 Good morning and welcome to Encompass Live, your weekly online webinar from the Nebraska Library Commission. I'm your host today, Michael Sowers, Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Krista is stuck in some meetings today, some very important ones I might add. So I am taking over both hosting duties of Encompass Live and my usual hosting duties of this month's Tech Talk with Michael. Today I have another very special guest on the line, good friend of mine, Bobby Newman. She's going to be talking about libraries and transliteracy and as you can see here I have that blog that she participates in up on the screen. Let me see if I have Bobby on the line. Bobby are you there? Yes I am. Can you hear me? I can hear you. Great. So what we're going to do this morning is I'm going to let Bobby give a short presentation about just what the heck we're talking about here and then I'm probably going to have some questions for her and happily open it up to everybody else. Just like to remind you if you do have a microphone you can just give a hand raise and I'll turn your mic on. Everybody is muted at this point and we also have the questions area in the go-to-web bar software so that you can type your question there. First I will mention we are trying something really new at the moment. We do have a hashtag set up for the go-to-web, excuse me, encompass live. It's encomp live. We do have Emily in another office here in the building kind of keeping an eye on there so if you want to use that as a back channel or you want to submit a question that way we'll do our best to pay attention to what's going on there. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and give Bobby permission here to let her share her screen and Bobby you should have that option now. There we go and go ahead and take it away. Yep we can see it. For those of you who don't know me my name is Bobby Newman and I'm the digital branch manager at the Chattahoochee Valley libraries in Columbus, Georgia and when I'm not at work one of my biggest passions in library land is this concept of transliteracy and that's what I'm going to hopefully give you an introduction to today and explain to you why it's important for libraries. The definition of transliteracy is that it's the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media and I've had a couple of people ask me well do you really think that librarians are the best people to be defining this term to working out the the definition of it and my response to that is that we're not. The term came from the transliteracy's research project which is the University of California, Santa Barbara and then was picked up by Sue Thomas out of the UK as part of the product and research in transliteracy. It's now just transliteracy.com but it's a group of researchers in the faculty of humanities researching in the Institute of Creative Technologies and they're looking at emerging areas of intersection of science, the digital arts and humanities. So a couple of months ago I came across this term and it really it really struck it out with me it was sort of all the things that I had been talking about and why they were important all of them to one word and it is coming change is coming it's here actually but by the time I think we see it sometimes it's a little bit too late to do anything about it. The spotlight is definitely on libraries right now of the challenges to budget cuts and funding across the states and in other places I understand and if you're not aware the FCC is working on a national broadband plan which is going to bring hopefully broadband and the technology to use it to most of the United States which is wonderful but what we're looking at right now is sort of a convergence of literacy so the boundaries between information media literacy information literacy digital literacy technology literacy these are becoming blurred because we're moving from consumers of information to producers of content this is a big deal and it's happening basically as I'm speaking now what this does is it changes the way we interact with each other and how what value we place on created content so what we're seeing is that things that people need to know critical skills like critical thinking global awareness and literacy these are not being taught in school you know people are not being taught how to evaluate a web page and determine if it's accurate now granted there are a lot of people who still don't understand that the inquirer is not legitimate media content but these skills are just getting more and more important so access to information used to be through the written work you had to be able to read and write or to be contributing participating member of society and that access now is moved away from the written word to technology right now we're exposed to more mediated messages in one day that our great-grandparents were exposed to an entire year and I know this is overwhelming for a lot of people all of a sudden information is coming at us in multiple formats print audio visual video anything you could think of and just in case you think that you're alone and this concern about the effects of inflammation and overload I want to let you know that Conrad Gessner was the first to raise the alarm about this in a Denmark book he described how the modern world was overwhelmed with data and that an overabundance of information was confusing a harmful to the mind and of course the media repeated and echoed his concerns and I just want to let you know that Conrad Gessner died in 1565 his concerns were related to the printing press so we've been seeing these concerns as we move along for information at the same time expressed about the radio and that concerns were expressed about schooling that it was harmful to children so we've got information coming out of some different formats and our concern is nothing new what we do know from the past concerns that we will get through it technology is evolving very very rapidly and I think my favorite example of this is that in 1976 which was the year I was born so let's say 28 years ago Steve Jobs built the first Apple PC in his garage in 2007 the iPhone came out and in 2010 we have the iPad technology is growing by leaps and bounds and libraries in some cases are lagging behind in that now why is that important because it's important to our patrons whether we like it or not they're looking to us our assistance with these technologies there is nowhere else they can go to get the help that they need with these things and you know we can close our doors and declare ourselves the hollowed hall of books but we are feeling our patrons if we make that choice life is getting more interesting that your health insurance plan probably has a website mine does I have an account that's where I have to go find out what's happening with all of my claims and my flex funding account all of those things government agencies are no longer issuing print forms the IRS and the state tax places are not sending out print forms anymore you have to get online and be able to download them banks are offering alerts and account balance information via text message or email the I got a package on the way from the US Postal Service the other day and you can sign up on your site to get an email when your package is delivered if you're working on the front lines of libraries right now you know that patrons are coming in and asking for help for job search to look for jobs and that almost all of that is online and so we get this these patrons don't have an email address so not familiar with the commuter computer and they need to know how to use these things just to be able to find a job education there's so much MIT has so many courses online now for free if you are looking for education there's a lot of free online opportunities of course you know we're still arguing over the value of that piece of paper but there are there's a great deal that you can learn online federal laws regulations statutes contact information for specific government and agencies health information which I'm going to talk about a little bit more and so not just these parts online but also the fun parts to which I think is what people often get hooked up on the old Facebook and all this new tangled internet that right now it's just to show that the fastest group of Facebook users is women over 55 so it's not people my age or younger but it's people my mom's age so and they are unfamiliar with technology and we all know that default settings for face the privacy are probably not the ideal settings and if there's no one helping them through that or telling them to consider that it may not occur to them they need to tweak those one of my favorite posts and an example I use over time is from lifehacker.com article about cracking passwords and we all have heard you need a strong password you need a complicated password and people say I can't remember it I can't keep up I have too many I can't remember them and one of the statistics this article shows is that with basic hacking software it would take 5.15 minutes to crack a six character all lowercase password and just by changing that to a six character upper lower and character meaning at sign pound sign something it would take it ups that time to 8.5 one days so some basic very very basic like having a password thing that just not be being taught in school and when I say this in front of a live audience I just see a lot of people making it to go change their password so hopefully a lot of you guys are doing that right now the flip side of that Internet isn't there is a problem of access the price of computers is dropping which allows more people to own one free Wi-Fi is springing up everywhere McDonald's has it when I was in Missouri the grocery store has had it in their cafe so you can go just about anywhere and get free internet access but for a lot of people these are new experiences experiences they can have with no tracing no supervision and no support and they are they're just being turned loose with them with no real instruction so while I applaud the federal government's attempts at installing broadband access across the country there remains to be a lot more done with that to ensure that people are getting the access that they need we know that students need connection to the Internet for their school assignments by federal jobs all these things in although in a lot for a lot of us in libraries this access seems sort of a given and it's ubiquitous it's actually not true the organization for economic cooperation and development ranked the United States 15 among its 30 member nations and broadband adoption per capita and according to the FCC more than a hundred million Americans don't have broadband at home either because they can't get it can't afford it or unaware of its benefits the adoption rates in other countries are much much higher so what we're looking at here is this sort of digital divide and that's what I'm talking about now is that there is a divide between those who can get access and have the ability to use it and that's fine if you don't want to get online and use Twitter but that's not what this is about this is about access to fundamental services and tools so when I'm talking about things like the US adults living with chronic disease are significantly less likely to have access to the Internet this is important because not only does it create a gap in the information that's available to them but studies show the access to an online network community a support system improves health it improves recovery rates in cases of things like cancer it improves isolation for people isolated feelings of isolation for people with chronic illness or disability same thing among seniors with with families spread out across the country at online system and network are so important now for this emotional support and all the studies show that people that have this type of network live longer I even heard it on NPR again today on the way in so it's not just about sharing that QCAT video from YouTube it's about really quality of life the other side of that is this illiteracy that we're looking at right now where we have people that you've got this need for access information the Knight Commission talks about the inability to have private broadband access for all we're looking at a new category of second-class citizens and I just saw a report where they were saying well the mobile phones might help to bridge this divide and yet study showed that the primary users of mobile phones for access are minorities so to me that's just we're talking about again another category of second-class citizens mobile phones are great but you can only do so much on that on them compared to the actual computers I think the most important thing for us to remember as librarians as we talk about this is that the world is larger than the space you inhabit it's very easy to look at the job you do at your library or what your friends and your family do on your spare time and declare that people don't need this access or don't need this service that may be for you but your bubble is really big and it's very hard to get outside your bubble of information I love the quote by Douglas Adams where he observes that technology that existed when we were born seems normal anything that's developed before we turn 35 is deciding and whatever comes after is treated with suspicion so I think we're all in for some real shocks including me who will be well won't say I'll soon I'll be 35 but so the libraries took up this call for literacy because it was important we took up the call for literacy because we recognize the need and importance for society and we need to shift that focus to transliteracy it's no longer enough to focus on the ability to be able to read and write we've got to be literate transliterate in order to be involved in a computer society this is a need that our patrons have it's our responsibility to adapt to be able to provide that to them and I'm not saying that we all are not need a Twitter account that's not what I'm saying I know people really love to associate transliteracy with digital literacy or media literacy but it's much much more than that more than technology I'm gonna be careful not to confuse transliteracy with technology it's it is information content connection format texting telephone call email instant messaging voice music art video images it is social networking but it's also face-to-face paper and pen gestures which you guys can't see but my hands are going like crazy it's expression social cultural change interaction sharing so we're looking at much much more than technology the other flip side of that is a lifelong journey you used to go to school you memorize some facts you passed a multiple choice or a little essay test you declared yourself knowledgeable about the civil war and you essentially moved on to the next thing that you had to learn about transliteracy doesn't work that way you can't learn flicker or you can't learn Facebook and you can't declare yourself translatorate one Facebook's going to change its privacy policies next week but two something else will come along that you're going to need to learn adapt it is about that ability to learn and learn and relearn it's not evolving it's a fluency so what can we do as libraries I know we're short staff we're short funded I would say the first thing we need to do is we've got to start fighting amongst ourselves there is a real divide I think sometimes between I hate these words but the web 2.0 and the web point oh people that they you know people just turn their backs sort of on technology because there was this big rush towards it a couple years ago and I think that neither side is totally right what we need to focus on is what is best for our patrons if it's what's best for patrons if it's what they need then we do it if our patrons don't need a Twitter account we do not do Twitter but if our patrons need help with their iPad we give them help with their iPad that's our job so we are risking becoming dinosaurs if we just stick our head in the sand pretend this isn't happening and I think that there are two huge responsibilities one is if you're a techie like me it's your job to leave from the state going forward you need to encourage staff you need to be open-minded if someone comes to you and shows you how they discover and tells you how they discovered who this weekend and they got to watch all their TV shows online you need to be excited for them I don't care if you're like me and you cancelled your TV a year or so ago and get all your stuff through Hulu and it's old news to you this is a new discovery for them and I think that you need to remember that you can always learn from other people and my sister is two years younger than me but decidedly less techie and less online than me and she now in the fall of the day and she tells me they got this disk for their weed that allows them to watch their Netflix movies on the week I'm like I didn't even know that was happening one because I have a Roku so I already get away to watch my Netflix but two I just missed it somehow so you can always learn something from other people always be open-minded and I would say that the flip side of that the non-techies you didn't need to get out of the box you need to start exploring take some initiative learn about some things if it's what your patrons are asking you about take some time to learn those things that's your responsibility either and I know it's not going to be easy your but you are librarians you don't have to know how to do everything right this moment but you do need to be willing to figure out and able to find out how to use these tools the 23 things is a is a great program and I have a lot of thoughts on that but I'm running out of time it's a good place to start there are tons of adaptations of it now share your stories with staff you know it would be staff means everybody share one new thing they learn and I don't care if that new thing is a gadget or something you read in a print newspaper or in a print magazine or online as long as you get in the habit of sharing and respecting other people are sharing you're spending everybody's knowledge I think the biggest thing is not accepting excuses we can always we always have an excuse for why we don't have time or we're not able to do anything and the truth is that this is what our patrons need that the notes this really is acceptable we've got to find a way to do it we've got to get on board and we've got to move forward that's it if you want to learn more about transliteracy so I went very quickly and I have much time you can learn more at a group what our group blog it's libraries and transliteracy.wordpress.com and the authors are myself I'm a public librarian Brian Holsey who works at a college library Buffy Hamilton who is a school media specialist and Tom Ippery who is the University of Nevada Las Vegas who's an academic librarian I'm doing Michael okay great thanks Bobby that was wonderful and yes very I'm very fast that's okay so okay I just want to remind everybody please feel free to submit your questions in the Q&A area there I am monitoring that I have that up on another monitor here and I was kind of I for those who were in my technical last month I kind of said I kind of intentionally didn't do a lot of research this on myself I want to come to it fresh and see what Bobby had to say although I was aware of the blog so I knew I was out there and I think I will definitely now be subscribing but so so I took some notes and some questions and I guess the big one which you just kind of barely touched on there and on the last slide and I've asked I think just about everybody I've interviewed in this Tech Talk series is I don't have the time how do you respond to that I mean I've responded to it I know other people responded to it but I like to hear different responses you know I'm I'm so busy I'm you know we're in Nebraska here we're various a lot of very small libraries one and two person libraries I don't have the time I'm busy checking out books I'm busy answering those reference questions and you know what now I gotta make sure all the kids aren't fighting over the computers how do I do all this other stuff what what do you say I actually recently wrote a blog post which made some people very unhappy but essentially was my but the decision is that you do every when you say you don't have your time what you're saying is it's not a priority and we all have different priorities like I fully knowledge that you you choose to spend your time how you want if you are this probably won't make you very popular but I think as a professional librarian you do have some responsibility to continuing education yes it would be wonderful if we all that time and funding at work to do those things however that's not the reality and because we're knowledge workers we're not assembly line workers sometimes that means we have to give up some of our evening time to learn those things on our own time and there's all kinds of free online resources out there if your patrons aren't asking you about something don't bother learning it yes your time is valuable but if they're asking about something you're gonna need to figure out a way to learn that oh and I'd agree completely on that I would say it is priorities I remember talking to David leaking and he was saying you know it he echoed pretty much the same thing in its priorities and he gave the example of the library book cart drill team you know it yes it may be fun but doesn't help your patrons what are your priorities and not that I'm knocking bill book cart drill teams I think they're fun but okay so we got a couple questions coming in through the Q&A so I'm gonna I'll try to integrate those in with with the notes I took Dana asked what is the place of critical thinking and a bit an evaluation skills across all mediums in transliteracy concept and how do we get all librarians talking the same language first well okay those two questions I would say that the critical literacy thing when you look at the definition of transliteracy when you look at what Sue Thomas knows are talking about it it is all encompassing so all those other literacies critical thinking information literacy fall within this one larger category so yes they're very important it's absolutely I think an incredibly important part of of transliteracy probably right now one of the more important ones the how do we get all librarians talking the same language my answer that is I'm not really sure and I'm completely aware of by using a quote I knew word like transliteracy that it has caused a problem for some people but the flip side of that when I saw it is that I saw it as a way to you to bridge that divide that we have people who are so married to the concept of of information literacy or that they don't want to do social networking or they don't want everything to do with technology that what by shifting the focus to one encompassing more but we're really talking about here is where our patrons need information literacy is great but librarians are like mad in love with that term I think they would sleep with it it's important but they don't look at it for the neat from the aspect of why our patrons need it they look at it as a thing well this helps them find you know the database information so they don't have to fuck me for it it's about so for me the thing with transliteracy is that it does shift the focus I hope shifts the focus back to the most important thing is what our patrons need so here's my question as you were going through I was thinking and every time you you said you know what are our patrons asking us about I I totally agree with but do we have to I kept also picturing adult patrons and and one of the notes I made as well okay we do story time for kids do we need to start doing like transliteracy or technology even though it's not just technology time for kids do we need to maybe you know if we got children's librarians in the audience is there maybe a different way they should think about this or do you think it applies across the board well I think that there's two parts of what what patrons are asking for one is my my cautionary count on that is just because they start asking me for a pony doesn't mean you have to give them a pony I'm still waiting for millions exactly so you know when I say what your Peter's asking for the thing with transliteracy is that yeah there's a need for it to be just like we look at literacy and information literacy and digital literacy it's becoming a need for society and yeah I think it would be great to get patrons in the door and offer some sort of training adult training for them now we how you do that in your library and your situation and what they need whether it's you know here's how you tweak your face the privacy settings or whatever that's that's a situation that will have to match your library Kate has submitted a comment here I think in in relation to my question says in Napa County we have formed a terrific working partnership between the county libraries and the school district libraries to work in progress but it has some terrific information fluency results for our students she also as you're preaching to the choir to which you know this is tech talk you know and the folks here are doing the continuing education you're doing it right now if you're attending so what I would suggest is when these recordings go up and guess you all will be emailed about that I did get a question about that you know pass this along to the people who aren't here today or didn't have the time to attend so I would add to that that a lot of what I've been thinking about lately is this sort of echo chamber effect and I think then Potter from the UK has got some great thoughts and great posts about that on his blog and I think it's the wiki man or the real wiki man or I can post a link later but yeah there is a problem which if you sign up for this tech talk chances are you are the choir so how do I get my message outside of you guys into the to the larger audience I'd love suggestions great and there will be links ever as those of you who usually attend and compass live there will be a delicious page with all sorts of things already added a couple more things to my list that Bobby's mentioned and I'll get some links from her and add to those and that will all go out send out the recordings she has another question and it was similar to a question I had which is could you provide an example of a public library service or program that builds transliteracy abilities for the library users now on the top of my head now I'm sure I could I would say that's true I know that this the I always give you example of the digital media lab it's it's a public library that Richard Khan put together and I can include a link with that later but they they are they put together a digital media lab for the patrons and they're using it in that way which I think is a great a great tool and I know there are other things like that happening at a library so that's when it comes to my first well to put you on the spot just a little bit make a tough question even harder could you think of something that wouldn't involve so much money I could I think that one a lot of times the patrons have these tools and if you can get them involved in it that they're willing to share or be involved in the other side of that is that there's a lot you can do without a ton of money there's you know there are grants out there and things like that but a flip camera and some base you can even use a great amount of free online video editing software so if you can get them involved to start creating content and start thinking about what they're seeing there's all sorts of resources out there about how to be critical and evaluative you know for example videos and movies and that you see online and what is the motivation of the person creating that sure yeah and idea that just popped into my head would be I know of libraries that have done kind of like a techie playtime or gadget garage I think I've heard it call things like that and maybe you can get your patrons to bring in their gadgets and get them to talk about them and actually I've had a lot of success with that when we do our ebook workshops I am and we have a downloadable ebooks from overdrive and one pick I do the instructions in the demo what I encourage patrons to do is to bring in their device and what I find is that we end up with one a great variety of devices way more than the library could possibly you know have or we could but good grief and then they're willing to share them with each other and talk about them Dana has a sort of a comment slash question here perhaps solution is mixing teaching tool specifics with underlying transferable skills to be able to navigate regardless of platform or medium I would agree with that and I think the trick is to always tie it into a need of the patrons have I mean having a workshop that says you know come learn you know how to do to use a flip camera isn't has some of a word of some people but if you can tie it to a real need that the individual may have how to shoot home videos or the best way to edit your child videos or you know something like that where you're tying it to an actual interest that they have and that makes a big difference yeah Dana followed up with this for example Facebook as a plat as the platform for a privacy discussion so you're all using Facebook kind of add that privacy stuff on top of that Dan also says that they've done classes on enrolling seniors in prescription dark plans with the help of the local pharmacy so they've they've also brought in yeah yeah I think so again great questions people I please keep coming them in one comment I had is I just want to stress for regular listeners that please notice that I'm not the only person who keeps saying you need better passwords I noticed Bobby although I will admit Bobby and I do disagree on some things about passwords but well we don't know how often it changed them we don't need to go there so let me let me ask one other question here that I kind of had I'd be interested in getting your opinion on is where do you draw the line between just being keeping up with the technology although I I I know you don't want to say it's just technology but that's where a lot of people end up focusing on this stuff just you know drawing a line between keeping up and being on that bleeding edge you know I heard you mention you know Roku boxes and streaming that flicks over the Wii and and I don't know how many people in the audience even know what a Roku box is I do but you know where where is that line between just trying to keep up and bleeding edge well I would say for me it's and this is what I would recommend other than what you think is necessary for your job the reason I know about the Roku boxes because I want a way to watch Netflix on my TV so I was like well what are my options and when I got to looking they the cheapest one out about now but at the time was the Roku box as opposed to I didn't have a ps3 or Xbox 360 and I think there's a couple other devices it works on so for me it was just a matter of I already had Netflix I knew that streaming was available I wanted to know what worked on my computer which is the same method I tell you to take with your patrons you know if you you have a problem you're looking for solution if that solution is technology then that solution is technology if that solution is a hammer and that solution is a hammer I hooked up a full-blown PC to the computer yeah it's into my TV in the living room so you know hey which was my new laptop in HDMI out is also an option for me now but then you have the Roku stuff yeah okay let's see here look at that my notes then Dan commented their Roku is great okay so Dana asks so real skill is ability to select proper tool for the job slash need yes okay I would agree with you yeah and there's a great video I have a bookmarked I won't have you guys watch it that Brian Halsey did defining can you see my screen yes yes we can still see your screen I have it up here Brian one of our contributors wrote this actually this video called transliteracy is a blueberry smoothie or he talks about this blueberry smoothie that he found and like the recipe and how he goes through the different ways of sharing that information with different people so he's choosing his tool whether it's you know printing it out and I think he mails it to his grandparents or something like that talks about those different methods so absolutely I think I'll have to watch that um yeah it sounds like it um you gave a I think it was a Douglas Adams quote about way a tool versus technology the one I always like to use I don't know who said of this is the definition of technology is anything invented after you were born right yeah so great well I'm not seeing any other questions coming in if I can keep you for a few more minutes I want to change the topic just a little bit because you've been involved in another project this week that I've been kind of keeping my eye on just a little bit called library day in the life and I was wondering if you could tell people what's going on with that sure library day in the life got started oh my gosh this is round five 2008 and it came about because I was looking at the boys' backpack when I first began blogging which really isn't that long up with some of the old old vloggers but I was looking through my the search terms that leading people to my blog I kept seeing the day like what the librarians day like and I thought well we should we should all the librarians should start blogging their day and talking about what their actual day was and so I kind of was it was one of the things where I'm blocked it I hope that other people would pick up on the idea and we would all sort of share our day in the life and the first round was in July and there was a decent turnout but it was when it first started I could read all of the blog post which is not no longer actually for me and I think last round round four is when it took off there's a Twitter hashtag for it now in this case for the 51 it's live day five and then there are videos on YouTube Catherine Rehill from from Australia did her YouTube video this morning there are photos on Flickr and as a Facebook group for it as well but the idea was that you're sort of sharing what your average day is like it seems to be the most useful tool where I get the most feedback is from people who are considering an MLS we're in school now for an MLS or instructors of the MLS and what we've done with the page we've actually broken it down by round now so that you can see just used done round five and people are including that their title and where they're at so we do have international participants I'd love for this to break sort of break outside of the echo chamber of library land and see larger coverage of it but it just really has not as far as I know happened so if if I wanted go ahead oh it goes on all week so it actually won't be done till Friday even though it's called day in the life what happened is that most of us don't have us a quote-unquote typical day it's easier to blog a whole week and get a better perspective so if you're wanting to participate you have a lot of options one the first would be to add your name to this wiki include your information if you want to tweet your day the hashtag is live day five if you're going to blog your day please use the library day in the life as one of the tags for your post and then include a link under here directly to those posts so that you know we're not see it three months from now when someone's looking for the minute searching back for your blog archive that link will take them right to it there's a group on Flickr there's a Facebook group and YouTube I don't think you can do groups but just go ahead and use that live day five and post it here well I'm I'm glad you hold it to a whole week or give us a whole week because I have some very boring days where there's nothing really to write about but today is a lot more interesting so I'm thinking tomorrow I'll write about today what I know with my new job is it's not nearly as exciting as my old job was I mean it's great for me but to read about it's it's a lot of time writing policy procedure and reading emails yeah 605 checked email 610 checked email right yes okay great um any other questions for Bobby about any of this I mean I at this point I would encourage everybody to participate in day of the life if you get a chance I think it's great I know I've done it in the past maybe I did it last year I'll have to go back and look I think I'll do it this year I've been working on another trying to write 30 blog posts in 30 days project this month so if I can do double duty on that I think that'll help my blog out just a little bit where I can participate in that and write a blog post all at the same time so if you don't Twitter and you don't blog you don't do any of those things you can create a page in the Wiki and link to it and we have you can see them over here on the right hand side where these posts are at here but people have done that so that's also an option if you don't blog you don't Twitter or your Twitter cast private or whatever here's another option for you great um and Dana asked she's a suggestion here how about a student slash patron day in the life sponsored by libraries could you see patrons somehow doing this or well YouTube recently did you recently did a big huge day in the life thing which I think actually was last week Saturday I think yeah so I mean there's there's that kind of thing going on I think it would be great if someone would leave that someone not me you mean you don't already have enough to do I mean you you've got lots of free time I'm finding that I learned need to learn to say no well by one of those t-shirts that just says no I think I need I need one of those also and the last thing I just looking quickly back through my notes again Bobby mentioned a thing from life hacker about how fast somebody can break through your password one of the sites I'll be showing here when I'm talking with Bobby is actually the task where you put in your password it will tell you how long it would take a desktop computer to break through that so I kind of tend to remind people every month about passwords so there you go Bobby is there anything else you'd like to say or share for the benefit of the group well Bobby yeah I know we most of us could because we just get to sit and read at our desks all day because we're librarians right so we need to talk to people instead right anyway well thank you Bobby very much I really appreciate you taking some some time out of your day to talk to all of us this is all being recorded everybody so you'll be able to watch this again listen pass along we turn it into a podcast Bobby will be putting it on her blog actually do you have a personal blog you want to plug real quick before I let you know I guess I could show that real quick I had it I had it up for the defining transliteracy post but I blog I blog at librarian by day if you're not familiar with that I'm librarian by day just about everywhere so Twitter and Facebook all those things you can of course find me here so wonderful all right well Bobby thank you very much I and we're getting several other thanks coming through on the through the Q&A area so I greatly appreciate you taking some time out of your day to talk to all of us and you are I'm gonna go ahead and mute your mic and take back control of the software but you are welcome to stay for the rest of the session if you would like completely okay thank you Michael thank you all right so let me do a little switching over here for just a second because for those of you who haven't participated before what I usually do what I've done speaking with my guest is I like to I have some bookmarks and some stories and some news that I've been paying attention to over the month you are welcome to write down this URL that you're seeing on the screen right now however we ultimately move these bookmarks to a slightly different URL on the Nebraska Library Commission's account and that's where we'll be adding some more bookmarks so what I would suggest is if you want any of these websites just wait about 24 hours we'll send you an email and we'll send you all the links to everything that I'm talking about here today and so I actually have a couple of links that are follow-ups to some stories that I talked about before and one or two that Bobby mentioned and I'll start off with this one here how secure is my password and it's a really big site and so this is a test it doesn't keep your password you can type something that's kind of close to your password but let's say for example here's a typical password I would use and no I will not actually read it out to you and if it says there that it would take about a desktop PC 163 days to do that password so notice that you know I pick generally pretty good passwords but I will admit these are all lowercase letters there's no numbers there's no anything else in here so if I was to just add say a one more character and I added a percent sign I'll tell you that much notice it just went up to a thousand years so I've shown in the past sites that will say if it's a weak password or it's a medium password or if it's a strong password this one actually kind of puts it into hard terms as to how long somebody with a good desktop PC would actually get into your account or crack that password so if you're wondering if your password is any good you know go ahead and check out how secure is my password net I think it's just a very interesting way of taking a look at that jumping around a little bit here internet Explorer 9 and whoops I just did something on my computer that I didn't expect to move this over here internet Explorer 9 is coming and they have what are called platform previews available so if there are any web designers in the audience you may want to take a look at this it does install completely separately from any current version of internet Explorer you have it does not have all of the features in fact it's practically menu lists from what I recall the last time I looked at it but if you want to test out things like new standards HTML 5 that sort of thing see what your website looks like in this very very very early version of internet Explorer 9 you are welcome to do that download and install that as far as I know it is only Windows at this point let me see if I can get my bookmarks list back here because I accidentally closed that up okay I mentioned last month some ways to do screenshots where you don't need to necessarily download and install some software and Krista sent me this link she said she used it this is actually downloadable software that you would use it's called screen hunter free this is the one she used works really well has some basic editing in it and ultimately doesn't cost any money I personally have not used this but like I said Krista has and she says she highly recommends it I personally use something called snag it but that is a $50 piece of software that I've decided is it important enough for me to infest it but if you're looking for a free option this could be one of your possibilities speaking of screenshots if you are a Chrome user this is an extension I found where it will actually add a screenshot button to your installation of Chrome and this will take a screenshot of a long web page it will do a scrolling screenshot so again just another option for you if you are somebody who needs to get screenshots for things a lot and are looking something for free and this one is specifically for the Chrome browser if that is your browser of choice okay let's do a few others here several months ago I interviewed a librarian here in Nebraska about their use of open DNS for filtering you can go back into the Encompass Life archive and find that if you are interested we're going to not try to turn this into a discussion of whether we should be filtering or not let's just assume that you've made that decision and you're looking for options if you're going to filter open DNS is a way that you can instead of using your ISPs domain name servers you can use open DNS servers and there were some filtering options available involving a lot of checkbox checkboxes this month open DNS has started a new feature called family shield which is a one check turn it on or turn it off filtering option available to you I have not actually personally tested it the kids in my house are in college already we don't really have a lot of filtering necessarily to do but this is an option it is free it's very easy to set up it's very easy to set up at the network level and so if that is something you're looking for you might want to take a look at this Dana has said in her comments that she has found a one button no download screencast tool called screencastle.com for screencasting I'm a fan of a site called screen toaster there's several others out there I will take a look at the screencastle sounds interesting I'm gonna jump around a little bit here in the interest of time I'd like to point out Dropbox for people if you're not familiar with Dropbox it is a way to upload files to a website send people a link down have them download those files you can also use Dropbox to sync files between computers which I do a heck of a lot of mainly I'm throwing this in here because I ranted on my blog last week about people sending me large attachments in email and especially on our state email system we have limited inboxes there are speed issues what I'm on my DSL connection at home so I'm really just trying to encourage people to use Dropbox so I'm using my platform here to get a little soapbox there if you're not already using Dropbox please check it out especially if you transfer a lot of large files between computers library camp in Nebraska 3 everybody's welcome but this will probably mostly apply to just those of you here in Nebraska but we are having our third annual library camp we are having it on October 13th in Grand Island Nebraska as a pre-conference to our state library and educational media association conference it will be pretty much an all-day event it is completely free to attend and you can come along there's no agenda until that morning it's an unconference it's been fun the last two years each time we've had about 50 registrants we're holding it to 50 again this year please if you if you're coming to state conference this year check this out even if you're not coming to state conference and you want to come you can register like I said there's no cost for library camp we welcome everybody to come and participate it's a wonderful thing and yes Louise I'm sorry we are holding our conference the same time as Iowa's conference I was really bummed out about that I wish you could make it okay one or two more here for those of you who are looking for blog ideas oh in fact look at here here screen toaster and so I'll show you that real quick as Dana mentioned screen castle screen toaster you don't have to install it it's a Java application you click start recording it allows you to pick up the microphone a webcam if you have one record what you're doing on your screen I've written several kind of instructional videos this month for staff and some other projects so if you're looking to actually record some steps for people you can go and Sarah adds screen toaster looks cool getting to see if the facilitators pretty need a webinar feature if you're talking about my little picture down here in the bottom it teach me to read those questions before I read them out loud in this case all I'm literally doing is I've got a webcam up on top of my monitor here and we're sharing my screen so I've got the webcam software on my desktop and since I'm sharing my desktop you can see me it's a little weird from our end especially when it's just me and I'm this close to the camera and I'm not actually looking at the camera in most cases I'm looking down at the screen but hey you know makes a little more personal so back to what I was saying a moment ago if you're looking for some ideas this is well let's not go with that example let's do this you type in a word and what it's gonna do is kind of create a dummy blog post title for you and I don't know if you actually want to write these six bits of library advice that will land you in prison although that could be a very interesting blog post and you can generate here ten underappreciated things about library or libraries nine ways library can help a total prison okay they've changed some of these things before I wasn't finding some of those but welcome to live internet so let me move on as I start to get a little embarrassed okay last what I'm gonna talk about then Dan I do see your question there so I will actually open that up fact let me read Dan's question give people a chance to think about that Dan is asking if anybody in the audience has any suggestions for patron printing software for controlling what print jobs may be paying for those print jobs logging into those print jobs other than vent print and I know Louise you're in the audience maybe I could put you on the spot I know you guys are using something at your library that maybe you can recommend if anybody else has some recommendations please go ahead and put those in the questions and I'll read those back in just a moment the last site I'm going to talk about here is a new piece of software that I just checked out I've not had a chance to use and this is something for the kind of Uber geeks in the audience the people who do the technical support for computers one thing you may have noticed is in Windows if you ever have to boot into safe mode to try to fix a problem one thing you cannot do while you're in safe mode is install and remove software which is kind of annoying if the problem is being caused by a piece of software that you want to get rid of well this little program which I guess has been around for several years but I just discovered it called safe MSI you install this on a flash drive flash drive and you get into safe mode in Windows you plug in this your flash drive you run this little program and that will turn on the Windows installer service which will allow you to install and uninstall software while you're in safe mode I think this is pretty darn cool I really don't want to have to use this but I've been in those situations where safe mode is the only thing I can get to because of a piece of software I've installed and trying to get around that problem has been a real serious pain and I think this is a possibility so immediately that piece of software has already gone on my flash drive that I carry with me everywhere and hopefully I'll never have to use it so we've got a couple of suggestions for you Dan that have come in through here Louise is saying envision where has good reviews but do not use come prize that sounds like one of their pieces maybe Louise you can explain that a little further and actually if you have a mic Louise raise your hand I'll happily turn on your mic for you she says that also that there's new print time management software is Cassie which is getting excellent reviews especially for smaller libraries and then Allison is saying they use Lib Libreka L I B R A R I C A I have no how to spell that Cassie so again another recommendation for Cassie so maybe Cassie is the software that you want to take a look at if somebody has a URL you could submit that to me and I'll happily bring that up on the screen I'm sure a random Google search on Cassie might get me some non relevant results to say so and so let's see so let's pull that up here got a URL that didn't copy well excuse me just a second okay Libreka okay that sounds a little better also Sarah has submitted a URL to a tech soup article on PC management software I will add that to the book list when we're done with the session Louise and I actually wrote a book on this software but it's several years old at this point so I'm a little out of touch with what the current state of the software is so I do appreciate everybody contributing that information there so I have one more site I want to show you real quick I did mention that I have been creating some online screencasts recently this was for a little project that I contributed to this month called the emerging technologies summer Institute the idea here was that it was a blog that people could participate in and all of the submissions for the whole month are screencasts on how to do things that you might want to do in a library here's someone describing how to use YouTube's audio swap feature here's somebody using mockingbird to mock up websites somebody did one on Prezi one using Digo here's one I did which was actually mostly for some staff issues we're having here at the Commission but I submitted it on subscribing to RSS feeds and Outlook so if you're looking for some neat little short tutorial ideas you might want to check out this blog and I don't think she'll actually shut it down at the end of the month so if you got any you want to contribute just follow directions in the sites and she will allow you to post your videos so any other questions or outstanding issues that might be good for the benefit of the group we're just about out of time here okay seeing no more questions in the Q&A and seeing no hands raised I'm going to again thank everybody for attending and especially thank Bobby Newman for participating this month I will add also let me actually have a slide for this we have some upcoming sessions next week we have someone coming in unfortunately don't have her name in front of me talking about what she saw was the the best at ALA this year and if you attended ALA feel free to sign up again and participate we'd love to hear what you had to think about ALA again on August 11th I will be back giving a presentation on RSS we found out that I haven't actually presented on that quite a while here in Nebraska so we're going to do that and then due to some scheduling issues it will be only three weeks not four until the next tech talk with me on August 25th and at the moment I do not have a particular person to interview scheduled I'm working on that I've got a couple of ideas out there and again you can always send me suggestions or of yourself or somebody else if you think they're doing something really interesting that everybody would like to hear about in their library so again thank you all for attending thank you for your wonderful comments in the discussion today that I think worked really really well and I'm gonna go ahead and say thanks and goodbye