ALA/Chicago/Playaway

And now for something completely different....I will be attending ALA courtesy of Playaway this weekend. I fly into Chicago tomorrow and will present as a part of a panel called "Playaway with Your Peers at 10:30 on Sunday. If you are attending ALA, please come by and learn more about the format and say hello! It will be at the NW Room 5 of the Hilton Chicago. Yvonne Oliger, Director of the Brown County Library in Nashville, IN and Kitty Pope, Executive Director of Alliance Library System in East Peoria, IL will also be on the panel. I know my staff at Herndon were asking if I would be blogging, tweeting and fbooking about my trip and I'll know more once I arrive in Chicago tomorrow night. And my library system, the Orange County Library System in Orlando, also gave me an Itouch on loan to hopefully show some of our cool new mobile apps, social networking, and 2.0 and beyond stuff.....

Look forward to meeting new folks!

Web 2.0 Applications

The # 1 winner on SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards for Questions and Answers was Yahoo! Answers. I have been using it on and off since May 2007. While it can be interesting, there are many times that it reminds me of Web 1.0 when AOL chat rooms would be invaded by people who weren't necessary interested in the topic of the given chat room, Basketball, BookShelf, 20s, etc, and more interested in coming into the chat room SCREAMING, sending a link or causing general mischief that violated the Terms of Service (TOSsed from the chat if you didn't abide by the rules). Ah the early days.

Anyway, Yahoo!Answers functions much the same way that any other avenue of information does. The people that get the most stars and helpful votes tend to be people that take the questions at face value (without making judgement) and answer honestly and accurately. Much like in person, no one likes to feel talked down to or leave with a feeling of condescension.

The nice thing about apps like these is you could really set up some measurements of success and track how you (or your organization ) is progressing. We would like to answer 30 questions in at least 5 different categories per day with at least 33% Best Answers. Or whatever criteria you see fit. Once you have the measurement of success clearly defined, Yahoo does the rest of the work for you.

Under Collaborative Writing, one of my goals this year was to create a community list for marketing and outreach of the Herndon branch. My librarians and fellow manager have been using Google documents to build the list and contributing to it throughout the year. The next step will be to really utilize it to market specific programs and to continue to develop it over a long period of time. It has been helpful. Tracking its effectiveness could be done be evaluating program attendance to see which contacts respond to our various outreach efforts.

Overdrive Truck

Today, at the Herndon branch of the Orange County Library System, we hosted the Overdrive truck. Overdrive is a provider of Downloadable Audio books and Ebooks to libraries across the country. You can download materials and transfer them to your IPods, MP3s, or portable devices. We, also gave away MP3s to patrons throughout the day. We had visits from the library's administration team as well as the Acquisitions Manager, Debbie Tour and the Assistant Manager in Collection Development, Vanessa Neblett. We had 158 patrons visit the inside the truck which included a number of big screen TVs and is so large that up to 30 people can be in it at one time. To give you an idea of the size of this downloadable bookmobile, it is 63,000 pounds. Now that may not mean much, but in layman terms, they could not do an event in D.C., because the truck weighed too much to be on top of the subway. Truly amazing. I'll try to upload some pics as well.

Staff Day Images

Here are a few images from staff day. Me and Herndon's Lead Circulation Clerk, Betsy Nieves and me with Wendy Prasad, one of Herndon's two librarians.

Team Building

So we just finished team building which included everyone sharing one thing that changed for them during the current year, reading customer comments, and sharing a Herndon video. I also talked about some of the changes coming up for the current year and thanked staff for all of their hard work.