McDreamy Time

Yes, the new season of Grey's is about to start... so in honor, I'll be doing a full day workshop at OhioNet today on The McDreamy OPAC. This is a revised edition of the program that I put on in February.

The McDreamy OPAC, take 2.0

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: libraries search)

PS. Yes, I'm back! I'll try to start keeping up with posts again. It has been a crazy half a year.

Our Baby is Here!

Mack Joseph was born a healthy 8 pounds, 4 ounces on March 26 at 9am. Levi has welcomed his baby brother with lots of kisses. He is a bit possessive of his book collection, but we are still finding time to sneak in some reading time with Mack, of course.

I'll be back to work in July, until then I'm enjoying some time with my boys. Right now, they are both napping... ahhh!

Check back this summer, and I'll start blogging again.

A New Mobile Reference Contender...

For those of you looking for a mobile reference solution, the new Sony Vaio UX Micro PC is worth a look. We ordered one that just arrived this afternoon, and it does indeed fit in the hand very nicely. The initial drawback is that the price is a little steep, around $2500.

We have only just unboxed ours, so I'll report back with more details later. For now, if you are interested in picking one up... Sony indicates that they are back ordered for several weeks, however, we put in our order to CDWG on Thursday and it arrived today (even with all that snow!).

Check it...

The photobook "When I Grow Up" featuring my little guy is the feature on the Shutterfly Gallery!

Have I mentioned that I love shutterfly? Yes, it is a great site for the photo-obsessed mommy. We take so many pictures at our house... I'm starting to consider branching out and doing some photos of friend's children. If interested, let me know. Once things settle down mid to late summer with our new little guy that will be arriving in the next few weeks, I'm going to schedule a few sessions to see how it goes.

In the meantime, my blog postings will likely slow (I think they have already) with the pre-baby craziness, and then will likely halt for a bit with his arrival.

Sparta Library circulates the Kindle

Sparta Library, NJ is circulating two kindles according to a recent blog posting at their library site, and the February 2008 Smart Libraries. The two devices have a healthy request list of around twenty patrons waiting, a one-week loan period, and operate on an honor system that allows each patron/customer to download a single title to the device. Over time this builds a patron-driven collection as each circulation adds one title to the device.

Interesting... I remain anxious to see how Amazon chooses to evolve the product line.

Graphing Social Patterns

Okay, so I never seem to find these conferences early enough (they won't let me on an airplane 8 months pregnant anyways, eh?), but wanted to share for those of you that can arrange last minute travel.

O'Reilly is sponsoring a conference on developing social network platforms, Graphing Social Patterns. The conference is only two short weeks away on March 3-4 in San Diego. The sessions are very appealing from Widget Strategies to Driving Fanatic User Engagement/Retention with speakers from MySpace, Facebook and Google.

This looks to be another one of those solid conferences outside the library world that I hope library representatives are able to attend. Slides from the first offering of this conference are posted online at: gsp2007.com/slides.

New Shutterfly Online Community

I've had a passion for photography since my high school days as yearbook editor, but the passion was mostly untapped aside from a short run of film photography courses that I took as an undergrad... that is until motherhood hit. Today, I take hundreds of pictures (mostly thanks to the ease of digital) without even thinking about, and when asked about my favorite web site my answer is usually Shutterfly.

I love the site because there seems to be no limit to the number of photos that I can share (great for the oober-photo fanatic), and there are so many creative options on how to compile and present photos. Oh, and if you buy enough they give you lots of offers for freebies along the way.

A couple of weeks ago, Shutterfly introduced a new component to their site. Taking lessons from the general web 2.0 movement, they now have a Community Gallery for sharing photobooks. There are many examples of traditional scrapbook-type books, but there are a handful of books posted already in storybook formats, including parents that have used photos and the photobook format to create original stories for their kids. These little original books are sure to be treasured for generations to come.

Circulation Workflow Best Practices

A special thanks to my former colleagues, Nick Tepe and Michelle Jackson, over at Columbus Metro Library for hosting us for a visit today. They walked us through their materials handling related to circulation workflow. The changes that have been implemented in the last year to eighteen months are quite amazing.

I can remember walking the staff hallways of CML's Main Library a few years ago being surrounded in blue transportation boxes filled with items requiring check-in. Today ... through performance standards, careful metric-based analysis and some big workflow changes, they are getting materials back on the shelf within 24 hours of return to the library. In fact the numbers are closer to 3-8 hours depending on the branch. This, of course, means that the materials are more available to customer and not hiding in back rooms or transportation boxes out of circulation for days and days.

The biggest changes are related to 1) floating collections between the branches (in other words the item stays where it was returned and is not returned to a "home" location), 2) sorting items directly onto carts after check-in eliminating the extra touches to an item, and 2) stand-up check-in stations that provide all the tools needed in item handling. (Should have brought my camera along to snap a few pictures of these.)

Kudos to Nick and the entire team at CML for implementing big changes for big results.

IDEO rounds out top 5

Just last week as part of the McDreamy workshops, I dusted off my copy of Night Line's 1999 DeepDive featuring the redesign process for the traditional shopping cart from the Palo Alto-based IDEO. It is one of my all time favorites for introducing innovative work process concepts.

I finally got around to opening the new issue of Fast Company, and learned that IDEO rounds out the top 5 on the list of the World's Most Innovative Companies. They are right up there with Google, Apple and GE. Pretty cool... and my favorite Amazon landed at 9, and Target is right up there at 17.

Check out the complete list, it is fun. More importantly, it begs the question... how can libraries break down our traditional committee/operating structures and behave more like the companies on this list. It's time for us to start McDreaming... eh?

The McDreamy OPAC: Creating a Vision for Next Generation Search Tools

When I was asked by Evan Struble of OhioNet to put together a workshop on OPACs, I was a bit intimidated by the thought of putting together 3 hours of content. But I forged ahead came up with the McDreamy title, and started compiling thoughts based on my 15 years of experience with OPACs and the ILS software.

Three months later, and after presenting variations of the presentation twice in the last week (last week to Dayton Metro Library staff and just yesterday teamed with Nieca Nowels to a group of weather braving Ohio public, academic and special libraries), I can say that this was so much fun to compile and present. Oh, and 3 hours isn't really enough time to do the topic justice.

Here's the power point that provides a snippet of what we discussed.

| View | Upload your own

For those interested, we are planning a repeat session this fall for OhioNet that will be an extended 5 hours. Watch the Ohio Net web site for details. Yes, you'll have to wait for Fall. I vowed no more presentations until after maternity leave. Two boys under two is about the only thing more intimidating than pulling together a 3-hour workshop!