Theoretical Job Description for the Librarian with a Laptop

In my last post, I mentioned the idea of a "Librarian with a Laptop," who goes out to coffeeshops and other co-working facilities and brings library services directly to patrons. Here's a pie-in-the-sky job description for such a role, too much for one person to handle but an idea of what might be:

Job Description: Digital Outreach and Training Librarian
a.k.a. "Librarian with a laptop"

Basic Function: Under direction of [an appropriate manager], to provide online and in-person training and outreach to staff and the public in the use of online library services and emerging technologies.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities:
1. Initiates, develops, plans and implements the Library's online services initiatives through personal consultations, onsite and offsite workshops, online and offline outreach, and other programs as developed.

2. Offers professional development to staff at centralized locations and at staff workplaces in emerging technologies, current databases, online outreach, and other subjects as determined by recognized need and staff surveys.

3. Trains and develops staff members to realize their potentials and use that developed potential to provide the best library service.

4. Attends public meetings around the city to present information about the library and offer tailored trainings to constituent groups (e.g., schools/PTOs, business/civic associations, cultural/immigrant organizations, etc.).

5. Maintains working relationships with educational institutions, social and community groups and businesses with regard to online library services. Facilitates cooperative efforts with these organizations to provide systematic service to larger constituent groups.

6. Writes training and promotional materials for city-wide library resources for distribution within library buildings and to promote city-wide library services in local business and organizations, including both print and online formats (blogs, RSS feeds, etc). Coordinates and encourages contributions by other staff to such publications.

7. Conducts and coordinates "Librarian Is In" sessions at local coffeeshops to reach prospective business and student patrons.

8. Travels to branch locations to provide direct training programs to the public on emerging technologies, current library resources and other subjects as determined by user surveys.

9. Recommends and/or plans changes in service and new services through the library digital portal.

10. Works with the Digital Services Manager to revise and update policy and procedural provisions affecting the delivery of online library services.

11. Responsible for oral presentations and written reports on assigned activities to senior management, trustees and other stakeholders.

12. Actively participates in system-wide committees, training and other professional activities.

13. Represents the Library on city-wide and state-wide committees, and at professional conferences.

14. Peforms other realted and/or comparable duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications:
1. A Bachelor's degree from a recognized college or university and an MLS from an ALA-accredited library school.

2. Five years of pertinent professional library experience.

3. Extensive knowledge of current library resources, practices and policies; substantial knowledge of library profession trends, theories and best practices; broad professional outlook.

4. Demonstrated interest in community and library work; demonstrated ability to use and teach searching via search engines and proprietary databases; demonstrated ability to work well with staff and public.

5. Demonstrated ability to assume responsibility and carry out assignments independently; proven oral and written communication skills, especially through electronic media; demonstrated knowledge of the techniques of programming and presentation; initiative, dependability, good judgment, tact and courtesy.

6. Flexibility and the willingness to learn and adapt; a commitment to professional development. Willingness to participate in professional activities and to expand on professional knowledge.

7. Proven ability to interpret and apply library policy; to analyze and solve problems; to generate new ideas; to organize and manage complex activities; and community relations.

A thoughtful return

Hello, all, and welcome back to the Eclectic Library. The very short reason for four months of silence? A lack of time and a lack of focus....I was too busy to keep up with my own professional reading and just didn't have very much to say.

Suffice it to say, with spring comes refreshed thinking. In particular, this post from Nate Hill over at Catch and Release about a Library Outpost service model stopped me short and lit a fire under me. After you've finished reading my post (;^), go and check out his.

Nate's idea was to create Library Outposts in places where people are already congregating -- near business centers, schools, apartment complexes, etc. These would be streamlined library buildings, with little to no print material but lots of space for computers and events. With this in mind, here’s another idea for you: From those library outposts, as well as traditional branches, librarians can make forays out into even more targeted areas of the community. Send a “Librarian With a Laptop” into coffeeshops and other places with free wifi to raise awareness of library resources among entrepreneurs and self-employed freelancers, researchers and writers. Set up in a corner of the space with a tabletop display promoting the library’s services, the nearest branch or Outpost location, and a few bullet points of what the library offers. The librarian can showcase database offerings and catalog functionality and help answer reference on the fly.

Think of these roving librarians as another tier on your service model, one even more focused on serving patrons as individuals rather than on the building as the primary resource. You might even use such forays as proof-of-concept for your Outposts, by sending the roving librarian in first to stimulate interest in the area you’re thinking of putting an Outpost later.

I'm not the first person to think of this, not by a long shot, but it's such an easily-implementable idea that I'm going to share my version of it with you. Also, it does seem to be an initiative coming more from academic libraries rather than publics, but we can serve so many more of our patrons remotely in this same way.

Next post, the job description for this Librarian With a Laptop, public-library style.

InfoClutter is Tamed!

All right, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the first presentation of my "Taming the Online InfoClutter" workshop was a rousing success. Six librarians joined me for two jam-packed hours of RSS feeds, organizing schema and discussions of generational differences (computer generations, that is!). I had a lovely time and thus far all the feedback has been outstanding.

As promised, the slides for the presentation are here. I used Google Docs Presentation software and found it to be an excellent basic presentation tool. No, it doesn't have the bells and whistles of PowerPoint, but the ability to pull up my slides anywhere I can get net makes it indispensible.

Also, use the infoclutter tag over on the right there to find everything I've written on this topic. I've linked to a number of articles on optimizing your RSS reader and finding ways to cut through the noise.

Now, on to Internet Librarian and finding some way to take 2 solid hours and pare it down to 13 minutes...yikes!

Still here, still busy

Yes, I have been remarkably busy over the past few weeks. And, as I mentioned previously, I prefer to write articles worth reading rather than spamming your feed readers with links.

You see the problem here, no?

I'm not sure how often I'll be able to post in the coming weeks, though things seem to be slowing down a bit. For now, I just have to share this with you:

A TED talk with Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Photosynth, an astounding new photo tool.
"Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar."

Link via Nicole over at What I Learned Today.

The possibilities for using this in a library setting are obvious and then some. First and foremost, this is the new Microtext platform. Forget the clunky readers or unprintable PDF images. This would have perfectly served a woman who asked for an entire issue of National Geographic (heavy on the photographs and she wanted to read multiple articles); with Photosynth she could view the whole issue from the convenience of her home computer, rather than have to be "happy" with a badly scanned printout.

Second, it makes image collections useful in a whole new way. Make all of your image collections available online and overlay Photosynth on them, and every image you have of the Mona Lisa -- regardless of the physical collection it's in -- is immediately accessible via a large image map surrounding the original image.

Third, far more mundanely, our intimidating Main Libraries can be showcased using a comprehensive virtual tour that reduces patron confusion, because Photosynth will take individual pictures and accurately translate them into a continuous panorama. Using an intuitive, analagous interface.

There are probably many more applications, but I haven't had my coffee yet and I've got to get the day on the move.

I can't quite say I wept at the beauty of this tool, but I came awfully close. Watch the video and ask yourself: how can you use this tool to help patrons of your library?

Playaways?

Reactive vs. proactive. And as the rate of change gets faster, we're pushed further and further into reactive modes.

What am I blathering on about? I just had a patron call asking about Playaways, a not-so-new digital audiobook format. She wanted to know if my library carried them; I'd never even heard of them before.

A little searching online made me feel only slightly better. Playaways have been out since 2005, and Illinois was the first library system to pilot the format (second paragraph from the bottom). OHIONET has a comprehensive FAQ about them for its member libraries, while the Rocky River (OH) Public Libraries and the Larchmont (NY) Public Library are offering them to patrons.

I'll cut myself some slack: I've only really been closely following tech trends since late last fall, so I would have missed much of the brouhaha about Playaways. And yet, if I can miss a new technology such as this, how many other less-savvy librarians out there have missed this and more?

Yes, professional development is much on my mind, for personally professional as well as generally professional reasons. I just gave that presentation that stressed that we need to be "...aware of as much of the rest as we can." So now, I live true to my own words.

So....Playaways. Very neat, very tidy, no moving parts and easy to circulate. Easy also to lose and break in a transit bag, but that's no reason not to have them for the same reasons that we have books on CD and even still on cassette. If you haven't already checked them out, give one a whirl and see if it'll fly at your library.

NEASIST Usability Mini-conference

In a previous post, I referred to a resistance to professional development on the part of my colleagues. Because I try really hard to act congruently with my words, I attended a local full-day conference on Website Usability during my vacation from "work." Hah.

NEASIS&T: Designing Usable Interfaces at MIT was worth it, though. Fun and fascinating thoughts on website usability, presented in digestible one-hour chunks. I'd heard of Steve Krug and Jennifer Tidwell before, but Holtzblatt was a happy surprise.

Karen Holtzblatt from inContext spoke about context-centered design. First of all, if you can have her speak at your organization, do it. She is a dynamic, focused speaker who spoke to the New Yorker in my soul and made me laugh out loud. A lot.

Context-centered design is most of what we think of as customer-centered design, with the added emphasis of observing the customers in their natural habitat. One of her main points was exactly that: User design supports or extends the user life practice. Figure out who your users are and what they are trying to achieve: "Design for the intent, not the use." Once you have the intent and purpose clear, the system you create to allow users to do that will spring from those starting principles.

Steve Krug spoke next, blending the concepts of his book Don't Make Me Think with the notion that usability testing is like dieting – we all know we need to do it, but we don't for all sorts of reasons. Usability testing might seem scary, but a streamlined process is remarkably easy to implement. He's currently writing a how-to book on bare-bones usability testing, meant to be done by anyone during the process of developing a site.

Last up was Jennifer Tidwell, author of Designing Interfaces. Where Holtzblatt and Krug focused on the process of usability testing and designing from the 30,000 ft view, Tidwell got into the nuts and bolts of using graphic design elements to make looking at and using a website easier for users. She discussed gestalt principles and preattentive visual features and their applications in site design. (Warning on that last link; big picture under the cut) A good dose of practical application after the slightly more theoretical presentations earlier.

After a short break, two of the three presenters came together in a panel discussion. The panel wasn't convened to discuss a particular topic, just to answer audience questions. While it was interesting, it was less focused than I could handle after a day of thinking.

It's a great day full of fun stuff I need to process. There's stuff here to apply to librarianship in general, not just site design. But that will be the next post.

Internet Librarian 2006, Day 1

[The one other post on my other professional blog. Again, saved for posterity.]

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Soon after I created this blog, my life took off in lots of unexpected ways. My apologies for the radio silence. I hope to correct that moving forward, with the initial goal of posting once a week.

For now, though, I'm going to use this space to semi-blog the Internet Librarian 2006 conference. I say "semi-blog" because the wifi at the conference center is a) not free, and b) of unknown cost (because you need to type in your card # before it gives you a price). So, I'll use the free wifi back at the hotel and do morning summaries.

Day 1: Preconference Workshops

"Project Management For Libraries" was exactly the cure for the past week of uncertainty. In September, I started a class at a local college in Project Management and was almost immediately overwhelmed by all the involved arithmetic. Had I had more time outside of class to work on learning this stuff, I might have made it. As it was, I dropped the class last week and felt awful. Today, I asked the presenter about all the bits that frustrated me, and she told me in no uncertain terms that "there was software for all that," and that my professional judgment meant more. Yay, rah!

I took four pages of detailed notes that all boils down to PLAN PLAN PLAN (pause) EXECUTE EXECUTE EXECUTE Celebrate! But the how of getting there made this three-hour workshop fly by.

"Creating an Online Tutorial In 30 Minutes" was equally useful, but could have been half as long. Greg Notess reminded me of a friend of mine -- down to some of the speech mannerisms -- and was lovely to listen to, but he rambled more than a bit. He used Camtasia as his demonstration software, but the rules and suggestions for screencasting were applicable across platforms.

The possible uses for screencasting in public libraries are nicely varied, from "How To Use Our Catalog/Databases" to "Internet Basics" to "How do I download audiobooks?" Screencasts won't replace the text descriptions, but they'll help less-savvy patrons to go through the process the first time. They may also help walk folks through a subject search across a number of resources (catalog - database - Web).

The other thing this workshop decided for me is that I need to have a Windows box of some form of my own. A nubmer of bits of software that do the things I want to do (project management & screencasting among others) seem to have Windows-only apps. I'm also more familiar and comfortable with a Windows environment for file management. I know the new Macs have Intel chips and might work for me, but we'll see how the cost bears out.

In the past day, I've done a bit of soul-searching as well, but it's not quite at a point where I can share with the class. I promise, you'll see it once I've figured it out. This post was getting a bit long, anyway.

On deck for today: social computing, web-based outreach, user-centered experience, staff tech competency and a vendor reception. But first, breakfast.

Internet Librarian 2006

Back in October, I attended Internet Librarian out in lovely Monterey, CA. It was a hoot, and I was asked by my institution to write up an article about what I heard and saw for the internal newsletter.

Internet Librarian 2006
Librarianship, as we know it, has shifted fundamentally. I won’t say “changed,” because the core of our work – providing professional & scholastic information, lifelong learning resources and recreational reading & activities – hasn’t changed. But there has been a seismic shift in how we provide those services. In October, I attended Internet Librarian, a conference now in its 10th year, to learn more about the increasing importance of online/digital library services.

The presentations I went to typically fell into one of two categories: ways to improve the public library’s presence in a digital/online environment; and tools and technologies that libraries are or could incorporate into their services.

Around the world, institutions are bringing "Library 2.0" to their communities. Moreover, these changes aren’t limited to libraries with piles of money and plenty of staff. The key is not resources, but attitude: making innovation, adaptation and change part of everyday work. These are libraries and librarians constantly looking for ways to improve service to all of their users – the ones who walk in the door and the ones who don’t. Mobile Services is reborn for the new era: rather than a bookmobile, we have the Internet, delivering library services to patrons around the world, free of charge, 24 hours a day.

One of the most inspirational things I heard at Internet Librarian was a job title: Digital Branch and Services Manager. A Digital Branch would start with our website and all of our electronic resources and then expand to push our presence further out into the online world, where our patrons are. Having a dedicated and supported Digital Branch would allows us to provide these services without overwhelming staff and would let us present a single, unified presence to the outside world. This is the kind of vision and commitment we need to have now.

What are these digital services? These are a few of the possibilities presented at the conference:

• a portal to invite patrons into our world of service, customizable to their needs
• all of our databases and electronic resources, prominently featured and widely publicized
• a user-friendly and interactive catalog, where patrons can enter reviews of materials and find things based on tags (user-created subject terms) and commonsense subject information
• blog-based book discussion groups for adults, teens and children
• instant-messaging (IM), text-messaging (SMS) and mobile reference, in addition to email and telephone reference
• new books featured on Flickr (a photo-hosting site), with direct links to the catalog for requests
• screencast tutorials on how to use our services
• interactive maps of all buildings, with virtual tours to make our main building less intimidating to new patrons
• Ecards for everyone, regardless of physical location, to have full access to our online services
• thematic booklists maintained on wikis, so that any librarian can update and annotate
  a reference blog
• a monthly podcast from the library, featuring department, division and branch heads highlighting what’s new & interesting
• entries written by staff on an official library blog
• articles written by staff in online publications
• an official presence in MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal and the other community-based blog sites
• classes, both online and in-person, on social computing technologies (e.g., blogs, wikis, Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, CiteULike, IM/chat, etc.)
• and ideas that haven’t been imagined yet

No library out there is doing all of this, but many libraries are doing at least some of it. There was far, far too much material for me to go into detail here, but I’ll provide a PDF of my notes (which also appear on my blog) to anyone who is interested.

In short, there is a wide digital world out there that our institution has barely begun to explore. Many individual librarians here are comfortable with and knowledgeable about this technology, and see the future path of public librarianship in it, but now the time has come for our library as a whole to become the library our users want and need us to be.