Also available, are travel and lodging tips. We’ve secured a conference block in the nearby Doubletree, so be sure to check out the details on the camp wiki (Thanks to Amanda Etches-Johnson for setting it up). Be sure to put your name down for a lightning talk or birds of a feather session if you’re so inclined. We have three distinct spaces available for the camp–an auditorium, a conference room, and a technology center and we’re planning a combination of lightning talks, group discussion, and workshop-ing throughout the day. We’ll also provide several tours for those who want to spend a little time getting to know our new building.

If you’re not going to make it in person but still want to join in on the event, we will plan on Ustreaming at least two of the rooms all day and keeping the chat rooms and twitter up for questions and back-channel discussion (#drupal4lib).

See you on the 27th!

Fait accompli.

Our Surface arrived this week.  We’ve been talking about it internally for awhile as a theoretical purchase.  Now it’s a reality.  It’s already made Microsoft’s Surface Blog, too!  It’s actually surprisingly easy to get one.  I thought we’d have to jump through hoops, sign NDAs, and give up our first-borns.  Not so.

So what are we going to do with it?  We’re giving it to the kids.  We have a perfect little niche in the Children’s Room that was literally designed with power and data in the floor to accommodate surface computing.  Yes that’s right.  Designed for the Surface.

We decided to put it in the Children’s Room for several very basic reasons.  Kids will just “get it” immediately without any explanation.  Kids are tactile creatures who are very comfortable with hands-on activity.  If we can give them a piece of really cool technology they’ve never seen before and invite them to literally put their hands on it, I have no doubt they will not only be impressed, but empowered as well.  They’re not going to ask silly questions like, “why would you put one of these in a library”, because they intuitively know why.

By the way, you clean it with a mild dish-soap solution.

Details!

We’ve purchased the SDK (software development kit) as well.  When the dust settles from our move, we will certainly begin exploring some of the myriad possibilities.  I can already think of a number of ways to build interesting applications on top of Locum and Insurge.  We were all musing this morning about how cool it would be if we tagged certain picture books so that when they were placed on the Surface, a video-recording of a story-time with that book would pop up.  As far as I can tell, the Surface SDK takes advantage of Silverlight, so it should be fairly simple to quickly develop attractive and fun applications.

There are challenges.  I had always assumed that interaction between the Surface and physical objects was RFID-based.  That would have been perfect.  Instead, the Surface uses proprietary tags that look to be something akin to semacode in ultra-violet ink.  We’ll look in to getting some, but I doubt we’ll be getting B&T to process our books with them any time soon!

We would like to eventually put a Surface in our Teen Room and then Reference.  I’ve liked the whole Surface concept from the onset.  I think that anytime technology and physical space can be mashed up in a natural, intuitive way, a whole new realm of posibility opens up.  A platform like the Surface extends our horizon of influence.  It’s also freaking cool.  We’ll keep you posted!

Anyone else?  Koha?  Evergreen?

Announcement on TheSocialOPAC.net

It turns out that Louise Berry, our director, was interviewed months ago for the article and thought it was probably abandoned. Not so, and it’s quite good. It begins:

WHEN residents of Darien, Conn., walk into their new library sometime in 2009, they will be able to read a book or magazine while sipping coffee in a cafe that spills out to the sidewalk. They will find books grouped by subject, as they are in bookstores, instead of according to the Dewey Decimal System. They will lounge in overstuffed chairs, peruse DVDs in a Blockbuster-style video section, write a report on a wireless computer or print one on a color copier, and bind a proposal in the building’s small business center.

And I love this:

“Libraries see their roles as much more of a cultural gathering place where people come together, kind of like the salons of the French and Victorian coffee houses,” said Darien’s library director, Louise Berry.

Other Connecticut library directors were interviewed as well: Maxine Bleiweis (Westport), Pat Holloway (West Hartford), and Kathy Leeds (Wilton). Connecticut is really a nexus of library change–an observation I made when coming to speak at Quinnipiac for the Connecticut Library Consortium in October, 2006. The librarians here do not lack for passion and energy and it shows.

But I think the article is good because it doesn’t take the familiar “oh, look what the cute libraries are doing” tone. It also reinforces what I’ve been thinking all along–libraries are not just about content. We need to be focusing on the library experience. In fact, content is going to become a tertiary component of what we do. Instead, we will be become enablers and collaborative partners with our public. A strong focus on the community is key to that vision. Not just reactive care and customer service, but a proactive approach to enriching the lives of the citizens around us. If you look at where the houses and hotels are on the game board, this is the real estate that Google and Amazon cannot touch. As Maxine Bleiweis says, “Human contact has gradually gone away. You add the isolation of the suburbs and you’ve really got a situation where people need to come together. One of the most natural places is the library.” If I could get our users to associate any two words, they would be “home” and “library.”

And if you want to watch the progress of the New Darien Library (you know you do!), click on the image above to see our construction site web-cam.

Attendance at Library Camp NYC was quite large (100+ people!) which certainly tested the open spaces concept. The 14th floor of Baruch’s vertical campus building was well equipped to handle the crowd, however, and a number of really great sessions were spawned. The only drawback of the unconference format, I’ve found, is that I always find myself wanting to be in two or three places at once. You can take a look at how the final program evolved on the event wiki.

During the first session, I attended ‘Library 2.0 show and tell‘ which focused a lot on wikis and some other specific technologies. The group also touched on topics such as how to get staff/patrons to buy-in to new services. I also attended a session led by OCLC’s Eric Hellman on their grid services concept (xISBN, etc). I think I enjoyed the final session the most, however, which was a discussion about cataloging and Weinberger‘s Everything is Miscellaneous.

A great day, and I’m sure we’ll see more library camps in the future.

Oddly enough, given my personal feelings on the matters in question, I found myself not taking offense to any of it, nor am I particularly bothered by it, so naturally I needed to examine that a bit further.

It helps that his points are, by-and-large, valid when considered from within his frame-of-reference. And despite his very pronounced colloquy that seems to drive people mad, he is a concerned citizen with some legitimate beefs. But it’s two recent posts of his that betray his misunderstanding of our 2.0 world and his subsequent strategy for coping with it. The Siren Song of the Internet, parts I and II make it clear that he’s misinterpreting the music. His biggest mistake is to assume that the flow of information through the Net is a zero-sum game and that there should be a procedural framework imposed upon it. You might just as easily catch the wind in a bag and to expect such from the internet will leave you in perpetual disappointment. Which is obviously where Gorman is currently mired. He thinks it is the sirens’ song we’re hearing. But it’s not. (Incidentally, I always thought that the wind-bag setback was simply a matter of poor, untransparent management on the part of Ulysses)

It’s more likely we’re hearing a song like that sung “beyond the genius of the sea” in Wallace Steven’s “Idea of Order at Key West.” It’s a poem that can never be explained, only understood. It defies logical examination, but conveys far more than the sum of its words in a clarity that is either grasped, or not. The metaphor is much more relevant here:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

There is no permanence online, there is little to no authority online, there are no borders online, there are fewer inhibitions online. “Online” has overwhelmed convention like a rising tide over a sand castle, it confounds giants like the RIAA and MPAA while simultaneously turning tiny David voices into Goliath ones. There is no pushing back against it. If information was a physical object, the internet would be a black hole of matter so densely packed that the laws of physics become irrelevant. So too are Gorman’s machinations, valid as they may be. They don’t apply, never will. We’re in a place where Apples can sometimes taste like pomegranates, where the down escalator often goes up.

But it’s not all naked chaos. There is a self-governing pattern of information exchange that arranges itself fractally into representations of a much larger truth. Sometimes we just need to back off and look at it from thirty-thousand feet before it reveals itself. But these are not truths that we can cite in scholarly papers or use as a basis for proof of anything. Ultimately they’re truths about the nature of humanity that present themselves for only a brief moment before they dissolve into another . Because the vehicle upon which all this has evolved is science-based technology, Gorman assumes its payload should, too, conform to the same laws.

Even though it’s not appropriate, his response to this nebulous new world is that of Ulysses’–tell his crew to put wax in their ears and lash him to the mast. So it’s no surprise to me that many of us (who he mistakenly thinks of as harpies) are really just sitting on the shore, listening to some really great music, sipping mai tais and casually wondering, “what the fuck is going on in that boat?”

Andrew Dubber emailed me today about a female duo in New Zealand who recently released this video:

A great video, but I’m biased, of course. What I’m really intrigued with, however, is Dubber’s thoughts on connecting libraries with marketing initiatives. I think he’s really on to something here. He knows his marketing, and like any good marketer is a true pragmatist and pragmatism often leads to good ideas:

I bet if you offered free downloads of the music through library websites, did a Libraries tour or something similar, BoingBoing would find that noteworthy.

When was the last time your library was linked-to from BoingBoing? Instinctively, I like this kind of out-of-the-box thinking. I obvioulsy don’t want to see libraries go down the “this book is brought to you by” route, but it’s clear to me that marketing departments are the places that can “make it happen” in most companies. So if we can work with them and not be so terrified of their agenda, we stand to benefit tremendously. How great would it be if we could be the venue for focus groups, screeners, performances, and the like. The traditional model consists of us seeking programming opportunities from the community while only occasionally being approached. Judiciously leveraging the power of corporate marketing could potentially fill our events schedule. More importantly, it pushes free content out to our users who really don’t care where it comes from.

The hows, whats, and whos are the details that need attention, obviously, but I’m certainly not recoiling from this idea.

I’ve been meaning to pen a little something about David King‘s “rant” in response to one of his Computer in Libraries experiences. He writes:

First, I asked if attendees had learned something innovative or new at the conference that they’d like to take back to their libraries. Almost everyone raised their hands. Then I followed up with this question: how many will take that cool, innovative idea back to their libraries, and hit a brick wall with administrators when they try to implement that idea.

ALMOST EVERYONE RAISED THEIR HANDS.

This is not good.

Why? Well, during my Q&A time at the end of the session, the whys started coming out. Techie librarians are discouraged. Many have administrators and/or managers who don’t want to change, who refuse to learn new technology and who refuse to implement new ideas.

True enough. The world has it’s share of myopic administrators. This is certainly not unique to libraries, though. In fact, in the words of someone I respect greatly, if you haven’t experienced working under an asshole, you’re just lucky. David King isn’t necessarily talking about assholes, but you might very well be one if you dismiss the recommendations and suggestions of your motivated, talented, and bright tech librarians. Either that, or you’re too busy playing the game to remember why you’re playing it. There are several reasons why administrators buck original ideas.

Primarily, new ideas represent change and change equals risk. Many people in middle and upper management know that risk translates into a higher possibility of failure. After putting in all those years of getting to that position, who wants to fail and be bumped off (or worse, down)? A management position in an organization represents a major career goal to many people and all too often, people have followed the time-tested formula to get there: keep your head down, tamp down on the risk, maximize “success.” Success, in this case, would be the routine, long-term maintenance of the status quo. Seriously, it works great–as long as you’re working for that king of institution.

Some people also just don’t like to step out of their comfort zone. They don’t want to absorb new things. I was on a top technology trends panel at OLA last January when someone asked, “what if we don’t want to learn about all these new technologies?” (paraphrase). I don’t think I was in the mood for hand-holding because my answer was, “it’s your job.” Really. I don’t believe libraries are life support systems for staff. We need to work for our bread. That means that we have so stop bunting and try to knock it out of the park every single time. That takes passion, and too many people in every industry, including libraries, lack it.

I think that Dave should have followed up his question with, “How many of you are going ahead with implementing your ideas anyway?” Those are the people I want to work with. If you love what you’re doing, then do it. Don’t let someone else’s tunnel vision dictate what you accomplish in your lifetime. I had breakfast with Sean Robinson (ACPL) and chuckled about the fact that we both routinely would code well into the witching hour (which may explain some of the “idiosyncrasies” in SOPAC). The point being that, there was never enough time in the day to do what we loved, so we did it when we could.

I’m reminded of a great quote from Steven Pressfield’s War of Art:

I’m keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what is important first.

If you raised your hand at David’s talk, chances are your boss doesn’t know the difference.

Naturally, you’ve got to bang up against the red tape, cover your behind, and remain within your sphere of authority. If you’re sharp enough to have a great idea, however, chances are you’re sharp enough to figure out a way to get some traction behind it.

Having come to the library world from a horrifically inbred engineering firm (and I’m talking afternoon-on-the-Chatooga, Deliverance inbred), I can tell you with all certainty that this is not a problem specific to libraries. There is one thing that is more prevalent in libraries, however, and that’s a pervasive culture of entitlement. Whether it’s the expectation that you’ll never have to step out of your comfort zone, that you’ll be able to settle in to a nice quiet career, or even that you have the right to have your great ideas met with ebullience. So, in the final analysis, I have a little sympathy for this particular plight, but it’s not keeping me awake at night–that would be the work I love.

“Our chefs and managers cook and run restaurants as if the word of mouth spread by each and every guest today will determine how full — or empty — our restaurants will be tomorrow. We work hard to hire people whose emotional skills — even more than how they can cook or serve wine — make them predisposed to deriving pleasure from the act of delivering pleasure. Long after our guests have forgotten how much they did or didn’t like the turbot or the lamb shank, they’ll remember how we made them feel.”
- Danny Meyer, WSJ, 3Oct3006

I’m not sure I can add more more to that. How does your library determine who it hires? Conversely, if someone is let go, is it because of a mistake, or lack of passion?

Before you do anything, fill your library with workers who can’t bear to think about doing anything else. Be one of those people.

I was at the doctors office the other day and while I was in the waiting room, I was half-heartedly watching the TV in the corner–the Ellen DeGeneres Show. I wasn’t paying much attention. The sound was off and closed-captioning was scrolling by on the screen. Then I noticed she now has a segment on viral video–selections plucked from the tamest of the tame (dogs doing flips, or some shit). Then I thought about the idiots down in Texas who filmed themselves as they coerced a two and five year-old to smoke marijuana–a video that is in wide circulation both online and in the news (I refuse to link to it).

It’s an entirely new flavor of discourse when video of children being abused like this percolates into our consciousness.

The debate over whether the video should have been released in the first place is, by and large, a journalistic one (and I’m not so sure there is any debate to speak of anyway). Libraries have, however, along with journalists championed the open, transparent flow of information and media. So, perhaps we need to accept the horrifying along with the bizarre, intelligent, and the hilarious. If that’s the case then are we completely divorcing ourselves from content and grafting ourselves to a new model of distribution?

I’m not sure how to answer that, nor do I really know how to answer the question, What does it mean for us? Well, first, I think the job of disseminating and housing the data is taken care of as well as it possibly could be. So what remains? In this feedback loop of viral content and network effects, are there needs being left unattended, are there gaps in the experience where libraries can reside? There are some practical changes to be made, for sure.

The blog, Picturephoning, came onto my radar several weeks ago and since then it’s been holding my attention firmly. Not because of the videos it links to, but because the stories it covers begin, over time, to reveal some very interesting characteristics of this new media and, thus, the profound implications they have for our society and media. The stories range from the superficially humorous to the horrific. All reported with stark impartiality. It’s a gem of a site if what you’re after is a pulse to put your finger on.

It’s from there that I was referred to the Mail & Guardian online who, with their new service, The News in Photos, have begun to actively solicit photos from their readers. Their reasoning?

“This is our most visible step so far to embracing audience participation in the news,” says Vincent Maher, the newly appointed digital media strategist at the Mail & Guardian Online.

“As the power to crystallise reality shifts away from traditional media towards social construction by users of the Web, our role as a media company is shifting from one as a provider to one as a facilitator,”

Bingo. Shifting from provider to facilitator. I mentioned that there were some practical things we can do if we choose to participate in this media, and this is it right here.

I’ve written before that no matter how fabulous our collections are, they will ultimately be unremarkable. Our capacity to allow our users to engage in this new media is what will cement our position as a vital community resource, going forward.

That means many things, like providing the equipment and expertise to let them participate. But it also means, somehow, providing a sense of appropriateness and propriety that befits our institutions and the dignity of the human condition.

I realize that a statement like that flies in the face of library neutrality, but I do feel that we have a responsibility to not just connect our users to this new layer of content, but to also advise them in their endeavors so that they can produce content that is significantly richer than average. We also need to be prepared to stand by them when we will be, inevitably, called to account for what they do.

Late October, I also spoke about the “Semantic Library” at a Connecticut Library Consortium symposium.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled upon this gem:

(link)

via Seth Godin (and Alan Gray).