Author: Robin

A post in the PVLD Director’s Blog – The Intimidating Library (hey look – a library director’s blog! That’s pretty cool!!) the director of PVLD (I couldn’t find the name of the library or the director on her about page – lots of biographical information, but no basic info… UPDATE: The mystery is solved! I’ve had two comments that have given me the name of the mysterious library director. From the director herself: “For the record my name is Kathy Gould, and I am Director of the Palos Verdes Library District on the beautiful Palos Verdes Peninsula south of Los Angeles.”) tells of a conversation she had with a citizen of her community. This person confessed that she hadn’t been to the library in a long time because she was intimidated by the systems (OPACs, generally) and didn’t want to appear stupid by going to a desk and asking for help with something she felt she should know how to do. From the article:

She wasn’t talking about a generally unwelcoming environment, or unfriendly staff. She was talking about a set of systems and service models that discourage her from even trying to use our services.

One of the solutions this director proposed was to unchain staff from the desks – roaming reference, if you will. That takes the intimidation factor out of going to a desk and asking someone “official” for help. Another solution I thought of while reading this was weekly, informal, no-reservations-required OPAC classes (at least until we get an OPAC that isn’t completely unintuitive to use) that last maybe 15 minutes at a set time (or times) throughout the week. A reference librarian can be on hand to go through the process of searching, finding and checking out a book to anyone who cares to show up. This wouldn’t have to be completely in-depth – just the basics. The woman this director was talking about was using a Blackberry during the time she sat with the director – a gentle introduction to the system is all someone like her would need. More formal, longer, classes have their place as well for those who have *still* never used a computer, but for those who just need a little push, short “introductions” may be just the thing.

Here are all the participants in the “Last Supper” of the Internet Librarian Conference at the Pink Tuna (yummy sushi!!) in CA. From front to back it is:
Michael S., Renee
Eric, Me, Chrystie, Merideth, Tom, Michelle, Amanda
David S., Beth, Steven C., and Jason

(I didn’t ever catch Beth’s last name, and some people I couldn’t find blogs for, so I linked to their twitter pages. Sorry Beth!!)

We had a great time at the dinner! Chrystie informed us that Web Junction dinners generally have a question of the evening and allowed David Lee King (not pictured) to choose the question. He asked who was the most famous person any of us had met. The answers were *very* interesting.

While in California for the Internet Librarian conference, I met a fabulous librarian from Vancouver, BC (that’s up in Canada for the geographically challenged). She informed me that searching YouTube for the phrase “library craptacular” would be a very worthwhile endeavor. I *finally* did it and I have to agree – it’s well worth the time. I’m embedding one of the “security” videos in this post, but you have to check out the pay equity video too. They just went through a 3 month strike up there and the pay equity issue was one of the major sticking points.

Very creative folks up there in Canada!

Library 2.0 owes it all to a stripper. Need I say more? Yes? Ok – this is an interesting comparison of Library 2.0 tenets to the movie Gypsy – starring Natalie Wood – in which she plays a stripper. In this post, the effing librarian (interesting name – read the “about page” for the discussion on that one…) creates “Library Rose Lee” and compares the characteristics and ideas behind Library 2.0 (for the customers, constantly changing, having a gimmick, etc.) to Gypsy Rose Lee and her stripper friends from the movie. An interesting comparison!!

Well, apparently it’s taking a new conference to get me back to blogging again. I’m up at 4:30am tomorrow to get ready and out of town by 5:30 for my flight to California for Internet Librarian. I’ll be blogging about the conference at http://mrrlconf.wordpress.com/, for those who would like to follow along. Bobbi is going and will be blogging at that spot also, so there will be twice the fun!
As for work-related issues – I’ve got both of my new fancy switches in and I’m now fighting with the wireless firewall to get public wireless access going again at the library. The firewall doesn’t seem to want to play with the NAT rules that it used to use… We’ve got multiple firewalls in place, though, so the problem could be with the first one in the chain, and not the wireless one. I’m still looking for an evening PCC clerk – I’m sick of working Monday nights and asking the staff to cover the other nights of the week – we need somebody in there!! I’m still interviewing, though, so that might take another week or better – especially with Internet Librarian coming right in the middle of the process. There is more, but I will have to fill you all in on the rest later – I’ve got to start doing now, and write later!

I took it pretty easy this morning, sleeping in until after 8 and not getting to the conference hotel until 9:30. My first presentation was on EbscoHost (see previous post for links, I’m lazy…) and went pretty well. My part was not terribly polished and on the short side, but overall there were lots of good questions and lots of head-nodding, so things were fairly well received. My boss was in the back row, threatening to make faces at me as I talked until water shot out of my nose. I made eye contact with every person (around 50 or so) in that room – but him. No water leakage!
The second presentation – the one I did with Bobbi went REALLY well. It was our second time doing it and we were very comfortable with the material and each other. I did manage to make eye contact with everyone in the room again (even my boss, who just looked proud that we were on his staff, as opposed to making crazy faces) and got even more good head-nodding feedback (and great, sometimes hard, questions, too!). At the end of the presentation, one woman came up and asked us if we could do this program at her library for her staff. It’s not official yet, but we are hoping to be able to take this dog-and-pony show out on the road soon!!
After the presentations, and lunch at Red Lobster, we separated and I went out to the “Library Central” building of the Springfield-Greene Library. It’s a beautiful building with LOTS of cool features (including a permanent Friends shop and a cafe). I noticed they used the SAM PC Management Software – the same one we use – and so I got to speak to the head of Reference (who selects which software is used for their public computers) about their experiences with it. It was all-in-all a great use of my time – even if I did miss a few sessions at the conference. After that, as I was driving back to the hotel, I detoured at the world famous Bass Pro Shop and went through their museum, shopping areas and arcade. It was fun! Now I’m back at the hotel, checking email, posting this and killing time until 9, when the “Hollywood Librarian” movie will be shown.

Even at 11pm, so I definitely ate too much at dinner – but it was sooooo good! We went to a nice Japanese Steakhouse (the kind where they cook your food in front of you) and we ate very, very well! After that we went to the “Ernie Biggs” dueling pianos event – cash bar, though I was good and remembered I have to present tomorrow – and very funny performers. What more could you want? Now I’m getting my final “read-throughs” on both the Ebscohost and RSS and the Library Learning 2.0 presentations. Natasha just called and informed me that she and Letitia were bringing me back a donut from the late-night donut party that I skipped out on, so I’m outta here. More tomorrow!

I’ve arrived in Springfield and have already gone to one really interesting session on Microsoft’s next version of the shared toolkit – SteadyState. It looks really interesting, and may save us some money if I can make it work at least as well as Centurion Guard! I ate lunch at a fast-food italian place called Pasta Presto (I basically got into my car, pointed it vaguely west and drove until I saw something interesting – that’s what I found) which wasn’t too bad – the salad was great, the rest was OK. I’ve checked my email, taken care of things at work and I’m now ready to head back to the conference and spend some time grabbing free stuff from the vendor booths.

On a completely different note – I apologize to Margaret and Bobbi – their comments on a previous post got eaten by the spam filter. I’ve restored them and appreciate the time they took to reassure me that they both read my blog – though I’m not sure I buy Margaret’s claim that she has nothing to blog about…

More tomorrow! Tonight is vendors, eating, WoW and sleeping so I’m somewhat capable of doing two presentations tomorrow – one right after the other. Fun… Drinking and partying will have to wait ’til Thursday night!

GND: Getting Nothing Done

Getting Nothing Done GND ™ does not compete with Getting Things Done, it complements GTD.

I’m not sure I’m expecting a lot of posts from this blog, but it’s pretty funny anyway…

Post Like a Pirate – Your Pirate Translator will take your text and post it to Twitter, MySpace, a web-based Email client or just translate it for you (as it did the title to my post here) so that you can talk like a bona-fide pirate today. Enjoy!!