanda thinks she’ll start implementing more of a PM culture. Right now, there are no expectations for communication or documentation, no sponsors of particular projects which was both positive (get things done really fast) and negative (no expectations means varying degrees of communication).
Created an advisory committee from the people who she wanted to be on the project team – they have full time jobs, too, though and couldn’t commit to being true team members. Perhaps a true PM culture would have helped?
“Where does the planning stop and the doing start?” – worked on planning, took a while to realize she needed to actually start doing.
Tips to keep you sane:
o Beware over-planning
o Timeline in 1-week chunks
o Deadlines are your friend
Best practices still apply
o Project charter
o Title
o Synopsis
o Scope
o Dates
o Resources
o Stakeholders
o Version control
o Keeps you on track
o Especially important for tech projects
o Watch for scope creep
o Stick to the plan
o More features – more time OR resources (or both)
o Break the project into manageable chunks
o Manage expectations (communication, communication, communication)
o Document
Some best practices don’t apply
o Gantt charts
o Complex PM software
She spent 2 days with advisory committee to get info architecture and first 2 levels of site wireframed – hugely helpful. Amanda also created working groups that were dealing with specific issues and have a short, firm timeline. Mary mentioned that she calls them “start and finish groups”.
Everyone is your project team! Don’t isolate yourself – the whole library can be your project team – they are all invested in the content and functionality of the site.
Question period
From the discussion:
o Shortish projects help keep people from losing interest
o Lessons learned become institutional memory for what works & doesn’t work
o Helene used an email newsletter (with updates from each department or project team members) and the unique communication method made a huge impact
o Too much functionality at once can cause issues with troubleshooting – when things go wrong, you don’t know what exactly doesn’t work, it could be anything that you are working on
o Determine a “main project” and the tentacles that come off of it- and decide if you need those tentacles
o The new generation is going to make us do things their way – and even if we don’t like it, we’ll have to in order to keep our users
Themes from Mary – wrap up times
o The value of planning up-front – but it needs to stop too, create a deadline for planning phase
o Breaking projects into manageable chunks
o Bringing passion into the team
o The PM team is more widespread than you think
o Achieve more communication through influencing than just straight communication (reports, etc)
o High-level sponsors/champions can do your communicating to the top levels for you
o Lots of the stumbling blocks mentioned at the beginning were answered in the presentations
o Managing by consensus/committee – PM process helps to alleviate some of that