IOLUG Spring Meeting Details Announced

The Indiana Online Users Group Spring Meeting will be held on May 14th, 2010 at Indiana Wesleyan University Indianapolis Education Center North.  The theme is “You Can Take it With You: Libraries Moving Into Mobile.” Details and registration can be found at http://www.iolug.org/index.php/programs/spring-2010-program/ .

The keynote speaker will be Jason Griffey, Head of Library Information at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.  His talk is titled “The Future is Mobile.”  I will be sharing a session with Bill Helling, Assistant Director and Head of Reference (former Systems Librarian) for the Crawfordsville District Public Library.  Our session is titled “How Friendly are library Websites and Databases?”  Bill’s session will be titled “How Does Your Library Website Really Look Like?”  This focuses on how to create a library website that usable for mobile devices.  My session “Bill Helling, Assistant Director and Head of Reference (former Systems Librarian) for the Crawfordsville District Public Library” is on accessing commercial and free databases with mobile devices.  I will demonstrate using an iPhone.  Right now I am looking at demonstrating EBSCOhost, WorldCat, Encyclopedia Britannica, and USA.gov.  I may add in additional databases if time permits.

Registration is $45 for IOLUG members and $65 for non-IOLUG members.

My First Mobile Library User

Yesterday I was at the reference desk and a student came to me with a call number and asked where he could find that book.  No big deal right?  Well, the call number was on a catalog record on an iPhone.  I thought “hey, cool, we have not gone mobile yet and the users are pushing it first.”  Usually we implement a new technology and then see if it catches on.  This is promising because we do have plans to create a mobile presence withing the next 8-9 months.

On My 14, 2010, IOLUG’s spring program will be titled “You CAN Take It with You: Libraries Moving into Mobile.”  I will be doing a session titled “Tested and True-How friendly are library websites and databases?” with Bill Helling.  Bill’s part will be on mobile viewable library websites, mine will be on databases with mobile capability.  I am compiling a list of these databases now but won’t be able to fully experiment until March when I get an iPhone of my own.  In other developments, Logan Library will be moving along with our consortium led by Indiana State University to Innovative’s Millennium with the Encore add-on.  One of the features that Millennium is supposed to have is a Mobile version of the interface so I’ll have to wait until its launched this summer to experiment with it.

The Library Website with a Face: Digitally Connecting to People Where They Are

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/the-library-we…where-they-are
Yesterday I gave a summary of the Indiana Online Users Group (IOLUG) Fall 2009 Meeting in Plainfield, Indiana on Nov 13, 2009.  Today I would like to expand a little upon what I spoke about.  I only spoke for 15 minutes, but it was about something I discovered that has profound implications for a small college library like mine.  My topic was “The Library Website with a Face:  Digitally Connecting to People Where They Are.”  In summary, creating a website where the users can always see if a librarian is available to help them and the ability to connect to them instantly through a chat widget.

At Logan Library, we experimented with a third party virtual reference service for one year.  We had very few virtual reference sessions.  First, to keep the price down, we could only have one librarian logged in at a time and there were large chunks of time when nobody was online.  Second, the chat link, a button that said “Online” or “Offline” depending on whether someone was logged in or not, was only located on the library website’s main page.  At the time that we stopped this service, we began a subscription to LibGuides, a Web 2.0 platform for creating subject guides.  By default, each LibGuide adds the guide owner’s profile to each page of the guide.  Profiles can include numerous types of contact information as well as a chat widget from almost any of the major IM services.  While the most commonly used widget by librarians is for Meebo, we decided to use AOL Instant Messenger and use their widget directly.  We found this best to suit our needs.  We also use Trillian instead of the actual AIM software because it allows us to set the time for the “away” message to coincide with the screen saver; thus we can set it to a very short amount of time so that if we walk away from our computer, the away message will kick in shortly thereafter.  This decreases the chances of users sending us a message and not getting a reply.  Since we only have two reference librarians, we also made it so that the profile of each of us was on the main page of each guide home page, thus they can see if either of us is available.  Finally, we added a “Help” tab to each guide which contains contact information and chat widgets to other library staff members who can help in other ways.  For example, our Interlibrary loan librarian’s box has her contact information, her chat widget, and her picture with the caption “I can help you with questions about Interlibrary loan requests.”   Likewise, each reference librarian’s caption says “I can help you with your research.”  This removes the ambiguity regarding who can help for certain questions.

As a result, we have seen virtual reference questions jump from a handful a quarter to a handful a day.  Most questions such as “what database would be best to search for a particular topic?” or “how can I find out if we subscribe to a particular journal?” can be answered quickly and easily.  In the past, most students would wait until they had time to come to the library to ask these simple questions.   If someone needs more in-depth reference assistance that is hard to do through chat, we can simply set up a time to meet them in the library to give them the appropriate attention.  Thus, knowing that most research is being done outside of the library and with the frequency of use, we know that we have filled an important void in our library service.

Our LibGuides site can be viewed at http://library.rose-hulman.edu and my presentation can be viewed at  http://www.slideshare.net/histrydude/the-library-website-with-a-face-digitally-connecting-to-people-where-they-are or by clicking the image above.

IOLUG Fall Meeting on Managing Your Digital Identity a Huge Success

Well, I’ve been quiet the last week or so but I’ve been busy.  Between spending large chunks of time at ISU to listen to ILS vendors give us sales pitches and demos of their systems, planning for the IOLUG meeting, and probably a dozen other little things that have popped up in the last week, I have not had much time to blog.  But again, that IS the theme of my blog…doing this, that, and the other thing!  So here is a quick wrap up of the Fall 2009 Indiana Online Users Group (IOLUG) Meeting.  The theme was “Hot or Not: Managing Your Digital Identity” it it was held at the Plainfield Public Library.  The morning Keynote was “Yes, You Are Speaking in Public: the Implications of Building a Personal and Professional Online Presence” by Jenica Rogers, Director of libraries at SUNNY, Potsdam.  This was followed by three breakout sessions 1) Online Public Identities: The Unexpected Dangers, by Jenica Rogers; 2) Tips and Tricks – a)New Friend Requests: Managing Personal and Professional Contacts on Facebook, by Jason Fields, b) Search Engine Optimization by Michael Witt, c) The Website with a Face: Digitally Connecting to People Where They Are, by me, Richard Bernier, and c) Virtual Venues and Collaborations:  Strengthening Your Staff and Services Using Facebook by Misti Shaw; 3) Facebook Basics (workshop) by Daniel Nguyen, Bill Helling, Emily Griffin, and Melissa Hostetler.  The afternoon keynote was “Social Library is People: Strategies for Making Your Online Organization More Human, by Toby Greenwalt, Virtual Services Coordinator for the Skokie Public Library.  The three breakout sessions included the Tips and Tricks and Facebook Basics again along with “Putting It All Together: Monitoring and Participating in Your Online Community without Losing Your Mind, by Toby Greenwalt.  The day was capped off with a Panel on Personal Experiences with Digital Identity.  Panelists were Melissa Kiser, Kayla Gregory, Malissa Hostetler, and Lisa Lobdell.

For me, this was the most enjoyable and enlightening IOLUG meeting so far.  It could not have come at a better time since I am currently engrossed in Web 2.0, social networking, and their integration into my libraries operations.  I also have two research projects in the works in this area.  I also enjoyed being a speaker.  It has been a while and I enjoyed it a great deal.  The highlights of the program for me included Jenica Roger’s Keynote, and learning more about the permission controls of Facebook by Jason Fields.  I am now reconsidering my decision to use a second Facebook account for professional uses and I may just make friends with my coworkers after all.  Actually, I will need to do so one way or another if I am going to launch and promote our Library’s Facebook page.  In my next posting, I will discuss the topic I spoke about in further detail.

Our Spring program will be on mobile computing and the integration of library services, or something like that.