technology use in libraries – infocamp session
This session was mainly presented by Whitney Edwards of the Libraries of Stevens County (where i grew up!). Stevens County presents some interesting problems for libraries – there is a need for fast connection speed, but the technology hasn’t arrived yet, except along the main highway. So, everyone with computers that live outside that area are stuck with dial-up. So, if the library wants their sites to be used by the population, they need to keep them very stripped down. So their site, is very basic and stripped down, which makes it look a little clunky. But the site loads quickly on dial-up computers, and people can search through their dial-ups, and that’s good.
So the library, with high speed access to the Internet, becomes the only game in town, not just for people with no computers, but for people with laptops and wifi, and for people with dial-up who want to do anything that requires a little more than the usual bandwidth (which is just about everything online, now, right?)
With all that, the library’s bandwidth gets used up alot – they have free wifi, and laptops that users can check out, and PCs, too.
They have filters on public computers, but lots of discussion around wireless access and filters – no legislation governing it. Use two different wireless connections, one for library laptop checkout, one for patrons who bring in their own laptops.
innovation with limited technology? Wikis, site, courier service to move books around the libraries in the county, site is very lo-tech, low bandwidth on purpose, because most users are on dial-up.
Lots of individualism in each library, so the catalog is shared, but communities, cities, Friends, work mainly with their local library, so no floating collections, for example. Librarians show up at rotary clubs and other local group functions to sell the library services.
www.scrld.org is the site for the library, and there’s a link on the site to the county community wiki, which is a great project. They started it so that people in the county could have a low-bandwidth place to put information about their clubs and businesses for free. They administrate the wiki, and act as editors, sending out links to organizations with templates to fill in, and instructions. When people add to the wiki, they make sure that there are navigation links in the entry, etc. They have sign-ins that make it hard for spammers, which is nice. They started the wiki, and went to a conference, and kept hearing about this innovative library system that was using a wiki for community resources, so they went around trying to find out who the library system was, so they could get some pointers – then they found out that it was them, and that they were one of the first library systems in the US to do this. That’s exciting, and it’s funny too – you look around for a good tool to solve a problem, and you put that tool to work, and that’s just it.
information overload – infocamp session
Information overload is a problem in a lot of work situations, where people are being overwhelmed with various communications that inhibit their ability to perform the normal functions of their jobs because they’re spending too much time answering emails, etc. Every interruption of a project takes up time, and then more time to recover and get back into the creative mode. It’s an issue that many people are aware of, and there is lots of talk about how bad it is, but not a lot of solutions out there
One way to approach this problem is to look at ways to increase the quality of the time spent interacting with information. There’s lots of noise out there, lots of irrelevant communications that are coming in. You have to filter through the irrelevant communications to get to the real human interactions, and the communications that are relevant to the moment.
things that cause information overload: IM, email, tv, blogs, clutter, etc.
solutions? Set times to perform certain tasks, be avilable for IM, etc.
solutions? email solutions – batching, shut down times, RSS feeds for company “allstaff” type information. Semantic email – tagging emails, so recipient can determine use and importance, develop a work vocabulary for tagging emails that have to do with specific projects, so filters can parse emails into folders that you get when you start working on that project.
solutions – easy on off notifications, auto-responses, pre-agreed times for email within organizations, updates in aggregators, generate advertising that eliminates information clutter
IM away messages – “working”
intuitive systems for tracking time spent on doing different things – “Harvest” is an app that tracks time spent like that.
www.attentiontrust.org has a firefox app to track time spent on various places
One nice solution, heavily dependent on ones own ability to discipline oneself:
Decide right away to a) produce or b)consume – pursue that mode for the day, or chunk of time.
be careful of tools that take more time to use than the task would have taken otherwise.
Nice session, with some interesting ideas – I don’t feel particularly overloaded most of the time at work, but i know it can be an issue, and there are people within my organization that feel this strain more than others, for sure.
InfoCamp
This coming weekend I’ll be attending InfoCamp in Seattle. It’s at the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in West Seattle. Anyone else attending? I think it’ll be a lot of fun, and interesting, and maybe i can get some ideas to bring back and share. I don’t have a laptop, so i won’t be “live-blogging” the sessions, but maybe other attendees will be keeping things updated. A search Technorati for InfoCamp might bring some results. Of course, it might bring you to this very post, since i just mentioned InfoCamp, and the title of this blog post is InfoCamp. Whatever.
Here’s a link to the InfoCamp site, if you want to see what it’s all about: http://asistpnw.org/infocamp2007/
New Theme, New Stuff
Okay, so I’m migrating all the information from the instructionwiki over to this blog. I’ll keep the information up at the instructionwiki for a while, and i’ll work on keeping the spam off. What i might do is redirect the link from the main list page so that it goes here instead of to the wiki page.
I decided on a new theme, but I’m not sure yet if i like it. It’s a little dark, and though i like dark sometimes, i’ve gotten used to bright.
I liked it because the pages lined up on the right margin, which makes them easier to navigate (for me, and i’m the important one, right?)
Anyway, feedback is always appreciated.
Squidoo
Well i did a bit of work making a squidoo lens as an alternative to the wiki, but i don’t think it’s the best vehicle. I’m thinking one of these wordpress blogs might end up being the best way to go – i could have a blog on the front end, and use the pages feature to profile each lesson. Heck, i guess i could do it all on this blog, and just consolidate. The comments on each lesson could be more effective/intuitive than the discussion portion of the wiki – wiki discussion pages seemed intimidating to me at first, even though there is little difference between them and a comments section in a blog. Interface and control – on the blog, the interface is comfortable and familiar. Also, when you comment on a blog, there is structure and order, which gives the illusion that someone/thing has control over the blog, whereas the wiki, by design, gives the illusion that no one person has control over what’s going on. I say illusion, because i think in most cases of wiki use, there is usually an administrative person or group of persons that moderates the content of the wiki. It’s a great collaborative tool, but with a few exceptions it works best for focused projects and uses by small groups with set roles and goals. Of course, Google Docs also works great for exactly that type of circumstance, without the worry of random spammers filling your pages with links to various products and services that you have no interest in. If something like Google Docs is better suited for the things that most wikis are best suited for, then that will leave for wikis only “group projects with set goals, the process and product of which should be viewable by a wide audience.” as opposed to just the members of the group.
Back to squidoo – i have a series of classes that i’m developing for the library called “FindInfo” and then a topic. So a typical class title will be something like “FindInfo: Travel” or “FindInfo: eBay and online shopping”
I think Squidoo might be the perfect place for this class series – i can put the content of the class online, along with all the links to places visited and discussed in the class, as well as other internet content – it makes it easy to pull information from del.icio.us, amazon, flickr, and YouTube – so if there’s a video or a photo series that helps teach your topic, then this can be a really easy way to put it together. It also might be good for some of the presentations I’m putting together on various web 2.0 tools. A blog or wiki is nice, but adding multimedia content can be a pain, or just impossible. ttfn
wiki again
Boy the spam has been coming on strong again lately. I’m thinking about moving the content somewhere where i have more direct control over the editing features of the site – in this case, maybe using wiki software wasn’t the best course of action – I’ve had very few real contributors – maybe two or three over the course of the last few months. I’m wondering if this might work better as a Squidoo lens, or if i should build an actual page, or what. Any suggestions?
Facebook fun
I’ve really been enjoying Facebook lately. I can’t tell if it’s the same Honeymoon feeling I have when I first started using MySpace, but it feels different enough that I’m not too worried. What i like about Facebook is the variety of diversions – there are many ways to interact with friends and acquaintances through the applications. For a while i felt like it was just the evolution of forwarding email jokes, but i think it’s a little different from that because people on Facebook all seem to enjoy fiddling around with applications, and getting weird or funny things for their profile. I have the Zombie and Vampire apps, and periodically go around zombie fighting with my friends’ zombies and vampires and getting zombie points (I’m a zombie ninja at this point.) I also have widgets for some of my social networking sites there – del.icio.us, goodreads, and Twitter. I like the sites where i can give little graphical ‘gifts’ to my friends, like Happy Hour, SuperPoke, and Top Friends. And the quizzes can be fun too – I’m still a Newbie in the Addicted To The Office app, but i don’t mind. Now I have a reason to go back and watch the whole series again. Which i can do because i bought season one and two on dvd. Because that’s the kind of guy i am.
Hey, what about using it as a reference interaction tool? Oh, right… yeah. I actually have used it for reference questions also. It’s a good way to get a hold of me, for friends and colleagues who have spread out over the world.
Anyway, those are my thoughts for the day, and the day is done, and i can go home and clean the kitchen. Woot!
Zwinky
I’m looking at another oddball social networking site that has elements that i think might become standards in the near future – that’s a long way of saying i think I’m looking at some element of the near future.
I haven’t joined or explored yet, so this is just a forming opinion.
Read the article at TechCrunch to get a better sense of it. Basically, Zwinky has avatars that you can dress up and accessorize like crazy – nothing new here, we’ve seen that with Gaia Online and Second Life, to name a couple. Zwinky now also sells online money for real money – like Second Life’s Linden Dollars. So, for a few bucks, you get some online cash to buy things for your Zwinky. Then there’s a world where your Zwinky can interact with other avatars.
My daughter has Webkinz (a gift from a relative), so I’ve been watching that as well – similar sorts of features abound – you can accesorize your dog, get furniture and decor for your house, go for walks, meet other webkinz, or play game. There’s all kinds of things that you can do to get free stuff, but only at intervals – so you can only perform a certain task every six hours, blah blah blah. The interactions with others are very structured – as far as i can tell, there’s no real chatting that goes on (if there were, my daughter wouldn’t be on the site). Instead, participants choose from a limited menu, and say things like “Let’s be friends,” or “Let’s go play a game.”
Back to Zwinky – apparently there is a companion site that sells real clothes that match the virtual gear you can get in the game.
Very interesting… very very interesting…
Here’s my thought – the world is ripe for some kind of user-friendly, reduced tech version of Second Life – so anyone can get on. Going a little cartoony, with avatars that don’t take up a lot of memory space, etc. Portals to virtual store versions of real places, so you can go shopping for real or virtual versions of things you like. And, why not a library? Walk in, put books on hold, check out your virtual bookshelf with things you’ve read, write/read reviews. Anything you make public, other people can come see. Have your own space that’s open to your friends, or maybe only open to them when you’re around.
Maybe it could be an open code sort of platform, like Facebook, so that other developers could write their own apps for it – like the library, again. That way you can get a crazy variety of things for your personal space – like a painting on the wall that cycles through your favorite works of art, or a goodreads shelf that’s 3D, or a juke box that has ten thousand songs in it, etc.
I’m just brainstorming here, but it’s just around the corner. Maybe somebody with the wherewithal will read this, and in a couple of years we’ll see it happening out there.
Me, I’m going to keep doing what i do for a living.
