CLA 2009 - Save You’re A.S.S. (After School Sanity)

Libraries should be welcoming environments for teens, but sometimes enforcing certain standards of behavior among your teen patrons can improve everyone’s experience. If you have trouble with crowd control after school in your library, here are some tips:

• Present a united front. Agree on standards for noise, library usage, etc. ahead of time and enforce equally
  
• When asking teens to comply with a rule, be unemotional and brief.
  
• Also be factual and spell out consequences. i.e. This is a warning; next time you will have to leave for the day (or stop using computers, etc.)
  
• Allow time for teens to comply
  
• Don’t argue or debate.


• If someone doesn’t comply, insist that the behavior was inappropriate and that they need to leave for the day.
  
• Ensure teens leave when asked. Don’t bluff.
  
• Have a signal among staff for getting help or intervention. Support and back-up your coworkers.
  
• If staff is uncomfortable talking to disruptive patrons, try role playing at a staff meeting and have some sample scripts to use. (You don’t have to follow the script verbatim, but some people find suggestions for the kind of phrases to use helpful)

-Amy Calhoun

Screencasting Tips & Tricks

Paul Pival (University of Calgary) demonstrated several free web-based programs that can be used for creating screencasts, recording activity on a computer screen and saving them as movies. Some examples: Screencast-o-matic,
Screen Jelly, Screenr. Others, such as Jing, have free and "pro" versions that cost a small fee, or are desktop installations, like Camtasia and Captivate. The Camtasia demo showed how much post-production editing is possible to create a custom screencast.

Internet Librarian 2009

A couple of years have passed since this blog was created as a way for staff to follow and participate in the experiences of those attending conferences. Since then, we've completed a successful 27 Things program for staff, and many now have their own blogs.

Four staff are attending Internet Librarian 2009 in Monterey next week, and their blogs are linked in the right sidebar. We hope you enjoy the posts, and we all encourage your comments and questions. Perhaps we'll be following you at a future conference. CLA, anyone?

Following blogs

I've tried several ways of following blogs including Google Reader and using the RSS reader feature on Outlook. Gotta say that I like bloglines the best. Following blogs using outlook was more convenient considering that I spend half my life on email anyway, but it's way, way too slow. Each individual feed that you click on has to connect to the actual blog. If I can just find a really good knitting blog, I'll be in business!

The Future of Libraries

Wow! Getting to meet Stacey Aldrich and listen to her was a real highlight of the CLA conference for me. Here are some of her key points:
What are the challenges of creating an organization that is forward thinking and moving? 1) Sometimes our rule/policies from the past stop us; ask to see the rule. 2) Strategically, how do we spend our time? We need to get more efficient. 3) Find the professional futurists (I love this!) in the organization and send them out as scouts to focus on upcoming trends. 4) Need to have a strategic plan, organizational values (how we all work together), a customer service philosophy and a clarity of roles. All these work together to build TRUST, essential for an organization's success.
Check out her powerpoint from the conference on her blog, http://ideablah.blogspot.com especially her model called Foundations. Well worth the visit.
Vicki Rondeau

Daniel Pink, Continued...

The session with Daniel Pink was certainly entertaining and fun. After he spoke, Joan Fry Williams led a lively discussion with library folks on how to put his theories and ideas into practical use inside our libraries. Pink named 6 things that matter most:

Design - How do we deliver things to people they didn't know they were missing? Ideas: 1) if you don't involve the user in the design decision, they should ignore you. 2) clutter is the enemy of design; moving clutter off the desk is the #1 improvement to customer service.
Story - We need anecdotes and transformative stories from the customers we serve in our community; helps in the relationship-building between library staff and our customers (brings them back).
Symphony - Pattern recognition, big picture thinking and looking for meaningful trends. Ideas: working together to create something meaningful. As librarians, we work with our customers to compile information, validate it as reliable information, help them to synthesize the information and finally, help them to derive meaning from the information within their own context. (Information Literacy!!)
Empathy - Valuable; cannot be outsourced. We need to make our signage more "emotionally intelligent". My favorite example of a Pink sign - 'WELCOME - Be Nice or Leave'. Another example - 'Don't Worry, this line moves very quickly'.
Play - Have fun! Suzy explained the Library Friday Happy Hour; let's go for it; why not?!
Meaning - Pink used the 20-10 example: If you had $20 million dollars in the bank with only 10 years to live, would you continue doing what you're doing now? Think about it......

Vicki Rondeau

VIVO, the future of talking computers

Professor and futurist William Crossman gave a compelling talk about what he sees as the end of literacy by the middle of the 21st century. He argues that text is a 10,000-year-old technology which was great for what it was developed for, that is, recording information for later use. However, text, not only on paper, but on-screen as well is quickly being overtaken by advances in VIVO, or voice-in/voice-out technology. Despite the long history of text technology, only 20% of the world's population is, in his words, literate, resulting in a huge digital divide between those who are literate having access to information and those who aren't literate not having access. Thus, he says, the rise of VIVO technology will have a huge democratizing effect on access to information and is therefore a good thing to be celebrated, not feared. This would result in the return of cultures to oral traditions and storytellers replacing novelists. As an example of the VIVO future being here already, Dr. Crossman gave an example of a VIVO service currently offered by Google. This service allows users to speak a search question into their cell phones. The answer is then spoken back to them.



He proposes that text messaging, the preferred mode of communication for young adults and teens, is actually one step in the process of the de-evolution of text, and goes on to say that folks in their teens and twenties (and younger) are already rejecting text as a way to communicate and will increasingly do so as VIVO technologies continue to improve.



It's probably no surprise that this notion of the end of text was not warmly embraced at a library convention, but it is an intriguing notion with possibly huge implications for commerce, culture, education, and, of course, libraries.