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I blogged – a long time ago – about the use of web-based operating systems that patrons of public Internet access spots (such as libraries) could use. Things have changed since then. Most have been eclipsed by services like Dropbox – which requires you to have a computer to store stuff on, unlike the cloud-based web OS’s I’ve talked about. One web-based OS that has caught my attention, though, is iCloud. It offers a mobile site, iOS and Android apps and features easy uploading of files in exactly the same manner as Dropbox – but to your cloud-based computer, not a physical one.
This all seems very cool and is something worth taking a look at – the free version gives you 3GB of storage, but you can buy more, of course, and the apps appear to be free (at least the iOS one is). This may very well allow patrons who have iPhones or Android phones but no computer at home to do all kinds of very cool computing tasks from their phones – then come into the library to print and manage things that might be a bit difficult to do on a phone.
Just thought I’d post a short note letting you all know that I’ve written a chapter for a textbook called Telementoring in the K-12 Classroom: Online Communication Technologies for Learning. My chapter is on using Web 2.0 tools to communicate (between telementor and telementoree), since I don’t know the first thing about actual telementoring – but I do know a little bit about using Web 2.0 to make communications easier…
Anyway, just making note of it here so I have a record of it somewhere for my future use…
I have created a blogging/social networking theme for my workplace for the next 12 months. Not every post will be strictly tied to the theme, but I’ll try to work in several posts over the month that have something to do with it. Some of them are big programs that we do (see the Capital Read months, both adult and kids), others are just timed to the holidays that fall in those months. One is completely random because I can’t think of a thing that I could focus on in March. Spring, maybe? New beginnings? I’m doing that this month (January), though, so maybe not. Hopefully one of my creative and wonderful coworkers will come up with something that I can use…
I’m making sure I remember the theme by adding in the theme as a draft post on the calendar (that is provided by the WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin for WordPress – very handy tool!) on the first day of the month. That way I’ll see, every month, what I’m supposed to be focusing on for the blog. For the rest of my social media outlets, I’ll just have to remember. I considered adding it to one of my Google Calendars, but they are so crazy full of stuff I’d just miss it, I think.
Anyway, I had mentioned that I was going to do this late last year, so I’m posting here the list of months with their respective themes so that you all can see what I’m doing and maybe take it, improve it and let me steal it back!!
January – New year, new services, new stuff
February – Love and family
March – Random because I can’t think of anything…
April – Love your library (Nat’l Library Week)
May – Capital Kid’s Read
June – Summer Reading
July – Freedom and Government
August – Summer Vacations
Sept – Passport to the world (get a card)
Oct – Capital Read
Nov – Thankful
Dec – End of year, holidays
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Last week, David Lee King posted a note on his blog about your boss being you and it got me thinking about staff training and the “will to learn” by library staff. I like to think of myself as fairly self-motivated. I learned HTML, XHTML, CSS and PHP without taking any classes – just reading some books and playing. I have picked up on the social networking stuff without doing any formal training, too. I actually like taking classes (that aren’t even for credit…) and learning new things without anyone standing over me requiring that I do so. I still – even with those things in the positive corner – don’t think I spend enough time and effort keeping up and learning new things. I feel behind at times and am occasionally rather down on myself about what little I know (though I have moments of validation – I had a MORENet tech come in to see what I was doing wrong with our firewall and he couldn’t figure it out either, I felt a bit better about my networking skills after that, such as they are…). For staff members who don’t take the initiative to stay current on basic skills, though, how much more lost must they feel?
This year, I’ve asked the department heads to take a quick look around their departments and send me a list of the skills (computer-based, generally, but I’ll take anything and see what I can do about it) that they feel their departments need to work on in 2011. Armed with those lists and some excellent core competency lists that I have stolen borrowed from libraries and librarians across the country, I’ll be focusing on getting staff up to speed on the things that they and their managers feel they need to work on. What I’ll also be working on this year, though, is to really stress to people that these skills are not “extra” work – being able to manipulate a Word document or understanding how to edit a patron’s record in our automation software is not stuff that “might be nice” for staff to know. These are core skills that will make them better employees – here and elsewhere – and that it’s stuff they should probably devote some brain power to. Hopefully, the training this year will not only provide some hard skills in these areas but it will also give staff the motivation to learn some things on their own, without someone standing over them with either a stick or a carrot.
When asked what a weakness of mine is in a job-interview like situation, what comes to mind immediately is my utter inability to recognize when I’m in over my head and need some help. Jenica Rogers, an utterly amazing woman who is the Director of Libraries at the State University of New York in Pottsdam, just posted a Lessons from 2010 post at her blog. One of her “lessons learned” was the fact that she occasionally needs help. This is an amazingly capable woman who is making the effort to realize that she needs help sometimes – and it’s inspiring me. From little things like hitting the button at the circ desk when I get overwhelmed (we have a door ringer that sounds in the back office and sends someone out to help when the lines get long at the front desk) to admitting that a particular project requires more time/talent/persistence than I have to give, I need to work on not waiting until it’s too late to ask for some help.
I’ve installed Drupal 7 in two different places – one personal and one at work – and I’m still not able to get it going because of various system requirements and a lack of time and attention to getting those requirements met on my systems. That being said, I have nothing much to say about the new Drupal release – other than to comment on what others who are more successful in their attempts are saying. One thing I’ve noticed, as reported on the ReadWriteWeb blog, that I really like is the fact that RDFa is built into the system’s backend. I spoke a bit about RDF and the semantic web in my Web 3.0 (RDF stuff starts on slide 12) presentation I gave to NAGW a couple of years ago, so this is really pretty exciting for me!! I get to actually make use of the stuff I’ve been talking about for a while!! When I get the PHP versions and various other system requirements updated on my servers, of course… *sigh*. I guess I know what I’ll be doing for the next couple of days. I wanna play now!!
Update: I do have it working now! I have my work test bed running a clean copy of Drupal 7 – first impressions are that it is DIFFERENT. I’ll post more about what I think about it later in the month…
I’m a knitter, as most of you probably know, and I subscribe to more than a couple of knitting related newsletters and lists. One of those newsletters just announced that they will be making some knitting books available for e-readers through Zinio’s interface. I just checked and one of the books they were pushing, New England Knits, is available through Zinio but is both out of print (in the paperback format, at least) and not available in the Kindle format at Amazon at all.
This book, at least, is compatible with iPad or computer (PC or Mac) only – not with the Nook or the Sony E-Reader or the Kindle. This (as a side note) is one of the reasons I threw over my Kindle for an iPad – the ability to read books in any format they come in is pretty nice!
It does, however, speak to the fragmenting of the market and the way the announcements are made. The newsletter was all about the new e-readers that folks may have gotten for Christmas, but the two books they pushed (New England Knits and Crochet So Fine) are neither one compatible with any e-reader device but the iPad (and the Crochet book isn’t even compatible with that – just PCs and Macs). This has more than likely created an expectation in their customers that won’t be easily filled – they want books and patterns that are usable on *their* e-readers, whatever they might be, and the newsletter is focusing on books that aren’t going to be usable on most e-readers that were gifted this year.
This is something to consider when pushing our services with e-books in libraries. We have already seen patrons who received off-brand MP3 players complaining that they can’t use our service because their device isn’t compatible with Overdrive. We try to be clear and publicize the lists of compatible devices, but there is only so much we can do. 
I’m pointing this out not to criticize how other professions handle the emergence of e-readers for their customers, but to show that we all have the same challenges with these devices and, maybe, to suggest that we should be looking at what knitters and engineers and teachers and lawyers are doing about the fragmented state of the market now. They may have some good ideas. They may do some things we can point to as “learning moments” and try not to do. We’re all moving ahead on this stuff together, so getting some ideas from how others are handling the issues can only be a good thing!
