Library Voice

Speaking the Language of the Millennials

Elisabeth E. Tully, Michael Blake, and Sara Ciaburri
Phillips Academy
Oliver Wendell Holmes Library
and independent high school

Hear to talk about their kids

Millennials born after 1981

Who are these kids?
Digital Natives–Mark Prensky
Like to receive information fast
like graphics before text
prefer random (hypertext) access
function best when networked
thrive on instant gratification
prefer games to serious work

Phillips Academy freshman class born in 1992
Google has always been a verb
have rarely mailed anything with a stamp

They really do thing differently
Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures
10,000 hours playing video games
20000 hours watching television
200,000 emails and IMs sent

We are facing a language barrier
How serious is this language barrier?
89% of college students begin research with a search engine
2% begin research with a library

Virtual Orientation course inside Blackboard
more than 75% voluntarily completed the activities
each participant had the chance to win an iPOD
used TRAILS to measure assessment
mean scores were really terrible, and Phillips kids are very high-achieving

The Dilemma
How to get the attention of kids who need but don’t know if when we don’t speak the same language

We have to be where they are

We have to change, but we’ve always done it this way
It’s hard being a digital immigrant

What should we do?
We have to communicate in their language

Web 2.0 can be that language
simplicity
rich interactivity

Opportunities provided by web 2.0 and Library 2.0

Phillips experimenting with Web 2.0 tools

Give them a Google-like interface
–federated searching

Planning assignments
–trying to use open source software as a assignment planner
–put in a date the assignment is due, gives you twelve steps
–provides constant email reminders
–assignemnt planner came from University of Minnesota

Electronic Reserves
–offer 24/7 access via Blackboard

Social Networking adn Millennials
–library 2.0 opportunity–become their friend

Social Software
MySpace–as site for everyone
–anyone with an email address

Facebook
–a bit more restricted

YouTube
–based on home video

flickr
–social photographs

What they all have in common:
interaction
feedback
connections

Why are millenials drawn to these sites?
Activism
Belonging
Contact
Freedom–adults aren’t supervising

Oliver Wendell Holmes Library has a MySpace account
but the students aren’t on MySPace

87% of PA students have a Facebook account
so they created a Facebook library profile
Use the wall to answer reference question

Blogs
they use TypePad
Student Advisor Committee blog
Newsletter
Collabortory blog

Library ELF
keep tabs on your library material
send you due date notices through email of text messages

Opportunities for the future
Develop wiki-based resource guides
Audiobooks on iPODS

It’s not about the tools, it’s about the communities and conversations they make possible
–Christopher Harris, School Library Journal, 5/1/2006

Sharing Knowledge, Creating Community

Karen Mellor
Rhode Island Department of Adminstration

Sharing Knowledge, Creating Community

The environment
works at the Rhode Island state library agency
adminsters grands, coordinat multi-type network, provides support and consultation, continuing ed
12 librarians with various expertise

needed a content management system

Answer was a blog
Define purpose  (content, audience)
Draft writing guidelines (allow analysis and commentary, less formal than website)
Create disclaimer

The Name
did not want to call it a blog
Rhodarian
Tagline:  Library news and information with a Rhode Island Accent
no one needed to know it was a blog

Blogger experience
–slow, somewhat klunky interface
–no categories
–atom feeds, not RSS
–Content and blog stored on external server
–external URL
–blogger excellent for many blogs, but not for their purposes

they later went with WordPress
–easy to install
–large user support community
–highly configurable

Refining the concept
–developed more content
–refinded and formalized writing guidlines (on the presentation CD)
–developed comment guidelines (we might want to look at these for our purposes at OU)
–presented to administration
–upon arrival, invited staff to view and participate

Promoting Rhodarian
–Latest two posts are on the OLIS homepage
you can use RSS to javascript, which might be a great way to incorporate Business Blog posts into the “Latest Posts” feature of the Biz Wiki

Getting noticed
–picked up by LibraryStuff, Librarian.net, and Information Wants To Be Free
–showed technorati and how blog is being utilized in the community

Signing up authors
–created log-ins for web team members
–one on one sessions to demo how easy it is

Creating community
–comments are enabled  (very intersting discussion on MySpace post)
–spam issues
–internal contributers
–external contributers
–request to post items from the community
–feedback and conversations in the field

Keeping it fresh
–8 writers contribute on a regular basis
–hopefully at least once a week
–content sources:  listservs, email, blogs, local news media
–get other people to write
–post topics tath engender discussion
–explore new uses

Lessons learned
–not everyone loves blogging
–don’t expect instant or total adoption
–complement and integrate with existing sources
–be prepared for spam–find anti spam tools
–update WordPress regularly
–Persisitence

Blog that Bibliography

Gary S.  Atwood
Babson Library

Springfield College
private, coed college
210 faculty
5000 students
20% of students enrolled in Health, PE, Recreaton (HPER)

This presentation about HPER Librarian
http://www.babsonlibrary.org/hper/

Research by Topic guides
Gary says his research guides had their limitations
–no mechanism to highlight new sites
-site management is time consuming
—html updates are time consuming
–no alert system

Use Web 2.0 to get over these limitations
–Gary admits that he should have done some more investigating
—he decided to use blog software, as it helps to highlight new sources at the top, has RSS feeds

Blog software blogs
–new sites featured at the top of the page
–site management is largely automated
–RSS feeds

Gary demonstrates how to do a post in WordPress to show how easy it is.

Gary says there is more to blogging than the technical aspects.
There are usability issues to contend with—how easy is it to use?

Five usability issues for Blogs
–Use descriptive headlines
Most people will make a decision about reading the post based on the title
–Write clear and concise annotations
–Links say where they are going
Don’t say “click here”  . Tell them where the are going to go
–Publish frequency
Gary tries to write every Friday.
–Use Categories carefully
Don’t label posts with multiple categories.  Multiple categories will confuse the reader.  Don’t be too general or too specific.
Gary admits falling into one of the traps of being too general with some of categories.  for example, a category called “Health”
Gary admits that he created categories on the fly, when he should have put more planning into it.

Additional problems
–Marketing
Gary did not anticipate how difficult it would be for them to use it
He focused on the faculty–try to tie in with faculty’s class
Gary admits that he should have built a marketing plan
If no one uses the blog, it’s a failure, according to Gary
—RSS adoption
RSS adoption is fairly low

Challenges for the future
–Clearing out dead or obsolete sites
most blogs you don’t worry about dead links, but with a research guide blog, you need to
–some links need to get migrated into research guides
–blog needs to be integrated into the research guides

Has HPER been a success?
Gary admits yes, technology, but strategically, maybe.

See Nielsen’s Weblog Usability:  The Top Ten Design Mistakes

I’m in Waltham, Mass. at Bentley College for the NELINET IT Conference today. I’ll be giving a talk about blogs and wikis this afternoon. What follows are notes on the conference.

Keynote
Ben Vershbow
From Institute of the Future of the Book

The Networked Book
www.futureofthebook.org
http://www.futureofthebook.org/

Cross between an academic research group and an internet startup

Coming out with an open source app called Sophie, a multimedia authoring tool

Blog is if:book

What is a book?
could be talking about multiple thing
–a book as a package
–a book as a cultural ideal

NOT talking about ebooks

The hardware red herring
–the idea that some kind of hardward that may come along to change books (ebook readers, etc)
–not a very interesting question, according to Ben
–does not take into account how the way we read and write is changing

We associate books with intangible things (ideas, knowledge, etc)
But books are visual cues, tangilbe things.
“the book isn’t broken”
a bunch of paper bound togeter is a really great piece of technology

How is the way we read and write changing?
linking of text to text is changing how we read and write
hypertext can allow you to add supporting evidence to what you write by linking to it (example, blog)
“Literature is an ongoing systemg of inteconnected documents” Ted Nelson

Vanevar Bush
“As We May ThinK”
The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945
idea of memex which stores knowlede, information, books
the memex links together ideas and create additional trail that will allow a user to find additional information
Amazon uses these trails, with “Buy this books with…”

Carla Hesse
wrote an essay “Books in Time”

Leaves of Grass
multiple editions
Whitman wrote anonymous reviews of his own work
Ben shows us a history of the multiple editions
information can from the Walt Whitman Archive which contains online edition
Whitmans works were always being revised

Also shows the Talmud and how it was constantly revised

Look at wikipedia. You can see all the revison history of an article
Ben uses the article on Iraq to show activity of revisions
He shows us some really cool looking history flows graphs
ALso looks at the discussion on an article
There is a moving target problem. How do you align the discussion of the page with the version? Discussion may no longer be relevant if the version changes

Social reading
Conversations going on as the document is read, updated, etc.
Feedback mechanisms are built in, which changes the way we write

Finnegans Wake wiki
entire text is in a wiki, and discussion is built in

Sites cannot happen on their own. If no one is tending the garden, it is going to fill up with beer cans and needles.

Books over wiki
The Wealth of Networks
other social reading sites.

Putting texts out there change the way we write
“collaborating with the reader” changes the way we write
writing is not isolated, it is a relationship

John Battele used his blog, the search blog, to write about ideas for his book.
Social writing helped him get ideas

Lessig’s Code Version 2.0
a collaborative book in progress
written by a community
http://codebook.jot.com/WikiHome

Without Gods: Toward a history of disbelief
http://www.futureofthebook.org/mitchellstephens/
an online discussion as the book is being written
a work in progress

GAM3R 7H30RY
http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/
Mackenzie Wark wanted to get feedback and ideas and discussion in writing a blog
wanted to do something differently . Blogs have a hierarchy
an interesting way to read the book http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/?page_id=227
Comments for each page are on the side
listed in NCSU OPAC

shows a movie that is a talkshow set in Halo.  Movie was recorded with video out from game, recording the game.  and then edited with audio voice over.  Very cool.

how do libraries tie in?  What do we consider a book to be?