Gorilla Librarian

My dream employers! I want them to hire me.






I'm only a cavewoman, not a gorilla. But I think I have some skills that would translate.

Oh Oh -- October Means 2.0

It's that time of year again. October is the month when the Big Chiefs of Library get together for the Library 2.0 Worldwide Virtual Conference .

I always miss this virtual meeting, because I am stuck here at work in my brick and mortar library, dealing with flesh and blood patrons. But I can watch the conference sessions after the fact. The conference people post recordings afterwards, and you can find those here.

There are so many good sessions to choose from! I would like to sit in my cave--er--cubicle, all day and watch these!

These are the conference sessions I want to see:

Embedding library services and information literacy: Successful online library liaison for TAFE (Technical and Further Education) students in Australia.

Setting Priorities in Libraries: Focusing on the Transformation

You are not a robot: Edmonton Public Library’s approach to digital literacy, digital interview, and flexible co-learning for library staff and customer

Toward a Sustainable Embedded Librarian Program

Taking Access to the User Online

Scanned publications in digital libraries: new Open Source DjVu tools

Training Classroom Faculty to teach Information Literacy

23 Things: The Next Generation

Digital Copyright

Leadership and Career Success for the 21st Century Information Professional

Campaigning for a Library Job: Maximizing Professional Development Opportunities to Differentiate Yourself From Other Applicants

Building Online Special Mini Collections for the Bryant & Stratton College Virtual Library

Creating and Using Webinars to Reach Distance Learners

Critical Perspectives on Social Media: A New Educational Role for Librarians?

Social Media for Scholars

Moving Beyond the Traditional One-Shot Library Instruction Session

Online Embedded Academic Librarians: accessing the student's library needs in the online classroom

Getting By With Google?

Free Online Conferencing Tools for Outreach & Instruction

Social Media Trifecta

Information Literacy in a Digital Culture: the Hierarchy has Toppled

Online Book Groups in School and Public Libraries

  

Social Media Narrowcasting

Good Leaders: More Important Than Ever - But How Do We Get Them Ready???

Sensible Shoes on the Ground: Embedding in an Undergraduate Research Experience

Web resources: Getting the most for your money

Effectively Curating a Pinterest Account for Academic Libraries

Citing Sources in a 2.0 World

Delivering 24/7 Library Services from an 8/5 Library Facility

The Triumphs and Tribulations of a Web Scale Discovery Implementation

Guide on the Side : Easy Tutorial Creation for Busy Librarians

Telling Your Advocacy Story with Digital Tools

Best practices in University Embedded Librarian work

Who is the Distance Learning Librarian? Exploring Job Announcements to Understand Evolving Professional Roles

Research on the Go! Preparing Libraries to be Mobile Friendly

Web 2.0 in the Library for Embedded Librarianship

Searching the Web: Information Literacy Tips, Tricks, and Strategies for Educators

 Online Vs Face to Face Information Literacy Instruction

Librarian Crap I Gotta Do Before the Snow Flies

My to-do list for October:

Write report of continuing education classes I attended at MCMLA to present to Grant Award Committee.

I took a class on non-delivery and another on making better presentations. Very helpful information to a cavewoman. Learned that I really am going to have to ditch the club once and for all. It intimidates patrons. And it does not make a very good pointer when I'm showing slides.

Speaking of the MCMLA Conference....

Review notes and wrote blog post about what I learned, so that I can remember what I learned, which I don't remember right now.

Write 300 word essay for application for ACRL Scholarship to take online course on embedded librarianship.

Ah, what's the hurry. I still have two more days until the deadline.

Review six papers that have been submitted for the ACC-RAC conference. 

Snooze.....

Sharpen tools

That is, try out nifty new online tools I read about on someone's blog and see if I can add them to my toolkit.

Create new Tumblr so I can call myself a Tumblrarian.

New Tools for Librarians - Not the Sharp Kind

I totally stole this from the Hack Library School website. There is a Library School named Hack?

It is a big-ass list of tools, and if there is one thing I like, it's a good tool. Before the Freeze, when I was still roaming the younger Earth as a cave humanoid, my people relied on many tools to survive in a harsh landscape riddled with steaming tar pits and blood-fanged beasts. So I know all about the value of a good tool that can save you from having to use your teeth. You don't have to tell me.

So here, copied and pasted directly from the librarian hacks are tools I wanna try:

Online collaboration and presentation tools (slides, videos, etc.)

• SlideRocket:A presentation tool that also includes interactive features like polls for the audience. (Note: free version available for students.)
• Prezi: I think many people have heard of Prezi, the zooming presentation tool that offers a dynamic variation of the slideshow. Some people experience vertigo with the more extreme zooming, though, so use with caution! The site provides more features for users who sign up with a school email account (ending in .edu).
• Storybird: For the visually-oriented, Storybird provides lots of illustrations that you can use to create a presentation or a story. This site is particularly wonderful for storytelling classes and other youth-oriented presentations.
• PBworks (wiki): This site allows you to create wiki workspaces for collaborative building of content on webpages. I used the site with a group last fall to build a site of information about the technology we used to communicate and construct our group presentation over the course of the semester: MLIS Tech Toolkit (includes some other online tools like QR code generators and faux-Facebook wall pages). All of the student groups in my program also use this site as a communication tool to post meeting minutes, draft letters, plan projects, and otherwise share information.
• Piktochart: This site offers templates for creating infographics.
• Mindomo: Mindomo is a concept mapping tool that helps you visualize connections between ideas. It is useful as a planning tool for group projects and can also double as a presentation platform. You can see the concept map my group created while putting together a presentation on technology and libraries: Technology Presentation.
• Google Drive and Google Sites: Google of course has many tools for communication and other things. I’ve used Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) to write papers and make slideshows collaboratively with classmates. Google Sites allows you to build simple websites quickly.
• WordPress: Though primarily a blogging platform, WordPress also has templates that make for good multipage websites.

Live communication and social media

• TodaysMeet: This site allows you to create backchannel chat rooms that you can use in various contexts to allow people to carry on a conversation during an event (like a presentation, a class lecture, a workshop, etc.).
• Poll Everywhere: This site offers real-time polling via text message, tweeting, and online web interface. You can set up a poll that updates in real time on a projected screen to show audience feedback, for example.
• Storify: There a number of these second-order types of social media sites that help repackage social media feeds.

Library-oriented sites

• Library Thing: Library Thing allows you to build collections of books, essentially creating a catalog that also has social media features (ability to connect with other users/collections and to access reviews across the site). We briefly looked at this site in a class to talk about the interface between traditional catalog metadata and social media tagging.
• Omeka: Omeka allows users to create digital collections and provides substantive metadata features for organizing digital objects and making them accessible.

Open Library: This site aims to be a universal library catalog with a page of information for every book ever published.

Thanks again to the Hack Library School for these. Very smart and helpful people. Though if you ask me, they really ought to change their name.

Screencast-O-matic is good. Make good screencasts. I like.

It's taken awhile, but I finally found a screencasting program I like. I was gonna use Jing, but they discontinued Jing Pro, and basic Jing didn't have enough editing tools. So then I was gonna use Screenr, but I could never get the screen recorder to launch. I tried many, many times on my work computer and my laptop, and it just spun there, never loading. A promise that never delivered, like some cavemen I knew back when there were cavemen. 

So I gave Screencast-O-matic a shot, and so far I'm happy with it. The screen recorder opened right away and before you knew it I was recording. I decided to get the pro version cuz it has editing tools ---change the speed, zoom and pan, add overlays, animations, transitions, fade in and fade out, add text, add call-outs, add images and audio ---and only costs $15 a year. Which in your world is what they call chump change.

I liked that Screencast-O-matic had little videos on its website showing me how to use the editing tools. That way I could see what the editing tools could do before I decided whether or not to go pro. I also like that the edit tools give you the option of sizing your video for YouTube. And whether you use the free version or pro, you can publish directly to YouTube, or to a MP4, AVI or FLV file.

I'm completely new to screencasting and to adding animation and call-outs and all, but Screencast-O-matic is pretty easy to use and I'm learning quickly. Even for a cave-woman. I recommend it.

Viable E-book Options for Libraries

I am cavewoman librarian. I being always confusion. Talking the books and e-books. Confusion.  Make me raise armpit hairs to my sky and say, "What happened to the tablets?" I mean the stone kind, not the shiny black kind that have spirits living inside them.

The spirit tablets have gods of many names. Ipad. Nook. Kindle Fire. But the Kindle Fire is a weak god. It has no real fire.

Major librarians say people read these spirit tablets, read e-books. They say these e-books are the future world and I am must learn them.

They give me two rules about e-books for libraries:

Rule #1  Ownership privileges are GOOD
Rule #2  DRM software is BAD

Must pound head with club to learn rules of e-books. Pound head good so rules don't fall out.

Here is guide to e-books for libraries that do rules. You use for good hunt:

http://lisinfo.org/ebooks/

Look out for spiders. The semantic web is here.

I'm told that the semantic web isn't really a real web like the cobwebs hanging from the corners of the mud pit where I do my bathing. So I'm reassured that there is no giant flesh-eating spider at the center of the semantic web waiting to devour me, though I have dreamed this many times.

Instead, I'm told, the semantic web is a sophisticated system of information that will make meaningful connections for us, figuring out what we want, even if we don't say it directly. In other words, reading our minds. Somehow this frightens me even more than the giant spider. 

But ready or not, here it comes.

So sez Mashable.

They say that Google is going to change the way we google, like today. They are launching their   “Knowledge Graph”, which will nudge and wink at you, suggesting in a pop-up window, that they know what you mean when you type in an ambiguous or vague search term, such as "man cave."

According to Mashable, Ben Gomes of Google says Google is switching “from strings to things.” That is, over 500 million people, places and things, with 3.5 billion attributes.

Just recognizing keywords isn't enough. Now it's relationshipes, entities. Nodes.

And soon enough, the whole webby universe is bound to follow suit. Everything is about to change tremendously. Again. Just when I thought I was getting the knack of this place.

It's enough to make an unfrozen cavewoman librarian cry.

---

New mobile products: Fanggle, Boopsie and Mosio.

When I was freshly thawed out, and desperate to learn about your modern world, I watched a lot of children's TV. The colors were bright, the songs were happy, and they broke things down in a way I could understand. Well, except for the Teletubbies. They just confused me.

Now I am a librarian, out in the workforce, and I hear someone talk about Fanggle, Boopsie and Mosio. I think these must be new characters on Sesame Street. Or a new cartoon. And I get a soft feeling for those shows I used to watch. But no, I am told these are companies offering new mobile products for libraries.

Fanggle and Boopsie make it possible for libraries to provide a bunch of services through mobile devices. Mosio has a Text a Librarian service.

I keep running into this sort of thing. It confuses a cavewoman. Twitter, Flickr, Google, Beebo, Wiki, ooVoo, Meebo, Moodle....They all sound like muppets to me.     

Eeee-Books. A Librarian's Guide To Publishers.

The landscape of e-publishing and e-formats is ever-shifting, like the earth that used to rumble underneath my people in the early time. Some times the earth would begin to quake, and then it would open up and swallow one of my many husbands.

E-books are kind of like that. There is no steady plain, no solid ground that might not turn to quicksand overnight. For this reason, they make me a little misty-eyed for my home land.

But I'm also very confused, which is why I was glad to see this Guide to Publishers in the Library E-book Market, published on the Digital Shift site. I will keep it as a reference, until the publishing ground shifts again.

 The guide differentiates between publishers catering to public libraries and those with more of an academic focus, which is good because a lot of the information I find on E-books is for public library collections, but I manage a small library for a health professional school.

Because our library is small, and the curriculum of our school has a specialized focus, we don't want some big wooly mammoth package, offering a lot of books we don't need. We want to be able to pick and choose the titles that are just right for us, like specific anatomy atlases and textbooks on physiology and pathology.

But I have yet to find a publisher or vendor who can match what we need on our terms. When I have looked through some of the book lists from companies providing health science content, I did not see anything that would be useful to a large number of our users. What I saw instead were titles like: "What you need to know about colon polyps."

Where I come from, we did not have colon polyps. The gravel we ingested with our food made sure of that. We did not have strange writings in the clouds. We had cave drawings. More direct, if you ask me. But what do I know? I'm just a cavewoman.

There are many, many mysteries surrounding Eeee-books, and each provider of e-books offers different lending/purchasing models, keeping the mystery alive. I ask, can we lend the e-books to everyone, or just one person at a time? Will they work on any device? What kind of pricing models are available? Would it even make sense to get e-books for our library? Or are we jumping on a wagon of bands? Do users want them?

So many questions. I will continue to hunt for answers, like I used to hunt the mighty Trachodon, and I will post the information I find here. But right now, my prominent, over-sized forehead hurts.

WebScale

So many webinars, so little time. And so much unfamiliar lingo coming at me! You modern humans invent new words like you're inventing fire. Like your life depended on it.

Today I watched a webinar presented by that great god in the sky, OCLC. The webinar was titled "Your library at Webscale: How radical collaboration is redefining library management services." They kept  throwing that word around: "webscale." At first I got excited, thinking they were talking about a mighty Hadrosaurs, a dinosaur known to my people, that had both scales and webbed feet...but then I realized they were just jawing about computers again.

The OCLC elders have created something called WorldShare Management Services that will help your library to be webscale. I still do not understand this word. But from what I could glean, which --with my primitive, undeveloped cave intellect, isn't much --a webscale library is the universal mind we have all been waiting for. It is a giant, throbbing brain, with arms that reach all the way around the earth ball.

If you want your library to throb like a smart brain, you must let go of the old ways. That ratty old ILS your library has isn't good enough anymore. It is soooo 2005. You may as well rip the computer out of the floor right now and make your patrons sift through a dusty old card catalog, because their searches will amount to the same thing, if you do not go webscale. This is what I learned in the webinar.

Library 2.0

I have recently become aware that there is this whole thing out there in the library world called Library 2.0. When I first saw the term I thought, 'Oh no! Is this an all-seeing, all-knowing Library program that has taken over the world and is out to destroy me?' I don't know. Because I'm a cavewoman -- that's the way I think. I know, I know....Library 2.0 is old hat. You modern librarians have been talking about it since at least 2005, when the idea was first presented at a library conference. But while you were experimenting with new gizmos and gadgets and your fast social medias, I was stuck inside a glacier, a human popsicle doing a slow thaw.

So now in an effort to catch up, I have become a member of the Library 2.0 network. Want to see the picture on my new Library 2.0 badge?

The Library 2.0 people are very smart people. Well, of course they are. They're librarians. But they are so smart they had a virtual conference last fall! They had a big meeting together, like a council meeting with the wisest members of the tribe, but they didn't even have to build a fire or make a sacred stone circle for everyone to sit inside. They just went on their computers, and all their speeches and classes were give online. By what sorcery are they able to do these things? I know--computer technology makes it possible. I have to keep reminding myself that.

Even though this virtual voo-doo took place last October, the Library 2.0 elders have made it possible to travel back in time as if it were still October, and watch and listen to the sessions from the conference!

So I looked over the schedule, and I have made a list of the sessions I want to attend. Many of these terms boggle my mind. What is a public knowledge base? What is an embedded librarian? Is that like being embedded in a glacier for 10,000 years? What are "digital natives?" I would like to meet these digital natives. They sound like my kind of people.

With so many choices, I hardly know where to begin. So I think I'll start with the first class on my list. The one about clouds and trees. Those are things I know something about.          

If you would like to sees the whole list of what's available, you can see that here:   You will have to register and become a member of Library 2.0, which means creating a username and password. Everytime I have to create a password, I worry that the computer gods are stealing my soul. Because that's the way I think. I'm a cavewoman.

My List of Library 2.0 virtual sessions, made available by modern science and not by sorcery:

Clouds and Trees: Using Folksonomies to transform Online Public Access Catalogues

Creating instructional screencasts: An overview of available tools and best practices

Down with the FAQ! Bring in the Dynamic PKB (Public Knowledge Base)!

Ebooks: Do They Use Them? Do They Care

How to build a mobile app from scratch for your library

How to Embed A Librarian, Library Resources and Service Components in Moodle!

Just click here – imparting effective scholarly habits to digital natives – the why, the what and the how!

Leveraging multiple literacies for sticky search education

Libraries in the Clouds

Libraries, Publishers, Vendors - The eBook Whitewater

Libraryhack : Setting content free

Multiliteracy is the new Information Literacy

My Info Quest: Providing Text Message Reference in Libraries of All Types

Outreach through Gaming

Privacy and the First Amendment , Friends or Foes in Cyberspace?

Proactively scanning Twitter & the web for feedback - How are users reacting?

Reading 2.0: the new role for librarians

Situating the Academic Library for Digital Natives: Enhancing Student Learning Through DLMs

The Embedded Librarian: A Crucial Addition to Online Courses

The Future of Emerging Technologies in Libraries

The Impact of Technology on Library Design

The Texting Librarian

The Unmined Potential of Ebooks: Create Passionate Patrons & Promote your Library

Developing a customized definition of enbedded librarianship.

Today's Libraries and the Self-Checkout Technology

Using Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Agents to Enhance Library Information Services

Web 2.0 Tools For You - A Cybrarian's Guide to Free Resources on the Web and their Practical Application in Libraries and other Work Environments

Who needs a computer? I have a QR Reader!

Here I am in 2012, a long-time library employee whose career goes all the way back to 1980, finding myself in this strange, new land of e-books, e-journals and embedded librarianism. Can I leave my primitive, cavewoman ways behind, and embrace the new technologies of this baffling modern civilization? Follow me and see.....