A week from heck

Yep, this has been a long week. So, I have not had time to blog the rest of CIL, or respond to Library Trainer’s Tag of the Passion Quilt Meme.

My response will have to do with my one year old granddaughter.

Today I have set up one training, given one virtually , about to give one live and about to write a paper.

Yeah…….

More tomorrow.  ( I hope)

Concepts Training: Visual Evidence

Crowd shot of our Concepts Training on Wednesday. There are more pictures on my library’s Flickr account and my Flickr.

There is even a fine picture of yours truly there.

Photo credits:  Crowd Image and My Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/hcplonline/sets/72157604609972703/ Fetched: 4/18/08

Concepts Training @ my library

The pictures below are from our library’s Concepts Training workshop held yesterday.

The training is part of our New Employee Training cycle and combines concepts shared by several organizational and knowledge management systems we exposed our staff to in the past few years: (FISH, Leading From Any Position, Learning Libraries, Problem Solving and Innovation) giving our new staff the same organizational vocabulary as our existing staff.

We want both our new and veteran staff to know that each theory is not a silo, but is part of an entire picture of how we want to learn, grow and continue to evolve as a system, as work teams and as individuals.

The gallery below shows the results of one of the exercises used to reinforce ideas covered in Learning Libraries (System Thinking, Shared Vision and Team Learning) along with Problem Solving and Innovation.  There are a few more pictures on my flickr.

The trainees had a bag of common items ( including dixie cups, string, straws, stickers and plates) and had to create something completely new, while observing how their team made decisions during the design, construction and naming of the thing.

Pardon the Navelgazing: Happy 1st Blogbirthday to the Chronicles

Thanks to everyone who reads this via RSS, daily browsing, Twitter or finding this space by random luck and links from other places.

I started my wee blog at @CIL2007 on my Dell Axim. (My first post) Since then, I have written over 150 posts that blogged CIL2007, ALA 2007, CIL2008 (the best conference ever), my trainings, my system, meetings,projects, NaBloPoMo, 23 things and more than 23 things.

Great tools and cool things (del.icio.us, Muxtape and Twitter are the new fun things). My brother’s butterfly business and my trip to the Grand Canyon. The images in these two stories drive the most search traffic to my site. Go figure.

I have been privileged to connect and start friendships with other trainers, techie folks, members of the library world diaspora, geeks and semi-geeks right here in The Old Line State and all across the country, expanded my knowledge base and hope to have added some thing to the world of libraries and learning.

Presented (with a partner) my first national conference presentation(s) and will speak (with same partner) at Maryland Library Association’s meeting in May.

Been written up in the ALA Newsletter (Post 2007 annual) and in the April 2008 issue of Computers In Libraries Magazine and mentioned, linked or quoted occasionally in some great blogs.

BTW:anyone willing to sponsor my blogging and registration for ALA 2008, hit me up! please, with splenda on top. I will act just like a golfer and wear your logo polo shirts, do golf outings and press the flesh. We can talk reasonable terms.

So, a birthday is as good as any to time eat some cake.

Thanks for listening to my navelgazing.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mmmmmmmmm cake.

Photo Credits:

cake image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkcakebox/1098602569/in/photostream/ fetched: 4-17-08
kid image from http://www.eyefetch.com/image.aspx?ID=378314 Fetched 4-17-08

Quick Cool Thing: Rubik’s Cube Generator

Most geeks and geekesque people love Rubik’s Cubes.  Even better when your avatar is the subject.

Make yours at http://www.dumpr.net/rubik.php

Your Government is a Twitter, are you next?

The Floor of the House of Representatives, The US Senate Floor and White House all have twitter feeds.

I think this a good thing.

CIL2008 Presenation Slides Posted

If you are interested in the presentation Nette and I gave at CIL2008 last week this

will take you to my slidespace where you can access both flavors of our workshops. You have the choice of the director’s cut or the made for tv version.

CIL2008 Gaming: Gimme’ Shelter

My attempt to sing Gimme’ Shelter by the Rolling Stones from CIL Gaming night.

Thanks to the Travelin’ Librarian for the kewl black & white photo.

From his flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelinlibrarian/2409595806/in/set-72157604426691661/

Retrieved April 14th, 2008.

CIL2008: Facebooked

In honor of CIL2008 (hereby known as the best damn conference I have ever attended) I have created a Facebook profile. I am not linking it (yet) to my blog or this post because I want to do some tweaking before unveiling it to the universe.

Still trying to figure out some annoying things about the setup and also figuring if it is a tool to keep in my geek bag o’ tricks.

CIL2008 Photo Evidence

Here is a picture of Nette and I doing our presentation at CIL2008

Today catching up and trying to process the days.  Tomorrow more blog posts about the conference and final thoughts.

If this Wed this must be Arlington

Well, seems that we did a good job with our presentation.

i am now writing this from outside the Regency Ballroom at the Hyatt in Arlington, VA.

I am both sad, happy and exhausted, which means it was a good conference.

After I catch up on my posts, I will do my own personal wrap up of CIL2008: The Conference that Ate Wireless.

CIL2008 Day Three In Review

Today’s CIL2008 Hits and Misses brought to you by Twitter –Once you start, you can’t get enough!

Hits of the day.

A great *triple play* of sessions attended by yours truly today. I will be posting more cohesive notes about each of the presentations shortly.

First, Chad B. from Ohio University talked about how to manage, market, make them work and pulling the plug if needed on wikis.

The next workshop featured two excellent presentations in one short time period.  Three UCF librarians discussed how they used del.icio.us to create on the fly pathfinders, catalouge in-house and we resources and other uses for del.icio.us.  UCF’s bookmarks live here.

Michael Sauers and Christa Burns from Nebraska gave a presentation on why twitter, how twitter, and really, twitter?  Systems are using twitter for event publicity and reference, bbc uses twitter for syndication of material and youc an get boston weather via twitter. And yes, there were people twittering the workshop about twitter.

Finally There was the afternoon wrapup workshop, 2.0 Pecha Kucha Conversation Face Off.   Each of the people pictured below

had 20 slides and 6:40 to cover IM, Podcasting, Videocasts, Wiki’s Facebook and someone played the skeptic.  The below pictures represent some o’ the scene at the middle blogging/twitter table.

Merely a small sample of the many folks blogging/twittering shoulder to shoulder at the session.

Wireless access working swimmingly in the hallway, outside of the rooms.

Meeting more people face to face that I know from the intertubes, including a fellow Quaker.

Two Words: Sushi Buffet. Yum.

Hearing “this product was presented more cathedral than bazaar.”

Misses

Wireless in the actual session rooms. Really, really, spotty.  Several folks have come to the conclusion that the Hyatt was not prepared with enough wireless for at least a 400 people expecting net access when they wanted it.   Thank god I do not need it for my presentation tomorrow.

SWIFT.

So again my hits are better than my misses.  Another great day in CIL2008world.

Tomorrow is another day.

CIL2008 High Touch with Customer Care

High Touch with Customer Care:  Amy Blaine is a Librarian from Inova Fairfax Hospital. Her half of the workshop actually got something useful of, so I will write about that. Amy Blaine, Inova Farifax Hospital is the librarian for a Level 1 trauma center in NoVa, and her obstetrics dept delivers 1000 babies a month. They answer 600 questions a month and provide service to their people seven day a week 359 days a year. They serve medical and nursing students, residents, attending physicians, hospital administrators, patients family members and members of the public.

They use a combination of sources to keep their constituents in touch. They use a regular email Patient Education Newsletter with snippets and mini reviews of new patient education resources, from listsrvs, Google and other national accredited sources. They also use a blog for further communication. blast to staff for selected resources and articles and maintain a blog for other types of information communication. They face some challenges to getting the infomation out to their people. This was my great takeaway form this workshop. This is applicable to all technology roll outs in any setting.

If they cannot read, they will never read it;

if the can read it , they might not be able to understand it; and my addition

If they understand it, they may not use it the way you want them to.

CIL2008 High Tech and High Touch: The full Report

This a more complete report on Jenny Levine - The Shifted Librarian’s talk today at CIL2008. This is her Presentation Wiki . The presentation will be up directly on her wiki. Her Blog is The Shifted Librarian.

Making things high touch does not mean necessecarily making things high tech. Changing the language of your web portal, or how you ask your customers to interact with your library can create the sense of engagement that many public libraries strive for daily. Here are a couple of way to do that:

• Don’t say “you have to place an ill query foto see if that is available for loan” say– We don’t own this, but we will get it for you. Very positive response to the same ILL question.
• Provide direct text responses to questions posed via IM or web.
• Create places where patrons know there are people behind the information. “Real human beings are our (libraries) advantage over Google.”
• Use your services to connect people to people not items, without the technical stuff getting in the way.
• Develop little human touches where every you can.

Two things to remember and one question to ask yourself over and over again: : “Content Creators Connecting in virtual space,” “Gaming also supports face to face contact,” and “Do we use tools that match our social capabilities?”

If you are feeling overwhelmed about the change in technology here are two things to consider:

First a quote: “Tools do not get socially integrated until tools get boring” – Clay Shirky who wrote Here Comes Everybody: about organizing without organizations. He has also started a blog about the themes in the book.

Second: In response to the question: How do you keep up with it? “Use your friends and let go if you can’t get it all”

CIL2008: Now I can catch up

Now that I am full of sushi from my favorite close to the hotel restaurant, and with nothing in the first two programs, knocking my socks off, I can now get to playing catchup with the sessions from yesterday and today. First up, linking things up to the Shifted Librarians talk from yesterday morning.

Just had someone from Silver Spring MD say. “gee, you have been working every time I see you at this conference” It is nice to be noticed for good things.

CIL2008 My Day Two in Review

So, if you notice a lack of posts about the conference, that is because we library geeks with all of our gadgets designed to keep us in touch with each other constantly, fried the hotel’s wireless connection in the conference area, so there was no service in many areas. I will be posting information about the afternoon sessions I attended with notes and all tomorrow. My apologies.

Now onto the Good, Bad and Ugly from day 2.

The GOOD

Meeting old friends in a presentation. And lamenting that I could not provide some support for his presentation, because it is the same time as mine on Wednesday.

Three presentations, two great bookending one good one. Got so me thing from every workshop. Glad I had notepad to fall back upon.

The Internet cafe in the exhibit hall. I was at least able to post some basic information about the morning presentation by the Shifted Librarian.

Electronic Friendly tables in the front of the room for my three sessions. That means powerstrips that anyone could plug into and recharge their equipment.

Putting two faces with voices and people from our statewide Synchronous Training class. Beth from Howard County, Kevin from Cecil County, Nette and I had a grand time at lunch. We found a great pub not too far off the beaten path and had a grand time talking about all sorts of issues.

My wife coming down and staying until tomorrow.

Nette live blogging the conference. The Librarian In Black live blogging.

Finding my blogging about the conference listed in the April 2008 Issue of Computers In Libraries. Check it out. I should have put my real photo in so folks could say howdy here. Oh well.

CIL2008 one of the top tags for flickr today.

Lots of folks of color participating at all levels of this conference.

Folks coming up to me virtually and face to face thanking me for posting the videos from Gaming and Gadgets. I am going to post the best one in a separate post tomorrow. You could look for it on my YouTube channel. Look for Enter Sandman on Rock Band. Trust me, it is GREAT!

Someone asking why don’t you use your webcam and do a streaming feed of the workshops you are attending and your day at CIL.  And then pausing and instantly brainstorming how you could do that with the three people sitting near you.  Then coming to the conclusion that you carry around too much *stuff* to make that work this year, but someone could work on that for next year.

The Bad

I am responsible for reservations for tomorrow’s lunch at the sushi place. They, along with the deli, Legal Seafoods and the restaurants at the hotel were all ahem, jam packed for lunch. There are too many people for the area and not enough restaurants able to handle 2500 or so library folks along with the normal weekday crowd.

Having to drop $$ again for stable wireless. You know my feelings about that..

The Ugly

The conference seems to have overloaded the hotel’s conference wireless capabilities. We inadvertently created a small “denial of serviceseque” on the wireless. Too many needs to connect with too few licenses to connect available equals bottleneck.

Also, there are quite a few folks using twitter to microblog the conference. Seems that created a little stress on twitter also. Or maybe it just seemed that way.

Overall, again more good than bad. I can now say this is my favorite library conference I have attended. I came away last year and will come away from this conference with so much information I almost want to pull myself in eight directions.

I can’t wait for next year.

CIL2008 Our Workshop Yesterday/Nette is Blogging

My co-presenter talks about our Computers and Libraries Workshop here on her blog Nette’s Conference Blog. The Librarian In Black also liveblogged our session. Check them out!

She also did a great job writing about the keynote which I *ahem* missed.

CIL2008: Apologies– Very Little Wireless in my Session Room.

Sorry that I was unable to liveblog the two sessions I attended this afternoon, but I did take notes the old fashioned way..with Notepad <g> and will post them shortly.

CIL2008: Hi Tech and Hi Touch

Just wanted to post a liveblogging note about Jenny Levine - The Shifted Librarian’s talk today at CIL2008.

Some of her quotes.

“:Real human beings are our advantage over Google”

“Do we use tools that match our social capabilities?”

and the best…

“Content Creators Connecting in virtual space” and sometimes meeting in the real world, as happend many times at the gaming workshop.

Her Presentation Wiki .  The presentation will be up directly on her wiki.  Her Blog The Shifted Librarian

Pictures and more detailed reportage to follow.

CIL2008 Editorial: A Melanin Observation

One of the things I truly LOVE about CIL more than PLA or ALA, which I have also attended, is seeing other people of color either attending, or more importantly presenting at the conference.

Just wanted to say that out loud.

I ran into Julian Clark from Georgetown, who helped this blog out with some notes at ALA2008, and he too is presenting at CIL.  Unfortunately, it is at the same time as my workshop.   Insert sad face here.