Time for a different look

It's Spring, what can I say?  I'll try the left-side links for a while.  I am left-handed after all.

Do you have a Wowbrary subscription?  If not, and you are interested in hearing about all the new stuff that HPL acquires before anyone else, I would highly recommend signing up.  Personally, it has contributed greatly to reinvigorating my desire to read for pleasure.  There are so many great things coming in every week.  One word of warning however, some patrons have been experiencing difficulty receiving their Wowbrary emails when signed up using an email address from Cox Communications (for example, "john123@cox.net").  We are working with Cox to solve the problem, but as of 4/21 it is still an ongoing issue.  I will update with a resolution as soon as we have one.

One of the books I found through browsing the Wowbrary newsletter was Boneshaker by Cherie Priest.  If an action-packed, zombie-filled book set in an 1870's steampunk alternate universe sounds like fun - this is the book for you!  I think it would make a great movie - Ridley Scott would do it right.

I just started The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence by Paul Davies.  Dr. Davies has published numerous works on physics written in a way that even a mathematically-challenged librarian can understand them.  This one is interesting in that Davies examines the SETI program and the search for "ET" to date and describes the possibly erroneous underlying assumptions we've made in trying to detect how an alien species might contact us.  As I said, I've just started this one but it is shaping up to be something I would recommend if you are inclined as I am to occasionally scan the stars and wonder who or what and how many might be looking back.

Clouds and my experience with the "Magic Smoke"

No, this isn't a confessional.  The Magic Smoke I am talking about is something that at my old job we called the "Genie" - that smoke that appears when an electronic device burns up or short-circuits.  Proper usage is, "Dave powered on the reference desk CPU, heard a crackling, and saw the genie escape."  Or one might say in a stern, chiding way, "It's definitely down since you let out the magic smoke!"  While I (thankfully) don't have to deal with it, at least on a regular basis anymore at work, the genie escaped from my home PC about 6 months ago causing a mini-crisis in my home.  After some work, all was well and 99.9% of our home network life was restored (the remaining 0.1% was lost saved games - the kids were a little miffed...)

What's the point, you ask?  A good portion of my documents, spreadsheets, etc. and software were not stored on my genie-less PC, they were stored in "the Cloud".  This situation certainly has its advantages.  I could use our other computer to work in the meantime, for one.  Also, there was no fretting over anything but the inconvenience of having to order new guts for the dead computer.  Cloud computing saved me again a couple of weeks ago when my work computer succumbed after a battle with a drive-by virus.  A combination of keeping important and/or currently used documents in the cloud and on a back-up USB hard drive made the whole experience much more tolerable since I lost no data.

But there are some worrisome aspects of cloud lurking always in the back of my mind.  Not least of these is privacy.  Although that is an 18 month-old article, the fight over who can see how much of your info out there in the "cloud" is still raging.  This brings a definite sense of insecurity to privacy-minded folks, like librarians.  Google, Amazon, and those sorts of commercial enterprises already track our searching to serve us targeted ads, ISPs could potentially (and may be already) tracking much more.  Nearly 5 years ago, an agency of the federal government was alleged to have captured data without warrant and with the cooperation of AT&T, (the folks trying to deflect the issue in that "privacy" article above).

Privacy issues aside, cloud computing appears to be gaining considerable, if sometimes grudging, acceptance.  And, as with all new twists in our technological world, our library and libraries everywhere will continue to wrestle with it.

What would it be like if...

...we didn't have an "Information Desk" on the first floor?  We are beginning to explore ways to give it a try.  Reference service (and the big desk) would remain as-is on the second floor.  But how would anyone get help on the first floor, you ask?  Instead of waiting for you to come to us (which often doesn't happen anyway), we would come to you.  This is a not-new, but not universally embraced idea called "roving reference".

 Why would we do such a thing?  At the root, because of studies like this:

• A study by Swope and Katzer in 1972 suggested that the majority of users who have questions in mind do not approach the reference desk for assistance.(1) This problem was compounded by the large-scale move to online public access catalogs (OPACs) and CD-ROM databases in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

So the idea is that if you won't come to us, we'll come out from behind the desk and help you!  The technology for such an endeavor has never been better - small, light, sometimes hyped, tablet-type devices to wirelessly connect to the Internet and cell phones for making calls would replace the desk phone.  That's all the equipment needed, really.  Maybe a pair of these for each of the reference staff.  What do you think?  Are we crazy?  Bear in mind, of course, that we will be experimenting with this concept regardless!

Learning Day - [UPDATE]

I am spending two days in Wichita at the Kansas Library Association annual conference.  It's nice to take a day or two every once in a while and learn what is going on with other people who do what you do.  It is also nice (sometimes) to sit in a session and think, "Hey, we already do that!"  Other times though, while it might sting a bit, it's nice to hear about a better way of doing something you thought you were doing well.

One thing in that latter category applies to HPL for sure.  It is that HPL has some major work to do on its website.  This is something I have been conscious of for a long, long time.  It's also something for which we haven't had the time / skill set / money to complete.  But those excuses are going by the wayside.  We have a happy confluence of opportunities coming over the next 2-3 months and we are starting the planning phase of a re-vamp.

I am looking forward to this afternoon when I will be learning more about graphic novel collecting and also about the Kansas Library Express which is a state-wide system for sharing books and other material. [UPDATE] - I have looked through the information from the KLE courier system discussion and feel somewhat more confident now about joining the network and receiving real value from it.  They presented a nice map which I will post here as soon as I can get it scanned.  The 200 or so libraries already participating are distributed rather nicely throughout the state.  Some of the larger libraries with which we regularly exchange lots of books are not yet on the system.  However, enough of our lighter-volume "regular" borrowers are on it to warrant a serious look.  Time to start thinking about Monday and putting all these good ideas into practice...

HPL 2010 Project Update

The end is near - but only in a way.  When we started the 2010 Project we always had the intention of leaving the completed project up to be used even after the initial "run through".  Now that we are nearing the end of our 10-week course, it is a good time to take a look at what we have accomplished.

Mainly due to the dedication and hard work of Kristine, our technology trainer, over 300 people have been exposed to scores of useful Internet-based tools and library resources.  On a personal level, I accomplished a change in habit by participating in the 2010 Project.  As I have alluded to in previous posts, I often feel behind the curve regarding the Internet and what tools are the "in" thing.  My new habit, developed over the 10 weeks of the 2010 Project, is to each week try one new tool I've heard about.  Will I ever "be on top of it"?  I doubt it.  But I will be keeping pace, I hope.  Here's one that I just learned about, a radio station locator called Antenna.  This one requires an install and seems to have trouble with Windows Vista - proceed at your own risk!

I've strayed off the topic a bit here, so back to my original thought.  If we assume about half of the 300+ people signed up for the 2010 Project actually complete all 10 weeks, then those 150 folks will have learned a minimum of 10 useful "things" each, hopefully feel much more confident in assessing new tools coming out in the future, and will share their impressions with people they know.  This last bit is important because we will be leaving the HPL 2010 Project website up for the balance of this year.  Although the prizes for completion will no longer be available, the resource will be there for any who want to explore the program.  I will post the web address for the project when it becomes available, so keep it in mind if you didn't get in on the original run-through.

Fiber is your friend

In more ways than one, really.  I am not talking about bran muffins, I am talking about fiber optic cable in this case, although if you are eating something with whole grains right now, more power to you!  Anyway, the library system where I worked prior to the wonderful Hutchinson Public Library was part of a county government.  To their credit, they realized that as their county grew and data demand soared they needed a solution that would get them ahead of the curve.  So about 5 years ago in 2004-5, they started building their own 100Mb (megabit) fiber network.  For comparison, the average home connection speed in Kansas in 2009 was 4.9Mb, not quite 1/20th of what they built.  So this was a pretty progressive and aggressive plan at the time.  In fact, when I left that library system the slowest connection in the county system was the 10Mb pipe to the Internet.

Why am I carrying on about data and pipes and megabits?  Because of this article.  The National Broadband Plan could wire "anchor institutions" such as schools, community centers, colleges and libraries such as good ol' HPL, with 1Gb fiber connections.  A gigabit represents 1 billion bits or 1,000 megabits.  In other words, this FCC proposal would create connection points in communities 10 times faster than the network my old employers built.  The implications are enormous.  A plan of this type could leapfrog the US back into the top tier of nations in the area of Internet connection speed.  Since we currently rank 28th in the world, I think this plan is worth attempting on the basis of lowering our international "Embarrassment-to-Prestige Ratio" alone.

More importantly, it could create the possibility in virtually every rural town for solid, high-speed Internet access.  This quote, from the ArsTechnica article above sums it up for me:  Bob Bocher, who works as a consultant with the Wisconsin State Library, says, "The more than 16,000 public libraries across the country are often the only places in their communities that offer no-fee Internet access to all residents.

This is certainly the case, for better or worse, at HPL.  As our bandwidth needs have grown, an ever-larger chunk of our limited funds have gone toward maintaining a tolerable usability level connecting to the Internet and the library's many paid digital services.  So I am excited about this change.  I wonder if the funding will be found to make it a reality?

The HPL 2010 Project and Ebooks

Typically around this time of year, HPL sponsors a huge number of programs.  This surge in program offerings seems to come from two directions; our own surge in energy following the sometimes-exhausting holiday season, and an urge to try some new ideas.

The HPL 2010 Project is one of those new ideas.  We are now past the mid-point in this experiment in self-paced technology training.  Hundreds of patrons and dozens of HPL staff members have learned about RSS feeds, streaming music, online TV, online newspapers and book reviews, cool library tools, with much more to come.

The responses to this project have been so overwhelmingly positive that I think we will adapt the concept of The 2010 Project for future uses and maybe offer it as an ongoing self-paced teaching tool.

And now a word about ebooks (because I can't help myself).  We receive a variety of questions about ebooks here at HPL.  Most of them revolve around the basic, 'Do you have any?"  the answer to that is, at this point, "precious few".  We have access to more through the State Library's download site, but as is the case with all new formats, it takes awhile to build what one might consider a 'good" collection.  That's not a cop-out, it is simply a function of having the money to do it or not.  One of our considerations is what will become the "standard" so that we don't buy a bunch of titles that are incompatible with the majority of readers.  I read lots about this, having set up a Google news custom section for this topic.  Recently a great article came up that I would like to recommend.  It sums up the current state format standards (or lack thereof) much better than I could do it.

OK, that's enough rambling.  Back to worrying about roof leaks and budgets...sigh.