You can't win 'em all...

This is the 100th blog post on thewikiman blog, and some of them have been seen more than others. The more widely distributed your stuff, the more likely people are to dislike it. Or rather, the more people who would dislike it if they saw it, see it. So it was inevitable that my Slide-deck about what to expect if you want to work in libraries would eventually recieve some flak as it's the most viewed thing I've done. Due to being featured on Slideshare's homepage, and Liked/Shared on FaceBook + linked to from Twitter nearly 1,000 times, it has been viewed a lot - nearly 15,000 times at the time of writing. By my normal standards, that is stratospheric. It has been favourited 30 times, downloaded 114 times and embeded on 68 websites, including non-English-as-native-language sites, such as Bibliosession. Bibliosession acknowledged a couple of other French sites that had drawn their attention to the deck, and it was because of that I was able to read a comment on lahary.wordpress.com, which, I have to say, is the best piece of criticism I've ever read!

I used Google Translate to get a better (yet still, I realise, innacurate) idea of exactly how cross they were, here's what it came up with:

Woof!

Anyway, Google Translate is always a hilarious source of entertainment, especially when you translate things through multiple languages and eventually back to your own. I mauled this quote through Afrikaans, Croation, Basque, Malay, Traditional Chinese, and Swahili, via a bunch of other languages, ending with Korean - then back to English... And got this:

:)

Ace.

In other news

[NB: Don't click the link in this bit if you read those Harry Potter books and are not yet finished the final book / waiting for the final film to find out what happenes.] A library in Norway has found a truly excellent way to ensure their books get returned when they're overdue. Is this twitpic of a letter sent to a patron - http://twitpic.com/3ro5z9 - real? Who knows - either way, it's a genius idea... Thanks to @Slewth for the link!

- thewikiman

Now for some good news: we're BUILDING a library!

In a world where almost everything you hear about libraries is bad news, it's amazing to find out you can create some good news yourself. Just before Christmas @Jaffne pointed out on Twitter that you could buy India a library, via GoodGifts.org, for just £1,250.

Clearly that's a lot of money in some ways, but in others it seems a tiny amount - they build the library from scratch, kit it out with furniture, fill it with books and staff it for TWO YEARS with that money. Furthermore, you can get a donkey-drawn mobile library in Africa for just £100! Unbelievable. In each case, the libraries bring books to areas which previously had none.

Anyway, while I was marevelling about this with Jan Holmquist on Twitter, Andromeda Yelton pointed out that although she didn't have £1,250 lying around herself, perhaps Twitter would do collectively? It's a simple but brilliant idea - crowd-source enough money from librarians on Twitter, to fund a library for a charitable organisation.

As soon as we had time to put it all together, Andromeda, Jan and I, roping in Justin Hoenke for the ride, set up Buy India a Library. It's a PayPal donation based system, and so far people have been incredibly generous - we've raised nearly £500 and the campaign is only three days old! There is a lot of discussion on Twitter using the hashtag #buyalib - there is a twapperkeeper archive of the tweets here - and loads of people have clicked the donate button and given what they can.

Do you think you could help out? If everyone who reads this and my Twitter feed gave the price of a coffee to the cause, we'd have enough already. If you feel able to donate anything at all, please click the button - let's create some good news and open a library at a time of closures!

[PayPal button removed -the campaign has now closed]

It goes without saying, the PayPal accounts we're using (mine until I reach my withdrawal limit, then Andromeda's thereafter) are only being used for this campaign. Whether you're able to donate or not, it would be fantasticly helpful if you were able to spread the word about the campaign, either by linking to the main Project website on your blogroll, or telling friends and family about the campaign, or putting something in the staff bulletin drawing people's attention to it. We've set ourselves a pretty ambitious target, and we need all the help we can get! If you're able to tweet a link to this post, or Share it on Facebook, that would be amazing.

What I really like about this, apart from the obvious thing of Information Professionals making a huge difference and creating libraries where currently there are none, is that it is such a tangible process of charity giving. Rather than just adding money to a pot of existing money, we're coming together to literally BUY something specific, and real. Things will be created and pressed into service, books will be sourced and purchased - because of what we're doing here. Even if the campaign stopped right this second, four mobile libraries would be made, stocked up, and begin to move around Africa, bringing books to children who need them. Can you join in and support the project?

The Buy India a Library FAQ

If the information above is the main feature film, this bit is the DVD extras. For those who want to know more, here it is:

Which charity administers this?

The company through which we are buying these libraries is UK-based, and called GoodGifts.org. It is the brain-child of the Charities Advisory Trust, a registered charity with more than  25 years of experience. What's great about GoodGifts is that the money is guarenteed to be used for the specific purpose advertised - it doesn't go into a general pot of cash, it is used specifically for what the customer chooses. So, libraries will come into existence which were not in existence previously, thanks to your donation! GoodGifts charges a £4.95 handling fee on top of the cost of the gift - we will pay this fee, and the entirety of the money we raise will go directly to the charities involved.

More info on the charities that take over at that point (the Rural Literacy and Health Programme, and the Africa Educational Trust) below.

Where exactly will the money be spent?

Once we buy the libraries, they are provided by specialist charities. The library in India will come from the Rural Literacy and Health Programme (RLHP), set up in 1984. To quote the organisation's website, the RLHP "...operates in 56 slums and 25 villages in Mysore, Mandya & Chamarajanagar districts of Karnataka State in South India covering a population of 50,000."

The donkey drawn libraries are delivered by the African Educational Trust a UK registered charity formed more than 50 years ago, dedicated to support education in Africa. The mobile libraries are aimed at kids, and contain around 100 fiction, non-fiction and reference books - the libraries travel to schools in Somalia, Sudan and Uganda (all of which are low on supplies of books, due to being former war zones).

What happens if you raise less than £1,250?

If we raise less than the figure needed to buy a permanent library in India, we will buy multiples of mobile libraries in Africa (each costing £100) based on how much we get. If we don't get an exact X-hundred pound figure, we'll buy Book Grants (of £35 each) to make up the difference.

What happens if you raise more?

We buy more libraries! Ideally we'd like to raise £1,350 so we can buy a permanent library in India, AND a mobile library in Africa. If we make much more than that, we'll buy more mobile libraries and book grants with the difference.

Who are the people behind this campaign?

Just four Information Professionals who talk to each other on Twitter. Justin Hoenke and Andromeda Yelton are public librarians from the US, Jan Holmquist is a public librarian from Denmark, and I work in an academic library in the UK.

Why are you using a basic PayPal account for this?

We spent a looong time looking into the options here - we looked at places like www.justgiving.com but they don't support this specific charity in this specific way, and we looked at the options to upgrade our PayPal accounts to business ones but opened a whole world of problems - the net result of which were less money for the charity.

In the end we opted to use a basic PayPal account (mine [EDIT UPDATE - now Andromeda's]), which won't be used for anything else except this campaign. Once we reach the limits of that (one can only withdraw so much from a PayPal account in a year) we will switch to Andromeda's PayPal account. PayPal take a very small cut of the money, but not a prohibitive amount - for example if you give £20, we'll recieve £19.12.

Why spend money on libraries abroad when our own are in trouble?

This is a good question, a fair enough point, and one a few people have raised. Should librarians be spending their hard-earned library salaries on building libraries elsewhere while our own insitutions are closing around us? Here's my view:

- It only costs 100 pounds – 100 pounds! (that's about 155 dollars) – to set up a mobile library in Africa, to reach parts of the continent that have little or no access to books. It costs 1,250 pounds to build an entire permanent library in India, kit it out with furniture and books and staff for TWO years! Neither of those amounts would make much of a dent on the UK/US library situation, but would make a huge, tangible difference in the poorer parts of India / Africa.

- People have no real mechanism to give to libraries in the UK or US in the same way. Even if you had $5 you wanted to donate to a library, how could you? We don’t think we’re taking money AWAY from any libraries in our own countries – we believe we will catalyse spending that wouldn’t otherwise happen. That said, if we can start some kind of movement towards giving to libraries at home too, that would be amazing. Libraries for all!

- Libraries are closing all over the place. Let’s open one and have some good news for a change...

Let me know if you have any more questions about the project and here, once more, is the donate button.

[PayPal button removed -the campaign has now closed]

Thank you.

- Ned

10 online tools I've found useful in 2010

10 online tools I’ve used in 2010

View more presentations from Ned Potter.

Other stuff I'm still using from last year includes wordpress.org, the KING of blogging platforms! And Slideshare of course, I'm using that more and more. Photofunia I still occasionally use if I want to put a photo into some kind of interesting context with the minimum of fuss. Flickr creative commons for images. iGoogle is still the starting point for my web use - I find being able to log into any PC in the world and find the same home-page, with all my bookmarks etc, very helpful. Pbworks wikis are ace - you can set one up for anything, even if it's just to have your own 'in the cloud' storage space. And finally Twitter - it's just over a year since my first ever Tweet, and it's arguably the single most valuable tool I use, I think. It's great for a million and one reasons - if you're an Information Professional not currently on there, I too used to be a big skeptic but trust me, it's worth it.

This is the final pre-Christmas blog post, so, have a good one! :)

- thewikiman

How to use Prezi really well

I'm loving using slides to disseminate stuff at the moment, so I've re-written and updated my Prezi FTW post and produced a new top ten tips on creating a great presentation with the online zooming software. Also, I used it as an opportunity to really really hard with the slide-deck and experiment with a slightly different style.   (And put in a little bit of library pride on the final couple of slides.) :)

edit: since these slides were created, Prezi has improved some features and made some changes - including a Theme Editor. This means point 2, about choosing your colour scheme early and the fonts / colours not being mix-and-matchable, is no longer quite as true...

How to use prezi and WIN - feel free to share / use this.

View more presentations from Ned Potter.

For more in-depth information, including a Prezi guide in Prezi itself, see my ultimate guide to Prezi.

Prezi as grand canvas

Since the original Prezi FTW guide I've used Prezi in a new way. Rather than just creating a presentation on a blank background, I've started trying to use an image as the canvas, and superimposing all my text, graphics etc onto that image.

Here is the interactive library map I created for the New Professionals Information Days:

Everything you need to know about technology and working in libraries on Prezi

As you can see it's designed to be used interactively by the viewer, rather than navigated through in linear fashion - everything highlightable is clickable. I think this makes more of the unique properties of Prezi versus PowerPoint - increasingly, I don't think it's worth using Prezi over really nice slides unless you exploit some of these types of capabilities.

In Edit view the Prezi looks  like this:

All those blue boxes are Hidden Frames, and hidden frames are what makes each bit highlightable (and clickable on). It's really easy to do.

I think this has loads of potential. You could do maps, plans, desks anything with a top down view really. Because Prezi writes directly and transparently on to whatever the surface of the canvas is (as opposed to having to create a text-box with a white or coloured background, for example) you can add text to anything which doesn't already have text on it. So for example you could take the full size version of this picture (from www.sxc.hu):

...and write text of varying sizes on all the little bits of note-paper, making full use of all the different angles, etc etc. You get a nice cohesive top-down view, and then you get to zoom in and read all the intriguing pieces of text individually. Or you could use an old fashioned painting as your canvas (imagine a 19th century oil-painting of a lake) and then zoom in with extreme close-up of some modern water-skiers on there, for some Banksy style anarchy (but subtler)!

So I'd encourage anyone to experiment with the Prezi as Grand Canvas idea. Good luck!

- thewikiman

Everything you need to know about technology to work in libraries

I've given a couple of talks on technology in libraries recently. Here's roughly what I said. (Or, more accurately, roughly what I intended to say, :) ) In modern librarianship you can do so many jobs, such a diverse array of roles which are salaried by the library; actually very few threads run through all of them. Over the course of the two New Professionals Information Days we've had more than 150 delegates through the door, and there's very little in common between ALL the roles we do or aspire to do. Certainly not books.

'Problem solving' is probably a thread which runs through most roles, 'people' is another. But really technology is the only thing that unites pretty much all the jobs we Information Professionals do. So, it's incredibly important to be comfortable with it. By technology I do mean hardware (PCs, scanners, iPads etc), but to a greater extent I mean software, platforms, social media, the internet and all that it entails.

Technology, when used well, is at the heart of the revolution libraries are currently under-going. Already well under way is the change from libraries as 'book wharehouse' to libraries as something much more dynamic and fluid, led by the information-seeking needs of our users. As New Professionals, we will soon become custodians of that change: we need to be ready.

If you think about a timeline of the world, and a timeline of libraries, the two have not been changing at the same rate. Libraries have been bobbing along in a very similar fashion for quite a long time, with not much in the way of drastic change between the library of Alexandria, and the libraries of 30 years ago. Suddenly, however, they're changing more in the last 30 years than arguably in the whole of the rest of their history put together. And of course, that seismic shift has its heart in technology.

Let's imagine a library has stood on this spot since the 1890s. Imagine a 30 year old man, like me, goes into this library in 1890 - he can expect a certain look, a certain feel, certain types of resource. If you took that man and forced him to travel though time, and placed him in the 1920s, he'd be all at sea. The world, and society, would be almost unrecognisably different. A World War would have been and gone, there'd be telephones revolutionising communication, cars all over the roads, JAZZ happening in clubs! Along with much else that would be almost unimaginable to our 1890s 30 year old. But this library - this library would probably look and feel much the same. Jump forward another 30 years - society has leaped again. The Roaring Twenties have been replaced by the Stepford Wives era, the straight-laced 50s. Technology has moved forward. Another World War has devastated much of Europe. Once again, our 30 year old's head would spin with all the changes. But this library is mostly unchanged - the types of resources are much the same. Fast forward another 30 years, to the 1980s. Society is permissive and developed in a way which would shock our 30 year old. Technology has moved on so much that not only has man landed on the Moon, but he's become indifferent to the idea of bothering to do so again. The Cold War hangs over the world. Computers are becoming common. A 30 year old from the 1950s would find the 80s a culture shock, to be sure. Yet he'd have little or no trouble using this library; the resources would look mostly familiar.

Finally, jump forward the final 30 years to now. Of course, the world is very different. But - and perhaps I'm being naive here - I think the 1980s 30 year old could slot into society without too much difficulty - it's not a cosmic leap forward in many respects. Similarly, as 30 year old now I could slip back into 1980 and not be totally lost. But the library would be completely unrecognisable! Suddenly the flat line of library development has shot upwards and gone off the chart. Technology has moved on dramatically in all areas of society - but much of the day-to-day effects of this are to do with how we access information. With how much we value information. With how we live now in an information economy. The internet has changed everything, including the library. Technology rules the library, it has shoved books to one side. People have always needed to access information, and libraries have always strived to provide access - but now the vessels for that information are changing. Librarians are increasingly becoming early adopters of new tools, platforms, and skills. Public perception, however, has quite understandably been unable to keep up with this change. It lingers behind, envisaging the library much as it was in the 50s, the 20s, or the 1890s.

So it is our job as the information professionals to equip ourselves with as much knowledge of the new as we can, whilst respecting what our predecessors have achieved. Because we newer professionals may not have that long to wait until we start actively start shaping the future of the profession. In fact, it's already happening.

It used to be said that what you learn in your Library Masters would last you five years before the information became outmoded. Now it's said to be just two years; this profession changes fast. Similarly the technology is evolving all the time - all this presentation can do is provide a snapshot of what is used in 2010 (and how we use it). I spoke to loads of my peers to crowd-source the information contained in this presentation, and they all stressed how they go to conferences, read blogs, subscribe to mailing lists and read professional publications, in order to keep up with what is going on. No one ever reaches a plateau of technological know-how in libraries, that they can afford to remain at indefinitely. As glib as it sounds, professional development never really stops.

All roads lead to technology eventually. All ROLES need technology eventually. If the job you want next doesn't require any technological expertise, chances are the one after that will. But even if your dream job doesn't use technology, it's actually very hard to get far enough up the pay-grades to get that job without going for some tech-related jobs. You can't afford to lose out to other more tech-minded people, because so many of the new roles and positions that are being created in libraries relate to the research, implementation, evaluation and development of various technologies.

As I've said before, it's more of a careers climbing wall than a careers ladder in this profession - there aren't always hand-holds directly above you. Those sideways or diagonal excersions often involve technology. For example if you need management experience, a great way to get that is from a project. Projects are often externally funded. External funders love to invest in the newest, most exciting things. The newest, most exciting things often involve technology.

Another point my peers repeatedly stressed when I was researching this, was how important interpersonal skills are. So much of what libraries do is collaborative these days - you have to be able to get on, to get on. Raw technical skill is not enough on its own - you need to be able to communicate effectively too. The TV stereotype of the computer whizz-kid who sits in the basement of an organisation, anti-social and belligerent, but kept on because HE'S JUST SO DAMN GOOD, would never happen in the library. He'd get to the end of his 6 months probation and his line-manager would say, I'm sorry, you're out. It doesn't matter how good your ideas are if you can't communicate them to your peers effectively.

A final word on technology. If you're scared of people, it'll be very difficult to sustain a career in libraries. You may be better off getting out now. If you're scared of technology, that's okay. We can help you! You need to immerse yourself in it - because the fear comes from unfamiliarity. Take away the unfamiliarity and you'll take away the fear. Just use different types of library related technology all the time, until you become comfortable with it. Learn to use social media platforms or presentation software even if you don't need to use it right now. Go on a course on one of the Office suite. Read the manual of your camera and start doing more sophisticated things with it. Just throw yourself into it.

Eventually, you get to a state where you're comfortable enough with technology generally that you're not afraid to take on ANYTHING new that might come up. And this is necessary because, as we've said, change happens fast in this industry. You need to get to a state where you're unphased by the idea of taking on some new platform or direction. It's all very well learning how to use one piece of kit - that's like learning directions from here to the railway station. Much better than that would be to learn where the railway station is, then you can get to it from anywhere...

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The above was from the last New Professionals Information Day for this year (and with MSU closing, who knows when there will be another one) so I can make my presentation materials properly available.

I used Prezi again, but in a different way this time. The canvas became an interactive map – I asked the delegates whereabouts in the library they’d like to work, then navigated to that part of the map and zoomed in on the desk in that ‘room’ to read all about the relevant technology. I designed it very much as an online object, able to stand-alone and be used without me wittering on in the background, so check it out below – just click on a part of the library you want to know about.

As ever, Prezis work better on full-screen. Feel free to embed this wherever you’d like – it’s available under Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike Creative Commons licences. And if you have any corrections or suggestions to make, let me have them!

Everything you need to know about technology and working in libraries on Prezi