Library on my mind

Presentation by David Warlick – very good on technology doesn’t teach you it’s the INFORMATION that the technology provides.
http://davidwarlick.com/handouts

uses a great presentation tool – pezi – http://prezi.com/  – virtual visual presentation is very picture oriented, but engages the group as the presenter talks “about” not reading what is on the screen.

Stop integrating technology integrate LITERACY – teach kids how to teach themselves.

Reading means “Exposing what’s true” – find, valid, appropriate, evaluate information…

• R – arithmetic – numbers are digital – music, video, etc… – using midi how you don’t necessarially have to know how to play an instrument you can compose music.
• R- writing – a market skill?  Long Tail – and the information environment – self publishing and self marketing our works that didn’t hit mass market. – lulu.com - self publishing tool that David Warlick has used.

Lietarcy – includes reading, arithmetic, writing.

Now 3 E’s – exposing, employing,  expressing – or that should be 4 Ethical use of informaiton.

What does this mean to libraries? – change peoples notion of what the library is – we are no longer just reading.  Work information, express information, – think Kindos for kids…

redefine, literacy, warlick

Wow very interesting…

Alliance Virtual Library

Ref Desk

Exhibits/events

Libraries

Book Discussions

Global Collaboration

Pacific time

Snow Crash – Stephenson, Neal – Fiction on virtual reality

Ed Opportunities

– Virtual Classrooms

– Conferences and workshops

– Immersive Learning Environments

– Research Symposiums

TWU Virtual Research Symposiums

Valibrarian research

avatars –

sitepal.com

voki.com

Signing avatar

Signingavatar.com

Thanks to our vendors – today Baker and Taylor breakfast was wonderful.

Escue’ and ABDO Publishing – snack was great!

Our first session “The 21st Century Educator” was really interesting presented by Kim Cofino.

Things I learned:

Grow your own PLN

– start small – rss? Don’t overwhelm yourself

o Learn by lurking

o It’s ok to ignore – don’t stress out about it

o You will build a niche with people with similar interests

o If you leave a comment they may comment back or email you

– Social networking – ning? Facebook?

– Blog your ideas – takes effort to keep up

– Online spaces/conferences – secondlife?

– Twitter – constantly connected – Nambu – tweek deck – seesmic(can link in facebook) desktop client?

She had GREAT pictures and this is where she gets them:

Flicker – creative commons search ability to modify or build upon – most interesting…

Books that were mentioned:

Presentation Zen – Reynolds

World is flat – friedman

Long tail –

Redefining literacy for the 21^st century – Warlick

A whole new mind – pink

Here comes everybody – Clay Shirky

Wow what an opening session very interesting about the history of Koha…

With about 100 people attending – and seeing that many computers and notes – I think everyone is getting something!

As always with this type of conference someone came up to me and indicated “last nights dinner even before the conference started made it all worth coming!”  I hope by the end of the day tomorrow everyone has that type of response.

I’m sitting in on the Database Structure session – with Paul Poulain – very helpful – wish I had seen this months ago!

I hope to have all the session handouts posted on the wiki conference website next week.  We are also attempting to video record all the sessions – we will see what happens…

Well thought I should give everyone a quick update.  The conference is coming along nicely!  We have over 80 people attending many of which are “interested in Koha as a future ILS”…

We have 2 days full of great information about Koha and I wish I could attend more than one session per hour!

Couple of things I have discovered about Koha and MARC – the 003 is a “required” field in the MARC coding so therefore in the frameworks it has become “required” so when I have edited records it keeps stopping me asking me to put that in.  If you have a NUC code from LC – I would go ahead during a conversion and put it in so you don’t have to deal with it in the future!

The 040 – also requires an a subfield so records we have had for years we are having to enter data there when we go to save it.  Again there is probably a way to turn that off, but I’m too busy to poke around and it is a low priority.

I am very pleased to say that our ISBN 13/10 Development project was installed and working beautifully!  We have even addressed the issue of records coming in and taking out the (pbk) etc… type stuff which in the past stopped the system from matching on existing records.  I think this was one of our greatest moments!

We are going to have our development of the Overdue report loaded hopefully Thursday so that after spring break people can start running overdues…  Man will the librarians be happy about this.  We have been holding them off running overdues until we had a way that we felt was more suitable to our needs.  Hasn’t made everyone happy, but this is going to be great!

3.2 developments

Developments that I’m excited about – there is some work being done on reports so that you can build one report and it will prompt you for information – so you don’t have to build the same SQL 67 times! and they are going to allow you to “tag” them so you could name them all for X location and that location just has to put in that “tag” and it will pull up all the reports for that location or tag.  Great thing for the future!

Holds for building local is coming – that will make several of our schools very happy.

I am really excited about the conference and hope that the Sponsorship sessions will be able to give us all insight in what is coming, what is done and where we can all possibly “Share” in future development of this great software.

Have a great day!

Well school was called off today due to Ice, but since I’m on a long contract guess who is at work! Since the phone is quiet and email is light I am doing some professional reading. I’m reading up after ALA and all the discussions that happened while I was hard at working keeping everything up and running here at home.

One discussion that happened evidently was some OCLC policy discussion and the introduction of Biblios.net – as a free service to the library community from LibLime. So I started reading Blogs and articles about Biblios.net. Mind you I am using Koha, and was introduced to Biblios.net almost a year ago so to see where the cataloging editor has started and ended up is a wonderful thing! I did some beta testing on the software to see how it worked, and there is some great potential here… With a district so security concerned, open Z39.50 searching from within the network is not allowed. But with Biblios – the searching is actually happening outside the district – so Z39.50 in the community does make it possible. Currently in my opinion Biblios.net is too Academic oriented/University – there are few records from schools or public libraries. Search Green Eggs Ham and you get 2 records one of them in French I believe…

Here are a couple of blog articles you might be interested in reading:

http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/the-state-of-the-future-of-cataloging/

http://blogs.liblime.com/open-sesame/archives/332

Here is a followup on items from our go live…

Turns out that the 500 item limitation has to do with Koha indexing and not the MARC record..  We had several records that when we loaded them they were unsearchable or circ’able – due to the fact that there were more than 500 items attached.  It created some strange search results at times as well.

Basically when you scanned that barcode you would get a Koha error …  So LibLime helped me to identify records that were still too big and split them so that the items are now searchable and circ’able!  Bummer…  Just something to think about as you move forward.

Another item we discovered is having 100 items checked out to a teacher and 400 items attached to a bib, when you checkout one of those items to that teacher it may take 20 seconds for all the updating to happen.

With that said we are looking at creating magazine records specific to each campus to keep circulation moving and not slow down the checkout lines for kids with magazines.  Teachers can wait – kids can’t.

We’ve had some slow issues, but that could be general in district traffic – which we are investigating.  I did talk with a district using a different web based software and they indicated acceptable checkout/in times are between 2-3 seconds.  The page has to refresh so it is a little bit slower than the client or terminal software in that instance.

All in all the librarians have been pleased and we continue to tweak things.  I will post hopefully more tomorrow on our Pac for student access and things we are learning!  We did stretch the setup some on that, but we think in the long run it will be great!(default searching for a specific location initially)

Well things just keep moving along.  We are loading items like mad so that the ISBN matching will work correctly…  We have sponsored the development for 13/10 digit ISBN searching/matching.  That won’t be available though until possibly February…

I have figured out a way to print spine labels one at a time with the Dymo printer – koha currently has the ability to print spine labels in batch – for 8 1/2 x 11 pages of labels so this was a twist they had difficulty wrapping their head around.

Authority searching currently only searches the 1XX fields in authority records…  hmmm  future development?  At least these people know what an authority record is…

Yes still happy with our choice to move this way…  Our biggest hurdle is holds – system wide at this point.

Go live is about a month away, but…  We only work until Dec 19th so we have 7 days of cataloging work days from today and 12 days on the current system left!

Librarians have been trained – assistants too all 140 people!  I’m still working on some documentation and how the OPAC or student workstations will look.  LibLime has been able to assist in figuring out a way in which we can have a link that will open up and limit to the local location so people won’t have to login first.

Our biggest discussion has been on holds – it is all or nothing right now and how we would manage those resources.  We do local only on our current system, but Koha is designed around SHARING resources so imagine that…  Our current hold list has about 1200 items people are waiting for and if we do district wide about 600 of them can be filled on the first day…  Poor in district mail people!  But from there it should slow down.

We have discovered that our work around for extracting records with more than 500 items has not worked so I am back to “duping” records to get them under 500 per bib.  This is huge and again if you are planning to migrate anytime in the near future – look at your catalog and get your items under 500 per record no matter what you do!

We have sponsored a couple of development items – a filter on attributes for overdues – so we can get a list of overdue by homeroom or period or grade -

Attributes are items in which you can add to the borrower record locally – so we have discovered a way in which we can load the student schedule so secondary can run Overdues on whatever period/class they prefer – and it all is updated automatically from our student records system.(I’m going to have to manually load them as I haven’t worked with CRON jobs yet to figure that aspect out.)  There is an opportunity for sponsorship!

Had to do minor sponsorship to get the book jackets/reviews etc from B&T Content Cafe’ working correctly.

We have figured out how to load all 53000 student pictures – boy was that interesting.  Figuring out who has pictures(Food an nutritional services, Grade book program), who needs them(same folks and now us), and how can we share them(I have this what do you have…  How can I get that without sending you the CD what if it breaks!)!  The picture companies will do whatever you need, but they have to know up front.  Sounds easy, but you need to give them specs for picture size and file formats – ie thumbnails – jpg format file name is ID number, need a text file with file name and student number ie – 123456, 123456.jpg – for each school.

Waiting on a few other sponsorship items to see if we have funding.  Before you sign your contract ask for a copy of items that have been quoted for sponsorship to help you determine how much needs to be budgeted and what you may want to co-sponsor.  When I heard minor sponsorship or some sponsorship I was thinking hundreds, well it can be thousands depending on how much work is involved.  REMEMBER!  Your maintenance has dropped SIGNIFICANTLY so you may be able to lower your Operating budget, but keep some money for sponsorship requests you may have.  I’m working with KUDOS – and setting up a “workshop/conference” for Koha in April – 16/17 – this would be a great time for people to come and talk about development and what they need/would like to see in Koha and are willing to help sponsor.

Well we are getting ready tomorrow Nov 18th to do training with our librarians. This is the BASIC training – there is only so much we can show them in 1 1/2 hours if that!

First – how to login to the new system

How to circulate a book

How to modify/add a borrower

Basic reports

Then maybe some searching.

This sounds simple, but we anticipate TONS of questions since the librarians have not seen anything up to this point other than demo things. They maybe tinkered with it, but didn’t actually try and figure day to day activities and how it would/wouldn’t work.

We’ve made great headway with borrower loads and dealing with Homeroom codes from Pinnacle, now I just have to figure out a way to use CRON to load that data on a weekly basis… hmmm Another learning adventure!

This has been a great experience for me, forces me to look outside the box and ask the impossible and see what happens!(even with our own staff!)

It came to us last week that we need to develop some 15 minute web type trainings that people can start attending or watching on their own.  That will help people become more familiar with the system and how to’s.  The help is totally web based as well and customizable, have to watch that in upgrades, but we can put links directly into the help screens etc…  Still working on that!