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?