MyUniversity Library has a new book display. It has comfy couches. I can watch what other people are choosing. I can flick through several books in one sitting..not reading, browsing. It is in a corridor between two buildings, and right near our reference desk. This means people strolling past or waiting for the ref. desk are introduced to our new stock.

I don’t like the list of new books in our catalogue. I can’t absorb it in one glance…and it takes too much effort to read each title. I do like the way it displays the cover of one new book on the backlinked page.

AM sent me a nice half way idea for those times when I can’t get into the library and browse. Edward Vielmetti , who writes the Superpatron – Friends of the Library, for the net blog has made a mashup using the RSS feed from the Ann Arbor District Library ‘s Innovative Interfaces catalogue. He’s taken the cover pictures of books featured in the new books list and placed them all on a single screen. He explains it here and has an image of it here. Clicking on a cover takes you to the catalogue record.

Now, all I need is someone to somehow integrate the Amazon.com function that lets you “look inside” an item, sit on my comfy couch and pretend.

librariesinteract.info (affectionately known as lint) is two weeks old today. So far we have had 23 posts and 83 comments…and not all of them from me. We had 256 hits on Friday. We have had some really great feedback via other blogs. Try a google blog search on our name ( like this ) to see them.

My favourite post so far has been VALA meeting (melbourne) 28th June brief report
from sparkle, where she passed on some very useful information about RFID, got really personal and told us what she had for dinner and amused us by telling us how she momemtarily mistook Barry Jones for Bob Ellis. Blogging at its best.

My favourite comment so far has been one from Kate in response to Hoi’s Blogging and the public libraries post. Hoi described her planned thesis topic. Kate mentioned a relevant paper she was in the middle of writing for presentation at Information Online 2007. Why is it my favourite? Because I have been rabbiting on about new technologies like blogs allowing academics to bypass academic libraries as the conduit for scholarly discourse.

If this type of hook up is happening on our blog, then I’m sure that it is happening everywhere in all disciplines. Kate might have talked about her research to Hoi if they met while attending the same function, but the chances are slim. While blogs may not become formal sites for scholarly exchange, the informal linkups between researchers are increased.

I’m not going to republish my posts from librariesinteract.info here, but I will every so often add a pointer. Here’s one to my post on Blogs: Who’s reading? Who’s writing? .

Now I shall finish my leek, potato and lentil soup and continue on with my (kid free!!!) evening, again with the cat stuffed up my poncho. Excuse me.

Connections abounded last night.

CW and I gave our workshop about how to blog a conference at the State Library, then moved on to the monthly Perth bloggers meetup at a pub about 100 metres away. I drove home thinking about so many things, but this morning I’m dwelling on how people want to interconnect, arrange things so they can connect, help others to connect, and accidentally connect.

Where were the connections?

• JJ talking about the need for country librarians to link up and how blogs and wikis may help.
• K3 seeing that the conference blog could be a conduit for matching spare rooms in Perth with attendees needing accomodation.
• Richard talking about holding barcamp in Perth on August 5th, the same day as they happen all around the world.
• Chatting about the effect that Reg Bolton had on so many people in Perth and around the world. He taught not only his circus skills, but also empowered others to teach them. No-one will ever do it like he did, and certainly is not likely to touch so many lives in the same way.
  
• Finding out that Dee had gone to school in the same Southwest town as me and even knew a couple of the same people.
• Talking about how I was at a party a few years ago and everyone co-incidentally had some kind of link to Z, except for me. Toxic Purity telling me that she knew someone, W, who tended to be the same. Yes, it then turned out that most of us sitting around the table actually did know W.
• Comparing notes about breastfeeding with Toxic Purity and Skribe and marvelling about the networks that are set up by people who have been there, done that to help parents and babies learn how to do something that no-one expects to have to actually learn.

Like yesterday, a good day…but this time, no reframing necessary.

Now, if my last post left you waiting in anticipation for something called “Why write another post about blogging”, then you’ll be disappointed. But disappointment is where I’m going today, so please come along. (I’ll guarantee you won’t be disappointed).

Last night, 14 months after my father died, my brother signed the papers accepting my offer to buy his share of the house that we both inherited. Yesterday, CW and I changed the name of the Let’s Blog Click06 blog to blog the conf, after the Click06 committee asked us to. Both events were the tail end of much to-ing and fro-ing and many phone calls.

Let me tell you about how I learned about “reframing”. You’ll see why further down. Every year we take Mr3 to the Kalparrin family camp while Mr8 has a weekend with his grandparents. This year we had breakfast with two Clown Doctors, who are people with real hospital name badges and the very serious job of using humour to lighten the stress for everyone in hospital. After much fun and laughter, the kids went of to be even more silly and we parents settled down to learn about using humour in our lives.

One of the exercises involved breaking up into small groups and each of us describing a problem that was bugging us. These people have kids with disabilities, so as you can imagine, the problems not trivial. What did the others have to do? Reframe it. Describe why it was actually an advantage. Make it funny. Take it to ridiculous extremes. Have fun with it. One person complained that she had to go to work the next day. “Well, you won’t need to do housework”. “You’ll be in airconditioning and out of the heat”, “That makes you appreciate being here more”, “You’re out meeting people”, “You may be discovered by a talent agent and go on to be really famous”. All around the room, we were erupting in gales of laughter about the most serious and complicated things.

So, do you want to know what I did yesterday? I learned about some people. I discovered how supportive other people can be. A couple of things finished up so I can use my energy on other things. I had a chance to really piss some people off and refrained. I learned that the workshop CW and I are giving tonight to help librarians understand blogging really is necessary. I went on a picnic with my kids and rolled down the hill in the sun and got grass stains all over my jeans.

Hope your day was as much fun as mine.

Played Twister in the sunshine at a park today. Not relevant to my topic, except to give the title and images for the next two posts. Part two is “Why write another post about blogging?”. This one is…

PART ONE- CAN’T FAKE THIS

My boss asked me to look at blogging and similar tools and how we could use them in our academic library. I was on the reference desk during a public holiday and thought I’d polish off a report in a couple of shifts. That was 3 months ago. I’m now one month into facillitating a two month project for libray staff where we use new technologies- like blogs, RSS and wikis to assess whether they are useful to us. It’s called MULTA (My University Library Thinking Aloud).

This week we do blogs. Participants already have blogs within the site. (Its a TikiWiki installation, so they are a bit ”toy” ,but adequate for the project ). I’ve written a wiki page giving the basics of blogs, which probably anyone who could research could fake. But…in the past three months, I’ve learned a few things that you couldn’t fake without hanging out in the biblioblogosphere:

1. Comments are a huge part of the blogosphere.
A hidden iceberg this one, but a delightful one. Posts make up the starting points and the catalysts, but the comments are where you’ll find the good goss. And where you’ll make the connections and networks to link your blog posts to others. I know I click through to the blog of everyone who leaves a comment here.

2. Quoting other blogs is not stealing, but creating community.
I hope I’m right on this one. I was worried when I first started quoting and linking to others’ blog posts. I thought that it meant that I was being unoriginal and not using my own thoughts and voice. Now I’m beginning to think that it’s another way of creating community. One of my posts was mentioned in another blog, then re-quoted by another blogger. I was so flattered, and interested in where they would go with what I started.

3. Be very careful when you talk about blogging to non-bloggers.
Do not presume that non-bloggers know about what type of things are blogged, and how informal and celebratory this can be. Say, for example, you told a non-blogger that you and a bunch of other passionate soccer fans were blogging the world cup. Don’t presume that they’d understand that you weren’t part of FIFA or speaking on their behalf. You may need to spell it out.

4. Remember the aggregators when you design your template.
Many of your casual readers can become regular readers if you add a feed from your blog. If you do want this, go to a site like feedburner and create a feed, or find out how to add a feed to your template directly.

If the point of your blogging is to get as many clicks as possible, you might was to try these tips from blogger about promoting your blog. Or take a reality check about why you blog in the first place.

5. Remember the aggregators when you design your content.
My last post had an embedded video. Looks great on my blog here at blogger. Does it show up on my PDA ..Naaah. Does it show up on my bloglines feed?…Naaah. Don’t presume that your posts will be read at your blog site and add links accordingly.

Now when I get my act together, I should revamp my Flickr account and store the image from this post there. Then I can add the link to my post.

6. Remember the aggregators and searchbots when you think noone’s watching.
My groovy stats meter shows me what link brought people to my blog. Who would have thought that a google search on “hot water bottles” or “library sleepover Illinois 2006” would land a reader here…but they did. You can’t predict who will get here and how..but they will come.

7. Does it fill a gap for you ?
Recently some participants in MULTA have been discussing what makes something blogworthy. I guess I’m writing the posts that I would like to read, rather than those I think other people want to read. A big difference, but one that I think gives a better voice to my posts, and is more likely to link me to oher people like me. I don’t much care for basenjis, so I don’t blog about them..but I’m sure some people would like to read about them..they’ll just do it on someone else’s blog. Me, I’m sticking with my Cornish Rexes.

Pottering about in Library Garden I found this post about the Bookcart Drill Team World Championships held at the 2006 ALA conference.

Now I had visions of frantic librarians (or more likely attendants) powering toward shelves, loading on as many books as possible, speed arranging them by Dewey and incurring injuries as they lunged toward the finish line. But..no..it’s something altogether more elegant, more courtly, precise and restrained. Eat your heart out Esther Williams!

Watch the winning team here:

My Co-Pilot snores. Loudly. It wakes me up. Nothing could be more disturbing, right?

Uh, uh. He’s going to a specialist about it soon. Specialist wants me to go too. Why? Co-Pilot is asleep when it happens, so doctor will ask me about it.

We even have homework.
Co-pilot has to …..sleep.
I have to….make a recording of the snoring and when Co-pilot stops breathing (sleep aponea).

So, last night I was awakened by an end-of-the-world chainsaw noise next to me. Shall I get up and find my PDA? OK. Snoring settles down. Doze. Snoring starts.

Turn on PDA

“Bip”. The “recording started” noise wakes Co-Pilot slightly. I’m too tired to get out of bed, turn on the light and switch off quiet bipping setting. Doze. Listen to breathing become shallower, shallower, shallower… building up to an aponea “Bip”. No good. Noise stops the snoring.

Inadvertently have discovered the cure for Co-Pilot’s snoring. Works better than hitting or turning him onto his side. Inadvertently have discovered cure for sleeping for me. 4:30am and I was up for the day.

Mr 3 had previously woken me up at 12:30am, wanting his wheatbag microwaved again. (We use them instead of hot water bottles).

Today I was a bleary-eyed semi-human traveller.

Tonight I’ll unbip my PDA and see whether I can tape my Co-Pilot’s snoring. Wish me luck and pleasant dreams.

Currently I have four web sites I’m nannying. They are always open in my browser and often send me auto-generated emails to tell me what is going on there. This blog is one, the librariesinteract.info blog is another. There’s the Let’s Blog Click06 blog and then a work project, MULTA (My University Library Thinking Aloud), which is a tikiwiki installation.

What amazes me is that I can do this at all, without crashing the whole kit and caboodle and bringing shouts of ire from users and other administrators. I’ve been a System Librarian and I’ve done a unit in computing at uni (mainly programming in PASCAL – really relevant today). I wouldn’t say that this qualified me to administer any site…yet here I am.

I wouldn’t have attempted anything like it a few years ago, although I had the same skills. What’s changed?

1. “Off the shelf”, free sites that hold your hand abound. They know how to give you power and safety all at once.
   
2. Open source software is easily available with lots of documentation, so I can easily evaluate it before installing it.
3. More techie sorts with “can do” attitudes. Once I thought I’d be bugging a tech if I spoke to them in lay terms, now they are much more approachable (or I’m less overwhelmed).
4. I’ve found that people who get a buzz out of doing something are usually very generous about helping newbies. Now I’m finding that I’m meeting more “regular people” who can do this type of site admin and will share, share, share.
5. Nifty stuff that I can nick is everywhere. So far I’ve stolen a site counter from someone else‘s blog. I have my eye on a nifty way of adding subject headings to my blogger blog. I don’t even have to wait until her back is turned.
6. Previously special interest groups with the best collaborative spirit possible just didn’t have the tools to create and administer a group run site. Now we can do it together and act as a cheer squad and tea and coffee makers for each other. Not only do we run the site we want, but we hothouse skills together as well.

So…I’m learning,learning, learning thanks to a bit of techie friendliness, generous spirits and old fashioned theft.

A couple of weeks ago two male contestants were kicked off the reality TV show Australian Big Brother for putting their privates just where they should not be.

Where could you go to see a downplayed, spin added description of the event? The official site. Where could you go to find pointers to the footage that was broadcast, a discussion of the ehics of the contestants and the show and get a feel for how passionate fans felt about it. A fan site like Behind Big Brother Australia, or Australian Big Brother’s Journal .

This lead me to think about whether a “not the official site” is a threat or an asset to an organization. So I’ve dot pointed my thoughts and Cluetrained them up a bit. Also in the style of “The user is not broken” (over at Free Range Librarian).

Why our non official web site is good for your official site:

1. You spending money on market research, focus groups and stakeholders meetings? Come to our site and see what we really think.
2. People at our site care about what you do. Passionately. We give up our free time to hang out together and talk about you.
3. Do things that please us and we will talk about it. LOUDLY
4. Do things that we think are crap we will talk about it. LOUDLY
5. We’d love to hear from you.
6. We don’t own you. How you present yourself is your business.
7. You don’t own us. How we present ourself is our business.
8. If we are not right for our users, they will drop away from our site and not tell us.
9. If you are not right for your users, you will hear about it here.
10. You probably don’t want to send traffic to our site 🙂 ,but we are certainly sending it to yours.
11. All publicity is good publicity.

I’m showing my good friend S how a blog works. We’ve just taken Mr 3 and Mr 8 to see the Enchanted Wood performed by a children’s theatre company.

S is also a librarian, so I’ve given her a 5 minute tour of blogs and wikis.