Superpatron

National Library Agenda Summit 2006 on wordie, delicious, superpatron blog

I'm keeping a wordie list for the National Library Agenda Summit which I should be packing for now. I seeded it with language from the agenda.

Looking forward to seeing Jenny Levine and meeting Leslie Burger there. I'll do my best to keep good notes. The tag for the conference is nla2006 (that's delicious). I won't have a camera with me.

Congratulations to superpatron Jon Udell on a new position at Microsoft

from Jeff Sandquist

Jon announced this morning on his InfoWorld blog that he is joining my team as a full-time employee of Microsoft. In Jon's new role he'll be creating screencasts, podcasts and conducting interviews for Channels 9 and 10. If you've never heard a Jon Udell podcast before or viewed one of his screencasts, you really need to. You are in for a treat.

Thanks to George Hotelling for the heads up. More direct from Jon Udell

A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft

For today's [listen] podcast I decided to interview myself about my upcoming new gig. It's a short episode, under six minutes, and the transcript follows.

Note: I actually meant to push this to the server later today, to synchronize with a message that will be forthcoming from Jeff Sandquist. But a mis-click on my part pushed it sooner, which means Jeff will be a bit surprised when he wakes up. Trust me, though, this is something I've been thinking carefully about for a long time, and it's very real.

Q: Your new job is with Microsoft?

A: That's right. My last day at InfoWorld will be Friday Dec 15. On Jan 15, after a month-long sabbatical, I'll become a Microsoft employee. My official title will be Evangelist, and I'll report to Jeff Sandquist. He's the leader of the team that creates Channel 9 and Channel 10, websites that feature blogs, videos, screencasts, and podcasts for Microsoft-oriented developers.

Jon is the inventor of the Library Lookup project and is a patron of the Keene, NH library.

Thanks to the library

Eli, John, Josie, Kip, Barbara, Eric -

I wanted to send a note to you all and to everyone at the AADL who I know by face but not by email and not by name (yet) and thank you all for having it be a really good year at the library.

I really appreciate how the library is a great place to get books, a super spot to take the kids out to, and a source of real engagement with the community about important issues of the day and the town. We have so many books in our house that I would never get a chance to look at without the library, I really don't know what my life would be like without you all.

I'm heading off to Washington DC on Sunday to be part of an ALA summit on a National Library Agenda, invited by ALA president Leslie Burger. I will bring to the meeting a bunch of ideas and thoughts about how libraries should be that I have gotten from your good example and that I hope I have collected to some degree in the Superpatron blog. It's a huge honor to be invited, and I'm hoping to go and tell the Ann Arbor story so that other libraries can see some way forward that is as innovative and engaged as you all clearly are.

I'm making the rounds of cafes on my birthday today (catching all of the free birthday deals) and trying to be sure I am appropriately thankful for all of the folks who work so hard to keep my world what it is.

thanks

Ed

Google Librarian newsletter for 12/2006

The Google Librarian newsletter for December 2006 is out. Highlights include directions on how to create your own custom search engine that searches only the sites you are interested and interviews with the people behind Google Book Search and Google Scholar.

Paco Underhill on the making of the superpatron

Boxes and Arrows interviews Paco Underhill, author of books on shopping,

We’re about to start a series of projects with different public libraries across the country, looking at how a library moves somebody up the ladder from a novice to an intermediate to an expert and their usage of a library. We’re trying to think about the design and communication aspects of a library as a lifeline to what the idea of a public library is long term.

Library Journal did a teleconference in 2005 with Paco Underhill -

What does it take for an average patron to find his way around your library? How easy is it to find a cookbook, or a PC, or a video on goldfish care for kids? In a society that jealously guards its time, our job—if libraries are to remain relevant—is to get patrons in the door and in front of the materials they want quickly and easily.

Libraries face pressing obstacles in organizing their vast array of resources. Ever-growing inventory coupled with patron expectations that libraries will have “everything” put shelf and floor space at a premium. Buildings that are historic or sentimental to their communities, cramped and out-of-date, are fixed footprints that are difficult to stretch to accommodate new materials, new media, and new services.

“The clock that governs our lives intrudes on our willingness to use resources,” says Paco Underhill, the retail guru behind such best sellers as Why We Buy and Call of the Mall (both from Simon & Schuster). In an audioconference sponsored by the Urban Libraries Council and Library Journal, Underhill advised librarians to get patrons to their goal and consider anything that keeps them from it to be the enemy.

and here's what the Urban Libraries Council said about the talk before it happened (no sign of the transcript or recording)

Improving Customer Service By Design: A Conversation with Retail Expert Paco Underhill
Audio Conference, October 25, 2005

"Paco Underhill styles himself as a "retail anthropologist." His specialty is “looking at the interaction between people and products, and people and spaces." He has spent the past two decades trying to figure out why consumers buy some things and not others. What he's learned so far has made him one of the most sought-after retail consultants in the world for companies large and small. Underhill doesn't talk with consumers about their likes and dislikes. Instead, he records their actual behavior on the selling floor, utilizing hidden cameras and human "trackers" who follow customers and document every move they make."

Paco was at the PLA conference last year - Multitype Librarian blogged about it:

Overwhelming majority of people who could use library don’t or don’t know how.
Have courage and energy to go out into community and talk to people.

Jeff Ubois on digital archives and mass digitization on the Scoble Show

This video podcast of an interview by Robert Scoble of Jeff Ubois (mov) has a good discussion of the issues surrounding digital archives.

This is a different kind of show for the ScobleShow, one where we talk about an issue that we should think about — in this case whether companies who are scanning books and other information from the world's libraries and universities are doing us a favor. Jeff Ubois is a co-chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists' Television Interest Group and is an expert about issues in digital file preservation and archiving.

Read more of Jeff's close following of these issues on his blog archival.tv .

The OPAC Sucks (The Laughing Librarian via YouTube)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
The OPAC Sucks
Recorded by: the anAACRonisms

the OPAC sucks, that's all i gotta say
you're outta luck if you can't spell "Hemingway"
i'm getting bad results
don't act like it's my fault

the OPAC sucks, a sad calamity
like it's stuck in 8 million b.c.
the title that i seek
is buried very deep

the OPAC sucks so bad that it's a crime
the law is broken: "save the reader's time"
what does it want from me?
i'm stumbling blindly

the OPAC sucks, people are confused
it runs amok, committing its abuse
years and years and years ago, computers replaced cards
how come finding what i want is still so goddamn hard?

the OPAC sucks, that's all i gotta say ...

(Lyrics and music: Smith)
Copyright 2006 Brian Smith. Non-commercial distribution of material from The Laughing Librarian is permitted only if the original URL and this copyright notice is included. All commercial distribution is prohibited without written consent of and large cash payments to the author. Some images are from a commercial clipart package and may not be redistributed. www.laughinglibrarian.com