Bridging the divide

Jessamyn C. West has written a wonderful book titled Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide. I'm not even half way through it yet, and I've already gleaned more ideas than I can use in a year. One thing I know for sure, I'm going to have to find a way to cram more classes into the schedule than just the one per week, plus the Monday morning drop-in, that I do now. There may be only one or two people in each class--we're a small community and, in my experience with them, no one person has quite the same computer needs as another person. I'm also hamstrung by the lack of a real computer lab. We have laptops, but it's proven to be very difficult to keep them in a uniform state between users. I wish I could just have half a dozen laptops that were never used for anything except classes. I may have to make such an investment with my own nickel. Certainly the prices have come down to the point where an idea like that isn't totally off the wall.

In addition to all the wonderful ideas in the book, Jessamyn has even shared many of her teaching materials. I love librarians! Buy the book. You won't regret it.

Fun with photos

Do you know someone who scrapbooks? (Is that the right verb?) Would you like to distribute family photos that are a little out of the ordinary? Take a look at Picnik.

To get started, just upload a photo and start playing with it. And if you already have a Flickr account, you can pull photos right from your Flickr sets. Here's a simple collage I made with some photos from a walking tour of Boston.

And here's a fancy collage I made using a photo from a trip to Greece.

I don't know who Daniel and Sophia are, but that's a text field that you can edit, and there are lots more fancy frames for making Mother's and Father's Day cards, holiday cards, vacation postcards, etc. Print them at home on your own color printer, or send them directly from Flickr to Snapfish and have them print cards, calendars, mugs, and more.

If you don't already have a Flickr account, it's like most web-based applications--there's a free version and a premium version. Likewise for Picnik. These were made with the free version of Picnik, but with the premium version you get a lot more choices of layouts for the simple collage, and lots more frames and layout options for the fancy collages.

Have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?

Interviewers have looked askance at me when I've given this or a similar answer to one of their technical questions. They think that technology should be much harder and more complex than this, and they probably think I'm something of a simpleton and a fake technology librarian, but the fact is that a lot of networking and other connectivity problems can be solved this way.

Case number 1: This evening we had the big kickoff for the summer reading program. The entertainer we had booked had brought his Macbook to be hooked up to our large screen television monitor. He's done this dozens of times at other venues without any problems. But our television didn't detect a signal from the Macbook. Yes, he had his own adapter to convert the Mac's video output to a VGA output for the television. He'd already tried System Preferences > Display > Detect Monitors. My boss the Director had already tried rebooting the Mac. Nothing worked. Then they called me.

I tried System Preferences on the Mac again. I had to. I made sure the adapter cable was snug at both ends, but I didn't unplug anything. I made sure that the television's input was set to "RGB-PC," but it still wasn't detecting a video signal. Finally I just unplugged the video adapter from the Mac and plugged it back in again. And what do you know, the television found a signal.

I can't explain why that worked. Maybe the order that things are connected matters. It shouldn't, but it frequently does--sometimes the hardware or the software at one end or the other is not yet quite ready to start, and maybe there is a window of opportunity outside of which the other device won't be detected. But the Director had already rebooted the Mac, and that hadn't made any difference.

Maybe it was just a bad connection that appeared to be okay but wasn't. If that hadn't worked, I would have gone for the can of spray cleaner and cleaned all the connectors. You can buy this at any Radio Shack--just ask for electrical contact cleaner. It comes in a spray can like WD40, with the same little red straw to direct the cleaning fluid onto the contacts. Don't squirt it into the TV or the computer. Just clean off the connectors at the ends of the cables.

Case number 2: I used to work in a library where at least once a month I would get called to fix a computer that didn't have network connectivity. It was always the same person and the same computer. In the manner of most librarians I know, this person always had several tote bags in tow. You know how it goes. You've got your lunch, and, depending what shift you're working, your dinner, too. You've got your book bag. You've got a change of shoes so that you aren't wearing your good shoes in the car or the bus or walking. Then there are all the miscellaneous things you have to have with you--in my case a netbook--and finally you have a pocketbook. This librarian was in the habit of tossing all of that under her desk when she first arrived. Well, guess where the network drop for her computer was? Yep. It "looked" like it was plugged in, but not all eight wires were making contact. All I ever had to do was unplug the connector from the wall and plug it back in. I tried to explain to her what was happening, but it always happened again.

So, the moral of the story is, it's not always that complicated. Most of the time, it's something simple. So why do we get paid the big bucks (that's a joke, by the way) if it's as simple as unplugging it and plugging it back in? Ah, but it's knowing when, and which one.

And that reminds me of an old engineering story...


There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail.

In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. Finally, at the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and said, "This is where your problem is." The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.

The engineer responded briefly: One chalk mark $1; Knowing where to put it $49,999.

It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.

http://www.i18nguy.com/engineers.html

Mobile website

Rye Public Library now has a basic mobile-friendly website, thanks to Brian Herzog of Chelmsford Pubic Library (MA). He gave a presentation yesterday at NHLA's conference, and included all the code and an excellent read-me file right on his website:

http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/mobile/

I downloaded his code, customized it for RPL, omitted a few features that I didn't get to today, and modified our regular website to include a link to the mobile website. The biggest challenge was figuring out the correct parameters for doing a keyword or ISBN search in our catalog. So now, when I'm standing in the bookstore, tempted to buy yet another book, I can whip out my phone and quickly find out if RPL has it. Yeah, I could do that from the regular catalog website, too, but this is way cooler, and saves me the extra step of enlarging the view to the point where I can type in the search box. ;-)

Check it out!

http://ryepubliclibrary.org/mobile/

Cloud Computing in Libraries

Here are some of the references I used for my talk at the New Hampshire Library Association conference yesterday. A slideshow and a written edition of my talk will follow soon.

Moving from Ownership to Access

http://lisnews.org/quotownershipquot_quotaccessquot_culture
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/the-end-of-ownership-culture/
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/01/better_than_own.php
http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/04/20/your-media-forecast-cloudy-with-a-chance-of-streaming/
http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/the-access-ownership-line/

Examples of Hosted ILS Solutions

Biblionix - http://www.biblionix.com/faqs/
LibraryWorld - http://www.libraryworld.com/cgi-bin/lw2.pl?command=show_page&pagename=home_tos.html

Examples of Office Suites

Wiki - http://pbworks.com/
Blog - http://www.blogger.com/
Google Docs - http://docs.google.com
Zoho - http://www.zoho.com/
Adobe - https://acrobat.com/
Microsoft Office Live - http://www.officelive.com/en-us/

Cloud Computing

“Where is the cloud? Geography, economics, environment, and jurisdiction in cloud computing.” Paul T. Jaeger, Jimmy Lin, Justin M. Grimes, and Shannon N. Simmons. First Monday, Volume 14, Number 5 - 4 May 2009. http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2456/2171

“The Web companies use Amazon’s cloud-based service to serve their Web sites, applications and files. Amazon’s customers include start-ups like the social networking site Foursquare but also big companies like Pfizer and Nasdaq.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/amazon-cloud-failure-takes-down-web-sites/

Survey Summary

https://spreadsheets.google.com/gform?key=0AkxxsS3dAUwhdDMzcnRXamFUaWFZdEVOUm1KeHVtX1E&hl=en&gridId=0#chart

Trying to see through the user's eyes

A patron I've never seen before came into my office to ask me about a problem with her computer. The following recreation is heavily edited.

P: The screen is all white!
me: What kind of monitor do you have?
P: The regular kind that sits on the desk.
me: I mean, is it a flat screen, like this one?
P: No, it's big.
me: Like a television? It might be a problem with your picture tube.
P: No, no, I can see everything, but the top and bottom of the screen are gone. It's all white.
me: So you can see the desktop, and you can see your Inbox?
P: Yes! That's what I've been telling you!
[I sign into Yahoo, open my Inbox, open my Inbox, and hit F11.]
me: Does it look something like this?
P: Yes! How did you do that?
me: I hit the function key F11.
P: What does that do?
me: Just what you see here. It makes the window go full screen and the menu bars and taskbar go away. Go home and try pressing F11 and see if that brings it back.
P: If there's no F11 key, can I just type F, 1, 1?
me: No, that won't work. There is an F11 key somewhere on your keyboard. You can find it.

Then there was a whole other conversation about leaving "the system" running for four months while she was in Florida, but what she really left on was the cable modem. Not a choice I would have made, but I assured her it didn't have anything to do with her immediate problem.

Invisible Patrons

Seven people came to the Excel Basics, Part 1 class the other night. Well, five really. The other two were my groopies, who have been coming no matter what the topic is and whether they're prepared for it or not. (They're still dealing with basic Windows terminology.)

Three were people I'd never seen before. The best moment was at the end of the class when I offered the newcomers a paper copy of the schedule of Thursday night talks, and they said, "Don't need it, we'll just check the website." Coming up on two years here, and no one's ever said that to me before.

There's a whole other invisible patron population in this little town, and I wonder how well we're really serving them. We're only open two nights a week, and only until 8 PM. I remember when I was commuting by car, by the time I got back to Danbury, the last thing I felt like doing was going to the library. The folks who commute to Boston by bus or commuter train from here probably don't feel like stopping at the library when they get home. We're open for six hours on Saturdays, but there are never any programs scheduled then--it's a 3-person crew, strictly for checking physical materials in and out.

The Board of Trustees meets at 4 PM on a weekday, too early for anyone who works out of town. The Friends meet at 6 PM on a weeknight, which is better, but still kind of early. I'm sure they are well-representative of a large portion of the town, but not all of it.

I hope that the new strategic planning committee includes representatives from this invisible population.