Emerging Technologies: Virtualization in Libraries
When: Monday, June 28th (10:30 AM – 12:00 PM)
Where: Washington Convention Center, Room 143B/C

A panel presentation on the use of virtualization technologies in large research, mid-size, and public libraries to reduce costs and staffing, improve reliability and security, and contribute to green initiatives. Speakers will represent a variety of backgrounds and types of libraries and will describe how virtualization in their setting is related to other emerging technologies such as cloud computing and identity management. Following the panel presentation, time will be available for questions and discussion.

Featured panelists are: Dave Pcolar, Systems Specialist for University Libraries at UNC Chapel Hill; Stu Baker, Associate University Librarian for Library Technology at Northwestern University; and Matthew Hamilton, Library Innovation and Technology Manager at Boulder Public Library.

Just kidding.

This year’s Computers in Libraries conference was themed “Information Fluency: Literacy for Life”, and the task of defining and supporting new literacies has rightfully risen to the forefront of librarian’s minds– highlighted by the IMLS Museums, Libraries, and 21st Century Skills initiative and the recent findings of the Knight Foundation’s report Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age. Further evidence that it is libraries that fill an crucial gap in addressing the digital divide are the findings of the recent US Impact study confirming that a large portion of the “have nots” in the digital age rely on us for our infrastructure.

While this isn’t news to those of us in libraries, I do think that at this crucial time, it’s finally getting attention outside of libraries– and that is huge. Just as many who are tied to the idea that we’re not much more than a warehouse for books are wondering if we have a place anymore, there comes confirmation that we are important for oh so many more reasons as well. So to my mind, the efforts of the librarians who are producing the Libraries and Transliteracy site are especially relevant and commendable.

At this year’s conference, I had the honor and privilege of presenting with two of the authors of the Libraries and Transliteracy blog, Buffy Hamilton and Bobbi Newman. Bobbi introduced the concept of Transliteracy, “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks” and Buffy highlighted the role of school libraries in supporting transliteracy and tied it to research done by Dr. Deborah Brandt.

My portion of the talk was to discuss how traditional IT departments must redefine their missions and orientation to better integrate with the rest of the library and its services (in fact, the IMLS recommends that a 21st century organization dedicates 75% of its resources to supporting  21st century skills and that “strategic planning for physical and IT infrastructure is fully aligned with the institution’s goals to enhance audiences’ 21st century skills“). We know that many claim that “IT is dead” and while I find that proclamation to be a bit premature, I see a lot of parallels with the pressure that libraries have felt with the changes of the last 15 years.

I’m not that happy with the Slideshare conversion. Because I use the “Presentation Zen” style in my slides, when you click through you get very little of what the talk was about. If you follow the link to the Slideshare site, you can read the notes I included which tell more of the full story. The best compliment I received after the presentation was when John Blyberg tweeted “Wish our profession had more IT managers like @brewinlibrarian“. I see a bright future for libraries, but we must leverage our IT resources well to make it happen.

Links to some of the resources I used or recommend:

• A Global Imperative, The Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit, The New Media Consortium, 2005
• Horizon Report 2010 Edition, New Media Consortium
• Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:Media Education for the 21st Century, MIT & The MacArthor Foundation 2009
• Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age. Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, 2009
• Museums, Libraries, and 21st Century Skills, Institute of Museum and Library Services
• Transliteracy.com
• Libraries and Transliteracy
• Libraries and Technology, American Library Association’s State of American Libraries 2010
• CyberNavigators and YouMedia at Chicago Public Library
• Scratch Design Workshops at Wilmette Public Library
• SOPAC, the Social OPAC
• GT System, Game Tournament software shared by Ann Arbor District Library
• Reading Record, Summer Reading software shared by Westminster Public Library in Colorado

I want thank all of the people who have helped and supported me on my career path. I hope that I can contribute to the field and help other new librarians in some comparable way.

Thank you! And….. now it’s time to get to work….. more good stuff on the way!

Besides, my focus is learning more PHP these days and I don’t really need to go any further with HTML at this point. PHP applies to the Drupal stuffs we’re working on at MPOW.

So when I say the site is finished… well, dear reader, you and I both know it’s not true. I’ll continue to try new things, probably break it once in a while, and just generally cause headaches for the three of you who are not getting this via RSS.

Thanks for your patience.

Now back to CiL preparations. I’ll be on a Digital Branch Managers panel with David Lee King, Sarah Houghton-Jan, and Bobbi Newman. I’m also doing a Transliteracy Preso with Bobbi and Buffy Hamilton (no relation, but she is cooler than me). Also on tap will be a something on virtualization at ALA annual for LITA-HoLT.

6:30-8:00 get myself and kiddo ready, leave for work

8-9:00 is my first email block, I do a poorly managed version of the “inbox zero” and I try to keep two email blocks throughout the day—the first and the last hour. Whenever possible, I try to leave work early enough to get a workout in for the day. I’ve found that it really does make one more productive! However, I don’t have my daughter on Mondays, so I tend to work late those nights. Of course, like most anal er… “driven” librarians, I work a lot from home at night and on the weekends, too.

Checked in on Foursquare

Get to work—open up Outlook on one monitor, Firefox on the other—use App Tabs to keep Gmail, iTweet, FriendFeed, Facebook, Google Reader and Hoot Suite open… but I rarely click over to them (sorry to anyone who tries to ping me during the day).

Plug in my iPhone for music.

Fielded question about constantly replacing headphone on patron internet machines—looking for a source of good, cheap headphones (difficult balance).

Called friend and former colleague, Jack Maness to confirm lunch

Set up Digital Services Team meeting for 9am

Posted picture of my desk on Twitter

9-10:00 met with Digital Services Team. This is my Systems guru, Jon Solomon and my Drupal master, Chris Evjy. We discussed the movement to the newest version of Web Pac Pro, new headers, integrating Library Thing For Libraries. We discussed Summer Reading program, looked at different software products and campaigns, set firm deadlines for the various elements. Discussed Evanced stylesheets and the development of a Feed plugin for Drupal to ease the display of Evanced information. Discussed our developing Intranet – production environment up. Broke down the tasks and discussed who does what and when.

10:00am – Filled out time sheet, generated the report for my staff and turned it in.

Looked into the myriad of suggestions for headphone replacement from Twitter. Many good suggestions – brought these ideas to our Assistant Director and discussed some of the pros and cons of each approach. We decided to take question to the Leadership Team later this week

Checked in with Finance Manager for library on the progress towards a contract with PingV, converting ArtsResource website migration to Drupal. ArtsResource is a web site paid for by the Boulder Arts Commission that we maintain at the library. It provides profiles with samples (audio, video, photographs) of work for local artists as well as art-related events listings. We are working with PingV to convert it over to Drupal from the legacy content management system it’s currently built in.

10:15am Did morning walk-through of the library – I try to do this twice a day so my experience of the library isn’t all just virtual. I stopped in the children’s area and discussed a recent hacking incident that unfortunately resulted in patron shoving our security guard when confronted. Further discussion with children’s staff about other recent security issues and our Leadership Team/Commission’s emphasis as top priority for the coming months.

10:30 – 11:00 Worked on IT governance meeting, implementing a Change Management group as per ITIL principles. I’ve been slowly adopting much of the ITIL stuff in one form or another since I came on board about a year ago.

Then Chris (the web guy) interrupted me and wanted to know where Drupal was installed on the new production server… also needed user permissions fixed. I tweeted about my frustrations with Linux file permissions.

11-11:30am, more follow up on Change Management

11:30 – gave up on Change Management and moving on to making some phone calls… Eric Sissler of the Westminster Public Library, Carson Block of the Poudre River Public Library District, Susan Staples of the High Plains Library District. Working on some Colorado Association of Libraries’ “Network Systems Interest Group” stuff.

Noon-1:30 – I try to make myself have lunch with a friend twice a week because the rest of the time I just eat lunch at my desk while answering email. Twice a week it’s good for me to get away from the screen. Today I had lunch with Jack Maness, Head of the Engineering Library at the University of Colorado up the street. We talked a lot about ALA Emerging Leaders, Technology in Libraries—cool stuff about Data Curation mostly. We talked career development and a *lot* about what we’ve learned and are learning being relatively inexperienced managers. Jack has been a huge influence and inspiration—I can’t say enough good about the guy.

1:30-2:00 check email, Twitter, Facebook … helped out Chris AGAIN with Linux stuffs.

2:00-3:00 It’s all about the performance reviews. I have one for myself due so I needed to prepare materials for my supervisor, and I have a staff member due soon as well. I did a little of both.

3:00-3:30 Got a call back from Eric Sissler and discussed the details of Reading Record, a Free and Open Source (hosted, no less!) summer reading tool that he developed. We’re thinking about participating with the larger Colorado Community in using this software this year. Also, discussion of Rsync and virtualization in libraries and setting up a time for him to come up and see our data center and geek out even more together.

3:30-3:45 Afternoon walk-through – this time of day has a totally different crowd (after school) and I like to check in with Circulation and see how things are going. Have they had a lot of questions or complaints about the system today? I also use the time to do an environment scan in general. What areas of the library are people using? How many laptops? What are they doing? Who looks lost? I try to overhear whatever questions they are asking our desk staff. I always peek in the teen room and see who’s using what in there as well. Then I headed through children’s to see what’s most popular there and observe the age groups.

3:45-4:00pm – Related to children and computing, I came back to check on the progress of getting our new multimedia touch screen computers set up. We’re going to deploy Windows 7 and a whole slew of new software for a wider range of ages. Currently our children’s PCs run Windows 95 and are installed at tables that are only appropriate for 2-5 year olds. The software selection is equally geared for little ones and out of date. Soon these cool HP Touch Smarts will replace them! Really excited about this…

4-5:00 it’s all about inbox zero, baby. Will I make it today?

5:30 – I have *not* reached inbox zero… far from it.
I look at the Facebook photos of the After Hours social at ALA Midwinter. Wish I could have been there. Now I want to go home—so back to email! I WILL PREVAIL!

6:00—Inbox Zero achieved. I does a happy dance.

6:00-6:25 – I gather my notes and write up this post. I will then head home but my day isn’t over—we’re doing some system testing later tonight about 9:30pm.

All in all, a pretty typical day except that I normally have a *lot* more meetings.

ADDENDUM: Running the new backup script hung on an SQL table tonight at about 10pm and our server crashed. I emailed back and forth with my Sysadmin for a while before finally deciding I needed to head into the office. He and I were there until about 10 minutes ago– 2:00am. III is still working on the problem as it turned out to be a Millenium issue rather than a Linux issue that he or I could fix. And THAT is a day in the life of this librarian…. luckily late night calls are *very* atypical.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/margolove/1810357551/

It is a very interesting time. As I gear up for another ALA conference, in the very rare spare moments I encounter I’ve been reflecting a bit on my life, my career, and inevitably… this blog.

I’ve seen the signs– blogging is dead. Well, no it’s not. But I’m certainly not the only one I know who’s taken a hiatus. I know the arguments– Friendfeed and/or Twitter have killed blogs. However, in my case that’s really not it. I remain semi-active on Twitter, but I’ve rarely spent any time at all on Friendfeed.

I have a lot going on right now. The transition from Library School student to full-fledged MLS’d librarian happened in mid-April, when I gave my final capstone presentation. I thought, “Ah-ha! Now I will blog again.”

But I did not. I spent evenings with my daughter. We went for bike rides, we read aloud together, we went to the park, and we spent many, many hours on the swing in the front yard.

And I don’t regret a minute of it.

However, by late May I began to feel antsy again and I started putting together presentations, trainings, reading a few blogs here and there, etc. But I just haven’t had the extra time to blog. As you can see from my last “post”, I had intended on live-blogging the Rocky Mountain Innovative Users Group summer workshop—but I ended up needing to come back up to Boulder after our patron network crashed for most of the day.

Which leads me to why I’m really not blogging. It turns out that moving from a position where you have little power (and therefore little responsibility) to one of great responsibility is a huge shift in many different ways.

Before, I could spend the evening on a whim staying up late coding a cool website or mashup just because I thought it would be fun. I could head off to pretty much any meeting, conference, or committee that I could drive to and afford. I could spend my time exploring and playing with ideas and writing rants about what needs to change.

But now I actually have to *do it*.

There’s no one to blame anymore if things don’t turn out well. There’s no “administration” that won’t let me implement something cool for our department. There’s no lack of ability to control the purse-strings or to delegate the tasks. Now I have to figure out how to be the one to get buy-in. I have to figure out how to take ideas from conception to reality not just in my own little office sphere—but across an entire organization.

I have to manage people. Granted—I managed work-study students at the University Libraries, and I managed all kinds of folks in the past in restaurants, sales jobs, etc. But it’s very different managing people who are mostly older than you, who are highly skilled, and who just plain have a whole lot more experience than you. Let me say this—I am ever more grateful *every day* that I had a management class in library school and that the Colorado Association of Libraries Leadership Institute has been so fantastic. It has really taught me a lot and helped me through some pretty intense challenges.

I also have spent a lot of time adjusting to my new role as professional. It’s no longer my job to do all of the nuts and bolts of coding up some new web tool or bringing online a new gadget. That’s something I have to remember. Now it’s time to trust and, when necessary, coach my staff and let them go do it. I need to keep my head in the clouds for strategic visioning and future casting. I need to participate, contribute to, and help shape policy development. I need to empower others.

I have to remind myself of this every once in a while. I almost spent this last weekend at DrupalCamp Colorado because it was “cool”. But I would have come home and played with Drupal all night, and not paid attention to caring for myself, my house, my pets, or getting ready for ALA—not to mention handling my management responsibilities for the week. I had to step back and remember, “things are different now”.

And that’s just fine. It’s tough to be stretched in many directions. However, I prefer to think that’s just a process of expanding myself. Expanding who I am and what I’m capable of. I only hope I remain malleable like silly putty—and don’t crack like old rubber band.

See you in Chicago!

Nice slides showing app layers (wish they’d post their slides)

Data layer
app layer
XML layer

TechEssence.info for API library info

check worldcat.org/devnet

can pull worldcat searches as XML and remix

xISBN for FRBRizing

MAshed Libraries UK – hackfest

Worldcat hackathon NYPL

OCLC bootcamp for Code4Lib

Visualizing Worldcat Holding
thesecretmirror.com/code/api-fun-visualizing-holdings-locations

Compare Everywhere app for android phone includes library for books through Wordlcat API
(usage spiked after introduction – importance of mobile and of freeing data for machine use)

Andrew:

Why can’t we move the lib workflow to the network?

Chris Anderson- web is all about scale

started with resource sharing… the licensed journal lit….. cataloging…. consortial…. (open source ILS? universal circ policies? Pines?)

sharing cloud storage of google scanned documents

webscale computing helps invert the 70/30 ratio 70% building infrastructure, 30% propelling biz forward

Libs have concentrated on diffusion and syndication

now we’re seeing concentration…. shared discovery layer…. ERM/knowledge base…. repository…..

Eventually ALL library management workflow

do things at scale, in the cloud

Ebay did well:

1. Simplify features of commercial transaction

2. provided platform to allow buyers/sellers to industrialize workflow

3. reap benefits by scaling this up

Library Scale 166 billion transactions per year, 5000 transactions per second

OCLCs goal: build a service capable of that….

when using social networks, need scale…. social networking content would not work so well with just a few library users….
but we still want to handle our metadata locally

practical web scale for libs – looking for efficiency

despite our huge investments, we appear small and fragmented in comparison to search engines

a webscale strategy would provide libs with the ability to just focus on propelling biz dforward

lib management workflow isn’t unique– can stop treating it as such

extend what we’ve done for library users, we can do for staff as well

concentration creates network effects, opens up new world of processes of resource sharing

a single networked source for vendors/providers, e-resources identities, bib item-level details

reports w/real details (financial, collection, circulation)

fund codes, bulk purchases, collection shifting, consolidation patron notifications, identity management

More notes:
http://cil2009reporter.blogspot.com/2009/03/day-one-track-d-moving-libraries-to.html

Redesign or Redevelop?

Redesign if just asked, old, boring

Redevelop if code is poor, usability poor, hard to update

Redesign is cheap (director won’t know difference)

Redevelop is $$$ more like triplebypass

Get off the major redesign cycle. Disruptive to users

Users dislike redesigns

Redesign w/ evidence based

Usability tests, usage logs, feedback show a need

Pitfall 1: not accounting time for assessment

Redesign where the biggest ROI in terms of content, services

Look where people are going

Google Analytics
Clicky
Usability studies
Find and document page rank

Plan for time to get consensus:
Need for change
Desired outcomes

Data is good here

Pitfall: death by committee
Make committee SMALL

Data+evidence based practice

Pitfall: being experts
Don’t design to make librarians happy, design for your users

Pitfall: thinking outside box
Cms
Blog
Wiki
Rather traditional page based

Pitfall spending too much time designing
Why be original when so many choices already?

spend time on content, services rather than arguing design minutia

Pitfall only looking other Library websites

User expectations formed on other sites, not libs

Pitfall use SMART goals

Increase page rank, improve content update times, improve usability x percent, increase in resource usage

Pitfall: not communicating enough
Consider blog or wiki, tool manage user expectations

Execution

Pitfall communicating too much
Redesign by committee
Look to evidence to avoid tedious discussions

Pitfall not providing clear path for users
Define primary functions and these paths are clear

Connecting people / materials get prime real estate

Pitfall reinventing the wheel
Use free stuff

Spent time money on remarkable content, engagement

Librarians are smart provide good content

Remarkable content is rewritten content for the web don’t cut and paste
Improvements in usability in hundreds of percent

Redesign for SEO
Structure HTML well consistently
Simple URL
Alt tags
Descriptive titles

Submit sitemap
Ask Google to remove old from cache

Design with social media optimization

Don’t throw old content

Update robots.txt

Pitfall not planning for maintenance in future

Do it right once

Others who took better notes include:

Bobbi Newman

and

Julie Strange