Rise of the women gamers

A December 23, 2008 BBC News Technology item:

The virtual battle of the sexes
By Tamsin Osborne
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7796482.stm

is the latest in a number of articles I've seen lately that document that video games aren't just for the Elf Lord in his bachelor pad.

According to Ms. Osborne,

But this stereotype has been challenged by a study investigating gender differences among gamers.

It found that the most hard-core players are female, that gamers are healthier than average, and that game playing is an increasingly social activity.

Despite gaming being seen as a male activity, female players now make up about 40% of the gaming population.

One possible problem with this study is that it only looked at one online game - EverQuest II. But this finding is in keeping with my own experience. Many of the folks I know who play World of Warcraft, EverQuest and who participate in Second Life are female.

Does this statistic translate in your library gaming events, if you have them? Let us know your experience in a comment.

Keynote: Communities and Communication in a Social and Mobile World

I really enjoyed this keynote by author Howard Rheingold, who wrote Smart Mobs. The themes were of trust and communication over time. Rheingold noted that when he had written other books, he researched them, wrote them, and then put the topic away, but this topic has stuck with him. His presentation was lively, interesting and relevant, with visuals reminiscent of Flat Stanley or Where's Waldo. I've stuck pretty closely with my notes from his presentation:

Cell phones are changing the way the world looks at time, children, and each other. In Finland, the word for cell phone is the diminutive of “hand.” In Tokyo, people were walking around looking at their cell phones instead of around themselves or at each other. Rheingold heard the saying, “kids flock like birds” and noticed a softening of time, where we don't meet at a pre-specified time as much, but rather plan to meet in the afternoon and work out the details of when and where later, on the phone. Protests, meetings, etc., have all been arranged by cell phone (for example: "everyone show up at this time in this place wearing black"), lowering the threshold for cooperation. Oh My News (Korea) tipped the election on election day via social networking, and there are many more examples of this type of thing from all over the world: high school kids in Chile, Basques in Madrid, violent radicals in Denmark, Nigeria, Australia, and more.

This isn't new. Way back when, hunter-gatherers needed protein every day. They gathered together in extended family groups and managed to drive all large mammals in North America to extinction more quickly. These were big, so hunters could provide for more than themselves and their families. Communication was key for hunting and sharing.

Later, big civilizations grew in the river deltas. Writing began from record-keeping: accountants started it all! Reading and writing was limited to the elite until the printing press. New forms of collective action emerged from new forms of communication. Science becomes collective intelligence instead of personal genius. Luther wasn’t the first priest to protest, just the first to protest after printed broadsides. There were similar advances in politics with the founding of this country. There were huge advances in banking and commerce because people could transmit currency with paper – keys are trust and worldwide communication system. This sharing allowed people to build on each other’s discoveries. Looking forward, we are on another cusp with toward near universal use of small communication/computer devices.

Markets are changing. Open source is growing out of self-interest. Opening proprietary source software, letting people use it, has been key to development, growth, and financial rewards. For example, Lilly created a market for solutions, like eBay. Amazon, Google and others have opened up their programming interfaces and ads to let others make a little money and them make a lot of money. Getting people working on problems across firms and fields has been huge and successful. Prisoner’s dilemma stopped trading with unknowns, but eBay helped increase trust with seller information and power sellers. The internet is allowing us to communicate and share, which is allowing development that never could have happened otherwise, for example: Wikipedia, ThinkCycle (cooperative design for developing world), Swarm Supercomputing Collectives (SETI @ home, Folding @ home, and more), Amazon Mechanical Turk (crowd-sourcing), Cocreation of culture (p2p and many to many) blogs, YouTube, and more. Success comes to those who provide powerful platforms that enable individuals. This is leveraged self-interest. It looks like altruism but enables their self-interest to help others.

We are in a multimedia world, with technology as mind amplifiers, used by people who never used to use computers. From small subcultures to large portions of population, people are, well, participating in participatory media…blogs, wikis, rss, mashups, podcasts, file sharing, tagging, and more. We have broader, faster, cheaper, social communication. We need to take risks with experimentation! Most learning is happening when the teacher isn’t looking, on evening and weekends, in the back of the class. Learning is self-guided, but needs more guidance from others, especially in how to apply skills. Librarians can help. There is a social media classroom available: http://socialmediaclassroom.com, a combination blog, wiki, forums, chat, social bookmarking, how-to and more, which we can use to help people figure out what’s appropriate for their use, and the appropriate rhetoric to use there. This is currently available as a free Drupal download, but will soon be available in a hosted IT-Free version for educators, including libraries.

This is not all just fun. Social media can be used to make the world work better (when Rheingold couldn't get Comcast to respond to an emergency repair request, he got quick help by contacting Comcastcares on Twitter, and wikis and blogs have been effectively used to coordinate worldwide emergency response, as in http://cooperationcommons.com). However, in this rapidly changing world, we need to keep up with the literacies, not the technologies. In searching: how do you get an answer, but also, how do you know the answers are true? This is key for librarians. We can help with the information literacy piece!

Seeing clearly?

Google's Gmail has a new service, just rolled out Monday: Google Goggles. It basically serves as an optional filter for those times when our internal filters aren't quite as strong. This nifty service aims to help prevent users from emailing when they're not thinking clearly, by requiring completion of some simple math problems in order to send an email at night on the weekends (or whenever you specify). I've seen the sorrow that can result from emails sent unthoughtfully, even if the person was not actually incapacitated by too much alcohol or too little sleep. Sometimes, just an extra step to make us think about what we're doing can be really helpful.

Of course, sometimes it's just annoying 99% of the time, so we end up turning it off right before the one time it would be helpful.

Betting on Newspapers

People reading my postings on this blog know that I don't buy much of the "People aren't reading / Print is Dead / Books and Newspapers will soon die" talk that we hear in and out of the library field.

One person who shares my views on newspapers is communicator Shel Holtz. In a blog entry titled,The future of newspapers (and the $100 I’m going to take from Jose Leal), Shel explains why he is betting a $100 there will still be paper newspapers in 10 years. In part he says:

Print, however, still has strengths. While many newspapers will perish before the industry figures out how to turn things around by playing to those strengths, print journalism will adapt. Print newspapers in 10 years won’t much resemble a newspaper today. My guess is that their focus will be hyperlocal. How good is the web for finding out about the dry clearners opening up down the street or the outcome of the town hall meeting? It doesn’t pay for Joe’s Tavern to advertise on the web when Joe’s customer base is limited to people who live within a two-mile radius. It does pay to advertise in a newspaper that lands on everybody’s front door, that people pick up before they board the train for the city.

Shel's post also has a number of statistics showing the continued strength of print media. Take a look and share it with your friends and especially people who still believe print is a dinosaur. See if they will put their money where there mouth is. And if I'm still blogging here in 2018, we'll revisit this post.

The Right Tool for the Right Job

In a post called Homer Simpson is the patron saint of innovation, Australian communications blogger Lee Hopkins makes the important point that communication tools tend to live alongside one another. This means that while experimentation isn't a bad thing, we should use the tools that we are most comfortable with.

Or as Lee puts it much better than I:

Just as there’s no point trying to get a non-communicative CEO to start blogging, there’s no point trying to use a tool and channel that uses skills not ordinarily part of your personal repertoire.

Naturally, there is nothing wrong with stretching, growing, developing, and adopting new skills. But be honest with yourself — if you don’t have the time and the self-esteem to vidblog (bearing in mind that video blogging can take ages to get right, far longer than text blogging or audio podcasting) then don’t commit yourself to it and your audience to expect it.

Something to think about. What are you comfortable with and how you using that to connect with your patrons?

Reference Renaissance: Theory Meets Practice

Theory Meets Practice: Educators and Administrators Talk was the sleeper hit of Reference Renaissance, at least for me. I mean this in the sense that on paper it sounded like the least interesting session. If *anything* had been playing against it, I would have gone to the other program. But it was the plenary session of the conference, so it had no competition. It was also directly after lunch on Tuesday. I gave serious thought to bagging this session and going for the three hour lunch. But because I believe I always owe my funding agency full attendance at every conference they send me to, I went.

This was absolutely the right decision because it was fascinating, energizing and thought provoking, complete with screaming audience and panel members. I was worried that I couldn't do this session justice from my notes, but thankfully, David Lenkes has posted an audio file of the entire session at http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/pod/2008/RefRen.mp3. If you've got an hour or so, listening to this program would be a great use of your time. To encourage you to take the time to listen, I'll dispense with my usual play by play of the session and focus on my reactions to it.

The presenters on this panel were:

• R. David Lankes, Ph.D., Syracuse University
• Jamie LaRue, Douglas County Libraries
• Marie L. Radford, Ph.D. Rutgers University
• Carla J. Stoffle, University of Arizona

The panel chair asked each participant to answer three questions in their opening remarks:

1) What is the most critical skill in reference librarianship?

2) How are you improving reference service or library education at your institution?

3) Do you have any predications for the future of reference.

To hear how the panel responded, listen to the audio file referenced above. What follows are my impressions and reactions.

One thing that seemed to come from all the presenters is that reference needs to be more about evaluating and summarizing resources and not just giving patrons a stack of articles. More is not always better in today's sea of information. While I haven't been writing summary memos since I've gotten back, I have taken this to heart in that I'm trying to offer fewer, more focused articles to my state agency patrons instead of sending lists of dozens of articles that may be somewhat relevant to their topic. I've also been re-impressed with the need for good reference interviews. We won't be able to do much "added value" type work if we're not very clear on what the patron needs.

Another concept that appeared to be emphasized from all panelists, but especially from Jamie LaRue, is that reference librarians need to be actively engaged with their communities. They need to members of the local chamber of commerce, of the rotary club, of other venues with community leaders. Only by being engaged in one's user communities can librarians get a good handle on what is important to the community and demonstrate the value of library collections and library expertise to the community. Jamie gave the example of one of his librarians joining the local downtown development committee. Now they won't meet without the librarian around to provide resources and research assistance.

I acknowledge this need, but I'm not sure what to do about it. My life seems plenty full already and I'm not much of a joiner aside from some selected church activities (where I do try to promote libraries). But I will be thinking about what opportunities I could be taking advantage of. And I may check with my coworkers and leadership to see what they're involved in. Then I'll have to see if there's anything in my life that I can downsize to make way for the new activities. Are any readers out there active in the way that Jamie suggests? What are you doing?

Another, possibly anecdotal or institution specific, idea talked about in this section was the idea that about 85% of typical reference questions could be handled by paraprofessionals. There was talk of letting frontline reference be exclusively paraprofessional with reference librarians being on-call for the other 15%. The reference professionals would then have time freed up to create the guides, the executive summaries, the economic gardening and community building suggested by most of the panelists. While this is a tempting concept, I'm wary of going through with it, as were a number of audience members. I can't really speak for my fellow attendees, but I'm wary because we as a profession haven't effectively demonstrated the difference between para and MLIS degreed staff. From the public's point of view everyone who works in the library is a librarian. And if paraprofessionals are cheaper and can answer the vast bulk of reference questions, why pay for the degree? Especially if they're not visible? Something like this actually happened at the Anchorage Municipal Libraries a few years back. Many MLIS degreed librarians were let go and hours were extended by staffing more positions at the paraprofessional level. Librarians weren't freed to add value to information the community needed, they were let go. But I suppose this could vary by community. And, not living in Anchorage, I might not be fully informed about the effects of the change.

After the other panelists emphasized the need for librarians to dedicate themselves to lifelong learning, Marie Radford practically brought the gathering to its feet by loudly pointing out that librarians already are dedicated to lifelong learning. It was a great moment, but you'll have to listen to the audio.

Finally, I need to mention something that just floored me, despite the fact I work in a very open, supportive workplace. During the question and answer period one of Jamie LaRue's employees had some very pointed remarks about some aspects of Douglas County Library's recent changes and how they weren't working for her and some other reference librarians. For all my adult life I have internalized the lessons "Thou SHALT NOT criticize your employer in public" and "If you can't say something nice about your employer, don't say anything at all." Unless my employers engage in blatantly immoral or illegal behavior that isn't being addressed in other venues, you won't see me writing negative things about them. I haven't been directed to act this way, but it makes sense to me.

So I was very surprised to hear a panelist criticized by one of his own employees in such a public forum. But Jamie LaRue appeared to handle the question and criticism with grace. I got no feeling that the librarian would face consequences for her actions. And a good discussion ensued about how supportive a workplace has been developed so that librarians feel comfortable in bringing up problems in this way.

Overall a very good and surprising session.

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Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you’ve got a different take on the session you’d like to share.

Reference Renaissance: Opportunistic Reference

The first session of August 5, 2008 at Reference Renaissance got off to a great start with:

Opportunistic Reference with Virginia Cole of Cornell's Olin Library; Bill "Slam the Boards" Pardue of Arlington Heights Memorial Library and Greg R Notess of Montana State University and the Search Engine Showdown.

Virginia provided an evaluation of patron usage of QuestionPoint's IM-like Qwidget vs. "traditional" chat reference. Cornell's experience is that introducing IM via Qwidget did not appreciably affect the number of reference transactions. During peak usage times, people looking for chat reference from Olin Library seem to split 50/50 for the IM Qwidget vs the traditional QuestionPoint interface. Patrons did seem to prefer the Qwidget for shorter questions. There was a clear preference for IM Qwidget for transactions between 100-500 seconds. Cornell analyzed their chat reference stats by type of question and found that IM Qwidget was prefered for holdings type questions (Do you have this book/journal?) while the traditional QuestionPoint interface was preferred for research type questions. There were more stats than I could write down and I encourage you to look at the presentation slides when they become available.

Bill Pardue was the next speaker and his topic was "Implementing Predatory Reference." He was a very friendly and engaging speaker who made us laugh as he talked about how some colleagues consider the term "predatory reference" to be creepy. He suggested that we should think of "predatory" like we do in nature films. Reference Librarians consume questions and we need to hunt them down whereever they are.

Bill suggested the following reasons to "go predatory" (i.e. outside the library):

• 90% of people identify libraries with books and may not realize we answer questions.
• People actually in the library might not have questions.
• People don't think of us for answers -- turn to search engines, friends, others.
• Users are going to Yahoo! Answers, Linked In and other places. Not library web sites.
• It's fun to "show our chops" in non-traditional forums.

Bill stated that the main point of predatory reference is to get patrons when they're not in the library. He spoke about AHML's efforts at grocery stores and other places. He said it was very important to consider your goals when sending librarians outside the library. Is your goal to provide reference or to meet people and promote the library? Both are worthy goals and not mutually exclusive, but in Bill's experience you need to make one or the other primary. Many of AHML's experiences focused on the meeting and promoting angle, in hopes that once people had encountered librarians "in the wild", patrons might think to contact users in the library.

According to Bill, three common strategies used in predatory reference are:

• Get out!
• Lurk and Leap.
• Weasel your way in.

As examples of getting out, Bill offered the "Answer Cart" used at George Mason University and Penn State. It looks like a hot dog stand, goes to campus events and dispenses information. He conceded that Academic libraries might have it easier because they have a captive audience in the dorm rooms. But he offered these possibilities for public libraries:

• Local Restaurants, like Panera
• Teen/Senior/Community Centers
• Nursing Homes
• Mall Information Desk
• Fairs, Festivals
• Grocery Stores

It is important to get permission from venue owners first and to be aware of any territory issues. Supplement what they do. Don't try to replace it unless they ask.

Lurk and Leap is a strategy suited for online reference. This is the essential strategy of the Slam the Boards project that Bill spearheads. Some ways to lurk and leap include:

• Commenting on local blogs when a question of fact is involved.
• Commenting on newspaper web sites when a question of fact involved.
• Get non library pages to carry your virtual reference link.

Weasel your way in is to join organizations and offer your research assistance. Bill offered the following examples/possibilities:

• Enroll one or more of your librarians in college Blackboard-based classes like Arizona State University does.
• Join a village/city committee and offer to do fact-finding and other research.
• Join your local Chamber of Commerce to learn about local business issues, take questions and talk up the library.
• Hold a pub trivia contest like Jessamyn West did.

Bill concluded by leaving us with two questions to ponder:

• Will doing predatory reference generate lots of questions and are we prepared to answer them all?
• Should we be paying a librarian to do this sort of stuff?

My notes for Bill end at this point, but with the second question I think he suggested that perhaps paraprofessionals could answer many of the ready-reference type questions generated by our promotional efforts. This was a theme I head a lot during the conference. More about that later.

My one regret about seeing Bill Pardue at this conference and introducing myself to him was that I forgot to ask him about astronomy. According to his bio he is an avid amateur astronomer and as much as the cloudy skies of Juneau allow me, so am I. It would have been fun to talk astronomy with him.

Ok, back to the program. Greg Notess was an energizing speaker. He gave a similar talk at Internet Librarian a few years back that a colleague talked about in glowing terms. I thought I got it then, but hearing it direct from Greg energized me anew.

Greg's talk was titled "Quick Screencasts for Distance Reference" and included references to materials available from his site at http://www.notess.com/screencasting/.

He basically said that librarians shouldn't let themselves be paralyzed by perfection when it comes to recording screencasts. It is possible to make a quick, good enough video for situations like:

• Responding to reference questions by e-mail, especially in situations where you'd normally type multiple steps to access a resource.
• To provide a quick instructional video. Databases change so quickly that you shouldn't feel bad about making quick videos that might a slight problem here or there. People won't likely notice and it will be time to make a new video in a few months anyway.
• To show tech support exactly what problem you're having with a particular program. Not only does this document the steps you've tried, but it may intimidate vendor front-line staff to immediately escalate your problem to a supervisor.

Greg mentioned a number of software packages that you can use to record video and all of them are listed at http://www.notess.com/screencasting/software/. For commercial software he recommends Camtasia. For free options he recommends Jing, although an audience member state she *hated* Jing based on last year's release.

Some tips that Greg offered:

• Go lightly on the editing. Aside from speeding the production process, it will keep you from having a very choppy video.
• Don't record full screen. Just select what is absolutely needed. Recording full screen not only increases your file size, but it encourages people to try and figure out what other software your computer is using.

All in all, a very interesting session. Hope to put some of "good enough" concepts into both personal and professional projects.

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Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you’ve got a different take on the session you’d like to share.

Reference Renaissance: You Bought It, Now Sell It

The fourth session I attended at 2008 Reference Renaissance was called, "You Bought It, Now Sell It!: Merchandising Reference Services" with presenters:

• Karen Long, Farmington Public Library
• Bernadine Goldman, Los Alamos County Public Library System
• Lizzie Eastwood, Los Alamos County Public Library System

Karen spoke on her library's efforts to market their reference services. Not just chat reference, but reference by any venue the library does. The first step was designing a logo. They settled on a puzzle piece with the words "just ask!" which you can view at Farmington PL's web site at http://www.infoway.org/. The next step was to put the logo all over their library (including large versions plastered to the ref desk), web site and brochures. They also have some of their employees wear "just ask" pins. They also use mp3 "cordmen" earbud holders to promote the IM part of the "just ask" service. Karen emphasized that it was important to do demonstrations of chat reference for your staff. They have to understand the product and its potential before they can promote it to others.

In addition to the "in the library" measures above, Karen talked about the importance of getting the message out into the community. She does this in part by radio spots and attending rotary club meetings.

After Karen was done, it was time for Bernadine and Lizzie to talk about their promotion of reference collections. Bernadine had the goal of "To make sure that all users of the reference collection are aware of all the resources available, and are introduced to them all in one place." The idea was to show patrons and other staff all the tangible AND electronic resources the library had to offer on given topics in the reference collection. Bernadine led the reference department to do this in three main ways:

1. Rearrange the physical collection into broad subjects without abandoning Dewey entirely.
2. Integrate electronic resources into the physical collection through the use of lists and brochures
3. Create displays of reference materials in the low shelving areas of reference.

For the rearrangement of the physical reference collection, Bernadine came in over a weekend and created several sub-collections in reference including: Aging, Health, Weapons, Environment, Culture, and Jobs. She then brought all the books together on these topics regardless of Dewey classification. For example the Health section includes Public Health items from the 300s as well as medical books from the 610s.

The next step was to comb through their databases and the list of RUSA Best Free Reference Websites list and classify them into the same keywords as the reference books. These lists of "resources by keywords" were then posted by their corresponding section in the physical collection.

Finally, books and resource lists were put on display using low shelving in the reference area. Another promotional tool used with highlighting the availability of 10 free photocopies from books in the reference collection. This seemed to give patrons permission to use the "don't check out" collection.

No formal assessment has been done to judge the effectiveness of these measures, but comments from patrons has been positive. They received one comment that the library has "doubled the value of the collection."

At my library, we're busy trying to highlight our circulating collection, something we really hadn't focused on for the past few years. We're creating more display space and trying to push interesting looking books through our RSS feeds. So we're going to complete that process before moving on to reference.

But these seem like intriguing ideas for promoting reference. What do you think?

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Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you’ve got a different take on the session you’d like to share.

Reference Renaissance: "Okay This is Just Too Weird"

"Okay This is Just Too Weird": Identifying Outreach Opportunities in Facebook by David Bietila and Elizabeth Edwards of George Washington University (GWU) was the third session that I attended at the 2008 Reference Renaissance.

This was a fun session to be in. And as someone who dabbles in social networking sites both personally and professionally, quite interesting. The session had a definite effect on my planned future friending behavior.

David and Elizabeth switched repeatedly during the presentation, so I'm not going to separate out their contributions like I've done with other speakers.

They did a study with the help of an anthropology student shortly after the GWU libraries had just completed a "friend a librarian" publicity campaign. About half of GWU librarians had Facebook profiles and students were aware that librarians were avaiable to be friended. But no students had friended any of the GWU librarians by the end of the publicity campaign. This study looked for the reasons for this result, among other purposes.

The study consisted of a survey, plus some ethnographic observations and interviews. Librarian profiles were also studied. While presenting survey results, David and Elizabeth compared their findings to a literature review they did. I omitted the references to the Facebook literature because 1) I trust you're keeping up with it and 2) this will be included in the proceedings and I'm not a transcript service.

How GWU students used Facebook

David and Elizabeth reported:

• Majority of GWU students use Facebook more than once a day.
• Strong majority of students use Facebook to maintain existing relationships. That is, they "friend" people they've met in real life and don't mine Facebook for new "friends."
• Students use Facebook for academic purposes including - communicating about assignments (68%); arrange study groups (61%); and communicate about academic interests (47%).

Despite using Facebook for academic purposes, most students also use Facebook for "study breaks" and self-report that Facebook negatively affects their studies.

For contacting the library, students prefer to e-mail or IM to using Facebook. In response to a question from me, Elizabeth thought this result might change now that Facebook has integrated chat.

What GWU Students Think About Librarians on Facebook

According to surveys and interview data:

• 32% of students said they were NOT interested in seeing librarian profiles.
• 60% of students wanted to see study suggestions on librarian FB profiles
• 55.7% of students were interested in tips on accessing library resources
• 26% of students were interested in personal information about librarians at their school

In general, students felt varying degrees of discomfort about librarians friending them without being asked. In interviews, none of the students cared for the ideas. But they were ok with the concept of adding librarians as Facebook friends IF there was some sort of face-to-face or IM/e-mail encounter first.

There is more to the study than is in my notes. Be sure to check the conference site (see below) for presentation slides when they come out. There were some interesting comparisons between librarians, parents and faculties in terms of how much students want to see them on Facebook.

David and Elizabeth concluded by saying that their library still saw value in having a Facebook presence for the library. Based on the student study, they offered some recommendations, which they cautioned should be taken with a grain of salt:

1. Create a fan page for the library for patrons to link to. This seems more comfortable to students than directly friending librarians. They offered the Gelman Library fan page as an example. A stroll through their 87 fans shows some current GWU students and several alumni, so this approach seems to workfor them.
2. In librarian profiles, keep a personal/professional balance. No personal is viewed as too cold, too much personal is seen as odd. It's important to include a picture and the librarian's subject expertise. Having one of Facebook's book recommendation applications is a good idea since it ties into the traditional library brand.
3. Let others friend you. Try to make connections in RL to encourage students/patrons to friend you.
4. Put a few, library-related applications onto your fan page. Gelman offers a meebo chat ref app and an Open WorldCat search.

Elizabeth and David said the grain of salt was necessary because your patron base might be different and these recommendations might get out of date in the next year or two as Facebook and other social networking sites change.

In the course of building their Facebook fan page, they found a few preexisting groups for the Gelman Library. These proved useful recruiting grounds for their study, but surprised them. I looked for my library, but found no groups or fan pages. How about you?

What I took home from this presentation was 1) I will not friend my patrons unless I've had some prior interaction with them and even then will probably wait for them to friend me; 2) might seek permission to create a library fan page before someone beats us to the punch; and 3) update my govdocs related groups and fan pages in the next few weeks.

=========================

Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you’ve got a different take on the session you’d like to share.

Reference Renaissance: Staff Training in 21st Century

Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you've got a different take on the session you'd like to share.

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The second session I attended at RR 2008, was Staff Training in the 21st Century and featured presentations by:

• Beth Jones (via DimDim) - Jefferson County Public Library
• Leslie M. Hass - Loyola University Chicago
• Flora Shrode - Merrill-Cazier Library

This session featured one public librarian and two academic librarians sharing how they train staff. Overall, I didn't find much to take home from this presentation, but that probably reflects my library's staffing situation. Since you might benefit from their remarks, here are my impressions of what people said:

Beth Jones came to us virtually via DimDim, a free web conferencing service that allows you to see the presenter via webcam with audio while she shares her slides. During her presentation, the panel moderator texted questions to Ms. Jones. The approach worked well enough that I hope to see it employed more often at more conferences. It will give people who have expertise but who lack travel funds the opportunity to present at regional and national conferences.

The Jefferson County Public Library has over 250 staff members scattered over a number of locations. So Ms. Jones has focused on creating online courses for them. She stress it was important to have standardized courses and make good use of "visual property." She primarily uses Adobe Presenter and Adobe Captivate to create her online courses which all include audio. She creates the courses with input from subject matter experts.

Ms Jones cited several challenges in creating and using in-house developed online classes, including:

• Finding staff time to take courses
• How to use audio without disrupting others (creates need for headphones)
• System errors and problems using attachments (Internet filtering often blocks retrieving files linked from courses)
• Finding enough development time and expertise to create new classes

Ms. Jones also offered some "new frontiers" for training in her system, including:

• Create classes for products staff do not have on their computers, like Overdrive Media Console
• Mini (5 min) database courses - For these, Ms. Jones might make use of tips from Greg Notess' talk on quick screencasts I'll write about later. And don't forget about vendor-generated tutorials like EBSCOhost's excellent videos.
• Create a staff wiki to support database searching - My library has a staff wiki we find useful for a number of projects and manuals.
• Create simulations
• Including branching (decision-making) in online class modules
• Incorporate game theory into online class modules.
• Add video (i.e. not just powerpoint and screenshots) to online classes.
• Make better use of shared resources - Ms. Jones pointed to training resources from Colorado's CLiC consortium at http://www.clicweb.org/continuing_education/index.php as an example of what she was talking about.

Leslie Hass of Loyola spoke about her experience in hiring and training the first employees of a new Information Commons that would include working with staff from the Library and the University Information Technology Department. They use a staff wiki for policies and procedures. All staff were given a three day orientation - day 1 - Information Commons 101, day 2 - Library 101, day 3 - Information Technology 101 to enable them to know what the university's expectations of them were.

Staff currently employed by the Information Commons current have IM access as a backup if they need additional information on policies or procedures while serving at their stations. I'm not sure I'd call that training, but I can see an argument being made that it is ongoing one-on-one training.

Ms. Hass noted that since the Information Commons was built as an addition to the library, library usage has increased. A happy result.

Flora Shrode of the Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University shared the several ways they train student assistants:

• A staff blog for searching and service hints
• A significant amount of face-to-face training
• Camtasia videos on frustrating tasks - I don't remember being given an example - does anyone else out there?
• Online computer training through Lynda.com

I said at the beginning of the entry that I didn't have many take-homes about training staff. And that's true. I run a department of 11 people and so don't need techniques for training large numbers of people. I was personally hoping for more on topics to teach and resources for teaching those topics.

But a number of the hints and approaches above may well come in handy for creating educational opportunities for our patrons, especially for the 2/3 of state agency employees who live outside Juneau. So I think my time was well spent.

Reference Renaissance: Reference in the Age of Wikipedia

Hi All,

I recently attended the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver. I started blogging about this conference on my personal blog, but thought the information should be put here as well. So over the next week or so, I'll be blogging here about my experiences as well. I was fortunate enough to hang out with two Alaskans at the conference, so I hope they'll be chiming in from time to time since we saw different stuff.

Here goes ...

Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I'm looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

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The first session I attended at Reference Renaissance was the Keynote, Reference in the Age of Wikipedia, Or Not, offered by David Lewis, self described renaissance scholar and Dean of the University Library, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. I started out being impressed with Dean Lewis because his very first powerpoint slide stated that his presentation could be used by anyone under a Creative Commons attribution/non-commercial license 3.0. Not only is that a nice thing to do, but it showed his belief in the words he spoke to us.

Dean Lewis began by suggesting that the term renaissance wasn't really the proper term to describe our common vision for reference. The original Renaissance involved the rediscovery of Classical resources and techniques. He pointed out that we are not reviving classical models for reference, but are in fact reacting to the last of three major revolutions.

These three revolutions were:

• The invention of moveable type printing in the 15th Century
• The industrialization of printing in the 19th Century
• The continuing internet/web revolution of the late 20th Century

Each of these revolutions expanded the availability of information by orders of magnitude and created new ways of organizing information. They also led to the destruction of some trades and the rise of others.

For example, the invention of movable type printing destroyed the pre-existing scribal culture within 50 years of Gutenberg's invention. Dean Lewis also argued that the printing press led directly to the alphabetical arrangement of knowledge as found in encyclopedias and dictionaries.

The industrialization of printing in the 19th Century led to mass literacy through the large quantities of textbooks, newspapers and dime store novels that industrial printing made possible. The modern library and the Dewey Decimal System date from this era.

In our own era, the internet has made amateur content of all types easy to create and share. I share Dean Lewis' view in this and have over 3,000 photos on Flickr to prove it!

The next part of Dean Lewis' talk drew heavily on two books - Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solutions by Clayton Christensen. (Details on these and other books I heard about at RR 2008 can be found on my WorldCat list.) Dean Lewis talked about sustaining innovations (making productions better) vs disruptive innovations (creating new markets by targeting non-customers). He suggested that libraries are facing disruptive innovation and offered the phone service Cha-Cha as an example.

Dean Lewis then turned to the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. Mr. Shirky posits that we are in a "cooperation revolution" characterized by mass amateurization and where authority as institutional guarantee has been replaced by probabilities supported by process. Dean Lewis offered Wikipedia as an example of this new kind of authority.

For Wikipedia and like social tools to work and attract collaborators, Dean Lewis suggested three elements that must be present:

• A plausible promise
• An effective tool
• An acceptable bargain

He showed how Wikipedia fulfilled each of the above criteria, but I did not get that down in my notes. You'll have to wait for the conference proceedings to become available.

After showing us a Wired video featuring Chris Anderson explaining why $0.00 is the future of business, Dean Lwis quoted someone who said "When everything can be copied, the only things sold will be that which cannot be copied." What can't be copied? He offered us: trust, immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability.

Dean Lewis closed with four questions and a challenge. The questions were:

1. What happens when information skills become a mass amateur activity?
2. Can we survive with one foot in proprietary resources and one foot in the open web?
3. What is the role of the institution in a Network World?
4. Do we support users as information users or as information creators?

Dean Lewis gave what he himself said were tentative efforts at answers, but that it was more important for the rest of us to consider the questions. I agree. I think question 4 is particularly important for libraries. He concluded by challenging libraries to create the tools and communities for open scholarship.

Overall it was a great start to the conference. I had a few quibbles. The main one was about whether the cost of information would ever truly reach zero. Google and Yahoo were given as examples of companies that "gave away everything to users but made billions." Free to users, maybe, but Google and Yahoo charge companies for advertising and use the revenue to run the search engines. If the future of business is really $0.00, then people would stop buying and ad revenue would dry up, taking the search engines with them. I probably need to examine the premise more closer before making such a bold statement, but that's my initial take.

I actually believe in the "gift economy" as a valuable supplement to economic activity and as a venue for human creativity. This blog and the others I contribute to are testimony to that. But I can't buy Wired's argument that the gift economy will replace our current economic structure.

In the coming entries, I will blog about the 1/6 of the conference I attended and once I'm done with session blogging, offer some thoughts about the conference as a whole. As I'm writing this, one great day is behind me and I'm looking forward to another great day of good ideas that will either be thought-provoking or find implementation in my community. I am very glad I made it here to Denver.

E-Books: Still not ready for prime time?

In a May 2008 American Libraries article titled The Elusive E-Book, author Stephen Sottong argues that aside from reference titles, e-books (the kind meant to be read off a computer screen) have no future for the foreseeable future.

Part of his pessimism comes from experience:

My own experience with computer- based subscription services was as a librarian in the California State University (CSU) system. From March to December 2001, all but CSU's smallest campus participated in a pilot e-book project with NetLibrary. In that time, there were 17,473 accesses to the e-hook collection. If that number were annualized and each access assumed to be from a different person, then, at best, only 5% of students and faculty would have accessed the e-book collection--and many of the accesses during this period were actually by librarians demonstrating the new system. Each access during the pilot project cost the university more than $5, This is not to fault CSU's implementation of e-books. The trial was well-planned, with most campuses integrating NetLibrary's e-books into their catalogs and providing a spate of publicity for the new service. Our students--who should be a group that readily accepts new technologies--just preferred paper books.

And part comes from ergonomics analysis that seems to indicate that reading off a screen is intrinsically harder than from a book:

Because both convergence and accommodation occur at a further distance when looking straight forward, monitors must be placed further from the eye. Since monitor resolution is less than print, the text on a monitor must be made larger to convey the same amount of information, which means that the width of the monitor must be wider to handle the same amount of text. As the eyes cans across text on a monitor, the distance between the eye and the monitor varies: closer to the eye in the center, farther at the edges. This means that the eye must constantly adjust for both accommodation and convergence as each line of text is read.

The consequences of these differences are enormous. Most computer users try to keep their eyes in the center of the screen, ignoring information at the edges. They skim text rather than read. When confronted with blocks of text longer than a couple screens, users either print the text or ignore it. This strategy works well with journal articles: Users can skim for relevant entries and print the ones they want to peruse in detail. But it doesn't work for book-length manuscripts or other lengthy text forms that require detailed reading.

My spouse likes to use our XO Laptop to read fanfic stories and it seems to work for her. But stories are sort of like journal articles. I've tried using our XO Laptop for reading some book length works and I can attest that it's a more tiring experience. Although my main issue with using my laptop is that there isn't a good way to bookmark your place. I have to make a notation in another file or on paper to get back to the page where I left off. On the other hand, the laptop is a great and comfortable tool for getting through my personal RSS feeds.

Does your library offer e-books for reading? What has your experience been with them? Are any more popular than others?

-------------------
Cited Article:

Title: The Elusive E-book.
Authors: Sottong, Stephen
Source: American Libraries; May2008, Vol. 39 Issue 5, p44-48, 5p, 1bw
Full text via Digital Pipeline: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=31872775&site=ehost-live

Students ask for "real", not "e" books

Think millennials prefer reading online? That's not the conclusion of a 2008 article in Reference and User Services Quarterly, titled But I Want a Real Book": An Investigation of Undergraduates" Usage and Attitudes toward Electronic Books:

If students were to be given the choice between using either a print book or the book's electronic equivalent, 66 percent would choose the print book while only 34 percent would prefer the e-book.

Here's how the article described the participants:

A total of 106 questionnaires were completed: 105 were from undergraduates and one was from a graduate student. Since the study focused on undergraduates, data from the one graduate survey was eliminated. The subjects were 60 percent female and 40 percent male, which is reflective of the college's en-rollment data. The academic status of the participants was 38 percent sophomores; 30 percent juniors; 17 percent seniors; and 15 percent freshmen. Ages of participants ranged from 17 to 46, with the average age being 21 years and the median age being 20 years.

The article isn't quite as cut and dried as I make out. Student would use an e-book if it was the only resource available and there is the fact that over a third would choose an e-book. But I think this article is a caution against making assumptions about users based on age.

Does your library offer e-books? What is your experience?

Full article citation (should be available from your desktop):

Title:"But I Want a Real Book": An Investigation of Undergraduates" Usage and Attitudes toward Electronic Books.Find More Like This

Authors:Gregory, Cynthia L.

Source:Reference & User Services Quarterly; Spring2008, Vol. 47 Issue 3, p266-273, 8p

Direct Link: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=32147098&site=ehost-live (Only in Alaska)

Know a deployed staff member or patron? Show their blog

Here's an interesting idea I ran across. The Public Library of Westland (Michigan) front page features this link to a blog of a local resident currently with a Styrker brigade in Iraq:

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The Blog of Adrian Massey

Westland, MI poet and soldier Adrian Massey has started a blog to share his thoughts and experiences while stationed in Iraq with his friends and the Westland community. He is the author of A Soldier's Poetic Response: A Slice of his Life by Robbie Dean press in Ann Arbor.

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According to anecdotes, there are a number of military bloggers who are deployed overseas. If one is from your community, consider featuring his/her blog. It is one way of showing your support for the soldier and highlighting their continued connection to your community. It's a good idea to check with your prospective milblogger first.

Do you know of other libraries working with/highlighting deployed personnel in some way? Let us know in a comment.

Audiobooks are popular sez LJ, what's your experience?

A recent article in Library Journal:

AUDIO FIXATION. (cover story) By: Kaye, Alan L.. Library Journal, 5/15/2008, Vol. 133 Issue 9, p34-37, 4p, 2c;
Full text available to Alaskans at http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=32071086&site=ehost-live.

Notes that the national demand for audio books is growing, although formats are shifting:

A 2007 sales survey provided by the Audio Publisher's Association (APA) highlights the increasing market hunger for aural entertainment and information. In 2006, audiobook sales rose six percent to a record $923 million. Seventy-seven percent of sales was for CDs, a far cry from 45 percent in 2003. Fourteen percent was in downloads, up from nine percent in 2005. Seven percent of sales remains in cassettes, less than half of its 2005 figure, and one percent was in MP3-CDs. Adults account for 87 percent of direct sales. Sales to libraries are growing and are slightly ahead of retail sales, representing 32 percent of sales ($295 million) versus retail's 30 percent. Unabridged audiobooks represent 71 percent of total sales, and fiction represents 69 percent. Sales data for 2007 is being gathered for the 2008 report, and APA plans to do sales surveys annually.

The article reports that library acquisition of audiobooks are driven by patrons. And they seem to be using them. In 2006, the APA found that 50% of people who listened to an audiobook borrowed the audiobook from a library.

What's your experience? Does your library offer audiobooks? If so, what formats do you offer? How are patrons receiving them?

Quick Tour of Web 2.0 via Library Journal

The May 1st issue of Library Journal carries an article worth reading by anyone who needs to brush up on so-called web 2.0 technologies like Facebook, Flickr, Second Life, iPods, etc. The citation for the article is:

Title: THE PARALLEL INFORMATION UNIVERSE.

Authors: Eisenberg, Mike

Source:Library Journal; 5/1/2008, Vol. 133 Issue 8, p22-25, 4p, 1c

It is available thanks to the Digital Pipeline and you're reading this in Alaska, you should be able to read the article at http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=31743791&site=ehost-live.


Each type of technology is briefly analyzed according to Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. I especially like this article for its balance. It is neither a manifesto to adopt every shiny new toy nor a call to return to 1965.