Tech

Library Services, Question of the Week, Tech, Teens
Question of the Week: Gen-Y Heaviest Library Users?
March 6th, 2008 | Permalink | Comment?

This seems like a fitting topic to tackle as we wind down Teen Tech Week 2008. As many of you are no-doubt familiar, a recent IMLS-sponsored Pew Internet Study looked at library use (among other things) and came to what some are calling surprising conclusions.

According to the study results, it appears that libraries indeed remain relevant in this internet age. In fact, the study found more than half of all Americans manged to visit libraries last year. Even more surprisingly, those tech-savvy, web-loving, Wikipedia using Gen-Yers were the biggest library users of all.

To start a discussion on the topic, WebJunction member alatreil asked:

“Would you say that Generation Y (18-30-year-olds) are your library’s heaviest users? What do you think this means for your library—and what does it mean for the nation’s libraries?“

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Please post in the original thread, or here in the blog comments.
Online Collaboration, Question of the Week, Tech, Web 2.0
Question of the Week: Getting IT Buy-in on Web 2.0 Efforts
February 15th, 2008 | Permalink | Comment?

This week’s question relates to a topic that may have increasing bearing on our library community: the tech “buy-in.” As technology solutions become easier for library staff to directly implement, I think we could face resistance toward our home-grown solutions from our IT departments.

At least that’s the roadblock member amberdevo seems to be facing with an intern-developed RSS implementation. They have a technology solution and need advice to help them get it to the live stage:

“Our IT dept keeps putting off (since August 07) in setting it up so it can be used. “Security risk — we’re looking at it — we need to have the code verified, blah blah blah” We don’t know what the security risks are, have never been told. Could someone perhaps enlighten me on what the possible security risks may be and how to set things up so there is no security risk.“

(more…)
Community Building, Tags and Taxonomies, Tech
Happy Valentine’s Day from WebJunction!
February 14th, 2008 | Permalink | 1 Comment

You still have a couple hours yet to make a special V-Day post in the Why I love libraries or Why I love my job WebJunction community discussions. We’ve had some great stories shared so far, and would love more.

For those of you with, ahem, other plans this evening—don’t despair. The whole of February (an extra day this year!) is Library Lovers’ Month, You’ve got plenty of time to read and share.

PS — don’t forget to keep tagging content in del.ico.us and flickr with “wjlove.” More on that project at the end of this post.
Question of the Week, Tech, Web 2.0
Question of the Week: Share Your Library Web 2.0 Sites
February 5th, 2008 | Permalink | Comment?

This Question of the Week embodies one of the best things about WebJunction: Sharing!

Rhastings added Web 2.0 features to his library’s website and thought it would be helpful to see more examples from the community. This particular discussion has been percolating for about a month, but we are sure many more of you are using Web 2.0 in a Library 2.0 context. Rhastings asked the WebJunction community:

“What library websites have you all seen that incorporate the features and applications of Web 2.0 in a really innovative way?”

(more…)
I'm Curious, Library Services, Tech
I'm Curious, George: E-books Kindle Buzz
February 1st, 2008 | Permalink | 3 Comments

This month we are trying an experiment with our long-running “I’m Curious George” column. As regular readers know, George’s pieces can often inspire reflection and occasionally lend themselves to group discussion. To facilitate such discussion we are posting the entire column here at BlogJunction. We’re optimistic that the “I’m Curious, George community will engage in a conversation right here in the blog comments. If this proves successful, look for more of our regular features published in BlogJunction. If it bombs, well, this is the web and we are supposed to try new things, right?

E-books Kindle Buzz

by George Needham

Dear George: When I was young, “kindle” was how we started a fire in the fireplace. Now, I see the name has been appropriated for yet another electronic book reader. I’m curious, George: What is it about e-books and e-book readers that make techies salivate? Don’t they realize that the good old paper book is the best possible technology for carrying information?-Passionate about Paper in Poughkeepsie

Dear 3P:

Before I address your question, full disclosure: E-content provider NetLibrary and WebJunction are both part of OCLC, and I work for OCLC. Second, I have a Kindle on order from Amazon for my personal use and to use in the workshops I teach. Finally, everything stated below is my personal opinion and not the opinion of OCLC or NetLibrary or WebJunction or the commissioner of professional football or the studio producing the movie contained herein.

That being said, many years ago I attended one of the first Public Library Association conferences where the keynote speaker was science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. He talked about writing a story in which he needed a high-tech device that was easy to produce on a mass scale, fairly indestructible, and compact, and that could hold vast amounts of information. Then, he said, he realized it had already been invented: it was the book.
(more…)
Library Services, Online Collaboration, Social Computing, Tech, Web 2.0, chrystie
sharing, privacy, trust (and vacation)
October 24th, 2007 | Permalink | Comment?

(Reposting from It’s All Good.)

I started a week’s vacation on Monday. I’m taking some time for a ‘writing retreat’ so that I can make my next deadline (Nov 1 - ahhh!) for the infamous book I’m writing about libraries and community building.

Serendipitous it was then that the new OCLC report on sharing, privacy, trust, and social networking was published online here (in pdf) on Monday. It’s perfect timing because it has such relevance to that ‘other’ work.

But because it also has such absolute relevance to my work at OCLC and with WebJunction, I couldn’t help but pop in here and say ‘hey! you should read this!’ and invite everyone over to my other blog for early thoughts and highlights. As I say over there, there’s more to come, I’m sure, as we dig into all those juicy details.

Back to vacation — very much looking forward to seeing some of you at Internet Librarian next week, BTW. If you’re gonna be there and want to connect, my profile and schedule is up on the IL wiki (as are those of some other WJ friends you may want to connect with).
Featured Guest Post, Tech, Webinar
Top 47 Training Tips from Today’s Learning Webinar
October 17th, 2007 | Permalink | Comment?
Wow, what a great group we had on the Accidental Technology Trainer webinar today! Thanks everyone for your great participation. I wished we had all day to keep sharing. At the end of the webinar I invited the participants to help me come up with a Top 10 list of training tips–generated from topics from the webinar and their own experiences. Well, they came up with 47 tips! If you missed the webinar, you can access the archived version (and the other past learning webinars) at: http://webjunction.org/do/Navigation?category=15543. On Friday, I’ll post the questions asked during the webinar, AND my answers. Do you have any additional tips to share or training questions you’d like answered? Just leave a comment on this post

Thanks! Stephanie Gerding, author of The Accidental Technology Trainer

Top 10 Training Tips from Today:
- Respect your participants
- Use activities
- Provide info in short bites
- Letting them DO more
- Train the Trainers
- Provide candy
- Reminder that the beginning and the end are the most important — make more beginnings and endings
- Give them an experience
- Patience is important
- Team teach when possible
- Keeping their attention, by making it fun
- Remember smokers…they may need to break more often…
- Don’t overdo the content
- Learning is not consumption but creation
- I like someone’s suggestion of partnering people of different skill levels
- Providing time for them to work independently
- Have structured and independent work on computer class
- Action plans
- Snowball fight exercise…great fun idea
- Let your participants do more — you just give backup at a certain point
- Begin and end strong and memorable
- Hands on is key
- Give them something to create so they leave with an example
- Mixing up the activities - lecture + activities
- Use humor to help keep the atmosphere relaxed.
- Variety, variety, variety!
- Polls
- Be flexible
- Make the classes smaller rather than larger.
- Laughter is a great motivator
- Find out participants expectations at the outset
- Get feedback!
- Immediately useful take-aways, professional or personal
- Let participants know they can request breaks
- Peer tutor
- Give time for independent learning and reflection
- Drawing
- Have them paraphrase what you have said.
- Positive Reinforcement
- Whoever is doing the talking is doing the learning.
- Allow time for practice
- Info they can take with them
- Allow plenty of time
- If available, guest speakers break the monotony
- Don’t try to cover too much material
- Certificates at the end for participants
- Tell them what you’ll teach, teach, tell them what you taught
Featured Guest Post, News, Staff Training, Tech, Webinar
Guest Blogger: Stephanie Gerding
October 15th, 2007 | Permalink | Comment?

I’m delighted to be the first guest blogger on BlogJunction! We hope you will join us this Wednesday for the next WJ Learning Webinar that will be based on my new book (being released on the same day!), The Accidental Technology Trainer: A Guide for Libraries. We’ll discuss how learning, participation, and retention can be increased in your library training programs!

No matter what type of library you work in or what kind of training you do, join our learning community to share tips and advice.

Compliments of the publisher, InfoToday, we will give away 5 copies of the book during the webinar. You just need to pre-register and then join the webinar to be included in the drawing. Over 100! people have registered, some who are new trainers and some with lots of experience, and I look forward to sharing and learning with everyone.

The Accidental Technology Trainer
October 17, 11 AM – 12 PM PT / 2 – 3 PM ET
Free via WebJunction’s Live Space
Register here (optional)

I’ll be back with more posts to keep the conversation going. Feel free to leave your comments and question here, before or after the session!

More soon,

Stephanie Gerding
Photo outside her home in sunny Phoenix where everything is in bloom
Online Collaboration, Online Learning, Staff Training, Tech, Webinar
Calling all (accidental) library technology trainers
October 8th, 2007 | Permalink | Comment?

This month we are delighted to feature guest speaker and trainer extraordinaire, Stephanie Gerding in our upcoming Learning Webinar, The Accidental Technology Trainer. Drawing from her many years of experience coordinating training programs in libraries around the country, Stephanie will share advice, point out best practices and address some of the concerns of library staff who find themselves not quite prepared to fill the role of a technology trainer.

While registration for this free webinar is not required, we invite you to enter a drawing to receive a copy of Stephanie’s new book, The Accidental Technology Trainer: A Guide for Libraries, by registering through the WebJunction Calendar of Events. We are looking forward to hosting a fun and informative presentation and hope to *see* you there!

The Accidental Technology Trainer
October 17, 11 AM – 12 PM PT / 2 – 3 PM ET
Free via WebJunction’s Live Space
Register here (optional)
Advocacy, Library Management, Sustainability, Tech, chrystie
about us. about them.
September 6th, 2007 | Permalink | 5 Comments

One of the best things about my job is that I have my own librarian. Ok, she’s not ‘my’ librarian. Her name is Tam and she’s more OCLC’s librarian. But it still feels like I have my own personal librarian because I email her questions and she just, like, answers them. Rright away. It’s amazing! I’m such a happy patron right now.

Anyway, one of the projects I’m working on (with my colleagues here at the WJ, including ‘my’ librarian) is gathering some basic info about librarians in the US. Who are we? What do we do? Where do we work? How many of us are there? Frankly, though I don’t often come right out and say it, I’m generally not all that interested in numbers, but this project proved to be pretty interesting and so I thought I’d share some of our findings:
In 2006, there were 229,000 librarians, 119,000 library assistants, and 113,940 library technicians (for a total of 461,940 library workers). Side note: as of last month, WJ has around 30,000 members (total) and over 500,000 unique visitors to the site (in the last year). Looks like folks know we’re here but we have a ways to go before we entice people to join the fun!
Around 60% of librarians in the US are over 45 and projected to reach retirement age over the next 10 years; 40% of library directors plan to retire in the next eight years.
Meanwhile, there are 57 ALA accredited library schools in the US, with just under 5,000 students awarded an MLIS or equivalent every year (1980-2002 average was 4,600). There won’t be a surplus of graduates to retirees until around 2020, with the biggest deficit between the years 2015-2019.
In 2006, 30% of reported MLIS job placements went to Public Libraries, 24% to Academic Libraries, 20% to School Libraries, 8% to Special Libraries, 5% to Government Libraries, .25% to Networks and Library Schools, and 1% to Vendors. Everyone else? You guessed it: Other.
The three highest ranking job categories (also in 2006) were Reference and Information Services (19%), School Library Media Specialist (18%) and, again, Other (10%).

Two ideas emerge from these stats. First, if the bulk of retiring librarians is at the director level, who will the profession promote to those positions? Even if the post-MLIS force keeps up with retirees, will they be ready for the positions they’re asked to fill? Second, if MLIS students are increasingly moving into non-traditional environments instead of taking traditional positions in public, school, academic or other types of libraries, where does that leave us institutionally?

I’d like to append to these facts and figures with an impression that has developed for me through conversation with colleagues over the last several years. Some of my friends in LibraryLand, many of whom are extremely innovative, ambitious, and eager to contribute to the profession, are often struggling in their library jobs. They seem unsupported by their institutions, sometimes specifically by their library directors and senior colleagues. Age, along with tech savvy or advocacy and a shift towards community-based authority or expertise layers in additional divisive factors, sometimes widening the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’. I have personally benefited from relationships and mentoring with elders in our field - I won’t call them traditionalists! - as well as from very strong institutional support from my employer for my work. But I’m wondering if there’s a way to shift our culture as a profession so that my experiences along these lines are more of a norm, rather than an exception.

And so, how can we bridge these gaps in our daily work? Can we create inter-generational or inter-experiential dialog and (two-way) mentoring so that the library profession, and our institutions, can thrive (not just survive) in the midst of this particular change?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach this. At least two projects in the works so far! Stay tuned…

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Tech

Library Services, Question of the Week, Tech, Teens

Online Collaboration, Question of the Week, Tech, Web 2.0

Community Building, Tags and Taxonomies, Tech

Question of the Week, Tech, Web 2.0

I'm Curious, Library Services, Tech

E-books Kindle Buzz

Library Services, Online Collaboration, Social Computing, Tech, Web 2.0, chrystie

Featured Guest Post, Tech, Webinar

Featured Guest Post, News, Staff Training, Tech, Webinar

Online Collaboration, Online Learning, Staff Training, Tech, Webinar

Advocacy, Library Management, Sustainability, Tech, chrystie

Sustainability, Tech

Library Management, Sustainability, Tech

Tech, Technology Planning

Tech, Technology Planning

Online Collaboration, Tech