Walt at Random

If there’s anyone out there who wonders why Cites & Insights hasn’t appeared for five weeks now (and isn’t likely to for quite some time), and who doesn’t read posts such as this one, here’s an update of sorts.

Massachusetts down…

I’m currently interleaving work on the draft text for Libraries in Social Networks (working title, from ALA Editions, some time next year with luck) with work on expanding my survey of actual public library presence on Facebook or Twitter from the current 25 states and 2,406 libraries to a total of 38 states and 5,957 libraries (or, if energy runs out, 36 states and 4,963 libraries).

I’m doing the remaining 13 states (all of them I hadn’t already done and that have readily-available spreadsheets of library names and population served) in alphabetic order–except that, regarding the parenthetic note in the previous paragraph, I’ve now moved Pennsylvania and Texas to the end, since those are the two with the largest number of reporting libraries.

I’d already done Alabama and Indiana. A few minutes ago, I finished Massachusetts (and the first three libraries in Maine, since I stopped at a “20 multiple” convenient spot).

Which means I’ve looked at the websites and other evidence of social networks for all the public libraries, memorial libraries, free libraries, incorporated public library associations, city libraries, town libraries, just plain libraries, reading rooms, citizens’ libraries, social libraries, athenaea (what’s the plural of athenaeum?)…and, last but not least, the Young Men’s Library Association in Ware, which has both Facebook and Twitter accounts. I’ve even managed the cases where two libraries in two different communities have exactly the same name (I think there were three of those), with a little help from Wikipedia.

Now on to Maine (and Chapter 5)

So now I’ll start in on Chapter 5 of the text…and interleave that with Maine’s libraries. (Odd coincidence: The number of reporting libraries/library systems in Maine is exactly the same as the number in Nebraska, which will come next. Whereas the numbers for New Hampshire and Ohio, the next two after that, differ by one.)

And that’s the news from South Livermore…in the heart of one of California’s lesser-known (but also one of the earliest) wine countries.

A mere 16 days ago, I posted “Still around, not posting much,” noting what I was doing rather than blogging–namely “Phase 1.5″ of the research for my book on public libraries in social networks.

I aimed to finish phase 1.5–cleaning up the saved tweets and wall updates and characterizing them–while I was still 65. At that point, I thought I’d be ready to do a quick pass for “extra” libraries (libraries where someone sent me comments for the book, where the library isn’t in one of the 25 surveyed states) and start preparing metrics and actually working on the book. Somewhere in there, I’d also do a hardnosed edit on already-written material for the October 2011 Cites & Insights and probably publish it.

Yes and no

Yes, I did finish Phase 1.5 by September 14, 2011, the day I turned 66.

No, I wasn’t ready to start preparing metrics and actually working on the book (that is, start writing text).

What happened in the middle: One of those who sent me info was Susan Mark, Statistics Librarian at the Wyoming State Library. Wyoming has very few reporting library agencies, and Mark had a list of those with Facebook pages. It’s one of the 25 states.

And my list didn’t match hers. Not even close.

So, after some digging around, I found that the problem was libraries with no obvious Facebook link on their websites (or at least on the home pages), and where the Facebook page itself didn’t show up high enough in a Bing search result (I was checking 15 or 20 pages). By using my brain and Ctrl-f (and Google, although I don’t think that made the big difference), I was able to check the first 100 results…and add in the missing libraries.

While it would be perfectly reasonable to focus on Twitter and Facebook uses that are linked from library home pages, I knew that I already had a fair number that weren’t–and thought it might be worthwhile seeing how many more I was missing. I took the first 100 (of 1,500+) remaining libraries and retested–just searching on Google and looking for a Facebook page in the first 100 results–figuring that if I found 5 or fewer, I’d just let it be.

I didn’t find 5 or fewer.

So I’ve now retested all 1,500+ libraries. Since I already knew these didn’t have obvious FB links on the home pages, I just worked with Google and the browser’s Find function. (There are so many fewer Twitter accounts, and they’re so much harder to find, that I didn’t bother.)

The results? Instead of 841 sets of Facebook updates and 370 sets of tweets (336 with both), I now have 1,158 set of Facebook updates, 381 sets of tweets (the extras mostly coming from the 19 “extra” libraries)–and 346 with both.

I just finished cleaning up and characterizing those updates and tweets this morning. So I’m now roughly where I expected to be last Wednesday—but with a whole bunch more libraries involved and some interesting new data.

By the way, it’s still true that, as far as I can determine, most public libraries (in the half of the country I tested) do not have either general-purpose Facebook or Twitter accounts (excluding teen departments), but “most” is a narrow figure: 1,231 libraries didn’t show either one, while 1,194 showed one or the other. (That number includes the Extra 19, all of which have one or the other–it would be 1,212 to 1,175 otherwise.)

You will find pages on Facebook for most public libraries, but hundreds of those pages are “community pages” that were neither created by the library nor have anything to do with them.

How many libraries are active on Facebook or Twitter? That depends on your definition of “active.” I’ll get into that more in the book and possibly in posts later on (or even in Cites & Insights if there’s too much blather to include in a relatively short book that’s mostly about what libraries do well).. Just to offer two data points:

• 86 of the libraries with Facebook accounts (having at least one Like and at least one post–I didn’t include accounts that don’t meet those fairly minimal criteria) have averaged less than one post per month. Notably, 66 of those 86 lack obvious FB links on the library websites; I’m guessing most of them are fully abandoned. Another 75 have averaged less than two posts per month, but for a very small library that may be entirely appropriate…
• 108 libraries have fewer than one Like per 1,000 residents.

Now on to metrics and some writing…noting that I’ll be doing a second research pass roughly one quarter after the first one (within a day or two either way), adding more new accounts and updating other figures. For Twitter, that means I can get reasonably accurate rates of activity–and for both, I’ll include a “freshness” measure for the most recent update or tweet, so that I can offer a reasonably sound basis for “active” or not.

In passing, I’ll note that marking up the updates has left me even more admiring the extent to which many very small public libraries serve their communities well with minimal resources. I always had such admiration, but it’s stronger. (It’s also a little remote: I’ve never lived in a town with a public library/system serving fewer than 50,000 people.)

So: Lots more blogging? Probably not. Did the C&I receive the intense editorial scrutiny I’d planned? Well…you be the judge.

Thanks to the 47 library folks who have responded to earlier requests. I’d love to have a few more responses by September 14, 2011, along the following lines:

Basic Information

Library/district official name
State, province or country
Service area population
Your name, title and email address
Whether you’re willing to have your comments used as direct quotations or only as background.

Comments on Twitter or Facebook (or both—indicate which):

Whatever you feel is worth saying about how your library uses the social network, how much time is spent preparing items and responding to items (if you do that), whether one person or many post, the feedback you’ve gotten from your patrons, whether it seems worthwhile—and whatever else you think is worth mentioning.

Comments on the relationship between the two (if you use both):

Do you use them for different purposes, or are Facebook statuses basically longer versions of tweets (or maybe the same)? Other comments on the differences and similarities as your library has used them?

Thanks!

I can’t guarantee your comments will be used—I’d expect that no more than 2,000-3,000 words of the book will be comments from these emails. I will list you in the acknowledgments (unless you ask me not to do so) and your comments will definitely help as I prepare the subjective portions of the book.

Please email comments to waltcrawford at gmail.com

If your library stopped using either or both (yes, I have at least one such response), I’d be interested in knowing that as well–and why.

The checked states

Responses are invited from people in one of the 25 states where I’ve checked websites of libraries (“libraries” as defined by the state’s own statistical reports)–a little over 2,400 in all, not the 2,500 I estimated in earlier comments–and also from those in other states, provinces and nations.

Here are the states I’ve checked:

California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, New Jersey, Arizona, Washington, Maryland, Missouri, Colorado, Louisiana, South Carolina, Kentucky, Oregon, Connecticut, Mississippi, Utah, Nevada, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, Wyoming.

Libraries in those states have defined primary service area populations totaling 163,657,750 based on the most recent state reports (2009 in most cases)–a little more than half the nation’s total, albeit a lot less than half of the public libraries.(There are hundreds of small and rural libraries in this sample–174 libraries serving fewer than 1,000 people and 639 in all serving fewer than 5,000.)

[The states are in descending order by total of the PSA populations. That's not always the same as the state's total population, for various reasons, and in one or two cases is distinctly larger due to reporting oddities, which will not be dealt with in this project.]

Anyway: More responses welcome, and thanks again to those who have responded so far.

If so, and particularly if your library has assisted patrons in using Lulu or CreateSpace for self-publishing, I’d love to hear from you–within the next three days, if possible.

Let me know who you are, what the library is, and whatever you have to say about the experience–noting which portions, if any, are NOT suitable for direct quotation in the book I’m currently finishing up. You can add a comment to this post or email me comments at waltcrawford@gmail.com

Thanks!

…if I ever said “No public library should consider this” to any suggested new service or tool.

…if I ever said “What a stupid idea for a book” to anybody considering writing one.

…if I ever said “Nobody would want to…” to any legal and moral suggestion.

Why so apologetic?

Well, in the last week I’ve had:

• One person respond to a request for comments on how libraries are using social networks, as research toward a book on the subject, by at least indirectly attacking the notion of publishing a book on the topic.
• Another person–and, unlike the first case, I’m acquainted with and respect this other person–respond to a request for examples of a new service public libraries could offer (I don’t know that any do, but my next book will be making such a service easy and desirable, I believe) with an initial response (until the concept was explained a little more) that this is not something public libraries, except possibly the very largest, should be considering.

In neither case was I asking for a critique of the idea; in both cases, I was asking for specific assistance or information.

So, if I’ve done the same thing or similar, I apologize.

Now:

I do not apologize for…

…criticizing claims that Every Library or Every Librarian should do, or know, X (with very rare exceptions).

…criticizing assertions that we’ll all be doing X (again, with very rare exceptions, breathing, eating and dieing being chief among them).

…criticizing books or blog posts or comments for being simplistic or badly argued.

Nor do I expect to be free of such criticisms.

True story

When I wrote my first book in the library field, MARC for Library Use, the first publisher to which it was submitted basically didn’t think it was of any use unless I turned it into a cataloging workbook.

I took it to another publisher–who also wasn’t certain, but took a chance. The result? Certainly the most important book I wrote for a very long time, and also the best-selling book I wrote prior to co-writing Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness & Reality. And I’ll assert that the book was directly useful to thousands of people.

So, y’know, I’m not abandoning either project. In one case, I continue to believe it’s a book that will help nearly every public library strengthen its community ties. In the other, I believe it will be a revealing, helpful and timely book when it’s published.

I’ve completed the first pass for use of Facebook and Twitter by public libraries in six states–which was, originally, all I planned to do (as part of a book project that’s not primarily about numbers as such).

Those six states make up roughly one-fifth of U.S. population (they include a very large state, a large state, a medium-sized state, a medium-small state, a small state and a very small state in terms of population). They include a total of 802 public library agencies (libraries and library systems).

Based on just those states, I can offer two “contradictory” comments, both true:

• Most libraries in the six states studied don’t use either social network: Roughly two-thirds don’t use either one.
• Most people in the six states are served by libraries that do use at least one of the two social networks (although “most” in this case is around 54%).

Think about it. There’s no contradiction between the two numbers. And that’s all the numbers I’ll note at the moment.

I will say this: I’m doing more than 6 states. I’ll almost certainly do another ten (two large, two fairly large, two medium, two fairly small, two small) states…and I might even do another eight beyond that. (The set of ten states includes a total of just over 800 libraries/library agencies. The set of eight includes just over 640. We’ll see how it goes.)

If your public library/library district has used Facebook, Twitter or both, and has stopped using one or both, I’d love to get some feedback, to help me prepare a book on public libraries’ use of social networks, to be published by ALA Editions in 2012. Please send responses to waltcrawford@gmail.com by September 14, 2011.

Basic Information

Library/district official name
State, province or country
Service area population
Your name, title and email address, if I need more info
Whether you’re willing to be quoted directly.

Comments on Twitter or Facebook (or both—indicate which):

Why you stopped using the social network and any other comments you wish to make.

Thanks!

I can’t guarantee your comments will be used—in all, I’d guess no more than 2,000 to 3,000 words in the book will come from direct librarian feedback. But I will list you in the acknowledgments and your comments will definitely help as I prepare the subjective portions of the book.

Note: I’m not assuming that there are any “failure stories.” It won’t surprise me at all if I don’t get any responses to this “negative” query. On the other hand, while I can see the Facebook and Twitter accounts in the six or eleven states I’m studying in depth, I have no way of knowing about former accounts that have closed—unless people tell me.

Thanks,

Walt Crawford

If your public library/library district currently uses Twitter, Facebook or both, I’d love to get some feedback to help me prepare a book on public library use of social networks, to be published by ALA Editions next year. Please send responses to waltcrawford@gmail.com, ideally by September 14, 2011.

Basic Information

Library/district official name
State, province or country
Service area population
Your name, title and email address
Whether you’re willing to have your comments used as direct quotations or only as background.

Comments on Twitter or Facebook (or both—indicate which):

Whatever you feel is worth saying about how your library uses the social network, how much time is spent preparing items and responding to items (if you do that), whether one person or many post, the feedback you’ve gotten from your patrons, whether it seems worthwhile—and whatever else you think is worth mentioning.

Comments on the relationship between the two (if you use both):

Do you use them for different purposes, or are Facebook statuses basically longer versions of tweets (or maybe the same)? Other comments on the differences and similarities as your library has used them?

Thanks!

I can’t guarantee your comments will be used—I’d expect that no more than 2,000-3,000 words of the book will be comments from these emails. I will list you in the acknowledgments (unless you ask me not to do so) and your comments will definitely help as I prepare the subjective portions of the book.

I’ll look up your library’s home page and go to your Twitter and Facebook pages, to pick up basic numbers (followers, following, tweets, likes, visits) and five recent items from each service as examples of trends and practices—unless you’re in one of the six or eleven states for which I’m doing full sweeps, in which case I’d do that anyway.

Thanks!

Walt Crawford

Clarification added August 2, 2011: While this message doesn’t name the “six or eleven states,” I did mention the six states (not the 11) in a FriendFeed note and may have mentioned them elsewhere.

The six states were chosen by population to give a good cross-section (that is, a very large state, a not-so-large state, a medium-sized state, a smaller state, a small state, and a very small state–all in terms of population, not physical size), since I can’t possibly study every single state.

While I’m retaining that principle, further investigation reveals the need to make slight adjustments for the sake of plausibility. In one case, a medium-sized state has hundreds and hundreds of libraries reporting, making it extremely cumbersome to evaluate; in another, a small state has only one public library with many branches. In both cases, I’ve taken an “adjacent” state instead–that is, the next higher-ranked or lower-ranked in population. If I go to 11 states or 16 states, I’ll use the same accommodation.

I can say for sure that California, New Jersey and Minnesota will be studied, since I’ve already done those, and Wyoming–the smallest state by population–will also be studied. It’s highly likely that the fifth and sixth states will be Mississippi and Idaho. That will mean I’ll have checked more than 800 library agencies…

In any case, all reports from public libraries, including those in Canada and outside North America, are welcome. They’ll be treated equally in terms of background comments, and I’ll do a special pass on all “non-studied” libraries come mid-September, treating them as a separate group.

Serious title for a fairly frivolous post, although the post could turn into a more-serious essay later on…

Social networks

I have no idea how many of these still have me as a resident or member or whatever. (I know Second Life is a Hotel California application, but I may have simply never bothered to delete accounts elsewhere–Orkut, for example).

And, yes, I added one more–need I say which one, or will a “+” suffice? I hadn’t been planning to join for a while, especially not while the initial “let’s all talk about what a cool thing this is” wave of buzz was going on.

See what I’m doing there? No? Oh well…

But a colleague–one I’ve never met but whom I respect enormously–sent me an invitation out of the blue, and I chose to accept it. And, of course, logging, found literally dozens but not yet hundreds of library folk who (a) are in my email contacts list, which only means “at some time either they sent me an email or I sent them an email” and (b) are already in the network.

For now, I’ve set up two named circles–one for library folk, specifically people who either are part of LSW or should be, and another for open access folk and scientists I’m vaguely acquainted with. The latter currently has eight members; the former, currently, 64, but it probably could have more than that. Which, given that I probably haven’t yet spent an hour total in the network, is pretty amazing.

To what extent am I actually social in networks? Of those that I’m aware I’m part of, I’d say:

• FriendFeed: Very active. I spend way too much time here, but it’s become my primary source for new ideas and comments (other than RSS feeds).
• Google+: Mildly active. For now, I’ll probably check once or twice a day, and could see becoming involved in some conversations here.
• Facebook: Barely active. I think my current status is two or three weeks old. I probably comment on someone else’s item as often as twice a week. I do check it at least once a day, but mostly look at recent items from a very small family group and somewhat larger “libclose” group.
• Twitter: Almost entirely a lurker, and even then rarely more than once a day.
• LinkedIn: Technically there, realistically not. As the Big Network for Professional Advancement, the only relationship of LinkedIn to past or present jobs is that it was taking over space that RLG was vacating, little by little, in the final Mountain View offices.
• I don’t know of or can’t remember any others.

Professional affiliation

As I noted in my random impressions of ALA NOLA:

The one meeting I started to attend was the fledgling Retired Members Round Table. Turns out that, quite apart from the $20 dues, it probably isn’t for me–it felt like a way for Involved ALA Members to continue to be Involved ALA Members. Frankly, it made me feel old–whereas my primary professional involvement (and the only ribbon I was wearing), the Library Society of the World, makes me feel, um, less old.

That’s probably unfair to RMRT. It’s quite possible that future gatherings will be vibrant and full of fascinating discussion. But for now it really is clear: My primary professional affiliation is the Library Society of the World, LSW, a disorganization of considerable and mixed repute.

Putting them together

Just for interest, I checked a couple of places.

The primary nexus for LSW at this point is a room in FriendFeed. As of right now, there are 703 FriendFeed folks in the LSW room. Given that FriendFeed really isn’t growing and probably never had more than a million or so regular users, that’s pretty remarkable. Frankly, the small size of FriendFeed is, to me, one of its great strengths…

There’s an LSW group in LinkedIn, with a remarkable 2,006 members–and my initial reaction is “Who are all these people and what do they have to do with LSW?” The button-down business-card nature of LinkedIn seems at odds with the irreverence and informality of LSW, and that shows in the threads on this version of LinkedIn.

Then there’s the LSW site itself, with 162 members and, shall we say, not huge amounts of activity.

At one point, a Meebo room was the hot LSW spot. If it still exists, I’m not aware of it (which mostly means I’m not aware of it).

And there’s “my personal LSW,” the circle on my G+ account, with 64 people to date (some of whom are no longer in FF/LSW, and some of whom might never have been there).

But the current key group is FF. That is, of course, subject to change.

(Is there an LSW page on FaceBook? If so, I think I’d just as soon not know… And I’m pretty sure there’s no LSW Island in Second Life and no LSW MySpace page. But what do I know?)

I was originally going to include this with the previous post, but forgot…

After seeing some of the year-end posts offering summaries or lists of the books people read during 2010, I thought I’d keep track this year, which I’ve never done in the past. So I started a spreadsheet, booksread.xlsx.

I didn’t (and don’t) have an actual goal, but given that I normally check out three books at a time from the library, and that Livermore has a 28-day loan period (for most books, at least), I figured “maybe 39″ would be an informal target–that is, three books every four weeks.

In fact, so far, I’ve been reading considerably more (no, I don’t include reading my own stuff, I don’t include “book equivalent” magazines, etc.) than that target. As of yesterday, the spreadsheet shows 23 books read–really 22.2, as I abandoned one partway through. And, let’s see, we’re about 17 weeks into the year.

I suspect my reading rate will slow down somewhat now that I have book projects for the next 11 months. I could be wrong–fact is, nearly all my book reading is after dinner, anyway, and I don’t do serious work on the computer after dinner.

So: I’ll stick with 39 as an informal target. Might make it, might not. Incidentally, so far I’ve only rated three books “Meh,” one abandoned book “Fail,” and four books “So-so.” I’ve enjoyed 15 of the 23 books I’ve read so far. Not a bad track record–or maybe I’m an easy grader.

I know that I’m never going to run out of new reading, even at the increased pace I seem to be reaching (that is, a book a week or thereabouts, counting as “book” only, well, actual books)–but sometimes I want to take a fresh look at memories of bygone years.

I’ve been thinking about one group of writers I think of as the humorist/essayists, although that’s probably the wrong term. These are folks I read, as much as I could find, some decades ago and enjoyed thoroughly–and I’m wondering whether they’ll stand up to rereading.

Who? Five names comes to mind immediately, but one of the five is a ringer: He’s my age and only well known as an essayist in fairly recent years, and I mostly want to read more of his writing.

Three really are from bygone days: SJ Perelman, James Thurber and Robert Benchley. One is somewhere in between: Woody Allen. The ringer is Steve Martin.

I have a feeling I’m forgetting some of the greats from 40 years ago, when I was doing a lot of this reading; maybe they’ll come to me while browsing the shelves (a combination of short stories, since Livermore shelves those separately, and other classifications–maybe 813.54 or thereabouts? That’s an ignorant guess, since I don’t know Dewey worth a damn).

Turns out Livermore doesn’t own any Perelman–maybe he’s faded away more than I thought. The others are fairly well represented (at least three of them also in films, to be sure). My best guess: The first three will still be funny, Steve Martin will still be great, and Woody Allen…….well, I’m not sure how he’ll fare.

I’m pretty sure the political humorists–Art Buchwald and the lot–won’t have aged very well, and I’ve forgotten most of them.

These are idle musings, but I will start rereading some of this stuff soon. I never subscribed to The New Yorker, home base for much of the best of this sort of writing; maybe I should change that.

There is, to be sure, a solution for Livermore’s lack of Perelman–and for Livermore’s lack of Barbara Fister (I’ve grown to respect her writing and thinking so much that I really want to try her crime novels, but I want to read one before I go out and buy them), for that matter: Link+, the fairly large library cooperative in Northern California that’s surprisingly well integrated into the local catalog. I’ve never used it; that’s about to change, I think.

Amazing: A post about books.

(Yes, I have some thoughts about the current ebook kerfuffle–and about the extent to which public libraries have pushed ebooks and ereaders despite the lack of ownership that was almost certain to lead to stuff like this. But I don’t know when or whether I’ll post anything about it…there are others much closer to the situation, and at least one of them has already said “Why is anybody surprised by this?,” which is a good starting point for a longer conversation.)

Here’s an honest question that may reflect my lack of intimate current knowledge of the formal library literature:

Has anyone studied the actual use of social networks by public libraries other than those with high-profile spokespeople/advocates? Better yet, has anyone done so on a scale broad enough to be anything more than anecdata?

I’m asking not because I assume the results would be “not much of any use” but, actually, the opposite: I’m beginning to suspect there’s a lot of real-world l0w-key adoption that we don’t hear about.

Why? Anecdata, of course. I was reducing the 16,000 words of Cites & Insights 11:2 to a 2,000-word Online column and found myself adding new material—and wondering what I’d find locally.

Just for fun, I thought I’d see what elements of 2.0 technologies I could locate at three well-used local public libraries—the one I use now and the two I used previously. None of these have high profiles nationally; all are reasonably but not lavishly funded; all are in a region where use of social networking and other “2.0″ tools should be predictably high. All three communities are roughly the same size (70,000-75,000 population).

The library I use now, Livermore Public Library, has had the same director for more than two decades. She has a blog—but doesn’t use it all that often, with nine posts in the three years since it began. (One post speaks to the nonsense you hear sometimes from doomcryers about most people not wanting or using public library services: In a local survey, 81% of respondents reported using LPL—and they rated service quality at 79 on a 100-point scale, a very high result.) There’s also a teen blog—but it’s only had three posts in its one-year life. LPL also has a Facebook page with a fairly steady stream of updates on LPL programs (seven updates in the last two weeks) “liked” by 550 people and a Twitter feed with 172 followers, with 905 tweets to date. How many of those 172 followers are actual Livermore residents interested in library issues? That’s a tougher question. There’s also a mobile catalog, a version of LPL’s catalog stripped down to a bare all-text minimum. All in all, a reasonable showing for a library with high usage and budgetary problems that stem entirely from city budgetary problems.

Mountain View Public Library devotes most of a straightforward home page to a catalog search box and set of current events—but there’s also a “Social Networking” icon that leads to a surprising wealth of items, some oddly identified (e.g., the library’s blog is identified as Blogspot rather than by its name). The library blog appears to serve as the source of the home page’s center strip; it’s entirely official announcements and book reviews and has ten posts in the past 3.5 months. A Teen Blog began in April 2010 and had 45 posts during 2010. There’s also a Delicious page with the library’s bookmarks (189 in all), a Facebook page with 285 people Liking it and 15 items in the past month—and another TeenZone Facebook page with 37 people liking it, clear evidence of teen patron involvement but relatively few recent updates; a Flickr photostream with 93 photos; two Twitter streams, a general one having 311 followers (and itself following 169 other streams!) and a fairly steady stream of tweets and a much smaller teen stream (33 followers, 88 tweets); and—unusually—a Yelp link, where you’ll find 89 reviews for the library. (Based on those reviews, MVPL is doing quite a few things right!) All in all, an impressive showing.

Like Livermore, Redwood City Public Library has a slideshow current-even element on its home page which can be either great or annoying. The front page doesn’t link directly to any blogs—but does have Facebook and Twitter icons. The Facebook page has 295 people Liking it and four updates in the last two weeks; the Twitter stream has 124 followers and 123 tweets—four of them within the last two weeks. In fact, RCPL had one of the earliest public library blogs, Liblog, beginning in 2002—but its URL now links directly to the library’s home page.

Conclusion? All of these libraries are using social networks with varying effectiveness. None of them makes a big deal of their usage. That may be as it should be.

When I was terminated as Editorial Director for the Library Leadership Network, I saved off the 104 (of about 180 total) essays that primarily represented my own writing, editing and gathering–about 360,000 words total, or the equivalent of seven contemporary books (I think of it as “roughly four books,” but at least within the library field, most nonfiction books now seem to be down to 50,000 words or less).

All of the material is under Creative Commons BY-NC licenses, so saving copies for later use was entirely legal. I let my former boss know that I might try to reuse some of it elsewhere; that wasn’t a problem. Because I anticipated reusing some of it for my own writing, I didn’t save off the other 70-odd articles, most of them either licensed from the original Library Leadership Network or composed of citations from the management literature.

Since then, Lyrasis has shut down the Library Leadership Network, which makes these articles unavailable. I think that’s unfortunate, since there’s a lot of good and relatively timeless material here, material that could be particularly helpful for new leaders (and, in some cases, new managers).

Finding a Home and Possible Approaches

I’d love to work with some agency–an association, a library school, whatever–to establish a new site that makes these pieces available, encourages discussion around the pieces and, possibly, continues to grow and improve as a library leadership resource.

At a minimum, for a modest one-time fee, I could do the second editing pass (to clean up links and remove additional extraneous material) and turn the pages (all HTML) over, and have done with it. The requirements would be that the new site be freely available, but it could certainly have advertising or sponsorship.

Well, there’s a subminimum: If no arrangement can be made and I continue to regard this material as important, I could always mount it as a set of pages attached to this blog–but I don’t think that’s the most effective way to proceed.

At a second level, with some modest level of ongoing support (at least $4,000/year, I think, and escalating based on level of desired activity), I could do that editing pass, help define the site itself–and then continue as an editor, both moderating discussions/comments (that is, checking for spam–if the site is, say, WordPress-based, advance moderation probably isn’t necessary) and updating pages/generating new pages. I don’t see going back to the “roughly half-time” level of LLN, but could see something that would aim for one significant upgrade or new article per month at a minimum, about one per week as a maximum.

Of course, it’s always possible that users of the new site could start generating most of the content–that was the original hope for PLN, the predecessor for LLN. Hope is a good thing.

Interested?

Get in touch. waltcrawford at gmail dot com, if you don’t wish to use the link.

I don’t anticipate doing much more to encourage such a site. (There are other things I’m working on. I might revisit this in two or three months.) If there’s simply no interest, that’s OK too–but LLN was nearing 50,000 article pageviews per month (excluding the home page and other overhead), which leads me to believe there is some demand out there.

Two miniposts for the price of one!

Gold star

I would be remiss if I did not mention that this here blog received a gold star from Salem Press in its library blog thingie, particularly since they were very quick to move this blog from Public Library Blogs (!) to General Blogs (I was hoping for Quirky, but you can’t always get what you want) after I let them know…

(There seems to be no shortage of links to the Salem Press list, so the lack of one here shouldn’t be an issue.)

Quick expert advice from librarians about web tools

Here’s an easy two-part test for modern librarians–or, better yet, just those who are considered web specialists. They’re honest questions, and presumably y’all should be able to answer them on the spot, in the comments:

1. I have a fully-formatted book ms. done using Word 2007, but also in PDF. How do I convert it to epub (without DRM), retaining as much of the formatting as possible? I even have Calibre, if that helps.
2. OK, so I have the new Facebook privacy tools now, but I just looked at my Privacy settings and I don’t understand what’s going on here:

Note: This is a straight screen capture, cropped but with no other changes. You may have to scroll right to see what I’m really interested in.

To wit: What does “Other” mean? How can I find out?

I await responses with some interest. Based on other discussions, I assume that any employable web services librarian should have answers…

Maybe that’s too broad a question. Maybe a better question:

Is it really reasonable to say that librarians must be involved in something they personally find unsatisfactory because lots of other people are?

You can probably guess my answer–but I’m not really a librarian. Of course, neither would I expect to use a librarian as my first source of helpful advice on, for example, tax deductions, which church I should attend, how to improve my golf game, whether I should be concerned about this mole on my neck…or how to manage privacy settings in Facebook. In all of those cases, the library might have useful resources–but I see no reason to expect each and every librarian to be an expert.

The background

I found the range and depth of commentary about Facebook’s betrayal of its users helpful changes to encourage openness in December 2009 so interesting and so relevant that I put together a Zeitgeist essay on it, which will appear in the July 2010 Cites & Insights. (Out well before ALA Annual–probably next week.)

That essay ends at roughly the point where FB announced the new easier settings, with the promise that they’ll remain in future updates–a promise that I can only interpret based on past performance and the CEO’s clear, obvious predilection to regard everything as preferably public (except, of course, for his own stuff). (The changes haven’t “rolled out” to my FB account yet, so I have no first-hand experience.)

Personally: I didn’t quit Facebook, mostly because I have family members and a few other acquaintances that I can keep up with, to some extent, through FB. I did lock down my settings, trim my already-sparse profile, and renew my self-promise not to Like, Join, or use Applications–the “you don’t mind if we harvest everything you’ve ever done, do you?” alert always did scare me off. My so-called Friends on FB, something over 200 of you, already know (at least implicitly) that I rarely update my status or post on my wall–most of my stuff goes on Friendfeed, this blog or C&I.

There’s my personal decision–and my understanding of what’s involved. It struck me (and strikes me) as entirely reasonable for a librarian or anyone else concerned with privacy and corporate behavior to leave Facebook as a principled decision. I didn’t choose that course.

The incident

Stephen Abram posted “Today is Quit Facebook Day – for Dummies” at Stephen’s Lighthouse on May 31, 2010. (If you go to the link, be sure to read “About the Author”–about which I will not comment.)

I thought it was an insulting post, right from the first sentence:

I wonder how many info pros will announce to the world they don’t have the information skills to manage privacy by leaving Facebook today.

This seemed to me to say that librarians (“info pros” lost at SLA and I’m not about to use it) can’t reasonably quit FB based on principled objections; if they do so, they’re “announcing” that they’re dummies. Hokay. And I started wondering about this:

It seems to me that it should be a reasonable user expectation of librarians and information professionals that they should be able to manage privacy settings and use the full range of web tools.

Really? Every librarian should “use the full range of web tools”? Why? Well…

I also would expect to be able to receive informed, current and excellent advice and training on how to deal with the emerging social tools from my professionals in the social institutions I frequent (public libraries, schools, univerisities, colleges, etc.).

And here I come up short. [By the way, that was a direct cut-and-paste, not retyped.] Should I be able to take a workshop on Effective Facebooking at my library? Maybe. Should I expect that I can walk up to any librarian–every librarian–and get “informed, current and excellent advice” on every “social tool”? I think that’s unrealistic, and I think it privileges “social tools” over nearly everything else in life. I don’t expect every librarian (or any librarian) to tell me where I can find the best asparagus or whether I should sign up for Safeway’s Club Card. I don’t expect every librarian to offer informed, excellent advice on how to improve my (nonexistent) golf game. I don’t expect any librarian to be a source of current, excellent advice on which software would be best suited to producing a self-published book, and certainly not on how to use each program–although I might be delighted if the library (not every librarian) had a workshop on the topic. And I don’t believe I should be able to walk up to any librarian and say “should I be using Flickr or Picasa to organize my photos–and how should I set up my Picasa account?”

Abram then tosses in a stick:

Will they exit Twitter and Google too for collecting private information? I suspect that would make them unemployable. At least, ironically, they’ll be easily identified by professional recruiters and HR folks through the standard tools and the digital trail they leave as they exit and discuss their position.

Set aside the simplistic equation of FB’s deliberate undermining of its former policies with Twitter and Google policies. Is it plausible to regard a librarian who doesn’t Twitter as unemployable? Really?

I commented as follows: