I’m here because MCL is really acting on an initiative to raise our profile and move services beyond the library walls - my role, of course, is to do so online. I’ve been really wanting to blog about our town and its inhabitants: good restaurants, walking trails, potholes… Is that kind of thing appropriate from the library? I’m hoping this will help me decide.

Him Me
Why libraries are primed for local This is part of our goal for scriblio, to expose local richness to the internet.
Google = “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But what about where you are now? I TOTALLY agree, this is an ongoing frustration.
The internet puts the world in your coffee cup… but not your community. The internet makes it easy to sip globally, but not locally. It’s easier to learn about Iraq or see satellite photos than it is to find out what’s happening in your own community. It took three of us to find the menu for Amicci’s in Balitimore last night - the spaghetti we finally got ended up spilled onto my lappy keyboard… maybe we would have been better off with sandwiches from the 7-11.
Google is trying to scale down from the global to the local.
Starting to comingle local search results with global. I did notice this last night.
Google bought Sketch Up and looking at local news. this is great, but I’m more concerned with what I can do in my library than what Google is already doing. Google is not the competition.
What is the Local web?
Local search: search engines, local media, photos, maps, social networks. I’ve been thinking about starting one by the library.
Social: User-generated, participatory, amateur, civic, grassroots, citizen’s journalism.
Localized: information about neighborhoods, communities, blocks, streets, buildings.
HA! He’s mentioning potholes - I had the same thoughts! Manchester potholes don’t mean anything to anyone NOT living in Manchester. It’s MORE important to us than Obama or Iraq.
Local web is the joining of the real world and the virtual world. Fringe benefit = if they find local, non-threatening information, reluctant virtual users might be more comfortable exploring its potential.
Internet = isolating and anti-social? NOT true, it’s supplementary, not conflicting.
Local web is bringing a sense of place to the internet.
Are libraries bringing a sense of place to the Internet? We are in the sense of place business - local history, heritage, genealogy, community information.
Can we do more? Join the virtual and the real. This is strange, I’ve said the exact same stuff SO many times.
Everyday life is still local. We live our lives within a 20 mile radius.
Become expert users of local resources and help the community, redefine the types of local information available. We can become active in locally focused resources. We can create our own resources.
Look at the most popular searches for your local area.
Libraries can register in the local search engines.
Libraries are creating their own - rollio, qwickie (?) WHY isolate? The goal is to put yourself in users’ way and not make them come to you. I’m SO not digging this idea. Sorry, library, they’re not going to come to you, they believe in Google, face it and play along.
Local blogs: placeblogs, metroblogs, neighblogs. Viable source of local info. Place blogger local. Blogdigger. Metro Blogging. I’m thinking these tools won’t work small rural areas, only urban
Libraries doing place blogging this is what I’m interested in Darien is doing it - hmmm…
Libraries creating online communities. Skokie Talk, myhamilton.ca. I love this idea. I’d be a bit concerned about appropriateness. This is something my town needs. Should it come from the library?
Even if this stuff is available it’s coming from the government who posts in a pdf or a database which is not searchable from Google. YES, that’s what I mean - it’s so difficult to use or find anything on most governments sites.
hartfordinfo.org libraries… local data aggregation.
Wikipedia… how about localpedia. Would a wiki be a good way to provide such information? I’d be afraid no one would participate.
Geotagging. I’ve only done it with flickr and I found it prohibitively cumbersome.
Libraries aggregating local photos.
Custom maps?
Local can be cheap - these are free sources. The investment, though, is in training and time. Both valuable resources, make no mistake.
No successful business model on local - they’ll all labors of love which is a good reason for libraries to get involved.
There’s lots of local data that hasn’t been put on the web.
Garner community goodwill. Academic libraries as well as local.

Monday @ 10:30

I know I’ve said it before and it’s uncool to drool and carry on about your own work, but seeing library events in my personal calendar is just so fucking cool. I apologize for the obscenity, but it just is!

I’ll see everyone at CiL next week!

Afterthought disclaimer: I am in know way representing the City of Manchester or its library in this post or on this blog. My ego and my potty-mouth are entirely my own.

Gosh, I wish I were better at coming up with post titles…

I had an email yesterday inquiring about some details of Scriblio. As I wrote back, answering her questions, it occurred to me that it was exactly the kind of thing it’s easy for me, so close to the project to take for granted while so fundamental that potential users must understand. Her question, slightly altered for privacy:

I am… cataloging our Special Collections, as well as getting a backlog of exhibition pamphlets on the shelves, or at least into a database. People have also been cleaning out their offices here and I have also been given [some] archival information, mostly newspaper clippings of very brittle nature. [A colleague suggested] photocopying the articles, and then using Scriblio to get a database of some of these items accessible to our patrons. I did attend the Library 2.0 workshop in Goffstown where you spoke, and had kept Scriblio in the back of my mind as a tool that might come in handy some time. I’m a little fuzzy on the connection between databases, cataloging, and our library’s website and wondered if you could shed some light on this or re-direct me. [Could we use] a simple database program (Access) or even just using Excel, if we were simply trying to organize the material quickly.

I’d appreciate any direction or suggestions you might have. I’m tentatively stepping into something that I think could be very exciting for our library. Thanks, in advance, for any advice you could give me!

I was flattered and impressed with her idea and happy to sit down to try and clarify where Scriblio might help and where another solution might be superior.

We have used Scriblio for Digital Library creation. For an example, check out Beyond Brown Paper. For this, you would need to scan the items to get a digital copy (instead of reproduce a physical copy as with photocopying). As for the difference or connection between databases, cataloging, and the library’s website - it’s a bit complex, which is likely why you’re fuzzy. When it comes to Wordpress, the software upon which Scriblio is built, things are different than they have been with traditional digital library systems.

First off it’s essential to understand that Scriblio is built as a *user tool* it is not intended to do any archival storage or anything beyond rendering a collection fully accessible, relevant, and usable to a visitor. I would be heartbroken if a misunderstanding of that led to disappointment with the long-term protection of materials or, even worse, their permanent loss.

That said, however, Wordpress stores all a website’s content in a database instead of within html pages, as you might know from any web development you may have done. This means that the webpages you see are largely created ‘on the fly’ as content is pulled from the database. It makes for a very efficient and easy-to-maintain web presence.

The cataloging is a bit more complex - because this is a system intended for natural language searching and not strictly the controlled vocabulary of cataloging. It is possible to do cataloging, especially for image collections, via Scriblio, but the process is different from what you’re accustomed to. It’s similar to adding tags as you might in flickr or library thing or any number of Web 2.0 tools. The method, though, is slightly more structured in order to give the tags more context and meaning. These, the cataloging data, are all housed in the database with the other content (or, as I like to call it, ‘the juicy stuff’).

Now, the relationship to the website. This is where things get really exciting for me. Traditional, and most existing, library websites, are basically collections of un-associated web components. There’s the stuff about the institution which looks and acts one way, and then the catalog that is linked from it, but looks and acts totally differently, and then, maybe, a calendar component which looks and acts different again, and so on. Scriblio gives the opportunity to entirely unite those so that what’s associated in the user’s mind as ALL belonging to the library and therefore all one unit, appears that way on the website too. It all looks and acts the same way. (See Tamworth Library for an example.) While Scriblio has that functionality, though, it also could stand entirely on its own as a separate digital collection as well (as with Beyond Brown Paper).

So, providing part of your ambitions for your project is to make the materials available to end-users on the internet, it sounds like Scriblio would be ideal.

There was a story in the paper a few months ago about a child who was snatched to a remote corner of the library and unspeakable things happened. It’s not the kind of image anyone wants associated with their local library - or anything else. In response, our board asked the professionals to suggest wording for signs to put in places that people tend to get distracted. They are working on the computer and don’t realize their little one has wandered off. Or they are reading this week’s People (c’mon, we all do it) and get up for last week’s issue, leaving their bag on the floor. They go to the facilities and leave their laptop on a table.

I’m generally anti-library-signage. I think that no matter what they say too many signs has a chilling effect on the patrons. That said, I was proud of us:

“Please remember this is a public building. Keep your valuables, including your children, close by.”

I poked my head out of budget season tonight and was proud to encounter cool things coming out of two state library systems near and dear to my heart. Bobbi Slossar, of whom NHSL should be extraordinarily proud, responds to the LOC’s Flickr initiative.* From Bobbi:

This seems like a good time to talk about metadata. Instead of trying to tag (assign keywords) each photo with the appropriate library-approved subject headings, LOC has embraced social tagging (on Flickr) and is allowing the general public to tag its photos for them. Again, why have they abandoned the traditional, restrictive approach? The answer is the same: to allow for greater access and community participation… Go to where the people are. (Did you know that a keyword search for “new hampshire” on Flickr brings up nearly 130,000 photos! Trust me, many of your users are already there.) Allow for more user participation. Your users want to participate in their library. Take a look at the comments on this LOC photo.

While Bobbi makes a concise, well-reasoned argument, the Board of Library Commissioners in neighboring Massachusetts launches a fantastic gateway designed to push traffic to local libraries. It’s part of a three-year public awareness campaign. I love every single library who has made an investment in marketing (I’m talking to you, Wyoming). Via Brian.

As part of my participation in the budget, I made up a wish list last night. Top on that list? A graphic designer to create a consistent brand for us and a PR firm to develop a marketing plan.

* Since when does LOC have a blog!? I really need to get out more.

The Problem

For so many libraries, figuring out how to display in-house events on our websites is a tough challenge. As we offer more content and services online, It’s important not to forget that online or in-bricks, we’re the same institution and those storefronts should complement each other.

Manchester took the route most libraries do when it comes to solving this problem, we contract with a calendaring provider. Ours provides administrative functions allowing us to track room bookings, program registrations, loan museum passes, and more as well as create a calendar to display next to our webpage. The problem, though, is very Web 2.0 vs 1.0. The content is attached to the software’s interface. There is no way to repurpose it. If someone wants to access our calendar they must visit that webpage - no arguments.

Speaking as a patron, this is mildly annoying; BUT as the person responsible for keeping our webpage up to date it’s downright infuriating. All the events that we want to publicize on the front page of our site must be hand entered and then hand removed when they’re outdated. For a library who hosted over 300 programs last year that can add up to a laborious and tedious (not to mention, expensive - time is money, you know) task. So far the solution has been to pick and choose what gets featured = a sad compromise.

If I ruled the world, my solution would be to migrate the whole site into Wordpress and be done with it, but I don’t. The city retains control over our site via a cms making that impossible. Nevertheless, the library is committed to creating a fully dynamic online branch. I decided to begin to solve both problems by making a distinction between a website (static and simple) and an online branch (dynamic and potentially confusing for beginners).

In short I could use the ‘online branch‘ to generate an events listing which I could then feed into the ‘website‘ thusly representing all library events on the front page in a timely fashion AND saving me the task of mucking around in html to do so.

The Solution - Generation

Enter Event Calendar. (Bless you, Alex.) It’s a Wordpress plugin specifically designed for handling events. You’ll find it deployed in slightly different forms at Tamworth as well as in my playground (sadly out of date now, but that’s for another day).

I began by installing and activating Events Calendar in my WP plugins directory and then entering a few events. To make this work, I had to configure it NOT to display events with regular posts, but in their own category only.

[Aside: the rad thing about Events Calendar is that you add events the same way you write a post, but it adds an option in the screen to define an associated date and time - this makes the magic happen.]

So from here, I get a nice list of the upcoming library events. Out of date events automatically drop off the list. And then, triumphantly, through the magic of Wordpress, I could get an upcoming events rss feed.

The Solution - Importation*

Now that I have my tidy little events feed, I needed to get it to automatically update in our static website. For this, I turn to Feedburner. This part is super-easy, actually, I simply add the events category feed as new, name it appropriately, and then configure Buzz Boost (under the Publicize tab) to republish is as html. Then I paste the generated javascript into the city’s content management system in the appropriate place and viola*!

Now Events can be entered one time, into wordpress and then accessed in the website, as a blog post, subscribed to in Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook, or any other calendaring application. Yay for the library getting in the path of the patron!

* I hope I just made that word up. It’s a good one.
** Potential extra step: tweaking the css a bit to get it to look pretty within the website.

I have a love-hate relationship with those holiday letters people send out. On the one hand, I really like hearing how my people’s lives have changed over a year. On the other hand, for some reason, I could never write one myself. I think it’s performance anxiety - a fear that somehow my achievements would disappoint. Silly, I know, but there it is. This year, though, I figured out a way around it. I managed to represent the year’s events abstractly and in the card itself.

I won’t spoil your fun by giving up the goods, but know that I wish you all the most fruitful and loving of upcoming years.

On a school trip when I was in elementary school we started at a brook that ran into town, climbed through the culvert under the road, and into the woods following the water up the mountain. It was spring, just before school let out and the water was cold, but it was fun. I don’t remember our feet touching dry ground, we just walked straight up the middle - leaping from rock to rock and wading through pools. We stuck our hands into the deep holes the water had cut in the granite bed. We came upon a rustic cabin in what felt like the deepest woods. The owners had carefully, over the years, dammed up the stream to create a lovely, deep, clear pool. Shortly after we emerged onto a dirt road, I was shocked to look around to find it was a half a mile from our house. I’d driven over it a thousand times and never thought about the stream - the universe widened. It’s the only full day I remember from Madison Elementary.

This is the stream; and one of my mom’s latest efforts. It’s interesting how the sense of discovery I remember is conjured so concisely by the painting. I don’t think she ever even heard my story about that day.

I hope it gets a home with a loooong hallway to do it justice.

In September I met the Library Director of the Effingham Public Library along with a board member-slash-web master. They asked me if I’d be willing to help them create a more dynamic and easier to maintain web presence. Naturally I enthusiastically agreed. Both of them had immediately grokked the opportunities that current internet trends provide; not to mention the fact that it’s just as easy, perhaps easier, for an organization like there’s to create something to blow minds than it is the big guys. Last weekend I finally got to sit down with Marilyn and talk turkey about the process of creating an online branch library.

I should note that with a population around 1200 people Effingham is one of the tiniest and sweetest towns in NH. As I was leaving, I passed through the town square - always spotless and decorated appropriate to the current season - but always deserted. It makes me feel I’m trespassing in another world entirely - one that’s there just to make me open my eyes and think ‘whoa, this is the world I live in.’

I can’t wait to work with this library - look out for great things from them!

When I got my new job, I searched on Flickr to find photos to illustrate my celebratory blog post. And then, when I arrived, I set up a Flickr account for the library to which I’ve been adding photos and made some awesome contacts with local Flickrers. Yesterday the librarian who’s responsible for creating the book displays asked me how to store the photos she takes as a record, “so I don’t do the same thing twice.” I, naturally, practically bounced out a plea to put them on our Flickr page.

This morning, I added a Manchester City Library public group to my collection. I hope this will become a type of online programming where we can interact about and via the library and the community. Wish me luck!

The title, btw, comes from the cool Flickr feature where you can retitle the various group roles. In our group, Administrators are called Librarians, Moderators are called Shusshers, and Members are called Patrons. I thought it kinda cute and fun.