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28 December 2005

Welcome to Superpatron, and an introduction.

Welcome to Superpatron! This is a new weblog (and with it also several other new things to come) to discuss the role that library patrons have in shaping the libraries of the present and the future.

I've been a patron of the Ann Arbor District Library since moving to Ann Arbor for school in the early 1980s. One day last winter I sent in a note to the suggestion box at the library asking if they had RSS feeds in the works for the catalog. I got a reply about their future catalog plans which had the postscript

P.S. We love your blog.

Of course I blogged that reply, got some response from the library blog community about it, and ended up on the AADL's technology advisory board to look at what they had in progress. Since then I've gotten more involved in the technology of hosting a library catalog, though fortunately I don't have to do the work, just be enthusiastic about it and provide suggestions and snippets of code.

I like libraries and support them wholeheartedly. We have so many books at home that our shelves are full, and it's great to be able to get new ones and bring them back when we're done with them. Our library is a super place to spent time at, has a kids room that my two boys enjoy and provided space for my 41st birthday party with a books theme.

I've been a library patron for a long time. In elementary school, when we got three copies of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for Christmas, one of them got donated to the Birchview Elementary School library. As an unruly middle schooler I read a lot in the Graveraet Middle School library, and then in high school I spent a lot of time after school at Northern Michigan University's Olson Library .

At college at the University of Michigan I did student work at the dorm libraries at Bursley and Alice Lloyd halls checking out books, and studied and wrote papers in the UGLI, Grad, and Chemistry libraries. (I was kicked out of the Law Library once while trying to study there, I guess my undergraduate attire was too clearly not that of a law student.) After a bunch of false starts I finally graduated by writing a long paper based on research at the Bentley Historical Library. I worked for a summer at the Grad at the Humanities Text Initiative, a piece of the Digital Library Production Service that led to the Google Book Search scanning efforts at Michigan.

This goes to say mostly that I love my library, and I'm looking for ways that librarians and libraries and friends of the library can do things to get more people to think the same way.

Welcome! Comments are open. I'm still working out a few details before I go super-public with this, but here's a start.

Posted at 12:42 PM |

Comments

What a fabulous thing you have begun! I very much hope that there are more folks like you out there who will lend your enthusiasm and expertise to our libraries. I just sent your url to my own "SuperPatron" in Spencerport NY. She is a member of the library board for the Ogden Farmers' Library and is also our technical guru. I hope she visits! I've added you to my bloglines feeds, so I'm looking forward to some good conversation and sharing.

Posted by: Patricia Uttaro | 28 December 2005 at 02:20 PM

What a wonderful idea this is! I hope you'll consider expanding it to message boards or the like -- a group of SuperPatrons would be an invaluable resource for librarians and library sysadmins.

Posted by: Dorothea | 28 December 2005 at 08:17 PM

Ed, this is great.

Plus, I think I coined a phrase!

Posted by: eli | 28 December 2005 at 09:51 PM

Hi! I found your blog through the shifted librarian ... I love it!

I'm on a committee for my university's library (I'm an alumna, not a current student) and will be sending this to some folks there, too.

Posted by: Erin | 29 December 2005 at 11:23 AM

* Patricia - thanks for your comments. Do introduce me to your superpatron - I'm starting up a little moderated mailing list to go with this blog for the sorts of interactive discussions that aren't really blog fodder.

* Dorothea - I'm hoping that getting a patrons group together will be a big plus for libraries. I think if I do it right it will be a catalyst for sharing innovations.

* Eli, yup, it was your phrase. Of the 500+ uses of the word on Google I was able to find, most are in French, with one exception, this quote from CIO Magazine from 2001:

IF ANYONE IS A SUPERPATRON of that giant library called the Internet, it's me. What heaven! A global library that never closes!

* Erin: Welcome!

Posted by: Edward Vielmetti | 29 December 2005 at 03:31 PM

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What they're saying about Superpatron

  • So you've got Ed exploring the possibility space, and John working to enlarge that space, and together they've created a virtuous cycle of innovation. Now this is obviously an extreme example. You are not going to find a superpatron of Ed's caliber and a superlibrarian of John's caliber in every town. But I think the dynamic at work there can apply more broadly. And if it does, it will matter that these patrons and librarians are situated in a local context. (Jon Udell, Remixing the Library, GRL2020)
  • Der Supernutzer beschreibt 10 Möglichkeiten, der Bibliothek zu helfen....Den wichtigsten Punkt hat er vergessen, ihn aber selbst erfüllt. Sozusagen als Präambel könnte man also anführen:

    “Übe konstruktive Kritik an der Bibliothek. Ohne Resonanz können die Leute da drin nicht wissen, was Du willst.” Infobib.de

  • How come only some books in the Google Book Search have “find in a library” links next to them? Diglet asks, and gets an answer, sort of a lame one if you ask me. update: Kevin mentioned in the comments that it would be great to see this for all books in Google Books. I went to bed thinking “Oh yeah, I should look into that….” and while I was sleeping, Superpatron, aka Ed Vielmetti solved the crime, er problem, and created a Greasemonkey script (a plug-in that you can run with Firefox) that does this for Ann Arbor and can be modified for any library. (Jessamyn West)
  • Curse you Superpatron! t's way past my bedtime, but the Ann Arbor Superpatron has been planting ideas in my head again… (Dave Pattern)
  • Superpatron is a blog run by a patron. The author posts entries about events and articles relevant to the library community, but does it with a patron point of view. (North Texas Regional Library System)
  • The blogosphere's resident "awesomest patron ever," Edward Vielmetti, appears in an article in School Library Journal about how he wrote a script tweaking (ahem, improving) Google Book Search. Vielmetti's blog, Superpatron, is one I read daily and highly recommend to anyone in libraries looking to get a very smart user's perspective. (Librarian In Black)
  • When I wrote him back, I called him the “AADL Super Patron,” which is very coincidental, since he has been planning to create a blog with almost the same name. Today, Superpatron is live and I’m sure it will quickly be filled with Ed’s terrific ideas about making libraries more responsive to patrons’ needs. So hurry up and subscribe already, ok? (Meredith Farkas)
  • The Superpatron (faster than a speeding reference librarian…) posts a presentation on the use of del.icio.us for research. Steven Cohen, Library Stuff
  • I've talked about Edward Vielmetti here before, but I never had the right name for him. Now I do. He's Superpatron! (Jenny Levine)
  • Last fall, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I gave a talk entitled Superpatrons and Superlibrarians. Joining me for this week’s podcast are the two guys who inspired that talk. The superpatron is Ed Vielmetti, an old Internet hand who likes to mash up the services proviced by the Ann Arbor District Library. That’s possible because superlibrarian John Blyberg, who works at the AADL, has reconfigured his library’s online catalog system, adding RSS feeds and a full-blown API he calls PatREST. (Jon Udell)
  • Little did I know that when I pointed to Ed Vielmetti’s blog, I was not only coining a phrase, but providing the name for Ed’s brilliant new blog. Ed is that (unfortunately still) rare creature that not only groks the net in fullness, but also has use for his public library. (Eli Neiburger)
  • Die Ann Arbor District Library hat einen Nutzer, der sie liebt. Und nicht nur das, er schreibt darüber. Oliver Obst

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