How can I get this presentation seen outside the Echo Chamber? (Or: If you want to work in libraries, here are 10 things you need to know...)

I've created a presentation which takes some of the essential careers advice for new professionals post, and re-contextualises it as: here is what you need to know if you want to work in libraries.

If you want to work in libraries

View more presentations from Ned Potter.

The idea is that it will serve four purposes.

1. It'll be of interest to existing and new professionals, maybe create some debate or heighten awareness of certain issues 2. It'll entice more dynamic peoeple into considering librarianship as a profession, by righting  a few misconceptions 3. It'll put off some of the meeker people who may labour under misapprehensions as to what librarianship is really like (I'm very happy with this ambition - we have too many over qualified pros as it is, so why not head people off before they waste time and money in a profession that isn't like they thought it would be?) 4. In the course of 2 and 3 it may increase awareness as to what Information Professionals do these days

I've deliberately tried to make the most aesthetically pleasing presentation I'm capable of, in order to increase the chances of people picking it up! And make it very concise, too. For numbers 2, 3 and 4 to really be achieved, I need this presentation to go way beyond the reach of this blog and my twitter account. With that in mind, if you know of anywhere that could display this presentation, or link to it, please let me know! Anywhere at all. I want ideas as to how to get this beyond the echo chamber, I'd love to see some in the comments... And also, if you'd like to embed it in any sites or blog of your own, please please feel free to do so - the code to embed it is available from the Slideshare page. I'd really love to see it in as many places as possible. :)

- thewikiman

The Echo Chamber, Live!

Of all the things I've been involved with, it's the Echo Chamber thing that I get most excited about - it's a real problem, but one that we can all help solve, and one that people really do seem to be engaging with, on both sides of the Atlantic, since we first started tweeting and writing about it. Woodsiegirl and I will be doing various evolving versions of our Echo Chamber presentation in the coming months. It would be absolutely fantastic to see as many of you as possible at City Business Library in London, November 24th, at an SLA Europe event organised around the #echolib theme. It's an evening kick-off so people can come after work, and we've managed to rope in some of the Voices for the Library people (JoBo and Bethan) to talk about their actual echo chamber escapes, so it's going to be fantastic. Full details are on the SLA Europe blog. The ideas and feedback from the audience will be written in to the Echo Chamber Prezi, which serves as a living archive on the subject, updated and added to every time we present.

I've put together a slide deck to act as a brief introduction to the Echo Chamber problem. If you'd like a brief outline of what it is and why it matters, have a look below. The final slide also gives details of the other Echo Chamber Live events we have coming up. (As ever, I'm more or less incapable of putting anything together that looks good small, so full-screen is best.)

A very brief introduction to the Echo Chamber problem

View more presentations from Ned Potter.

For a more comprehensive round-up of the Echo Chamber phenomenon, see the Echolib Netvibes page.

- thewikiman

Using Netvibes to collate your online presence

If you have multiple spaces online, Netvibes could draw them together for you. If you are involved in multiple projects, particularly those which involve content from other people and from the library community, then Netvibes really comes into its own! This is essentially a post about discovering a really useful too, which I'd heard of but never previously understood. Some context: I couldn't attend Internet Librarian International this year, but luckily a lot of people on Twitter did. I think it was Bethan Ruddock whose tweet I saw, drawing attention to the fact that Phil Bradley now points people towards his Netvibes page as his 'home page'.

I've looked at Netvibes before, particularly around the time CILIP set up the 'cilip future' dashboard, but never found a good use for it - all it seemed to do for me was display the results of a bunch of key-word searches. But then I saw Phil's public page and it all made sense... I still don't use the private page (iGoogle does sort of the same role for me) but I've now set up a public Netvibes page - check it out at www.netvibes.com/nedpotter - and I'm really pleased with the possibilities it opens up. On the one hand, I'm loathe to add YET ANOTHER online place for people to go to, as my e-dentity (has that been used before? If not I'm gonna trademark it :) ) is fragmented enough as it is. But what I've found Netvibes does for me is aggregate all these online presences into one place, and also allows me to draw together the various projects I'm involved with. I've been meaning to update my website for ages, and I will still do so - but in the meantime, it's massively quicker to drag and drop some content into Netvibes than to bash away at DreamWeaver for hours to edit thewikiman.org. I figure I'll still give my blog URL out as my 'primary' address, but will give out the Netvibes one if people are particularly interested in an aspect of what I'm doing (whether that's Library Routes, LISNPN, the Echo Chamber thing, or anything else).

So, my Netvibes page currently has four tabs - the 'General' homepage contains a little bit of free text and a picture, and then links to a few things such as thewikiman.org. Mainly though it contains embedded content drawn in from all over the place (all which will of course be updated in real time as it changes elsewhere) - my Twitter feed, my blog feed, my Youtube videos, my flickr pics, a precis of my LinkedIn profile, It also contains a presentation from Slideshare,  and the papers and presentations page embedded from thewikiman.org. This gives people an enormous amount of stuff from which to build a picture of me and my professional activities.

The way in which Netvibes has really convinced me, however, is with the other tabs. The Echo Chamber tab, for example, gives a far better summary of the whole thing than is available anywhere else online. There's some free text explaining the concept, there's the Prezi presentation that Laura Woods and I created and are adding to as we go along, there's a blog search and a twitter search on the subject, and there's my one-page article from Library & Information Update which explains the whole thing. This is the first time I'll have had a URL to point someone towards which pulls everything together. I know that my own website could (and probably should) do this, but there are two reasons why Netvibes works better - firstly it would take time and expertise I don't have to embed all that stuff on my own site, and secondly I feel that this netvibes platform is better for bringing in content created by other people (which is to say blogs, tweets etc) than my own website, which somehow wouldn't be appropriate.

I've created a LISNPN tab and a Library Routes tab which work in much the same way, and will soon be adding one for my actual day-job too. Take a look and see if you think Netvibes could do a similar job for you.

If you agree it might be useful and are anxious to get started, here, as ever, as some top tips I discovered through trial and error which I'd have like to have known from the start:

• Enable your Public profile right away. You don't have to tell anyone it's there until you're ready - but I spent ages mucking about with my page before realising it was only the private one. I thought I could 'make it public' but you have to create a separate public one, so I had to start again...
• Use the Settings Menu to choose a theme. It's in the top right hand corner - choose something you like early on and then arrange the content to suit it
• Tabs = good. The 'general' default tab is great for giving a summary of all your online stuff, but if you have particular projects or areas you're involved with, give them their own tab. That way if someone asks you about something specific, you have a URL to point them to directly (rather than just saying 'it's own my website' which can come out like, 'go look for it yourself'.)
• You can edit the tab layout easily. Each tab has an 'edit' button - click this and you're given options as to how the content will be arranged. Number of columns, whether stuff goes all the way across the page or only part of the way, etc etc. It's easy to pick a layout that suits whatever you have on that particular tab - so don't be trying to crowbar a massively wide website into a half-screen column when you don't have to.
• Before you embed a website, see if there's already a widget for that site on Netvibes. Here's the Essential Widgets menu (which you get to by clicking 'Add Content' in the top left corner):

  

  So Twitter, LinkedIn etc - it's all there for you, just drag the widget where you want it to go, put in the relevant URL and it does the rest for you. Some sites, such as Slideshare, aren't represented in the widgets - for those,  you can use Link Module (not sure if you can see it on the pic above - it's top row, just to the right of centre, next to Web Page) - this creates a little thumbnail of the site, which looks nice. (You can see an example for my own homepage, in the middle at the bottom of the picture.)

• Use the Webnote widget to introduce the page. You don't need any knowledge of HTML or programming to throw your page together. If you use the Webnote module (top left in the Essential Widgets screen-grab above) you can just type into it normally - I use it at the top of some of my tabs to just give a brief outline of what that tab is about.
• Use the search widgets. On page 2 of the Essential Widgets there are various 'search' widgets - search the web, search images, search videos, search blogs, search Twitter etc. These are great for pulling in content from other people, to give wider context about a given topic. You can say what you think about something, and you can show what other people think about it too.
• For the blog search function, use IceRocket. I've never heard of IceRocket before, but when you use the Blog Search widget, you get by default several tabs, referring to different ways of searching blogs for the same topic. I found that the IceRocket tab produced by far the most relevant and pertinent results, more so than Google Blogsearch. I've mostly got rid of the other tabs and just kept IceRocket, or in a couple of cases IceRocket and Google Blogsearch.
• And that's it! Have fun.

- thewikiman

Blogging is growing up: why be merely commentators when we can be activists?

I get really wound up when people dismiss blogging as a dead medium. I feel the same instinctive aggressive defensiveness that older professionals must feel when we New Professionals suggest their ideas and methods might be out-moded, because I like it and I've invested so much in it, and I'm ill equipped to move on from it. Recent events have given me cause for optimism that my faith in the medium is justified, because in the library world there appears to have been a subtle shift from those of us in the biblioblogosphere just being 'describers' to becoming 'doers' as well. There's just as much conversation, but a little more action too.

Even in the short-time since Laura and I did our Echo Chamber presentation (and if you missed it, we will hopefully be doing it twice in November both Up North and Down South, so stay tuned for that) a whole load of people seem to have gone out and broken free of the Chamber - particularly gratifying for us is that Lauren Smith (aka @WalkYouHome) was catalysed by the presentation into thinking she COULD actually make a difference herself, and SHOULD actually start trying to make things happen. Since then she's turned into a veritable one-woman media savvy library saving machine... Guardian articles, appearances on Radio 4 and 5Live, a Save Doncaster Libraries campaign getting wide recognition and generally actually making a difference - and, in fact, the use of 'one-woman library saving machine' in that description isn't accurate as she's clubbed together with several other library bloggers to launch Voices for the Library.

Voices for the Library involves no less than 8 librarians, many of whom have previously provided much comment and analysis of library problems (via various online platforms) but all of whom now felt moved to get out there and DO stuff. The result is an excellent website which is getting thousands upon thousands of hits, is being promoted in Library Campaigner Alan Gibbon's blog (great to see librarians and non librarians working together), and contains loads of stories and accounts highlighting the value of libraries and more particularly, librarians. More than that it has a page entitled 'What librarians do' - I love that, I've argued so many times I'm bored of hearing myself say it: if people knew what we do, they'd value our services and use them more. It's ignorance of our actual existence in 2010 that is at the route of a lot of the problems regarding library perception, and it is OUR job to right that perception.

Right before I started this blog, I presented at my first proper conference on the subject of how we're defined by our building, as librarians, and how unfair that was (and, indeed, is). I was quite happy to see my job as flagging up the problem. But actually it is my job to try and change that perception, at every opportunity, and by multiple means - not just talk about how that's what we should do. When the echolib thing first started, I was happy to just identify the problem. But now the presentations we're doing are offering up solutions, and because the Prezi is acting as a living archive of suggestions, more and more solutions will be added over time. And if just one person in the audience at each event (we're booked up for four so far over a 12 month period and we may end up doing more) is moved to try and change stuff in the way Lauren has been, then things really will start changing.

People are quite immunised to the argument that if we all did something little, something big would happen. People say, well I could take the train to this conference so as to save the planet, but if everyone else takes the plane anyway it won't make any difference. But what people seem to be proving recently is that actually you don't need EVERYONE to do something for it to be effective - even just a few people are able to be agents of real change. Me taking the time to explain to someone what librarians do next time I'm asked why I need a degree in it, rather than shirking the question, will make a tiny difference. But if the three or four hundred people who read this ALL take the time next time they're asked that question, and continue to do so as time goes on, that'll make a small difference and a worthwhile one. That's really the LEAST you can do - take serendipitous opportunities to enlighten people. And if you're feeling gutsy, go a little further and create opportunities for yourself. [preaching mode disengaged :) ]

Since I wrote all of the above, @reddite tweeted the following: "There is a difference between wanting libraries to be saved and wanting to save libraries". I'm really excited that people in the biblioblogosphere seem to be understanding of that difference, and moving from the former camp to the latter.

-thewikiman

This isn't just a library, it's an M&S library...

So they want to put libraries in supermarkets, eh? Well that could work - depends on the supermarket. Iceland - maybe not. Kerry Katona eating snack-sized party favourites whilst dead-eyededly telling Jason Donavon about how she saved 33% on her access to SWETS resources, equals bad. But Marks & Spencer, on the other hand...

With deliciously free Wifi access, and an achingly gooey selection of online resources wrapped up in gorgeous single sign-in, presented on a bed of modern, bright interior with brightly coloured children's areas, filled choc-full of tender, flavoursome books, CDs and DVDs and more...

Etc etc.

Anyway, I'm behind. I only get online for short periods of time at the moment. But today I've had an hour or so to catch up with the latest headline grabbing library statistics, which equate to a drop in public library use in this country. I've got a big old blog post on statistics planned when I get more of an opportunity - in the mean time though, Ian Clark's piece is essential reading for everyone - read it now! :) The part of it that is really interesting is statistics from CIPFA show that while library footfall is indeed down, the numbers of web visits is up (from 07/08 to 08/09) by a massive 49%. A hypothesis immediately presents itself - the way people use libraries is changing, they don't have to visit them so often due to the accessibility that comes with internet access (not least because they can renew book loans online - that alone accounts for a huge amount of library visits no longer necessary), so although visits to the building are down, the use of the library per se is not.

Sadly, the Government - or, to be more specific, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport - have NOT chosen to take into account internet access in the report which forms the basis for the recent headlines. Take a look at the report for yourself - you can download the spreadsheets detailing the figures, as well as the actual Word document with all the analysis, here. It's 2010, yet the report only looks at library use from the point of view of whether its subject, to quote it directly, 'Has visited a public library in the last year'.

[snarky aside] Guess how I accessed this report? Online. So does that mean that, according to this report's way of analysing 'use', I haven't read it at all because I didn't go to Westminster in person and pick up a paper copy?

Buffoons. [/snarky aside]

Anyway, the figures are quite interesting - mainly fairly miserable reading, but the clouds part to let some light through on occasion:

• Black and ethnic minority use of libraries is up since last year (it's only by less than half a percent, but hey, no one reads the details of these things anyway, right?)
• People who are religious but who don't classify themselves as Christian's use of libraries is up since last year (same again with it being by only a tiny amount, but still)
• 11-15 year old girls use the library quite a bit more than they did in 2006/07 when the figures were first collected
• The number of 5 to 10 year olds (of both sexes) who have visited the library 'in the last we'ek has gone up by more than 20% over last year...

HA! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, doom-mongers! On a serious note, I think that's encouraging - good to see that even during a down-turn in overall visitation, some minority groups are finding more reasons to visit than before. Incidentally, the report says, more than once, "The decrease in library visits is consistent across all socio-demographic groups." Maybe I'm missing something, but that seems quite a sweeping statement in light of the stats above. If the report itself glosses over any positives, what hope is there of the headlines picking up on anything other than the negatives? In the same Ian Clark blog post I linked to above, he makes another point I think is interesting, true, and very important: "...the narrative is not being controlled by the profession but by those who either do not understand the service or are trying to undermine it for their own ends." In this case, the Government itself is undermining the service with a report whose own headline conclusions are apparently determined to see only the negative even where the figures can be seen positively - it doesn't take much of a cynic to interpret this as a classic Tory 'softening up' before they unleash massive cuts. Happy days. How can we take back control of the narrative?

Interestingly, the sample size used to generate the recent, poor figures, are much, much lower than the sample size of the earlier ones. Does that mean the figures are wrong? Probably not, but they are certainly slightly less valid than the original ones - asking 6,000 people about their library use does not represent England nearly as well as asking nearer 30,000. Some of the regions surveyed are only represented by a couple of hundred respondents. Anyway.

Libraries in pubs and supermarkets? Yeah, why not.

Among the proposals the Government are considering is sticking libraries into pubs and supermarkets apparently. This has perhaps understandably met with some derision from the library community. But actually, I think this idea is considering.

Providing the pub and shop branches didn't replace actual purpose-built libraries, why not take our resources to where the people are already? After all, that's why social media works so well - that's why we all love Twitter. Because we're on Twitter anyway, so the news, views, links etc come to us. So why not follow a similar principle with libraries? Clearly the part of libraries that would easily transport to other venues is mainly going to be the traditional 'borrow a book' part - but that's okay, it will get people interested, and maybe, just maybe, they'll be tempted to visit the library proper and see what else we have to offer.

Maybe there'll even be a Halo Effect! (See the comments section of this previous blog post.) So to use the example in that link, the National Archive digitise collections, and then withdraw them from circulation in order to preserve them. They do this on an epic scale; more and more gets digitised every day. The statistical upshot of this is fascinating - physical consultation of the actual collections they digitise goes down (in most cases to near zero), but physical consultation overall goes up. People are finding what they want online, and they get so hooked and interested that they end up requesting other stuff which hasn't been digitised, so they have to go to TNA to see it in the paper. Digital use and paper use are both way up, together.

Perhaps it is worth, then, trying to embrace the idea of libraries in different places and ensure it's done well so we can reap any benefits, rather than just assuming it's a completely hopeless idea...

- thewikiman