Love it or hate it (or, like me, be completely torn over it), the iPhone is changing the way we function in our day to day lives.  You may not have one (I don’t), but you probably know a few people who do (assuming you’re in an area serviceable by AT&T). Watching folks who’ve mastered their iPhones can be inspiring. Not sure where to go for lunch? With a shake of their phone, they’ve got great suggestions at their fingertips. Not sure if that picture you just hung on the wall is level? Using the level app, they can tell you.

And now you can add all around life-saver to the list of things the iPhone is besides, well, a phone. This from Wired.com’s Gadget Lab:

Man Buried in Haiti Rubble Uses iPhone to Treat Wounds, Survive

…

After being crushed by a pile of rubble, Woolley [a US Filmmaker in Haiti at the time of the earthquake] used his digital SLR to illuminate his surroundings and snap photos of the wreckage in search of a safe place to dwell. He took refuge in an elevator shaft, where he followed instructions from an iPhone first-aid app to fashion a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound, according to an MSNBC story.
The app even warned Woolley not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his cellphone’s alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes. Sixty-five hours later, a French rescue team saved him.

While this is just a plain cool story (aside from the overall grimness of any news out of Haiti right now),  there’s a larger message here, and one that libraries would do well to heed: As a culture, we’re getting used to having a world of information available at our fingertips. We’re decreasingly tied to our desktop or even laptop computers, and are relying more and more on the increasingly powerful computers that fit in the palm of our hands.

Earlier this morning, I sat in on a webinar sponsored by Educause called Library in Your Pocket that highlighted the mobile efforts of the North Carolina State University library. I suspect the archive of that event will be available shortly, and would recommend it to any larger library systems that have some developers on staff.

But one point that the speakers made is that even with no tech expertise, you can create a mobile presence just by utilizing some free tools like WordPress.com to create a mobile-friendly website with some basic information about your library (hours, locations, upcoming events) which can allow mobile visitors to your library get access to the stuff they may want on the fly.

What about your library? What are you doing at your library to connect to users on their mobile devices? Let us know in the comments!

Back in September I had the pleasure of presenting at the Association of Rural and Small Libraries (ARSL) conference in Gatlinburg, TN. The session, Leading Edge Librarianship, was a 60 minute talk about some of the changes that are taking place in our patrons’ information landscape and what sorts of technologies we need to be aware of to stay relevant to our patrons’ information world.

A few months after the presentation, I was delighted to see Anne Layton Rice from the Monroe County Public Library in Key West, Florida (they’re on Facebook!), post something to the ARSL listserv about what she learned from that talk and how she had incorporated it into her work. The best part? It wasn’t the content of my talk, but the format that really hit home for her! I used a presentation tool called Prezi instead of PowerPoint (follow presentation the link above to see it in action), and for Anne, part of the message of my talk was the medium. Here’s what she posted to the ARSL list:

Last week, I used Prezi for a class on Flickr for very beginner web users. (“Beginner”, as in, they just set up their first email address last month.) I think Prezi is better than PowerPoint for most presentations, as PowerPoint is rather linear, while Prezi allows your presentation to “float” from bigger to smaller concepts and back and forth to show relationships. I found myself zooming in, out, back and around in Prezi during the Flickr class. This is more characteristic of how we present to a group, I think—esp. when we introduce new ideas.

The Flickr class was great fun.

Here’s Anne’s Flickr Prezi.

Here are a few other points Anne made about Prezi from a follow up email (to me, not the list):

• I’m bored to death by PowerPoints but needed visual cues for this class. Experimenting with Prezi made class preparation fun for me—I think it showed.
• Don’t you hate when a presenter responds to your question with “We’ll get to that slide in a minute.”? Prezi allows an immediate response within that teachable moment.

Anne also let me know that she’s working on a few other “leading edge” things, too! Her library is looking for a new ILS and they’re inquiring of each prospective vendor about their product’s support (or lack thereof!) for RSS; they’re working on getting a chat reference widget embedded onto the desktop of each of their public workstations; and, she writes, “I’m challenging my colleagues to give me one good reason why we should spend our paltry operating budget on MS Office upgrades when we can use GoogleDocs instead.”

Way to go, Anne! Way to drive progress!

Her Library’s Flickr collection has some great shots – check it out!

This is a great story, overall, but I think that what makes it so great for me is that in a time of little or no spare money for libraries, Anne was able to make it to a great conference that was relevant to her work, and then was able to make that trip valuable to her library by taking concrete action based on what she learned there. I have no doubt that the Monroe County Library service community will be better off thanks to Anne’s ambition!

What about your library? What sort of leading edge activities are you engaged in to offer your patrons more interesting and valuable services? Let us know in the comments!

Just in time for the holidays, the folks at ReadWriteWeb.com have published their techy predictions for 2010!  It truly is the most wonderful time of the year – for tech geeks like me, anyway.   Some of the predictions are, well, predictable (Facebook will continue to grow – and continue to have privacy problems, the iPhone will rule) but some are a little more interesting (Google’s Android phones will make major inroads because the iPhone App Store sucks, more people will be making e-commerce transactions with mobile devices, “netbooks” lose ground, and in between devices – not quite as tiny as a netbook, but much more streamlined than a notebook – take off).

It’s an interesting read for anyone interested in technology, but the implications for libraries is pretty clear: our patrons are rapidly moving toward an increasingly mobile experience and and they will continue to congregate in online spaces that offer social functionality.

Has your library taken any steps to be a participant in your community’s mobile computing world? Have you engaged your patrons in existing social spaces online, or added social functionality to your own web spaces?  Let us know in the comments!

(and PS – if you are interested in techy stuff, and don’t subscribe to or regularly read ReadWriteWeb, you should!!)

So, the Oxford University Press has announced 2009’s word of the year! Contenders included “sexting” (sending sexually suggestive text messages to a paramour) and “netbook” – both tech terms. And the winner? “Unfriend.” As in “Can you believe that she unfriended me on Facebook?!!” Christine Lindberg, one of the OUP’s senior lexicographers, says that the word “has both currency and longevity,” and “has real lex-appeal,” a pun which I find irresistible.

I won’t bother making any high-minded assertions about the significance of this selection in terms of how we connect (or don’t connect) to real people in real ways (or about the use of the prefix “un” with a verb noun) , but I will say that it’s a sure sign that social networks in general and Facebook in particular have permeated our lives in some very real ways.

What does this mean for libraries? It’s just another tribute to the ubiquity of social networks, and further proof that more and more of our patrons are spending more and more time in these virtual spaces.  In the past, outreach has meant driving bookmobiles into neighborhoods without libraries or opening up small branches in popular shopping malls – essentially moving our products and services to where our public gathers.  As our public makes a move to gathering in virtual  spaces, how can we stay in their line of sight?

Do any of you have Facebook accounts – or other social network presences – for your libraries? If so, let us know about it in the comments.  How are you leveraging the power of these networks for your library?

The folks down at La Junta High in La Junta, Colorado have decided to take advantage of some prime screen real estate on their library’s public access computers by embedding a Meebo chat widget right onto the desktop. Check it out!

When a student sits down to get online, the first thing they see is that chat widget, which allows them to ask a question of the librarian. This can help them get started in their research, or can make it easier for them to ask a question when they get stuck.  It may seem odd to a lot of us to put a chat widget on a computer that sits less than 20 yards from a librarian, but a lot of younger users are so used to online communication that using a widget like this is often easier than finding the nerve to talk to An Authority Figure.

Ruth Taylor, the Library/Media Aide at the school, decided to reach beyond her comfort zone to get the chat widget project rolling when she realized that as a librarian she couldn’t afford to lag far behind her students when it came to technology. She wrote to tell me that learning the language of technology was the hardest piece in figuring out how to do what she wanted, but that the process was definitely rewarding! Even better,  it gave her a little knowledge and confidence when it came to other tech projects.  Here’s how she put it:

And another project came along regarding widgets, and I knew what that was!  So, my advice would be to jump in and at least try a few things and try not to get totally frustrated, because when the job is done and successful you can give a great big “Yes!”

Congratulations, Ruth!

There’s a quick screencast on this page showing you how you too can embed a chat widget on your library’s public access computer desktops.

Are there any other great “YES!” moment stories out there? How have you reached beyond your comfort zone to provide better service to your users?  Share your stories in the comments below!

Remember Clue? As in “Mrs. White in the billiard room with the lead pipe”? I thought you might. It seems that the venerable classic has been re-imagined, and guess what they’ve added? Text messaging. That’s right. In the new game, CLUE: Secrets & Spies, players text Hasbro and get a few clues sent to their phones throughout the game. Check out the trailer (yes – a board game trailer) below.

A couple of not-entirely-fleshed-out thoughts:

1. While texting is an optional piece, Hasbro obviously expects that most – if not all players – not only have texting capability/ability, but also an unlimited or at least generous texting plan.  I know when I was a kid, we’d play game after game of this for hours. Without unlimited texting, no way my ma would get this for me now!
2. Board games like the old school Clue are of course interactive – to a point. We pretend to be in the world of our characters, wandering that mansion and looking for clues. But in this game, the game comes into and interacts with our actual world.  The game contacts us the same way our moms might – by sending a message to us from… the Hasbro HQ, I suppose.

And as a happy coincidence, I’m re-reading a favorite sci-fi book, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. In the world Stephenson creates in this book, movies of the sort we know now are referred to as “passives” (because we don’t interact with them) and are about as culturally relevant to most of the world’s inhabitants as silent films are to us now.  In the future world, most movies, shows, etc are ” ‘ractives” short for “interactives” where buying a ticket to the movie entitles you to play a part in the story.

It’s a long way from the “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories.

My point I guess is about our changing expectations for information and entertainment and the seeming inevitability of a world in which sitting back and absorbing information is less common than working/playing with it and changing it.  And of course the part that new, increasingly-mobile technologies will play in that.

What sort of examples of this shift from passive consumption to interaction are you seeing in your libraries? What technologies and tools do you see your patrons using to effect this shift?

Interesting sidenote: As I typed this, I got an email alerting me to the fact that Hasbro is sponsoring the 2009 National Gaming Day @Your Library. Coincidence? Hmm…

Looks like while a lot of us are still trying to get our heads around the evolution of the net referred to as “Web 2.0,” the world has moved on ahead of us and skipped all the way up to Web 4.0.

Thanks to Ray and Colleen at the Utah State Library for bringing this to my attention. It’s a great video that should serve as a wake up call for a lot of us!

Are any of you leveraging the power of social networks or the mobile web in your libraries? If so – or if you have questions about how – please let me know in the comments!

If you need to quickly launch a basic website for a project at your library, or perhaps even just for yourself, but lack the web design skills to do it from scratch, check out this post at Read Write Web.  Jolie O’Dell takes 4 web-based site creation tools for a test-drive with some pretty impressive results.  The sites she checks out:

• Edicy.com
• Zimplit.com
• Wix.com
• Amplifeeder.com

Each is has some unique strengths – Edicy is super quick; Zimplit is “dead simple” and offers great code-free skins; Wix allows you to create Flash-based sites; and Amplifeeder, Jolie writes, “creates sites that are the living end in terms of social media aggregation,” allowing  you (or your library) to pull in the content you create across a slew of different social sites like flickr, twitter, etc!

I tend to recommend WordPress for this sort of thing, but all of these look like great – and free – options, too. And of course, for a small fee, each of these sites will allow you to publish to your own domain.

Have any of you used any of these or other online web creation tools? If so, let us know in the comments!

Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium and CogDogBlog recently had the displeasure of sitting through a painful webinar, and in that experience, I know he’s not alone. We’ve all struggled to keep focused, eyes open, while some faceless voice drones on about… who knows what. In fact, we probably don’t rightly recall because the delivery was so bad that the information just didn’t stick.

Lucky for us, Alan uses his experience as a cautionary tale to all of us who have to lead webinars, and he gives us a list of 5 things to do if you really want to run a lethal (as in bad) webinar.  They are (with my commentary included):

1. “Make it hard to even get inside:
   Nothing says “Welcome to my webinar!” quite like a majorly convulted and broken process for entering the virtual space.
2. “Don’t let your participants know who else is there”
   Hiding the participant list doesn’t do anyone any good.
3. “Make it hard or impossible for the audience to communicate with each other”
   While having this kind of control  may appeal to the elementary teacher within, we need to recognize our audience is made up of adults, and we need to allow and even encourage the backchannel conversations that are often where a lot of learning takes place.
4. “Don’t greet the audience or make them feel welcome”
   As a presenter in a live space, would you not make eye contact or interact with audience members before your talk began? I didn’t think so!
5. “Ignore your audience, make ‘em wait til you fill the hour with your voice, do not involve them at all.”
   Talking heads are bad enough in person. They’re even worse when it’s a completely disembodied voice.

Read the original article – it’s worth it!

Need another screenshot tool? I know, I know. I talk about these things all the time, but this one’s unique in that it captures an entire webpage (not just one screen’s worth, but the whole thing!) without requiring any installs, accounts, or downloads.  All you have to do is pre-pend the url of the page you want to capture with aviary.com/ and hit enter.  So, for example, if you wanted to take a screenshot of this page – which is http://blogs.bcr.org/training, you’d enter into your address bar this: aviary.com/http://blogs.bcr.org/training and hit enter.

Try it now!

You’ll be taken to aviary.com and a newly snapped screenshot of this page will display. Even bettter? You can edit it before saving it to your desktop. If you sign up for a free account, you can even store your screencaptures online. Now that’s slick!