|
|||||
|
The 11th annual Internet Librarian, October 29-31, will be held in Monterey CA. This year’s theme: 2.0: Info Pros, Library Communities & Web Tools. Consider sharing your experience and your knowledge at this Information Today event; send us a proposal to speak at IL07! Don’t you just love the Google graphics! Made my day, right after my husband’s funny, but appropriate card! But now I’m really craving chocolate covered strawberries….. yummmm! Fantastic article about Jeff Trzeciak’s work as Univ Librarian at McMaster University bringing in Second Life (Cybary City), blogs and wikis, plus the training program underway to support this. Mohawk College joins Second Life next week. While you are looking at Mac’s site, take a minute to read Jeff’s blog where he talks openly and honestly about the Transformation initiative and the new groups he’s formed in Facebook, Association of Research Libraries and Canadian Association of Research Libraries. Stephen Abram, VP Innovation, SirsiDynix and Chief Strategist, SirsiDynix Institute spoke to the Education Institute today about keeping up. He talked about learning styles and how you can spend 15 minutes each day to learn something new, and hopefully it’s a lot like playing. He suggests keepinga list (started by his love for 43 things) of things you don’t know about so you can find out about them and/or try them out. Stephened referenced Helene Blowers, Technology Director, used of 23 things to stir 2.0 learning in her organization,Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. Stephen’s top 10 tips (many borrowed from Helene):* Don’t confuse learning with training* Design the program for late bloomers* Allow participants to blog anonymously* Use 1.0 methods to continually communicate* Focus on “discovery” & offer challenges* Encourage staff to work together* It’s not about “doing IT right”* Practice transparency & enable radical trust* Continually encourage staff to “Play”* Consider rewards — they work and focus attention A great reminder from Dave Pollard which includes when not to use email:* To communicate bad news, complaints or criticism* When you are seeking information that is not simple and straight-forward* When you are seeking approval on something that is involved or controversial* When you’re sending a few people complicated instructions* When you are asking for comments on a long document* To request information from a group on a recurring basis* To convey instructions to a large number of people* To achieve consensus* To explore a subject or idea* To send news, interesting documents, links, policies, directory updates and other ‘FYI’ stuffHis comments are interesting and make me think about how much we do need F2F (face to face) communication in a number of situations, or at least telephone conversations. And how will our new social media tools help us with communication? Great post about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s library and it’s staff of 8. Talks about:* providing research services to CBC production (6500 questions in 2006)* keeping the CBC’s history back to the 1930′s (and therefore being the custodian of one of Canada’s key cultural assets!)* arranging site licenses for online resources* speical collection, 69 volumes, of material on the Royal Family* program schedules from 1939Lots of interesting comments on the post as well. Check it out. Talk about interaction with your viewers/readers — just had a look at the number of comments on the CBC‘s hockey site — Coach’s Corner. Just shows you how much social interaction a controversial, or strongly opinionated commentator can generate! Impressive. Have you tried Hakia? It’s web site say’s it’s “building the Web’s new meaning-based search engine with the sole purpose of improving search relevancy and interactivity …. The basic promise is to bring search results by meaning match — similar to the human brain’s cognitive skills — rather than by mere occurrence (or popularlity) of search terms.” Let me know how it works for you. Amanda Etches-Johnson started the panel discussion at OLA conference off with her three areas of trend focus:* RSS, especially browser integration of RSS with Firefox* Library Websites as the virtual branch: some libraries are now looking for virtual branch managers; some libraries are liberating their search tools so they can now be seen at the front page of the website; web development that is integrating social aspects, like the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) ; using WordPress for content management* Mindful use of social tools for outreach: mindfully being in the user space and being useful not spam (as the term for some organizations is used in MySpace & Facebook); blogs having a specific audience, focus and human voice engaging others in conversation. John Blyberg pointed to a map monitor on the net, and asked how we know when we are successful and where we fit into the networked map. He talked about open sourse, data, standards, spaces, dialogues, processes, minds, meetings, etc., and sang the praises of Linux. He talked about co-operation and the semantic web (web 3.0?) – publishing information with associated ontologies, or using a layer of artificial intelligence (AI) to publish data, built on open standards. His advice:* check your priorities* initiate contact* offer help* build your networks* do a gut check* co-operate and share Michael Stephens flashed the covers of recent magazines, Newsweek “Putting the We in Web” & Time making “You” the person of the year, to illustrate how mass collaboration is changing business. Continue reading Top Tech Trends Interesting to hear Scott Stirton, VP Strategy, Bank of Montreal (BMO) talk about what retail banking has learned * from fast food retail operations (CommerceBank in the US)* from the superstore concept of multiple lines of products (Wells Fargo in the US)* from discount retailers in the UK (HBOS)* from the retail franchise industry in Australia (ANZ Bank)Lots of tips for libraries and other organizations about cross-selling our products, exciting ways to generate foot traffic, setting up service level agreements with clients, utlizing secret shoppers, using “retailtainment” (jugglers, hot dog vendors), having happy employees for happy customers. I particularly liked CommerceBank’s principles of having a second approval to say “no”, their emphasis on keeping customer promises and focuses on problem resolution. As they say, “To err is human, to recover is divine.” |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Dysart & Jones - All Rights Reserved |
|||||
