Gaming and more @ your library

Hey I just wanted to post a brief report on the NJLA Information Technology meeting that was held on Thursday at the East Brunswick Public Library. LG's Tyler Rousseau gave a great presentation on Gaming in Libraries! The full presentation and handouts will be available very soon on the "Links of Interest" section on the NJLA IT page.

After Ty's presentation everyone got a chance to do some hands-on gaming! We provided Play Stations with Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero (one of my personal faves); some online gaming and the new Nintendo Wii. The only downside to this event was that NOW I MUST HAVE A Wii!!! ;-)

I don't consider myself to be much of a "gamer," but once I tried this I found out what all the fuss is about! It comes with the sports game that includes bowling, tennis and a few other things. I played the bowling game (against a very formidable opponent, Mary Martin, who kicked my butt!) and I am really hooked! The "real action" play of using the wireless hand-held controller while performing actions very similar to "real" bowling was just so much fun! I am officially saving up my money as of yesterday!

Funny aside: The other night a newscaster was reading from the teleprompter and read "Wii" as "World War II"!

Also, if anyone is interested, our next meeting will be held March 8, location TBA, and will focus on Vodcasting! Check our page on the NJLA website for more information!

And, I wanted to point people to a great tool shared by Jessica Adler at the meeting (one of the regular features of our meetings is sharing information and sites or tools of interest)! The tool is Snipshot and it allows you to edit photos online before you share them. There is nothing to install - it is 100% web-based, with a one-click important from any site, and you can save to a free, permanent URL. I haven't tried it yet but it looks great! Thanks, Jess!!!

ALA Midwinter in Seattle

At some point I'll post some thoughts about ALA Midwinter, but at least I've gotten my pix uploaded to Flickr.

For a variety of reasons, this midwinter meeting was one of the most useful, practical and fun conferences I've been to. There were a few people that I had hoped to see and didn't (my fault for not reaching out--I always think "Oh, I'll run into them at..."), but generally speaking the social networking was superb, the meetings were highly informative, the food was yummy, as were the local spirits--what few sips I had here and there -- and the rain pretty much held off.

More when I get a chance.

Technorati Tags: ALA_MW_2007, MW2007, ala2007, LibraryGarden, Libraries

A Graphic Novel Wins the Printz!

For the first time, a graphic novel has won the prestigious Michael L. Printz Award. Gene Yang, author of American Born Chinese, has crafted an extraordinary book that shows not only the pressures of trying to fit into a culture but the struggle to fight off one's cultural labels as well.

ABC follows three separate story lines. The first is about Jin, who moves into an American town and is constantly picked on for strange Chinese stereotypes. The second follows Jin's cousin, Chin-Kee, who visits and is a constant embarrassment to Jin because of he represents typical Chinese culture and stereotypes. The third is of the Monkey King who, after being cast from heaven for not being human, decides to wage war against the gods and prove he can be just as worthy of a god.

In the end the stories do connect, somewhat loosely, and portray the most important message of all: You must be comfortable and accepting of yourself.

I was fortunate enough to have First Second Books send me a free copy of this book for review right before the publication came out. Even though I would have likely cast my vote for another book, American Born Chinese is more than worthy of receiving the honor and notoriety of being the first graphic novel to win the Printz award.

Go, go Graphics!!!

"Digital Bling" -- Spicin' it up with Widgets

I learned a bit about web widgets at the last Internet Librarian conference, but this is the first very interesting (and fairly in-depth) article in the mainsteam press that I have read discussing widgets. Not sure what these "widgets" are all about? Check out today's New York Times Technology Section's "Some Bling for your Blog" article, describing what widgets are, what they can do, how you can use them, etc. Some of my favorite excerpts from the article:

"Widgits are elements, often in the left or right columns of a blog, that enhance its usefulness or aesthetic appeal. (The term “widgets,” confusingly, can also refer to compact applications that operate on a computer’s desktop.)"

"'Widgets pull content or services from some other place on the Web, and put it into your personal page,' said Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures in Manhattan."

"Ed Anuff, a co-founder of Widgetbox.com, divides widgets into three categories. 'One is self-expression widgets, like photo galleries, games or YouTube videos that you like,' he said. The second category includes widgets that generate revenue for a blogger, like a box that displays auctions from a particular eBay category, or a blogger’s favorite DVDs from Amazon.com. The third category, Mr. Anuff said, encompasses 'site-enhancement widgets, like discussion forums, news feeds or a guest book, which provide better utility for your Web site.' Widgetbox is a site begun in September that collects widgets, spotlighting the newest and most popular ones; it offers more than 500 widgets.

According to Widgetbox, its most popular widget allows bloggers to incorporate an updated feed of news items from the site Digg into their blogs. Matt Mullenweg, creator of the WordPress blogging software, says the widgets that his users have been incorporating into their sites lately include Meebo, an instant-messaging application that allows blog authors to chat with their visitors."

The article goes on to discuss the benefits of widgets to blog visitors and publishers, more examples of their use, and people, companies, and sites that promote and supply widgets. A very interesting read, I must say, again. I am looking forward to playing around with various widgets, and I hope you enjoy reading this article as much as I did!

Update on U.S. Web Search Market--Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, & Time Warner

In this morning's USA Today Tech section, a short article was written about the U.S. search market from comScore Networks, showing that in December 2006,...

* Google sites were ranked as #1 with 47.3% of U.S. search market
* Yahoo sites as #2 with 28.5%
* Microsoft sites as #3 with 10.5%
* Ask Network as #4 with 5.4%

Also interesting from the article...

* "An estimated 6.7 billion searches were conducted by U.S. Web users in December, up 1% from November."

"The number of U.S. Web search queries has grown 30% since December of 2005, comScore said.

Go to the actual January 15, 2007 press release of comScore Networks survey cited for some more detail, which also lists...

* Time Warner Network as #5 with 4.9% of the U.S search market,

and it states there that "Google Sites led the pack with 3.2 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (713 million), Ask Network (363 million), and Time Warner Network (335 million)."

Celebrating and Teaching about Martin Luther King, Jr.--Quality Resources

As I ride into work at Rider University early this morning, I listen to a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., and I check my RSS feeds for anything unique about MLK that I might be able to learn about. Right away, I find an Associated Press article on Yahoo! News published yesterday, entitled, Rarely seen King papers go on display. The article describes a bit about the "collection of more than 10,000 King papers and books," now displayed at The Atlanta History Center, previously in New York at Sothebys' auction house, described as "an unparalleled gathering of primary documents from Dr. King's most active years." It is impressive, and I enjoyed watching the video clip from ABC Video linked on the left of this article, "Memorial Sheds New Light on MLK," which described the exhibition, as well as the "MLK Day Is For Volunteering" clip, also there. Reading this article and watching the clips was good way to start the day, and after watching the "Volunteering" video, I thought, why not blog about these and other quality resources and help celebrate and teach about MLK--a small way to volunteer.

Additional resource sites of interest to everyone this fine day:

- The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute housed at Stanford University "serves as the institutional home for a broad range of activities relating to King’s life, the civil rights movement in the United States and the history of struggles worldwide to achieve social justice." It details their King Papers Project's website, described as "the world’s largest online archive of King-related materials, receiving over 500,000 hits a month." I really enjoyed surfing the site map available at Standford, and thought the The Liberation Curriculum section there for teachers that provides "teachers with educational materials that engage students in active learning and critical inquiry" was especially valuable.

- The King Collection: Morehouse College is also one of my favorite MLK sites, not only because it gives additional details about the large collection of "handwritten notes and unpublished sermons of Martin Luther King Jr.," described above, but I find that the short, easy-to-print-out King Timeline and King Fact Sheet were also great handouts to display in our library.

For more on MLK, you may also want to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, with links for teachers and kids, as well as the Seattle Times: MLK site, and, of course, Librarians' Internet Index provides two dozen more links to other quality resource sites.

Overdue Books Affecting Credit Score

I am sitting here watching the local evening news when a story comes on about the fact that if a library reports your overdue fines to a collection agency you can lose anywhere from 50 to 100 points from your credit score. Wow, that is a lot of points for overdue books!

I only caught a portion of the story (Mommy duties intervened), but what I did catch was an interview with a library director stating something to the effect that in times of budget cuts it is essential that libraries make it know that overdue materials affect the bottom line.

I went searching for some reference to this story, and found an article published today on Kiplinger.com called Boost Your Score that starts with this tidbit:

Pop quiz: Which affects your credit score more, getting married or having overdue library books?

Surprise answer: A library fine that goes to collection can shave 100 points off your credit score -- and boost your annual interest payments by hundreds of dollars. But getting married doesn't affect your score at all unless you co- sign for a loan with your new spouse.

I am not entirely convinced that library fines are even needed in the first place, so my gut reaction to having someone's credit score ruined by late library books doesn't sit well with me at all. I might be more sensitive to this as I protect my credit score with a passion ever since I had to work so hard to build it from scratch when I first moved to the USA 9 years ago. None of your credit history follows you across the border (so I discovered, much to my dismay) and I could not get a credit card, car loan or any other other loan to save my soul for several years. A few points off your credit score can make a big difference in loan rate and I am sure that the average citizen watching this news segment did not get a warm fuzzy feeling about libraries learning that we could be the ones to impact their future mortgage rate.

Get your head out of your OPAC

So stipulated: Library OPACS, uh, lack the functionality we desire. We're all agreed. OPACS should be much, much better.

Here's my question: How does the quality of the OPAC ultimately affect the total quality of customer experience and customer satisfaction? I think the answer to that question may be quite different from library to library, depending on the needs of our different user populations. Public library users may be more inclined to be browsers, and may not really care that much about how good the OPAC is. Academic, school and special library users may be more inclined to search for specific titles, or titles within specified subject areas, and may therefore care more about the quality of the OPAC.

But even in libraries where customers rely heavily on the OPAC, I'm not sure that the quality of the OPAC figures that greatly into the customers' overall satisfaction. (I suspect it often doesn't…) I worked in a small special library that had a truly awful, terrible OPAC. It was one of them home-grown government agency deals--ugh! But our small, dedicated staff gave great customer service, did a lot of outreach, offered a good deal of training, and our user satisfaction was quite high. While I'm sure our users really would have valued a better OPAC, their overall library experience was not greatly affected. If we instead had offered a really super-great OPAC, but lousy customer service, I don't think our users would have been quite so satisfied…

In Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey suggests that we are most effective when we focus our energy at those points where our concerns intersect with our ability to influence. Clearly the OPAC falls into our collective sphere of concern. But I'm not sure how much influence we have over the quality of the OPAC. I'm not suggesting that we don't try to influence the quality of the OPAC -- by working with vendors, creating our own systems, or a combination of both. I'm truly thankful that John Blyberg and Casey Bisson are out there. But I do think that for many libraries, or more perhaps I should say for many librarians, we may be able to get more bang for our limited buck, more return on the investment of our time and resources, by focusing our energies elsewhere.

I'd like to see libraries looking at their own spheres of concern and influence and making critical choices about where their time, energy, and resources can best be used to improve the quality of customer experience. In many cases, I suspect that we can have a much greater impact on customer experience by focusing on (in no particular order) the quality of the library's environment ("library-as-place"), the library's customer service, the library's webpage, the library's collection, the library's programs, the library's outreach, and the library's marketing (they can't experience us if they don't know about us.)

I'm particularly interested in how libraries can create better customer experiences and be more relevant to their user populations by improving their physical environments. How do our customers experience the actual library space including, the visual (displays, colors, lighting, layout), the tactile (comfy furniture) the olfactory (yum… coffee…), and the aural (zones of quiet, zones of noise, background music)? How does the library staff improve the quality of the environment? Are they warm, friendly, and hospitable? Are they visible? Are they proactive and helpful?

As Joshua Neff recently pointed out, I'm not the only one thinking about these things. Meredith Farkas, (in a must-read, smart, sensitive, insightful, and mostly-polite post) says that she doesn't use her library because she, "found the whole atmosphere really unwelcoming." Nicole Engard found that her local librarians "were not very approachable, knowledgeable, or friendly." Jennifer Macaulay , "admits" that she's not a library user either (and how many of us would "admit" the same?)

Now how many of you don't use your library because the OPAC sucks? Just wondering.

Technorati: OPAC, Library as Place, Customer Experience, libraries

Free Viewing of Air Gear

Calling all Teen Librarians, your Manga fans will want to know...

The popular series of Air Gear is ready to be released in its anime form. To help push the transition to celluloid (although, it's probably all actually done digitally), IGN is showing the first episode for FREE on their website for the following week. Just click on the picture to link to the website.

Incidentally, the series has also been made into a musical which opens on January 7th in Japan... is it perhaps the new Jerry Springer Musical?

Testing 1-2-3

Ever since we moved to the "new" blogger I have had a problem with my posts disappearing never to be found again. Just want to see if blogger is going to play nice with me today and finally let me post list for the 5 things meme since I have now been tagged twice. Nothing more to see for now... but hopefully more later today.

Edited to Add:
It worked!!!

From today's New YorkTimes...

Town Considers Guards for Library Disrupted by Students
By TINA KELLEY, Published: January 4, 2007

NYTIMES, MAPLEWOOD, N.J., Jan. 3

The Maplewood Township Committee is asking the public library’s board of trustees not to follow through with a plan to close its two buildings during after-school hours and is considering providing security guards to help quell disruptive behavior, Mayor Fred R. Profeta Jr. said Wednesday.

The committee discussed a plan late Tuesday night to provide the library with security guards. "The township will pay for that, because it’s a public safety issue, though it may go through the library budget," Mr. Profeta said in an interview.

The mayor said he would petition the library board to rescind its initial decision before the planned closing on Jan. 16. “I think the closure’s a very bad idea,” the mayor said. “I think that it was not warranted, because a lot of the programs we have in the works are designed — and well designed — to alleviate the situation. We just have to put those in place.”

But David Huemer, who represents the Maplewood Township Committee on the library board, said the library had already indicated that a plan for guards was not enough to rescind its vote on the closing.

More at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/nyregion/04library.html

Technorati Tags: Maplewood Library, Youth Services, YA, LibraryGarden, Libraries

The Thrill of the Chase in Cyberspace: A Report of Focus Groups with Live Chat Librarians

Happy New Year to all the LG faithful! At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I am writing because I am very excited at my 1st publication in an electronic journal. Lynn Silipigni Connaway of OCLC and I were invited to do a Guest Forum for the Informed Librarian Online, which we have called "The Thrill of the Chase in Cyberspace: A Report of Focus Groups with Live Chat Librarians. " It is a brief account of the results of our focus group interviews with chat librarians from our IMLS grant Seeking Synchronicity: Evaluating Virtual Reference Services from User, Non-User, and Librarian Perspectives. The results of these focus groups have been used to design an online survey which we are in the process of conducting with 200 chat librarians. I am very interested in your reactions to our findings and welcome your comments!

...And I tag

Oops... Forgot the most important part of the Five Things meme. (my fiveish things are here.)

I tag: Nancy Dowd, Steve Backs, Darlene Fichter, George Needham, and Stephen Abram.

Five things about Pete

Thanks to Amy for tagging me in the "Five Things" meme. I'm going to do the Creating Passionate Users twist and answer Kathy Sierra's fivish questions. Here goes...

1. What's the most fun work you've ever done, and why?

The most fun work I've ever done has always been the work I'm doing at the time, so my current job is the most fun work I've done. Why? I get to work in a supportive environment on diverse projects (QandANJ, wireless projects, audiobooks, etc.), have a lot of freedom and can exercise my creativity in many ways, and I get to interact with lots of people (f2f and virtually).

2a. Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did?

I wish I did a better job staying in touch with family and friends. I used to write a lot of letters. Now I barely pick up a phone or email. :-(

2b.Name one thing you've always wanted to do but keep putting it off?

I'd like to take formal guitar lessons. I walk around with the phone number of a guitar teacher in my wallet. I've been meaning to call him for a couple of years now, but then I started watching Buffy on DVD and, uh, other priorities asserted themselves. (How lame is that? But to be fair, Buffy was quite a show!)

3a. What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why?

As I mentioned, I'd like to achieve some measure of competence on the guitar. Why? Because I love music, and I would especially like to be good enough to create music with other people. I just finished reading This is Your Brain on Music and I'm feeling so jazzed (heehee) that I just might pick up the phone and call Mr. Guitar Teacher (that is, as soon as I finish watching Angel on DVD. Curse you Joss Whedon!)

3b. If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn? (two more sentences, max)

I'd want to do an apprenticeship with Marshall Rosenberg. I would hope to learn how to use the principles of Non-violent communication to better connect with other people.

4a. What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you?

Kind, funny, non-judgmental. At least, that's how they better describe me if they know what's good for 'em. You listening family and friends??

4b. Now list two more words you wish described you...

Organized, effective

5. What are your top three passions? (can be current or past, work, hobbies, or causes-- three sentences max)

Love to play the tennis, spend time with my wife, and listen to live music (which I do now, once every two years or so. Hmm... Self-care much?)

6 Write--and answer--one more question that YOU would ask someone (with answer in three sentences max)

If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, do they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does? Let me rephrase: What's funny? Answer: Groucho Marx, Coen Brothers, Woody Allen, Jon Stewart, Adam Sandler singing about his red-hooded sweatshirt, Seinfeld, Joss Whedon, Scrubs, and a lot of other stuff.

[Bonus: What is one question you wish people would ask themselves?]

Is this worth paying attention to... and...If it bothers me, is there another way of looking at this?

Bonus Fact about me me me!

I've lived most of my life with in New Jersey but have almost no identifiable accent (so I've been told.) I think that's because most people in NJ talk good.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak. What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Tags: Five things, Joss Whedon, CNVC, NVC, libraries