 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns, your host at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event where we cover any sort of library-related activities that may be of interest to Nebraska librarians. We have commission staff that do presentations and guest speakers, which we have a mixture of today. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time Live and they are recorded so you can watch any of our archive sessions. We have a huge list of them now and see if any of those would be of interest to you after we do the live sessions. This morning we have our monthly tech talk with Michael Sowers. Hi Michael. Hi Krista. Hi. And he is actually at Internet Librarian in Monterey, California where I just came back from yesterday. Very, very late last night. But he is there with a group of people that we hung with the last four days or so. And I'm going to switch over to you guys and see if we can see you. And you'll see us. I see you. Yes. Hi guys. Hi. You can't see me, but I'm waving. We'll take your word for it. So I'm Michael Sowers, Technology Innovation Librarian at the Nebraska Library Commission. And Krista, we're all missing you here. I'm sorry. You have to go back home. Thank you. I'm glad we can do this. This is a test for everybody. We haven't really done this kind of live remote location thing before. So I think it's working well so far anyway. I got some friends with me here and I'm just going to go around and let them each introduce themselves, say what they do and where they're from, and then we'll start talking about conference. So Louise, why don't you go ahead and go first? Okay. I'm Louise Alcorn. I'm the Reference Technology Librarian at the West Des Moines Public Library in Iowa. Just next door to you guys. Yep. Just up in the river. Just up in the river. Through the woods? No. No woods. Okay, woods. We don't have woods in the Midwest. Yeah, and through the core. Right, exactly. Okay. I'm Beth Hoffman and I'm an Independent Technology and Information Training Consultant from Tucson, Arizona. Great. I am Amy Mather. I am the Adult Services and Programming Manager at Omaha Public Library. So we know where you live. Yes. And Jasmine? I'm Jasmine Dean and I am the Director of a Public Library in Chubbock, Idaho. Great. So we got none kind of across the board here. I'm doing great. Okay. So some of us have presented. A lot of us have attended some things. And I guess just my first question is, so far in your last couple of days here. Oh, and we have one more guest attendee over here before we get further here. Actually, maybe sit between Beth and here. Yeah, one more person coming in. Is that Jennifer back there? Yes, Jennifer's here. Hi, Jennifer. Hi, Jennifer. Introduce yourself, name, rank, and serial number. Hi, Jennifer Korber. I am a Web Services Librarian at Kennedy, Boston and in New Yorker. One can walk at full speed and eat a bagel. We should also just clarify for everyone. I'm sure if you can do the math, you can figure this out. We broadcast and come us live 10 a.m. Central Time, which means it is 8 a.m. for all of these wonderful people out in California. Yes. Thank you so much, guys, for being able to make it up this early. Yes, oh, seven ugly. Oh, dark and ugly. Yes, although the sun is coming up behind us here, so you probably can't see that. So anyways, thank you all for attending. Where I was going is just anything that's maybe stuck out from any of the presentations for you for the last couple of days. Some of you here were here for pre-conferences. I don't believe many of us have been playing too much hooky for a conference the last couple of days. Some little maybe, not completely. I've seen you in rooms, so I know you've all been around. We're playing hooky, it's because we're standing out in the hallway talking to a colleague networking and learning something probably almost more useful than what we would have learned in rooms. Oh, totally. Yeah, that counts. That definitely counts. I can actually, and the name given to that is the hallway track. The hallway track. Yes, yes. Lobby cone. Lobby cone. Very, very popular. Yes. But occasionally more interesting. We're having those momentary conversations that just spark new ideas and spark new consumptions and spark new avenues of thought. I just had one. Well, yes. Yes. Well, gentlemen, you have one while you were getting your bagels. Yeah, yeah. So you want to share that with us? Absolutely. I did a cyber tour on QR codes and half of the cyber tour was very academic and focused because half of this year I was an academic science librarian at the Claremont Colleges. And the other half of this year, I've been the director of a small public library in a smaller section of Idaho. So I'm thinking about QR codes for public libraries. And one of the things that I'm going to do to market my library when I return is work with the local historical society to get QR code images on buildings. So that as people are walking through the historic district or other areas of interest, they can click a QR code and have a webpage presented to them with images, statements of how the age of a building, and other interesting things. And then, of course, links to the historical society in Pocatello and my library. So that's one of the takeaways that I'm going to do around Pocatello and Chuvick and my district area with QR codes. Cool. Anybody else doing anything with QR codes yet? No, but I am totally inspired now because I actually sit on the board of the first county historical society board. And I'm also involved with a lot of other groups that this would be really awesome to do. And this, you know, my biggest takeaway from the conference has been sort of like thinking about the QR codes and its application and the whole augmented reality kind of thing to do because that's basically... Well, I actually got the interesting idea. I had been hearing about QR codes for a while and how they've been using libraries, mostly academic, as Jess mentioned. But I actually got a piece of mail the other day that was from my alumni association at my undergrad college. And on the back of the envelope was a QR code. And so you didn't even have to open the envelope. You know, I knew it was a fundraising letter because that's all I ever get from them. But, you know, you could scan the QR code, go straight to the fundraising thing. And I was thinking about this later that day and thought, wow, our friends could use this. And in fact, they could save on postage because they could just send a postcard with a QR code on it which is going to save them a bundle. And so it said sending a whole envelope with everything in there. They could just send this out or they could even... There's even ways to potentially email them out so you do have an email list now for the friends. So we're always looking for new ways for them to market because they've struggled with that for a while in terms of how to market and get more donors. They've kind of been a steady level of donors. So I thought that might be kind of a fun techie thing. And there's a couple of techie types on the friends board now. Now, I almost wondered though if you were to send out a postcard like that to the mailing list, how many confused responses you might get as to what the heck did you just send? But that actually sparks a conversation. So put on there, what's one of your friends' foundation? This is a QR code. More information here. You can always give them that and they kind of get it started. But those who know, they can scan it. You can have the website URL immediately above it if you want more information. Exactly. But I'm just thinking that these people in and there's just so many ways. I love somebody, I guess it was, I think it was Jess's idea of putting them on the ends of rows of books. So that they click it and they don't get the dewey necessarily. They might get a dewey along with the subject areas so that in their hand, in their mobile device, they can be walking down and kind of roughly figuring out, oh gosh, I'm in American history. What we had decided to do with that, it's a pending project when I left, was to put the V card, the contact information for the subject specialist in a link to their live guide. Right there next to the book ranges so that if you're in the Vs shopping for psychology or what have you in the VFs, then right there at the end of the book range was a QR code that would take you to the psychology library. And that was a pending project when I left Taiwan for QR codes. Yeah, the most unique usage I've seen is I've been down in the stacks of the Love Library at University of Nebraska at Lincoln. And they'll have what's on this floor, which sections, and you scan the code. And because they know which floor you're on and which QR code you're scanning, it would then bring up on my phone a little map as to where I needed to go on the floor to actually get to that call area. So that was actually helpful. These half floors and multi floors. Well, we've been struggling for a long time with, okay, how do you get that data to a mobile device when we're walking through the stacks? Get them that mapping data without having to download a lot of information. We wanted to pop them to someplace on the web that was dedicated to that. So they didn't look at a larger map that was dedicated to that journey. Yeah, so it's been it in. So I'm getting a sense that mobile is something big at this conference? Yeah, yeah. A little bit. Did anybody hear it's head in the mobile track? I did, yeah. The Internet Adjustment? Okay, so what did you hear learned there besides QR codes? Well, I was very interested in mobile applications. And I just recently created a new website for my library using WordPress. We are a small resource light library. And as a result, I needed something that was quick and easy. So I attended a lot of those sessions on how to think about creating a mobile website. And the biggest conclusion I came to, the biggest takeaway is that if you are a resource light library and you do not have a web person or a web server or any of that, making a mobile interface, a mobile web page was better than trying to create applications. And this is also really good for my community where we are very diverse as far as what smartphone or not smartphone that you may or may not have. So I did a little research and with the help of Mirella, she helped me find a WordPress pack that I can install that enables me to make a mobile website based on the same sorts of widgets that you would install for Flickr or Twitter or what have you. So that is another thing that I learned about from this conference that we'll be taking back to my library to create a mobile website. Great. I would love to get a hold of that because I've got a couple of websites that I'm helping to oversee that are all WordPress based. And it really is just a drop in simple interface. And as some people watching or listening may know, we're doing WordPress based websites across the state of Nebraska right now. It's a project I'm running. So nobody's asked me about mobile yet. They're so far passing out cards now. Do you remember the name of the WordPress pack? Do you remember the name of that? No, but I can get it. Okay. We're librarians. We can find anything. I mean, that's what I've been saying for years. I don't remember anything. I just know where to look at that. Exactly. What you just witnessed here is exactly what's been going on the last few days is that somebody starts talking about, oh, I learned about this cool thing. Oh, really? I'd love to apply that in my library. What did you hear about how easy it is to use or how much server space it needs or whatever else? And these discussions just keep going on. And then we kind of connect when we get back to our real world and try to figure out how to slot it into our daily lives. So it is called WordPress Mobile Pack. So I'm sure you can Google WordPress Mobile Pack, P-A-C. And is that a WordPress plugin? Yeah, it's sort of a plugin. Mariella found it for me. And so I immediately put it in the notes. It was at the time that the web conference track didn't have web access. So she found it on her phone and let me know. And I just put it in my notes and I haven't actually looked. But she said that, based on the description that she found on her blackberry, that it would be able to mobilize, so to speak, your WordPress site. The lack of internet access at a number of the venues for the conference is a constant source of amusements and frustration. But those of us who have been here a couple of times are kind of used to it. And I'm beginning to wonder, seeing an iPad in front of me, knowing my droid is a couple of feet away, seeing an iPhone nearby. I'm beginning to wonder if that's going to matter as much, as more and more people have some level of 3G connectivity or 4G contact. Well, I was surprised I haven't seen any Mi-5s floating around. I've seen Mi-5s listed especially for the keynote. Oh, interesting. There's a Wi-Fi on and they're all locked down so you can't actually connect. No, well, I mean like attendees bringing their Mi-Fi, it's just sharing. People are bringing them, they're not sharing. They're not sharing. That's a limited fashion for their problem. Two years ago when I was here, my roommates and I went to a local radio shack, bought a wireless router because there was only a hard line for the hotel room we were staying in and returned it at the three days later in the conference because we were no longer interested in keeping the product in the radio shack. We were very suspicious about that but it worked really well. And so we see a lot of this. You didn't hear any of that? Yeah, no, I'm sorry. Was that on the tube? Anyways, so I think this is going to be a real issue and you bring it up for seeing iPhones and iPads and things like that but with the pricing structures, people still need to have internet. If you're paying for a low-key... Yeah, I mean it does but I don't pay for that. Okay, so you're just using the Wi-Fi. I can't exactly work on my presentation on my cell phone yet. You need a little more than that for this problem. You want to throw up keyboards again? Yeah, and then you're done. But I think that conferences still really need to start emphasizing that because not everybody has the ability. I mean think of all of our Canadian visitors who can't afford the data plans. They can. Exactly, so they really need to have that free Wi-Fi available to them. Although I will say the power outlet situation this year has been wonderful. Yeah, plenty of power. I think that's the constant whinies in the last few years. And Michael, the first year I went to computers and libraries and the companion went to this. Brought his own power strip and it became very popular. I know a little portable one. But I remember bringing a full slice of power. There are photos online of 16 laptops. That's how I met Michael initially. He shared his power strip. Okay, yeah. Great, so let's see. On Monday there was also a web presence. Learning and training, actually some of you presented in learning and training. That's nice. In fact, is this your first presentation this year? No, no. Actually, I can tell a success story. Okay, please. We'll get to fail in a minute. So I attended my first. Michael? He moved the microphone a little closer over there to Jennifer. It's not really picking her up very well. Don't spill your coffee. That might be the first time I've ever been told that. Cool. I need to remember to project. So in 2006, I attended my first internet librarian here in Monterey, tagging along with some bigger wigs at my library. And I was so completely blown away by what I heard and what I saw and the conversations I was overhearing that I came back under my own power in 2007 and decided I had enough to talk about to step up and do a cyber tour. I had put in a presentation. It wasn't accepted, but they said, hey, would you like to do it as a cyber tour, which is a 15-minute presentation that you do out in the vendor area. And I said, sure. So I did that. And it was a lot of fun and it encouraged me to go back and put in another presentation moving forward. I skipped 2008 for a number of reasons. But in 2009, I went to computers and libraries for the first time and proposed and had a presentation accepted for 23 things using it with patrons rather than with staff. And then I did the same presentation here at Internet Librarian in October of 2009. Did it again at computers and libraries in the spring of this year. And that got, having had a few good presentations at a national conference under my belt, I now feel comfortable enough and crazy enough and have met Michael that I put... It is your fault. Everything's always your fault. This whole thing is your fault. To put forward proposals for a pre-conference workshop and three presentations. And they were all accepted. You've been a little busy. Yeah, I've been a little busy for the past few days. So I haven't actually attended as many sessions as I would have liked because I was standing behind the podium instead of out in front of it. But it's been a lot of fun. And I'm now, today is my day for attending, which is great. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, and I think there's a balance you have to try to find when you come to any conference. And this includes even your state-level conference. So if you're presenting, you know... It's also especially hard if you're presenting like at the last hour of the last day. I've done that a couple of times, because you're kind of worrying about it throughout. So you have to do your best to kind of set that aside and enjoy the sessions and learn something, you know, up until the point about an hour before your presentation. And then get back a year for that one. Yeah. This is something you've already finished writing your presentation. Well, there's that problem. That was my conference. But in fact, I think even just the experience of kind of sitting there working on your presentation with people around you. You could listen to the conversations around you. You're always going to learn something as long as you're kind of centered in the space. But you do have to find some sort of a balance between... Because you're not going to get to every session. It's physically impossible, you know, unless you're like Hermione Granger with a time turn or you're not going to make it. So, you know, best to just choose what greatly interests you or what challenges you. Like something you don't know anything about. Go sit through a session. And maybe it won't make any sense to you for two or three years. But some of the things that I learned at CIL in 07 are only now becoming relevant to what I'm doing. I understood what they were, but I just knew I couldn't apply them. Well, there's a tip and force square on that. So they left a tip and force square to actually push your boundaries and go to a session that is only moderately related to what you do in order to identify as many connections as you can find that relate to what you are doing. And I thought that was a really useful and interesting tip that was left. And moreover, just attending a conference like this may be pushing your boundaries. When I attended in 2006, I was a generalist reference librarian out at a branch of the Boston Public Library. I had nothing to do with the back end. I had nothing to do with the technology that was not anywhere in my job description. But I was interested personally in it. My higher-ups knew that, and so they encouraged me to go to the conference. And I didn't understand the vast majority. I could see a little bit of how it worked. I knew some of the words. I knew some of the words. You knew the vocabulary lesson. You really do. But I learned after attending and I came home from the conference, really excited, and learned more on my own. And then I went to the next one and learned a little bit more. And you just... If it's something that you're not doing and not part of right now, but you're interested, go anyway. Because no one's testing you on this. No one's asking you to come right back and pass a quiz. You just develop that knowledge over time. And it's taking five years, but now I'm a web services librarian. Well, more to the point, the people who are giving the presentation make a point of talking to them in the car, at least getting their contact information and scroll that away. You can even say, I saw you at the computers and libraries in 2006 and you were talking about such and such. Are you still working on that at all? Can I ask you a couple of questions? Even if they're not, or if they've moved on to something else, they may be able to refer you to somebody who's working. Yeah, we just got up and spoke in front of a room of 250 people. We'll happily talk to you. The speakers have to kick out the previous speakers because we're still talking to people down front after their session. It's like, I didn't get mine now easily. Take it out of my heart. And this is true. Even over the coffee and bagels in the morning, you might strike up a conversation. This gets back to the lobby con and the value of that and the brainstorming that happens when side conversations begin. So it's very good to put yourself out there and push your boundaries and participate that only increases your ability to provide for your community. Just from breakfast yesterday morning, I got a card from somebody who just started working at Google in some sort of training program. She's like, we need to talk later. I'm like, okay. Change cards. We'll send some emails. Let me focus on one other thing from Monday's keynote. I'll say for the record, the keynotes this year have been very interesting to me because they've been very different. Some of us who attend regularly have kind of... The buzz has kind of been, it's the same keynote people over and over and over again. I keep trying to defend it by saying 25% of the audience almost every year is somebody who's never been at this conference before. It's us regulars who hear Lee Rainey twice a year or five years. This year they got people completely out of that field and so the buzz over the weekend was, who are these people? Good morning, Patricia Martin who, for reference, she pretty much started the Bill of Millindy Gates Foundation as I understand it. She's up there. She talked about kind of the future of libraries and the way she put it and I want to give people's reflections on this is that libraries need to be where people have dwell time. Yeah, we agree. Okay, so I guess would somebody like to try to defend or define dwell time and figure out we all agree. What is dwell time and why do we agree with this? On the easiest level it's where people spend their time. But not just where they spend their time but where they spend their time when they're actually paying attention. When they're actually open to ideas and open to things that are coming at them. As opposed to at work where they might be focused on the particular tasks that are in front of them the dwell time as I understand it is more the it's those other times. It's those times when you can catch their attention and I think this comes from a marketing perspective of getting their eyeballs on your product but you've got to make sure that they're present and aware and available to receiving your product. So I know there was a little bit of that. I kind of look at it from the Sims perspective. So you have your as you're playing the Sims you have your green plus bar and then you have your red negative bar and people come to the library for green plus time. They do not make it an errand they come in and even if they know that they want to check out six new fiction books they let their kids play the games on the computer and look at the puppets and the turtles they might sit and do the puzzle for a while. You have turtles? We have turtles. We have turtles. So they come in but it's a very pleasure oriented time it's not like going to the grocery store going to the bank or going to run these other errands that we must do it's a whole different subset of that where you allow yourself time to interact, engage, enjoy and so that's how I took the dwell time concept is that people are sitting in a library building and they're having green plus and they're adding to their happiness bar right because they are enjoying their time looking and interacting with people and online resources and print materials and turtles. Okay, I'm envisioning a video here to give to the animation of something something green bar going out. Somebody also mentioned I mean, honestly I kind of looked at dwell time a little different because somebody to me mentioned yesterday the library in people airport in Amsterdam and they were kind of saying where? It was down the shader. Oh, that's right. You know, time in the airport could be well time. You don't really have anything else to do. But again, that comes from that marketing perspective these are places where they're okay, let's put it bluntly, they're trapped. You're in an airport, you're trapped and yet is it possible to make that a transformative experience time and I think this comes from that that wonderful study that came out of OCLC and others did was talking about on that grid of sort of education of the transformative where the libraries, you know, and we're trying to move libraries into that transformative corner of this grid and I think, you know, things like the library in simple airport really helped that because you're saying, okay you're in this space where you might not necessarily think about this product the product being the library, but lo and behold, here we are and we're providing you with this space and not only that, but we're providing you with a space that is unique in this environment a quiet place a place to contemplate, a place to perhaps recharge and oh and by the way remind you about libraries. And it's a unique in that environment but it's also deeply familiar. Yes, people understand even if they've never been in a library or they haven't been in 25 years many, not all, but a lot of new immigrants from other countries and are in Boston and many of them have never even believed in the concept of a free public library, so that there's an education there, but for many, many other people a library is an anchor point and they understand that they mostly get how it works and so if they see the library in a new space in a new place, in a place they didn't expect it it's something fun and familiar to hold on to and say, oh I know what a library is I know what to expect there and it might be different than it used to be but it's still, it gets them in the door and it gives them that moment of connection that moment of agreeing plus. And I think the part of the point was that we need to be in those spaces, we can't just count on the physical spaces we already have to draw them in because the reality is they're running around they're mobile, they're virtual now so we need to be in the spaces where they are we need to be on their phones, we need to be you know where they're looking at every 5 seconds of traffic we need to be out in the community we need to be at the mall, we need to be in all of those things we've talked about for many many years and sometimes they've made work and sometimes haven't but the reality now is just becoming increasingly virtual and people's lives are becoming increasingly scattered so we can kind of be in those places where they are as often as possible in a light way it doesn't have to be a big heavy way either it's just a, hey you know what I wonder if the library has that book oh look, on my phone I can check really quick, rather than having to call up or having to go through the internet and find the website, but no there's an app just click the app they're not going to just open a safari and go through that and search for the library and try to remember the URL, they're going to want an app, go boom boom boom search yes they have it, it's checked in I'll put a hold on so I think we dwell now in a lot of different places and it has little or nothing to do with our physical space more often than not I think you're right and this makes me realize that we really need to emphasize the level of comfort with our dwell space I'm thinking about how you're staying at this airport, they're trapped they're a captive audience and how many times have I watched the uncomfortable dad loitering in the front of my library while his wife is shopping in fiction his children are playing with the puppets and he's just kind of standing there so how could I make that space comfortable I started to put the magazines up there in the front and you know different chairs, I'm buying love seats so that I can encourage and approach this father and say would you like to read on stream well this is Idaho right here exactly exactly, because we need to think about how we make that space comfortable and how we make it easy for them and enjoyable for them and if they are going to consider it a place where they need to dwell either by choice or because they are a captive audience how do we make it a green plus experience for people and that's another point to take about the conference itself the old internet library and the focus is on computers and technologies but very often things that you learn ideas that spark will have a real world brick and mortar application as well because it's and even just as something as straightforward as putting the chair, the comfy chairs in the magazines up at the front of your building you'll hear a concept that is presented about an electronic space but then you can apply it to your real world spaces so again even if you're not technological stuff there might be still something there that you can bring back and immediately apply and it's all about those immediate applications of what you've learned sure, now here's something else that Kristen I ran into and she's heard me now this figure has stuck in my head for four days now at our pre-conference we had somebody from a larger county library system here in California I don't remember exactly which one he said that with this the system they have set up you have to use your library card to sign on to the computers so they know who signed on to the computers and they know because if you use your library card to check out a book who's checked out a book so they actually ran the numbers and they have only a 15% overlap between those two populations so he's looking at pretty much two distinctly different member groups I'm trying to use member instead of users now because I watched another thing about they want to be called members they have a card and they pay their taxes that's their membership fee I like this somebody actually asked their patrons what do you want to be called and they came up with members so they have two very distinct member groups in their library how do we deal with that well the question that I have is in addition to pulling the statistics on use did they pull the statistics by age is it that the that it but I think that would be interesting absolutely if we look at my environment a majority of the people who take advantage of my library services do not have internet at home their children also are latchkey children and they come into the library after school which is fine we have a wonderful community they are very well behaved children they do not take advantage and abuse the library they are very respectful they do spend a lot of time playing games they spend a lot of time doing Facebook they don't necessarily check materials out because of arbitrary rules based on how you are allowed to check out and create library cards and so on and so forth and so I would like to see additional data on the age groups because I do think that the way that the generations interact with material is into a part of that and that part of that 15% are the people who do come in and take advantage of doing research on the stocks or maybe look at consumer reports but then at the same time take away their fiction so I'm very interested in seeing where those two and diagram intersect and what contains that intersection well and I can tell you in our library they intersect from 2.30 to 5.30 every afternoon and not happily because we have a 9th grade school that's a quite large school a thousand kids we have a zoo and bless their hearts they're little hormones with feet and they're empty inside when they get to so luckily we have a cafe and the best thing we ever did was get a cafe and put a state trooper in charge of it he's an ex-state trooper and he went into food service and he's wonderful with the teens he's like the best guy he knows their names when they walk in he knows their name and a little bit about what they're to do just that we had a terrible problem before with a mini gang we had this mini gang of rich kids but still it was an issue and we just didn't have the staff because we had a large spatial area where we didn't have eye shot but what's interesting to me is that they do intersect there on the computers where the kids want to play their games and do their Facebook and talk trash about their friends and there's still people there who've been there since 9am when we opened who have been working on their resumes all day and they want to print and suddenly they can't because we're having network problems because of all people playing games and it is a genuine problem and I think the data I would get in fact I know the data I would get would support that confluence and so how do I make a transformative space for everybody all the time how do I make that 230 to 530 time before everybody goes home for dinner useful to everybody without conflict is where I kind of run into it and there are technological solutions which is what I come here to find out about in terms of increasing our network feed and making sure that our time in Transpandagement system isn't the frankly piece of crap it is now so replacing that I spend a lot of time this conference talking to other vendors of other time in Transpandagement system saying please help me I'm drowning and in them giving me some potential solutions so that's very helpful so I can go back and say for this service problem I have a partial technological solution I'm going to try to implement but then I may also have some other ones that I've learned from sitting around talking to my colleagues about what we do is we make sure we have such and such a program available let me take that back to our program let's talk about that because I'm in the same boat I'm a little bit a few steps behind because I'm still trying to find the print management and authentication system so I would very much like to hear that and then I can share with you some of the things we've done as far as programming and space restrictions that have helped and we have a very open plan so yes it's something I struggle with in our space and you can see how it's not just technology in fact that's just technology is a tool and I think everybody who's here mostly everybody who's here they're tool to a greater purpose they're not there for the second being there although some of them are just really really cool and you just want to put that in the box and that's important too it energizes you as a professional you're and wherever you are on Library Stamp we are all professionals don't we and so and so those coming here at least in part for yourself is okay supporting your own interest supporting your own energy levels supporting your own boom moments is vital because it really can reinvigorate you and your interest in your profession that's actually why I started coming to this I was still a student in library school and my program was still kind of trying to figure the technology thing out and so there wasn't so much in my program to learn this stuff and I heard about the conference and decided okay yeah I want to go Hey Michael this is Krista hi I just have a few comments from one of our attendees on this on the session live we have Maurice Coleman from Hartford County Public Library say hi mom he is logged in he says GoToWebber doesn't play nice with his computer so apparently I guess he can't talk but he said that Louise is an awesome presenter for anyone who's attending to definitely attend any of her presentations and he would like to invite everyone to come to their November 5 TIsForTraining workshop his TIsForTraining podcast and call into that and talk the same thing about what you guys had your impressions of the conference okay oh so is anybody else anybody listening yes TIsForTraining wonderful podcast Maurice we miss you here yeah Maurice usually comes to these things great thanks okay so we got a few more minutes to talk here then we've got a keynote to go to but so let's have a high note let's talk about failure yeah I was hoping you would ask about that when I was very interested in that track as I had to leave before it really got going it was great literally it was a great old track and there was even a contest as to who failed the worst or best and the person who won actually what she was talking about was identical to an experience I had gone through twice in the last 10 years which was basically a website redesign that went badly badly long and somehow as the librarian she had been put in charge well I did the same thing where I was in charge of all these people from a larger city so I was having flashbacks as she was giving her failed presentation and seriously literally shaking in my chair the experience and I went after her afterwards and she's sort of a pal of mine and I was like thank you because I need to remember those failures in order not to repeat them because we're about to go through another redesign and so I was very grateful to hear that A I was not alone which is very important and B that you know okay remember not to do that again and I love it that out of fail camp came a fail wiki yes that's right and think about it it's live but think about it you know it was a very valid point that was brought up we publish what works that is what our publishers want we publish what works they don't want to hear about how we really flopped on our faces that doesn't get published and accepted so we can't share and we do have the cycle of reinventing the wheel because we don't know what didn't work we didn't hear about these experiences that other people are having so being able to create a shared environment a wiki where we can talk about our absolute failures I thought that was brilliant and so now we'll have a place to see what didn't work and how it may or may not apply to the situations that we are in what actually happened was the somebody during that session called fail camp said well we have the library success wiki we should have a library fail wiki and Kendra write the front row and I'll set it up and by the end of the session I think it was live I mean she did it right there I've actually been thinking about this for my statewide and I'm at state association and it's important one of the things that I think we have a hard time with admitting to each other especially I think it was easier to admit to near strangers you know like I can sit around with a bunch of people over a beer at an internet library and say oh my god let me tell you about this perfect failure but I think talking to your colleagues who are in your state who have a lot more steak in you being successful and a lot more potential harsh words for you if you don't I think that's harder and I want to break that mold I'm really I'm very much wanting to have an Iowa library failure wiki and you know in you know linking to the larger in the sense of here's some great failures that we learned from you know and kind of say it from that perspective because it's not about oh this was just terrible and we keep doing it over and over again that's not a failure that's bad management and I mean it's a failure but it's a failure you're not doing anything about if you keep doing it over and over again again that's that you know a definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results let's change the results by sharing you know I sort of therapeutic response to failure you know if we share them we're more likely to come up with solutions we're much more likely to come up with answers and in that vein you know my biggest success was also one of my biggest failures because I could not get pure buy-in and I could not get management support even though I had faculty and dean faculty dean support so perhaps being able to be more honest about how we do need to actually help each other in our places of employee we do need to buy in we do need to support and by being able to make some of the failures more public maybe that will get the message across that yes you actually do need to kind of pull on your tough pants and do what you need to do what's in the greater good yeah Maurice has some good comments about that as well talking about administrators sometimes bad management is the failure that you're having and even if they don't seem to say it they want to know what doesn't work to save time and money and why it didn't work and he even put up a quote from Gandhi to make the change you want to see in the world and I think also that when you look at it you get when you put it outside your head let's just put it that way we can all kind of go over the hamster wheel in our head over and over again but there's a point where if you put it out and especially if you put it out on the inner tubes for people to see there is a point where you can look at it with a certain amount of perspective and perhaps come up with your own solution in a way that you just can't when you're running it through your head and through your blame you know all of your blame channels in your head and you're so emotionally tied to it yes Jennifer you found the I have indeed the URL is parent simple failbrary.org F-A-I-L-V-R A-R-Y oh bless Kendra's heart failbrary.org alright so everybody who's listening to this go to failbury.org contribute your failures yes we will be sympathetic one of the other things that I'd like to share that was really revolutionary for me in fail camp was the identifying of benchmarks right so there was two things there was the fail marks how do you identify and set a fail mark for something that now must die because it is not working when we plan and when we think of assessment we don't necessarily think of fail marks we don't consider what means this is not working and it is wandering precious resources and that's something we need to think about in planning and strategically thinking about where we want to go the other thing was fail-safing contingency plans what are you going to do if something doesn't work or users do it differently and those were two very poignant thoughts for me about the whole process of fail and learning from your fail we need to start really thinking about this kind of stuff because we outline how we want it to go and how we think it goes but we don't necessarily think about the other part I love what Matt Hamilton was talking about the anything model I'm very excited about it I know a lot of people have been giving them great but I'm very excited about it this is a library system in Colorado that's basically turned itself on its head and become something far more interesting what I liked was that try for 80% I love that they made the assumption that it wouldn't necessarily be perfect the first time and that was okay and then what you did was you then worked for the other 20% once it was implemented but you actually implemented at as low as 80% fully done so you didn't nitpick at it nitpick at it and then not make it available to anybody until it was no longer useful you yet threw it out there with planning and so forth but you got it up to that at least 80% and then let it fly and then did feedback loops from that to make it better I think we're going to wrap this up I want to give everybody here a chance to maybe say one more thing about the conference or why you should attend or what you got out of it or and you don't have to say anything about it around the table here but any last thoughts before we wrap this up bye I have to say I have to say that this has been one of the most revolutionary internet librarian CIL conferences I've ever attended because I was academic for 8 years and I had a huge comfort zone with my very academic very tech heavy big bang theory user world and now all of a sudden I'm making these beautiful connections with public librarians and we're talking about the same sorts of issues that now are in this world that I live with and to me it was just a very therapeutic invigorating conference more than it has been for any other because I feel like I have serious takeaways and even deeper community because of the days I spent here similarly this is the first conference I've been at where I really knew people when I got here that's all your fault yes computers and libraries this past spring and it's all gone from there and making those connections I'm living or not I'm a shy quiet retiring person if I don't know people well and I I'll take your word for it and a librarian wow imagine a reference librarian and it took a lot of effort for me to make those connections this past spring and I am reaping the benefits of this conference I have had more and it's not about making the connections it's about making a deeper connection it's about actually believing that I'll go home and now talk to these folks these fabulous folks in this room and make those connections and keep those connections and keep that those thoughts bubbling in my head and that's for me that's been my big yeah that's actually been the most the biggest thing for me at all of the conferences this is my fourth and I'm always amazed every time I come since the first time I came and started meeting people I'd both get to see the people that I only get to see in real life here because I don't go to computers and libraries it's farther than I really want to travel but I always also meet new people who I know I'm going to get to see next year and who I'll be keeping in touch with next year it's great the networking yeah exactly exactly and of course every once in a while I might be traveling to Boston well and for me I've known Jess actually for a little while through Mutual Friends but since she was in academia we had things to talk about but now I'm like I can help her and I'm all excited because that's what I'm all about and so I'm excited that my 14 years of horror time and preventive positions will now be useful for someone so that makes me very happy well thank you everybody this is wonderful I think this one's swimmingly I'm glad I can get you all up at Oh Dark and Ugly to do this for us who are time zone challenged and so that is it I think for today from the internet librarian and we'll send it back to you for that one okay great thank you very much everyone I'm so glad that you all did the talking rather than me as anyone who knows my voice does not normally sound like this this is the I'm at work I made it here but are you feeling better yes I am I'm better than I was Monday night yes definitely got myself all drugged up and ready to go so I'm going to take back I think control here and show I just wanted to let everyone know that all of the links that were mentioned today I believe this is the one that had to with WordPress Failbrary share your library failures and the tears for training podcast that you can the next one is November 5th those will all be included in the recording for the sessions you'll be able to see all of those links and I hope you'll join us next week and I'm kept us live well we will have a similar session to this one actually about our state conference NLA annual conference was two weeks ago and we will have people from that conference sharing their conference highlights so thank you very much thank you everyone in Monterey go get yourself some coffee and we will see you next time thank you bye bye