I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet

Don't know who "Lunch" is but I'm delighted that he "hearts" me. That's some graffiti I found down on Cannery Row earlier today and I couldn't resist the photo op. I also like to think that I have the potential to do some groundbreaking in my life & career - it's possible I already have, as we just experienced an earthquake here in Monterey, 5.something on the scale. Fascinating.

After dinner a few of us also wandered over to Monterey's weekly farmers' market, which is apparently famous for its...overpriced, faux cashmere scarves? However, I did have fun with one vendor, a funky young woman from LA. She was selling an aromatherapy product that resembles pretty tumbled stones but in a variety of lovely scents. I made a small purchase but told her I had to run back for a program. Her response was priceless: "Please don't tell me you're a LIBRARIAN." I believe her eyes also rolled. I responded in the affirmative. I assured her however that my job is fun, creative and everything I could ever want. She handed me my bag with a shake of the head and just said, "I'm sorry, but you do not look like a librarian."

In a certain sense, that's the point of this whole conference. Not a makeover of the physical appearance of librarians, but a rethinking, a rebirth of our presence, our image - a strong and earth-shaking attempt to NOT "look like librarians," at least not on our Web sites. We can be what we want to be and more importantly, what our communities and users want and need us to be.

Finally, late this morning, the clouds broke and the fabled California sun broke through the gloom. Immediately, one sensed ants in the pants of even the most dedicated resident of Virtual Reality - everyone needed some Real Reality, especially a reality that involved salty sea air and the soothing sounds of waves on the beach. And the manic barking of sea lions.

I took my sunshine break in late morning, after Joe Janes’ keynote, which was funny and insightful, as Janes always is, but was also a rehash of some themes I’d heard him speak on last May at a symposium in Oakbrook, IL. Nothing wrong with that, though - and everybody needs a refresher course in creative thinking about one’s own profession.Janes pulls no punches in telling librarians that the fastest route to extinction is to professional stagnation - digging in our heels and clinging to the remnants of “traditional librarianship” when our patrons and communities are asking us to move along and stay relevant.

I thought one of the best speakers I heard and saw on Monday was Erica Reynolds, Web Content Manager from the Johnson County library. She was talking about how difficult it is to find inspiration for a library Web site redesign (Amen to that, sister!). An earlier speaker, Jeff Wisniewski, also told us that a really bad way to find inspiration for your library Web site was to...look at other library Web sites. Ouch. A mistake that me and my coworkers have made many, many times. But what Jones said she and her Web redesign team did in order to stoke the flames of their collective creativity was to visit an art museum. With that thought in mind, I headed out from the dark and enclosed confines of the conference rooms and out into the streets and piers of Monterey.

I had already felt inspired by my visit, on Sunday afternoon, to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The restful beauty of the sea life and the intelligently designed exhibits, the interactivity and the presence of happy, curious people of all ages not only provided entertainment, but got me thinking about work as well. In fact, I found myself emailing ideas to myself as I walked around! (I tend to do this a lot. It annoys my family and friends, but they’re getting used to it.) Today I gave myself time to walk down Fisherman’s Wharf and then took the Monterey Recreation Trail to Cannery Row, a landmark historic area made famous by the great American writer John Steinbeck. I won’t bore you with my train of thought as I walked, but there’s nothing better for clearing the cobwebs out of one’s brain than a gentle walk, free from the obligations of conversation, free from sound other than seagull and sea lion. I find California inspiring even when the ground isn't shaking, even when I'm not in a hotel banquet room listening to a Web guru of some kind. The scenery is amazing, the marriage of earth and sky, shore and sea. But there's this crazy creativity on the streets, in the galleries, the beaches and museums. Outside of the hotel today, there was a vintage car show with 50s music blasting in the courtyard, the farmers' market, people biking and jogging, sailing and whale watching.Everyone and every thing here seems very, very "green" - even tonight, at our "Gadgets, Gadgets and Gaming!" session, there was a tremendous emphasis on green uses of techology and every one of them got a huge round of applause.

Right now I want to focus on tonight's showcase - after the rousing introduction to gadgets, we're being visited by the Shanachie Tour, 3 Dutch librarians who have been travelling across America making a video documentary of great libraries while on their way here to Internet Librarian. They are fun, they are way cooler than us (we have to admit that) and I'm having a blast listening to them and watching clips of their journey. More soon. Back to ORD via LAX tomorrow.

It's a beautiful day - don't let it get away

Thanks to my coworker Bob Blanchard for posting his "virtual iPod" playlist. "Beautiful Day" is a great song by U2, one of my favorite bands. It's also the perfect description for the weather that finally broke through the clouds and gloom mid-morning, so I will have the song in my head all day for sure.

The Internet Librarians awakened to grey skies and fog hanging over the bay, so everyone pressed on and made it back to Conference Land, fueled by free coffee. The sun graced us with its presence right around the end of this morning's keynote. Today's keynote speaker was Joe Janes, always delightfully off-color, aware and courageous. Courageous because it's not always easy to confront a group of people with the concept that if they don't shape up, innovate and stay relevant, extinction is inevitable. Librarians have an unpleasant tendency to cling oh-so-tightly to the past. Not that we shouldn't respect the longstanding tradition of librarianship - but you can appreciate the Rosetta Stone while preferring and using Google, if you know what I'm saying.

That reminds me - Bob Blanchard also asked, "What is Web 2.0? Library 2.0?" Bad assumption on my part that such library-tech jargon would be meaningful to most people. Brief history lesson: the Internet, the actual network of world-wide computers that can communicate with each other, has been around since the 1960s. It was developed for military usage, to prevent communication breakdown in the event of war, disaster, etc. Not long after, scientists and researchers realized this world-wide network held much promise for them as well, allowing research facilities to share information quickly. Researchers often do their work on university and college campuses, so then those educational facilities got into Internet development too and brought sophisticated tech-geeks along for the ride. Suddenly it was the 1990s, and Tim Berners-Lee and some Swiss physicists created hypertext mark-up language and the World Wide Web and - welcome to the free-for-all. That is the "Internet" as most people know it, the dot.coms, Amazon, eBay, CNN, Wal-Mart online. That is what we now think of as Web 1.0 - the earliest version of the WWW. Web 2.0 resides on the trails we've been blazing in the last few years, not just spaces for getting information and buying stuff, but online interaction and participation. It's YouTube, blogs, Wikipedia, Flickr, and countless numbers of creative online services and applications - many, even most of them, Open Source and free of charge. The conference I am attending, Internet Librarian, is subtitled "Info Pros, Library Communities & Web Tools." In other words, it's a conference to connect information professionals (librarians) with these new Web 2.0 tools in order to better serve their library communities. Web 2.0 will help libraries stay relevant. People in contemporary society want to be more involved with information, they want to contribute to the body of knowledge, they want to share their opinions and expertise. Libraries that continue to function as sacred temples of knowlege where the unworthy come to be enlightened by the genius of librarians are, as Joe Janes suggests, heading dangerously into obsolete-ville. Definitely not where DPPL wants to be, so I'm so grateful and enthused about the opportunities I have, as Web Services Librarian, to bring a new level of interactivity, usefulness and fun to our library patrons.

And that's why I'm here. I have more to tell you, but it's time to get back to the sessions, specifically workshops on creating employee tech training programs and doing screencasting and podcasting on a small budget. I'm having such a great time here, but I really can't wait to get back to work and start using what I'm learning.

Internet Librarians Take to the Streets!

At least that's how it seems - look how quiet it is here at the Monterey Conference Center now. Just myself and two guys, furiously typing on our laptops. I am not a complete wallflower/
couch potato, however - I have just returned from a warm and convivial dinner with some new acquaintances, including our library system director, Sarah Ann Long, and my dining companions proved me wrong on the "Librarians are anti-social" theory. In fact, one of my fellow Illinois librarians, Karen Kleckner of the Deerfield Public Library, made the same observation I made earlier: these Internet Librarians seem particularly clammed up. Too much virtual reality, methinks - maybe some kind of "Hugs for Librarians" movement is in order. Earlier this evening there was a reception when the exhibit hall opened, and while there I met some librarians who actually wanted to talk to someone without using an electronic gadget! I met librarians from Waco, TX, a corporate librarian who works in biotech, and a systems librarian at the Defense Language Institute right here in Monterey. Many vendors are giving away iPod nanos, so I expect the exhibit hall to be a lively place for the rest of the conference, even when the wine and cheese have stopped flowing.

The day began with a keynote address from Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. If you don't know Lee and his work, but you have an interest in how people are using technology on a day-to-day basis, check out www.pewinternet.org. Pew (nothing to do with church pews, btw) is an independent, objective, non-profit organization dedicated to research on how people use technology. Maybe that doesn't sound important, but it's tremendously valuable. Consulting the type of statistics that Pew Internet & Family Life generates allows libraries to understand their communities and plan online/electronic services that are valuable and meaningful to people. Rainie's keynote was the kind of information explosion that I love - fast-paced, funny, and nothing but factoid piled upon factoid. I also appreciated his balanced and sensible view of technology - he acknowledges the habits of the "omnivores," those young, techie guys whose lives are dominated by gadgets and applications, but also reminds his audience of those folks who feel harassed by technology and use it only reluctantly, and even those who prefer older media - the people for whom a good quality TV, no cable, is just fine. Since much of the rest of this conference is devoted to the movers and shakers in technology, the early adopters who have 57 new Web 2.0 features on their Facebook pages, it was good to start with an overview of all kinds of users - and non-users. If you're reading this, rest assured, you are not a non-user.)

Rainie also referred to the new digital, technology-driven world as an ecosystem - multimedia gadgets are ubiquitous, "the Internet" is now synonymous with the computer (remember when we used to use computers without being online?), and users are now content creators as well. Large percentages of users are sharing photos, making movies and writing blogs. Rainie went on to describe his user typology with "omnivores" at one end of the scale (8% of Internet users) and unconnected non-users at the other end of the scale (twice as many as "omnivores" at about 15%). For libraries, where meeting the needs of our diverse population is so very important, the challenge arrives as we attempt to provide services for every part of the Internet user spectrum. I think we're up for it.

The rest of my day was filled with presentations on marketing and Web site design. The latter was a focus of mine when I decided to attend this conference, since we are in the beginning stages of a total Web site redesign at DPPL. I now feel more inspired - and more confused. One of the speakers this afternoon shattered many of the long-standing rules about Web design but upheld others, and got me thinking that we need to rethink our redesign before we get too committed to one idea. Yet other speakers seemed to reinforce what I already knew and believed. When it comes to Web sites, one size does not fit all. Nevertheless, judging from the amount of notes I've been taking, I'll be returning to Des Plaines with plenty of ideas and inspiration for Web services, so keep your eyes on www.dppl.org!

I'll check in again soon - oh, and thanks to my colleague Sara McLaughlin for catching a typo in one of these posts. When I'm writing on the fly it's hard to stay focused on the details. (I have, however, noticed typos in every single Powerpoint presentation I've seen today - tsk tsk!) And in case you're feeling envious that I am in California, it was warmer in Des Plaines today than it was in Monterey, and we were under thick cloud cover most of the day. Just as well, as it made the seaside seem bleak and uninviting, keeping our minds on wikis and RSS and the acronym-stuffed world of the Internet. Want to know something about the Internet Librarian conference? Drop me a note.