WHY LEARNING ABOUT EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES IS PART OF EVERY LIBRARIAN’S JOB

Kathryn Greenhill [Emerging Technologies Specialist, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia] has written wonderful piece on 21 reasons why learning about emerging technologies is part of every librarian’s job. She writes, “This list is designed to provide context and motivation for library workers to find time in their day for their own learning – either as part of a formal workplace learning programme or as self-directed professional development.”

1. Performing core business better: Our core business is linking information and people. There are new and better ways to do this and we need to know how.

2. Increased productivity: [Our work] can be made easier using emerging technologies, but you need to know how to use them.

3. Gaining international perspective: Your network of professional contacts does not have to be restricted to your own country. New tools make “communities of interest” easier to form.

4. Finding out what other libraries are doing: Printed journals and conferences are no longer the best way to find out about the successes and failures in other libraries. With blogs, wikis, podcasts--all harnessed into your aggregator via a subject search, you can keep up and have an avenue to discuss these things with professional colleagues.

5. Understanding all formats of information: Users will ask us about these information sources. Are we serving them well if we say “sorry I only know about information in some formats?”

6. Trend watching: Tools are constantly evolving and changing. What starts as a seemingly pointless diversion can become a potent information source when it reaches critical mass or people discover a new use for it. (eg. twitter). We need to be there watching this and understanding it.

7. Repurposing our traditional skills: Tagging, metadata, data-mining, indexing - new technologies need our skills.

8. Understanding technical background when dealing with vendors: If we don’t know what can be done, for free, using new tools, then library software vendors can continue to sell us “solutions” that are inflexible and costly.

9. Being prepared for when a tool moves out of early adoption phase: What a few early adopters are using now, others will use in 18 months time. If we learn about them in their early phase, we will have a good understanding how to use them when our users expect our services to incorporate these.

10. Understanding the redefinition of our core business: The definitions of some core concerns of librarianship are being re-negotiated - copyright, plagiarism, scholarship, authority, privacy and recreation. We need to be in among the conversations on sites where this is happening.

11. Managing our tech-savvy workers: We need young, tech-savvy, passionate, clever library staff to deal with the changes, and we need to know enough to manage these people and get the best out of their new skills.

12. No-one else knows your users as well as you do: Many new web tools are very simple to use and learn. A thorough knowledge or your clients – their needs, preferences and ability tends is not easily learned. Nobody but you will be able to assess how these new tools can serve your clients – but you need to know what the tools can do and how they work to do this.

13. Fun: If staff are given permission to have fun and be creative as they learn in a supportive environment, it can lift workplace morale.

14. Providing better service to our clients: If we know how, we can offer better service to our users, where they are and using their preferred tools. (e.g., SMS output of item location records to their mobile device via Bluetooth)

15. So we can tell the IT department what we want: If we feel overwhelmed by web-based technologies that are now only available in beta, imagine how it feels if your job has been to set up software, protect a network and standardise operating environments.

16. Our professional users are required to keep up: In academic and special libraries, our users are required by our organization to keep up to date with technology in their fields. To support them, we need to know what that is.

17. Many user interfaces have become “pseudo-standards:” The tools we will use from now on aren’t old standards like AACR2 and LCSH. The best tool for the job shifts and changes daily with our users’ needs. We need to learn general flexibility and skills to adapt to this.

18. Can’t predict the future–-so experimentation is insurance: Without crystal balls, we don’t know for sure what will be widely used. We need to try and assess many services to find what works for our users.

19. Crowds are fickle: Good quality tools with easy user interfaces may not be favoured over early established tools with a critical mass of users…and the crowd may switch. This happened when a mass of people migrated from bloglines to Google reader as their preferred aggregator. Today’s unused startup may be the Next Big Thing.

20. Collaborate better: Libraries have a culture of sharing resources and ideas with each other. Emerging technologies enhance this.

21. Experimenting increases skills: When Windows was first released, it came packaged with a game of Solitaire. People needed to learn how to use the mouse interface and to put in several hours of repetitive movements to get good at it. Solitaire turned out to be the fastest, most efficient way to educate the workforce. Some seemingly pointless sites teach us new interfaces.

URL:
Download the paper from http://librariansmatter.com/blog/2009/05/05/why-learning-about-emerging-technologies-is-part-of-every-librarians-job-educause-australasia-2009-presentation/

GUEST ARTICLE--THE FUTURE OF LIBRARIES

Think For The Customer .....The Future of Libraries
by John Stanley, John Stanley Associates, Kalamunda, Western Australia,
Australia

Libraries are no different to any other business as they face the challenges of 2009 and beyond. What worked in 2008 may not work in a changed market place. The consumer has changed their shopping habits and their buying habit, probably for good. This has real impact on the role of the library in the community.

In more difficult times the consumer relooks at the way they spend their money. As a result, small luxury items sales increase. Small indulgencies increase in popularity during tough economic times. Businesses that believe they do not have small indulgency items for sale often succumb to playing the sales game to generate sales on the High (Main) Street. The result is the consumer is being trained to accept the 70 percent off sales as a norm.

But, how does this affect Libraries?
In more difficult economic times, libraries come into their own again. People who have not walked into a library for many years are rediscovering, or discovering, libraries for the first time. The challenge is, are you marketing your library to attract the consumers who at times may find a library uncomfortable and forbidding?

I was recently intrigued to see a banner [in the photo above] over Balham Library in London ,UK promoting free reading in the library. This was a direct marketing campaign aimed at promoting the benefits of the library in the community when the consumer was thinking about how they could save money. This was especially relevant, as the local bookshop was offering an incentive for their consumers to get a discount if they returned the bookshop books back to the bookshop once their customers had read them.

Reading is recognised as a small indulgent luxury by more people during tough economic times. This is a marketing opportunity that can be used by the library service to increase patronage. The key is to observe how consumers think and adapt your library service to the new thinking process and at the same time, you need to make your library more consumer friendly to these new patrons.

By nature, a librarian, like many other industry experts, tends to think about the product first and then secondly think about how the consumer will react to their product. A classic example of this is laying a library out using the Dewey System; the Dewey System alone can deter many people from going into a library. The entrepreneurial thinker will think differently; they will put themselves in the customer’s shoes first and then arrange the product and signage system to help the consumer.

However, with new consumers looking for access to a wide range of reading material, they may choose to venture into libraries. That creates an opportunity for librarians to re-think the presentation of their “products” and offer new ideas on “merchandising.” Try the new ideas and then test them to see if they work and whether they are worth adopting in the library.

Libraries, in my view, will have a new role in the community over the next few years and will become a lot more relevant than they may have been perceived to be in recent past years. Libraries today have an opportunity to attract new consumers, and that means it is also a time to experiment with new ways of attracting new consumers. It is time to brainstorm with the team how you can present library products and services in a way that could attract more consumers to your library. The library industry is entering a new and exciting era and now is the time to grasp those opportunities and run with them.

John Stanley is a world-reknown library and retail consultant, speaker and author. John helps libraries: lay the library out with the consumer in mind to increase lend rate, create displays to maximise lend rate potential, and market their services to increase patron count.

URL: http://www.johnstanley.cc

GUIDELINES FOR HEALTH LIBRARIES

The fourth edition of Guidelines for Australian Health Libraries is now available. It is endorsed by the Australian Library and Information Association. The guidelines are divided into Planning and Strategy, Organisation and Philosophy, Resources Management, and Information Service Provision and include evidence-based staffing levels. They cover all types of health libraries, not just those in hospitals. At this site are also links to two checklists for self-assessment.

URL: http://www.alia.org.au/policies/health.libraries.html

BLOG ON MUSEUMS & DIGITAL MEDIA

I just found this blog, Fresh+New, written primarily by Seb Chan [Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia]. "The purpose of the site is to act as a repository and sounding board for discussions around digital media and its use in museums. It evolved form a team discussion tool into a sector resource."

URL: http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/

SURVEY RESULTS OF AUSTRALIAN HEALTH LIBRARY WEB 2.0 TOOL USE

Preliminary results of a survey on Web 2.0 tool social networking use in Australian health libraries is available now, according to a message on the aliaHEALTH electronic list from Suzanne Lewis, Lisa Cotter and Gillian Wood, the researchers. There were 203 responses, from all states and territories. Results will also be posted on the HLIS blog. These are preliminary results presented using the MLA format for ease of comparison with the original MLA survey results. Further analysis will be done over the next month or so and messages will be posted to this list and the blogs.

URLs:
Survey results: http://www.eblip.net.au/projects/web2survey/Report_Dec07_Results.pdf
HLIS blog: http://hlis.wordpress.com/

NEW BLOG: LIBRARIANS IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

“ALIAWest co-ordinates and communicates strategic professional issues and organises continuing professional development activities statewide. As part of this role ALIAWest has produced a newsletter, Biblia, as a communication tool for the profession in Western Australia.Throughout 2007 the ALIAWest committee has been exploring methods to make Biblia more accessible to today’s generation of library workers. We’ve investigated a number of options and settled on the model of a blog. All ALIA members are invited to blog about items and issues of interest to the profession in WA. Liz Burke, convenor.

URL: http://aliawestbiblia.blogspot.com/

ANOTHER QUESTIONABLY USEFUL RESOURCE

AUSTRALIAN HEALTHCARE NEWSLETTER NOW AVAILABLE TO NON-MEMBERS AS WELL

ARCHI, the Australian Resource Centre for Healthcare Innovations, now allows non-members to access its online newsletter, ARCHI Net News. The current issue has articles on decision-making tools to assist nurses and midwives, why patient flow matters (a master class), and conference papers. Unfortunately, you cannot click through to the full-text of the articles, so I’m not sure that this is anything but a membership promotion effort. But it’s more access than we’ve had before.

URL:
September 2007 issue: http://www.archi.net.au/our_services/nn/2007/sept

AUSTRALIAN PATENTS NOW SEARCHABLE

Patent Lens now includes Australian Granted Patents, searchable and full-text, in addition to the US and European ones already available. The service provides free PDF downloads. CAMBRIA in Canberra, ACT, Australia produces Patent Lens, as well as other “molecular enabling technologies with a focus on their use by disadvantaged communities, for example, in international agriculture and public health.”

URL: http://www.patentlens.net

PUBLIC LIBRARY BLOGS: 252 EXAMPLES, BY WALT CRAWFORD

Walt Crawford has self-published a new book, Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples. From the description: “The 299-page paperback features descriptions and sample posts for a wide range of blogs from 196 public libraries of all sizes, in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. If your library is considering a blog, this book should help you find blogs from comparable libraries to consider as examples. If your library has a blog and is considering more (or revising the ones you have), this book should help you find interesting examples--the public library blogging community is remarkably diverse!"

To order the book:
Cites & Insights Books store at Lulu.com: printed on 60lb. cream book stock, http://www.lulu.com/content/1117701
After 14 September, from Amazon.com, ISBN 978-1434805591

AUSTRALIAN LIBRARY WINS US$1 MILLION GRANT

The Northern Territory Library [Darwin, Australia] has won the prestigious annual Gates Foundation Access to Learning Award. The award was presented to Jo McGill, Director, at the IFLA 2007 World Library and Information Congress in Durban, South Africa. “The US$1 million award recognises the library's work to provide free computer and Internet access and training to Indigenous communities and for its unique 'Our Story' database. Being the recipient of the Access to Learning Award recognises the importance of the Northern Territory Library program in contributing to improvements in the lives of Indigenous Territorians living in remote communities. It assists people to retain 60,000 years of oral tradition, and plays a part in helping our Indigenous communities to survive and prosper through improved literacy The award will be used to spread training in 'Our Story' to more communities, and expand the library's early years literacy program for indigenous children.

URLs:

Northern Territory Library: http://www.ntl.nt.gov.au/
Gates Foundation: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/ATLA

SEARCH ENGINE FOR LAW FIRM NEWSLETTERS

Linex Legal is a new search engine that allows you to search the newsletters put out by "over 1,000 leading law firms and government organisations" in in ten countries: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK, and the USA. Specialty areas include: product liability, international arbitration and mediation, employment, health and safety, pensions, property, planning and construction, and European Competition law.

This looks to be a very useful and unique tool--and it is free.

URL: http://www.linexlegal.com

LIBRARY TECHNICIAN BLOGS

Compiled from various sources...

Aus Library Technician, http://auslibrarytechnician.blogspot.com, The library life of Australian library technician, Kevin Dudeney [New South Wales Department of Corrective Services, Australia]

The Library Dude! http://librarydude.blogspot.com, The Day by day of a Library Technician in the big bad world, [ACT Library and Information Services, Griffith, Australian Capitol Territory] but changing jobs

LibrarySupportStaff.org, http://blog.librarysupportstaff.org, not a blog, is a great resource for finding blogs and other resources for library techs

Library Technician, http://librarytechnician.blogspirit.com/, Life as a long term techie of the library variety, from Australia

Library Technician Training in Australia, http://www.auslttraining.blogspot.com, also from Kevin Dudeny

Library Technicians: Education, Training, Practice, Career, Jobs, etc., http://lit2542006.blogspot.com, Educational techniques, tools, and trends have a great similarity among many disciplines that have adopted the Information Technology. This blog will adapt what suits the Library profession, with special reference to Library Technicians, from Mohamed Taher [Toronto, Ontario, Canada]

Nova Scotia Association of Library Technicians, http://nsalt.blogspot.com/

Paraprose, http://nclpa.wordpress.com, North Carolina Library Paraprofessional Association (NCLPA).

WLA Paraprofessionals, http://blog.wyla.org/parapro/, Wyoming Library Association

THE FUTURE OF LIBRARIES, 2010, VIDEO

Andrew Finegan [Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia] has a neat video on the subject of the future of the library. I am collecting the written ones in the series and will print them at some point--or will blog them, not sure which.

URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V67QuW0NeXI
&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Egoogle%2Ecom%2Freader%2Fview%2F

GOOD 2.0 STUFF FROM DOWN UNDER

Judy O’Connell [Catholic Education Office, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia] created a wonderful presentation called Capture the 20:20 Vision for Libraries for the Annual Weekend School of the Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa and the School Library Association of New Zealand Aotearoa in Nelson in April. Her slide show is available at http://www.slideshare.net/heyjudeonline/
capture-the-2020-vision-for-libraries.

She also has made available slides of the beautiful Broadgreen Intermediate School Learning Centre, also in Nelson, at http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/slideshow.php?id=28088. For more from O’Connell, see her blog, Hey Jude, at http://heyjude.wordpress.com

GREAT IDEA--CHECK OUT A LIVING BOOK!

Mount Barker's living library
by Ian Hildebrand [Mount Barker Community Library, South Australia, Australia], inCite 28(4):19, April 2007.

“On Australia Day 2007 the Mount Barker Community Library invited residents to borrow a Living Book from South Australia’s first Living Library. The aims of a Living Library are to bring people into contact with someone they might not meet or associate with in their ordinary day-to-day-life, to break down barriers and dissolve stereotypes.

“Readers of the Living Library could check out a Living Book for a half-hour chat, and ask questions about that person’s life. Some of the ‘Books’ in the Living Library were people representing groups frequently confronted with prejudices and stereotypes. Others were South Australians with interesting life stories to share. Living book titles at the Mount Barker Living Library included old people; hippies; a human rights activist; a human zoo participant and animal rights activist; an indigenous woman; a Jewish couple, a Muslim, a Catholic nun, a Chilean refugee, a Vietnam war orphan and a witch.

“All books got a good reading with at least seven loans per title. Best sellers were the Muslim (29 loans); indigenous woman (19 loans); witch (18 loans) refugee (15 loans) and Vietnamese war orphan (13 loans). In total, the 16 Living Books received 152 loans from 58 registered readers during the five-hour duration of the Living Library.

“Lismore [New South Wales] was the first Australian library I know of to hold [a Living Library event] (November 2006). Bayside in Victoria have on planned for Library Week this year (Mount Barker’s second one will also be held during Library Week 2007). A Living Library was held at the Malmo [Sweden] festival in 2005 and they have been operating at youth festivals in Denmark since 2000."

What a great idea! A corporate library could let customers “check out” a vice-president for a chat; a hospital could “circulate” top administrators; a law firm could do the same for partners. You get the idea.

INTERNATIONAL INDIGENOUS LIBRARIANS FORUM

I just found out about the International Indigenous Librarians Forum. "In 1997, the Maori Library Workers Network [New Zealand] proposed to the American Indian Library Association (AILA) and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library Information and Resource Network (ATSILIRN) [Australia] a gathering of indigenous library workers from around the world."

"Forums are held every two years in a different country"--this year's is in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia 4-7 June. You can get more information at their website or in the April issue (v. 28, no. 4) of inCite, the journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, page 15 (quotes from that article) . Sounds like a very worthwhile group.

URL: http://www.5iilf.org/

NEW HOSPITAL 2.0 BLOG

Health LIS 2.0 is a new blog from Australia. There are some good posts there. Check it out.

URL: http://hlis.wordpress.com/

NEW FORUM FOR OPLS IN AUSTRALIA (and soon, elsewhere)

Denise Cadman, coordinator of the Queensland OPAL (One-Person Australian Librarians) group (part of ALIA, the Australian Library and Information Association), has created a new facility for the OPALs community, The OPALs Forum. The forum will give you the possibility to share your knowledge and get support from OPALs in Australia and abroad. OPALs in Australia have the opportunity to be the "early adopters" for this new initiative. Based on your participation and feedback, this facility could be extended to library OPALs globally. Please note that the forum is for OPALs only and you are required to register with your real name and an email address that can be used to identify you as an OPAL.

The forum will be a learning experience for all of us—this is ther first use of this forum software.

If anything doesn’t work as you think it should, or you would like to see additional features enabled in the forum software please post in a new thread.

To register for the OPAL Forum, go to http://forums.softlinkint.com
Once registered, access the OPAL Forum at http://forums.softlinkint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=10
If you need help to register, go to http://forums.softlinkint.com/video/registration.wmv to download the registration video.

I hope you will enjoy using the OPAL Forum!

NEW GOVERNMENT RESOURCES from Australia, Tonga, and Canada

The Australian Parliamentary Library has a new RSS feed for their new documents and one for This Week in Parliament.
URLs:
New Documents: http://www.aph.gov.au/library/rsspubs_feed.xml
This Week in Parliament: http://www.aph.gov.au/rss.htm

Tongan Legislation Online is now available and searchable. It is funded by New Zealand's International Aid & Development Agency.
URL: http://legislation.to/cms/home.html

The Maps, Data, and Government Information Centre of Carleton University [Ottawa, Ontario, Canada] has made available a Google Custom Search for Federal, Provincial, Territorial, and Municipal Canadian Government Documents on the Web. Thanks folks.
URL: http://www.library.carleton.ca/madgic/

PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITY FOR INTRANET MANAGERS IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

The Intranet Leadership Forum has been established to help all staff, provide a model for implementing blogs and RSS feeds, to help understand how wikis can be used, and “find better ways to manage the balance between day to day operational tasks and the bigger picture strategic thinking for your intranet.”

This sounds like a wonderful idea. Why isn’t there something like this in the USA? (Or is there?)

URL: http://www.intranetleadership.com.au/