Wired: Public Library Geeks Take Web 2.0 to the Stacks

Take a look at this excellent article in Wired about Helene Blowers and her Learning 2.0 program over at PLCMC. Michael Stephens and I had the privilege of speaking at the kickoff event last summer and I've been following her program ever since. Helene's program has been picked up in so many libraries worldwide that it has truly become an international hit. My congratulations to Helene and her team in Charlotte.

Learning 2.0, developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe.

"We don't have to wait for some training company to come along and say, 'For $20,000 we'll show you how this stuff works,'" said Michael Stephens, who wrote Web 2.0 and Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software. "Helene put it on the web so anyone can use that program."
Article link.

Libraries as a source of local information

Some of the more popular computer classes in our electronic libraries have introduced patrons to the valuable local and state information available through our website. I thought about this when I read the paper by Charles Lyons, The library: a distinct local voice? posted to the peer reviewed internet journal firstmonday.

The paper "examines the library’s place as a local information provider ... suggesting some ways that libraries can become better recognized as places to turn for local information. " Lyons discusses the convergence of the growing trend of turning to libraries for local information with the emerging 2.0 technologies which is creating amazing opportunities for libraries. He further refers to an article by Walt Crawford in Cites & Insights which states:

“I would love to see many public (and academic) libraries expand their roles as centers for preserving local history and culture, and I believe some of the ‘Web 2.0’ tools could be important to facilitate citizen participation in building and maintaining such living local archives.”

Just some food for thought...

Even non-librarians are impressed by Helene!

Wired published this article about PLCMC's Helene Blowers and now I'm really excited about the possibility of getting her down here for our kickoff! Plus her blog is very cool.

International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Conference Dates-March 26-28, 2007
Yes, they have whole conferences on this sort of stuff...

There are plenty of interesting papaers to read - see a wrap up from The Resource Shelf.

Squidoo's Lens of the Year Award-Library 2.0?

L2 Lens is Up for Lens of the Year!
News about the L2 Lens http://www.squidoo.com/library20/ :

CONGRATULATIONS!
One of your lenses has been nominated for Squidoo's Lens of the Year Award. To celebrate turning 1 year and 100,000 lenses older, we took our previous Lens of the Day winners (yep, that's you) and lined them up, to see which lens our lensmasters and readers think is simply THE best.

What is Squidoo, you ask?

A Little About Squidoo:
Squidoo's goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo's goal as a co-op is to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo's goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.
Read more about Squidoo at The SquidLens.

Worldcat's Top 1000 Books -- The Children's Titles

OCLC Research has updated its list of the top 1000 titles owned by member libraries—the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the "purchase vote" of libraries around the globe.
Here are the children's titles on Lorcan Dempsey's del.icio.us page; see the cloud on the right to bring up other lists.

From the Bloggers: A New Book Award

Unlike other awards for children's books, the Cybils consider both literary merit and kid appeal. Read more about this award that children's literature bloggers came up with in School Library Journal.

The Future President, On Your Friends List

MySpace, and other social networking sites, will help elect the next president of the United States. Read all about it in today's New York Times right here.

What Manga is all about

Heidi and Jennifer headed over

to USF yesterday

to share Manga, Anime,

and library info

with a group of teens.
And Japanese food

goes great with Manga!

Story times on a blog

Miss B, children's librarian at Palos Verdes Library District in California, blogs her story times so that anyone can replicate her themes and activities. Save yourself some time this week by pulling a program right off her Story Time blog!

MySpace is a good thing!

I know here in the libraries we have come to think of MySpace as nothing but trouble, but it is dynamic and has a place in library world.
For example, check out the MySpace page of our very own Ask a Librarian!.
And you can virtually visit the MySpace branch of the Ann Arbor District Library in Michigan!

PLA on Blogs & Wikis

The Public Library Association has just published Introduction to Blogs and Wikis as part of “Tech Notes” Series.

Read this concise introduction.

Written by Richard W. Boss. MS Word document.

Latinos Online-America's Digital Divide Narrows

The March 15th Business Week magazine has a feature article - America's Digital Divide Narrows - highlighting the gains made in the Latino community for Internet access.

Some highlights:
"More than one-in-two Latinos (56%) goes online, a lower rate than among non-Hispanic whites (71%) and non-Hispanic blacks (60%). Several socio-economic characteristics that are often intertwined, including low levels of education and limited English ability, largely explain the gap in internet use between Hispanics and non-Hispanics."

• 67% of Latinos, 77% of African Americans, and 86% of whites age 18-29 use the internet.
• 61% of Latinos, 77% of African Americans, and 85% of whites age 30-41 use the internet.
• 58% of Latinos, 69% of African Americans, and 80% of whites age 42-51 use the internet.
• 46% of Latinos, 49% of African Americans, and 75% of whites age 52-60 use the internet.
• 27% of Latinos, 31% of African Americans, and 55% of whites age 61-70 use the internet.
• 17% of Latinos, 7% of African Americans, and 27% of whites age 71 and older use the internet.

Read the Pew Hispanic Center report with the full data.

Story Time

Clifford 4
Originally uploaded by Penfield Public Library.

Next time you see a flickr photo here it will be from one of our programs!

New York Times Book Review - the Podcast

The New York Times Book Review has a podcast - Listen to authors talk about their books...

This Week: Author Kurt Andersen, children's author Brian Selznick, poetry editor David Orr and best seller news.

Listen Now (mp3)

eAudiobooks billboard (Flickr Test Post)

eAudiobooks billboard 3
Originally uploaded by Alice Sneary.

Wouldn't it be cool to see this on I-275?

Library 2.0 in 15 minutes a day

Sam Wallin of the Palos Verdes Library District has created this wiki as an instructional tool for the library staff there...
"The "15 minutes a day" approach to new technology is a growing trend in libraries. This wiki page is designed to be a kind of repository of the various short lessons being done, so that other libraries can benefit from them. The whole reason for the '15 minutes' approach is that time is of a big concern, and certainly every library won't have time to build a full curriculum of this sort. "

Take a look ...It looks like a great program.

Twtter Explained for Librarians, or 10 ways to use Twitter

From David Lee King...

First - what is twitter?Think of Twitter like a personal IM account that can be shared with everyone. Once you have a Twitter account set up, you can send short IM, SMS, or web-based messages to Twitter. Others who are marked as your friends or followers receive those messages. And there’s a public timeline that displays everything everyone is texting (there’s also an option to keep messages private, and to send messages only to individuals, which triggers an email)...

Read more...How would you use this in the library?

The C's of Our Sea of Change

February, 2007 Computers in Libraries article about PLCMC's recent 9 week Library 2.0 training program...

The C’s of Our Sea Change: Plans for Training Staff, from Core Competencies to LEARNING 2.0 by Helene Blowers and Lori Reed.

Yes, they use the term - "Core Competencies"...take a look.

Who's Watching YOUR Space?

Summary video of the OCLC Symposium at ALA MidWinter in January,2007...



This is the 3-minute version of the most recent OCLC Symposium at ALA Midwinter 2007. More than 400 people attended this discussion of social networking practices and trends on January 19, 2007 in Seattle, Washington. Michael Stephens, Instructor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University and author of Web 2.0 & Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software, was moderator. The expert panel included: Howard Rheingold, a leading thinker on the cultural, social and political implications of communications media and virtual communities; danah boyd, PhD candidate at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communications; and Marc Smith, Senior Research Sociologist, who leads the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research.


Watch the entire 2.5 hour symposium...

Nine Best Practices on Learning 2.0

From Helen Blowers:

In the past few weeks I've had several libraries contact me asking for guidance in creating their own Learning 2.0 programs and while I can't say that I have all the answers, what I can offer is a list of my Best Practices or Lessons Learned from my experience. So here they are in no particular order.

Learning 2.0 Thoughts & Best Practices:

1. Don't confuse learning with training
2. Design the program for late bloomers
3. Allow participants to blog anonymously
4. Use 1.0 methods to continually communicate
5. Focus on “discovery” & offer challenges
6. Encourage staff to work together
7. It’s not about “doing IT right”
8. Practice transparency & enable radical trust
9. Continually encourage staff to “Play”

Read more ...

the revolution is just beginning

From David Lee King's blog -

Just a random thought floating around my head the last few days. Next month, I’m speaking about planning and implementing Library 2.0 at Computers in Libraries. Quite a few of my colleagues frequently talk about web 2.0, library 2.0, and similar types of “emerging trends” topics. And I have like 2000 different online accounts for everything from flickr to gobs of social networking sites to my various bad video endeavors.
But you know what? All this wicked cool stuff is still pretty new. Really. Here’s a sampling:

• Blogging (the granddaddy) - term coined in 1997
• RSS - created in 1999 (and we still can’t describe it very well)
• Wikipedia - 2001
• Flickr - 2002
• MySpace - 2003
• del.icio.us - 2003
• Web 2.0 - 2004
• Facebook - 2004
• YouTube - 2005
• skype - 2005
• Library 2.0 - 2005
• Twitter (the newest fun time-waster) - 2006
  

In my book, most of this stuff is still pretty new. Features change frequently, some are still considered to be “in beta,” and people are still figuring out what to do with them. Certainly libraries are right there - we have to figure out what to do with them both for staff and for public computer users.
So - that’s why this post is titled “the revolution is just beginning.” In three more years, it will look WAY different from what it does now.
And I can’t wait!

49% - Young Adults Love Video Games

Are you surprised?

"Today's youth play a lot of video games. Nearly half (49%) say they play games that can be hooked up to a television such as PlayStation, Xbox or GameCube. Roughly one-third of Gen Xers (35%) play these types of games. Very few Boomers and Seniors spend time playing video games (12% and 3%, respectively). Just over one-third of Nexters (36%) say they played video games in the past seven days. The gender gap on this measure is substantial. Fully half of young men (51%) played video games in the past week compared with 21% of women." Read more

From Pew Research Center

Ten Tech Trends for Librarians 2007

From Michael Stephens - author of Tame the Web.

These are at the heart of the Library 2.0 experience:

• conversations
• convergence
• content
• redefining LIS job descriptions
• citizen journalism
• openness and sharing
• participation
• experience and play

See (and watch) what he has to say -> Ten Tech Trends for Librarians 2007