Mar 28, 2017
Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library did this great Taylor Swift parody video for National Library Week. I think you'll like it.
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Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library did this great Taylor Swift parody video for National Library Week. I think you'll like it.
Hey, any tumblarians headed to DC for Computers in Libraries this year? We should plot to steal the Declaration of Independence high five.
I see you #thomasjefferson #libraries #cildc #nofilter #dc #conference 😀 (at Jefferson Memorial)
San Jose Public Library took a 39 foot Winnebago, crammed it full of makerspace-type equipment, and hit the road.
Visualizing Funding for Libraries
http://libraries.foundationcenter.org/ This is one of the cooler things I have discovered at Computers in Libraries 2017. Visualizing Funding for Libraries is a web-based service that takes data about grant funding for libraries and plots it out in a variety of visual displays. The data comes from the IRS, which makes it more comprehensive than many other sources. Charitable foundations are required to report their activities to the IRS and this data is public. With funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the team takes this data and visualizes it in a way that any librarian can use. Upon entering the site, I am first confronted with a map. Tapping Minnesota, I learn: --Since 2006, there have been 727 grants made to libraries by foundations --The total value of said grans was $33.9 million --The total number of funders was 182 --The total number of recipients (libraries) was 113. I tapped a few more times and drilled down into the data to get details on each project including the foundation, the recipient, amount, and purpose of the grant. Search filters allow me to limit my results to specific types of projects such as capital projects. How cool is that? The data is about a year and a half old, since it takes time for the IRS to process and make it available. But still. This is a great resource. There's a lot more, such as maps that show relationships between different foundations (great for figuring out how to most effectively schmooze) that I have yet to explore. There is support information on the site but online video training is coming in June 2017, which should make it even easier for libraries to jump in and start searching for funds.
Horizon Going Down - In a Good Way
I was struck by a slide from Marshall Breeding's Resource Management & Discovery Products & Vendors presentation. ICYMI, Breeding was giving a sneak preview of the 2016 International Survey of Library Automation. The full results will be published in May 2017. Anyway, there was a slide showing percentage of libraries that report considering migrating from their current Integrated Library System (ILS) plotted annually back to 2007. In all but one case, the trend line either held roughly steady or was going up. In other words, each ILS had a percentage of customers considering a move that was either holding steady or going up. Except Horizon. The trend line for Horizon is going down consistently since 2010. I suspect that most of the libraries able and willing to make a move did so, many in the less-than-great years around 2008 to 2010. Those who are left, including SELCO, have compelling reasons to stick with Horizon. That's what I think, anyway. Breeding didn't venture an opinion but did find it interesting enough to mention in his remarks. The promise of Web Services and BlueCloud has yet to be fully realized for Horizon, in my opinion, but the tempo of progress has accelerated noticeably in the last couple of years. If that continues, Horizon may stick around for awhile yet.
Check this site out; it's really cool!
"Failure is always an option!"
"Failure is always an option!" was an unofficial motto of The Mythbusters and I think it held a great truth. It didn't mean that you should be sloppy or not care about the success of whatever you undertake. It simply meant that you should always be trying something new; something outside the box. If you try often enough, the occasional failure is going to happen. The point is to keep trying. I took something of that away from one of today's Computer in Libraries sessions. Helene Blower spoke about Columbus Neighborhoods. The project created a website with digital collections of photos and other information about neighborhoods in the city of Columbus. Created in collaboration with numerous partners to celebrate the anniversary of Ohio's statehood, Columbus Neighborhoods is a rich source of history and stories. It's hard to argue that the project is not a success. It is well used and popular with patrons. But there is one issue. One of the project's selling points for partners and funding sources was the ability for the public to add their own comments and content to supplement the digital collections. While the website is well-visited, the user-generated content never developed to the degree expected. Blowers suggested today that she and the other project planners were thinking outside the box when they envisioned the website. Perhaps, they should have been thinking inside the box. Or, as she put it "inside the core". What is the core? The core is the motivations of the public for whom the site was designed. Demographic analysis of Columbus reveals that the target audience, based on the time period in most of the photos, is not the largest subset of the website's users. For this and other reasons, it became clear that the audience using the website was unlikely to generate the volume of content expected. The project didn't successfully consider the motivations of their audience. I want to be clear here: Columbus Neighborhoods is NOT a failure. The website is popular and houses an amazing digital collection that you cannot find anywhere else. Those who planned and created it have much to be proud of. But we learn from our mistakes and it's important to consider what didn't work out as we consider what did. Kudos to Blowers for bringing her "failure story" to Computers in Libraries. At SELCO, we sometimes let worrying about failure get in the way of new innovation. We sometimes feel that we have to nail down every single detail before moving forward, lest we forget something or get it wrong and open ourselves to criticism. After this conference, I am going to try to be a little more daring, a little more forward. I don't intend to throw stuff together in hopes it will all work out. But I hope to do good work with the rallying cry 'Failure is always an option"!