Library Voice

I work every Monday night. The business students all know that I work every Monday night, as my hours are posted on my Contact Page, and I tell them in every class I teach when I work. So here is what one Monday night looked like a few weeks ago, between 6:00 and 7:30.

Busy Night on IM

Yep, that’s a lot of IMs. My fingers were going crazy. I was in my office monitoring our general IM/chat reference service, but I also had my own IM open as well. You know what’s funny?  Nearly all of those students were in our group study rooms about 150 feet from my office. They could have just come to my office to ask a question, and actually a few other students did. But these students chose to contact me in a way that worked for them.  Wonder what would happen if I didn’t make myself available via IM?  I would bet that most of those questions would have gone unanswered, and I would have lost a valuable customer.  How are you making yourself available to your patrons?

Click to see my blog spam

Web Worker Daily has a post where they ask “Are Blog Comments Worth It?” I often ask the same question, particularly with the comments I get on my Business Blog.  The Business Blog is primarily aimed at the faculty and students that I work with, although I do believe most of the hits to the blog come through search engine traffic.  While the blog has a modest 150+ subscribers (again, not likely my intended audience), I don’t get many comments from those readers.  Instead, I typically get comments like the ones that appear in the image in this post.  These comments get through the spam filter because  they are submitted by a human.  As you can see from the image, most commenters don’t have anything relevant to say but are simply looking for a link back to their own blogs.  The page ranking for the Business Blog is pretty high, so others are simply trying to cash in on the high Google indexing.  Since I moderate all comments on the Business Blog, these comments tend to sit until I get a chance to delete them all without approval.  I suppose if the Business Blog received more comments that were actually relevant, this would be more of a pain to deal with. I do have a commenting policy, but have only recently linked it on the comment submission form. We’ll see if that fixes things a bit.  I have also closed comments on the Business Blog for posts older than 60 days, and that seems to have reduced the quantity of these irrelevant replies.

Here at Library Voice, comments remain open and un-moderated.  The Akismet spam filter for WordPress does a decent job at getting the really nasty stuff, and the comments with links get held for moderation automatically.  This blog doesn’t get nearly the comments as other library/tech blogs (though comments are welcome!   ), so I don’t have to worry so much about spam and trolls.  I will say, too, that most of my traffic to this blog is not from the intended  library/tech audience.  The WordPress stats offer a ton of information that tells about how people found your blog, and from those stats I can tell that most visitors find the blog through Google searches.  I have a healthy number of subscribers according to Feedburner, but those numbers don’t come close to matching the search engine hits.

Since the posts on the Business Blog tend to cover things like money, finance, company and industry analysis, etc, it gets a lot more people who are trying to link back to their own site.  I guess spammers figure there’s not much money in linking off Library Voice, a blog of some dude who posts about libraries, video games, open source software, teaching, learning, and bike rides.  I’ve never thought about turning the comments to the Business Blog off, but this has got me to thinking.  I know some very well known bloggers don’t have comments enabled (Seth Godin, for example), but isn’t the purpose of a blog to share information with the potential of promoting conversation?  Are not libraries in existence to share information, promote conversation, and foster learning?  What messages would a library blog that did not allow comments send?  If you’re not getting comments from your intended audience, is it okay to turn comments off, or should you re-evaluate who your audience is or should be?  If you’ve got an answer, I’d love to hear it.  Maybe post a comment.  They’re allowed here. 

Because it’s growing by leaps and bounds, that’s why!

“The number of unique viewers of online video increased 5.2% year-over-year according to The Nielsen Company, from 137.4 million unique viewers in January 2009 to 142.7 million in January 2010.”  I’d like to think that a few of my videos that I created in the last year have contributed to a growth in that number.

Today I did a count of my videos, and discovered that I  created 27 business research videos and 21 library-related videos (like the ones I post on this blog)  in 2009. My business research videos were viewed over 2600 times, and the more general library videos have been viewed over 4200 times.  Most of my videos took less than an hour to produce, from start to finish, so the return on investment is quite huge.  It’s good to know that something that takes so little effort to put together is getting used so frequently.  For me, web video offers a great way to reach my users.

I’m in the process of putting together a series of blog posts on how I use and create web video, including services, tools, and more.  Hopefully librarians and others will find the information useful. Look for the posts coming soon.  In the meantime, if you have any questions about web video, please leave a comment.

This is a video that I put together last week to address a complaint that a faculty member had with her students’ research. The students were finding one particular resource and overusing and over-citing it in their projects. To address her concern, I put together this video and posted it all over my Business Blog, Biz Wiki, and I even listed it in the course management system. I could tell via my blog hits and the stats on Blip.TV that the video was viewed by quite a few students after they got the message through the class email system. (I’m embedding YouTube here to avoid confusing the hit count, but I generally use Blip.TV as my primary method of distributing video.)

The video only took me about 30 minutes to put together, using my Flip Mino camera and Camstudio to record the screen. I wrote the script out the night before on the back of an envelope while waiting for a pizza to cook in the oven. The script was basically just an outline that explained what I wanted to talk about and in what order. The entire video is just 3 separate clips, all shot with one take for each clip. I trimmed and joined the 3 clips in Windows Movie Maker. The entire project was done before a 9 a.m., including uploading, encoding, and distributing to Blip.TV. I deleted junk email and made coffee while the video rendered on my computer, so I was able to do other things while working on the project. The video is not perfect, but I don’t think it has to be to get the job done. I also think the video is a bit more persuasive than if I had just sent all of the students an email.

What are your thoughts? Are you using video in a really cool way? I’d love to learn what others are doing.

I’m not an Apple fanboy by any means, but I will say that Steve Jobs does have a knack for drumming up a little excitement. This video shows how you can incorporate some of Jobs’ style into your own presentations.

Granted we don’t have a product as exciting as in iPhone when we teach students how to do library research, but we can offer such things as “free information” that can “make their lives easier” and get them “well on their way to completing their research” with “as little effort as possible.”

This morning when I launched Trillian, I received the following message:

A good Friday morning greeting

What a wonderful way to start a Friday morning.  It’s great to feel appreciated.  I think today I’m going to try to let someone else know how much I appreciate what they do, sort of like how they pass on kindness in that insurance company commercial.  Is there someone you know who needs to feel appreciated?  If you’re a librarian, when did you feel the most appreciated?  Drop a line in the comments if you care to share.

The World's Strongest Man by professor evil

Some of my best thinking comes when I’m the least plugged in, like when I’m hoisting a 300 pound barbell above my head. In a recent post at the ACRLog, Stephen Bell writes of the importance of unplugging as a way to calm down a bit and maintain balance.  I was particularly interested in his comments about going to the gym:

I do get the value of unplugging – if not for days on end – at least for specific periods of time during the day. I set aside several periods where I unplug. Any time I go to the gym, usually two or three times during the work week, I leave my cell phone behind so I’m not checking email or keeping up with social networks. I do listen to music which helps me contemplate. During this time I often find myself coming up with solutions to work challenges or ideas for new blog posts or essays – or they come in the post-workout shower – which is actually a fairly common phenomena. Studies have found that when we free our minds from any complex thought activity, some of our best ideas will emerge from the ether.

I try to go to the gym during my lunch break  most days of the week. I can get down to the gym, work out for 30 minutes, get a quick shower, and be back at my desk in an hour.  Going to the gym really relaxes me, and I find that if I don’t go, I’m not as pleasant to be around later in the day.  I appreciate the challenge of exercise to clear my head.  The duties of the day, the stress, your emails, your tasks, none of that matters while you’re trying to squat 400 pounds.  You’re just trying to concentrate on the issue at hand, or in this case, what is on your shoulders.

I find that on days that I do cardio I get some of my best thinking done.  The Cross Trainer can get really boring despite cranking up Social Distortion while watching close-captioned Days of Our Lives.  (Just so you know, Bo Brady is still sleeping around, and Stephano is still a bad guy, just like they were 25 years ago.)  After a few minutes of cardio, music, and soap operas,  my mind tends to wonder all over the place.  I get ideas about projects, videos, blog posts, gift ideas, goals, dreams, and much more.   Since our gym discourages cell phones, I don’t have my Palm Pre with me to immediately write memos to remind myself of the sweat-and-fatigue-induced ideas at a later time.  I usually have to fetch a pen from one of the workers and right the idea down, before the next hill interval leads me to another epiphany.  If I can write the idea down quick enough, I can usually expand upon my notes while eating my usual turkey sandwich in my office.  If I don’t write the ideas down, it’s likely I’ll forget them before I get back to my office.

Now every day doesn’t lead to new ideas, so don’t get the impression that I’m full of inspiration all the time.   But finding a way to unplug on a regular basis can definitely helps me with my thinking.  Do you unplug on a regular basis?  What is your favorite way to unplug?  Fell free to leave an idea for others in the comments.

Oh, and for the record.  I can’t bench 300 or squat 400…..yet. That must have been one of those lofty goals that came to me in a fit of exhaustion on the treadmill.