Text A Librarian Cell Phone Messaging is Coming Here...

The ink is dry, and we are about to begin the process of adding cell phone text messaging via textalibrarian.com which works with the major cell phone carriers. We have been using the AOL hack of 265010 ccplhelp [What time to do you close?] hack. It works, but we have not been advertising the hack plus and not all cell phone systems work reportedly with this method. Well, we have some training to do and some prep work before rolling out the service, but I wanted to post this note just letting people know askccpl full cell phone SMS text messaging is on the way to CCPL. On yr mark gt set 4 celfne txt msgN..

Thoughts on Email Document Storage

Do you have a mixed relationship with your email accounts? Currently, I do. I have a work email for work, one account for receiving newsletters, forms and online banking, promos and miscellaneous things. And finally, I have another account I use for correspondence among friends and people outside of work and in a pinch I'll pass along my work email account to those who need to contact me pronto for something during the work week... Email is a great way to store stuff, but at times I wonder...

What does email have to do with libraries you might ask? The positives. Email is cheaper to use, uses less resources and in many cases is easier to store and find content when in need. When your at a branch and don't have the cash at the time to print a document out, saving it in an email account is practical storage. Would you rather have a filing cabinet of documents/books taking up space or a thumb drive and a backup hard drive in a single drawer? For me, it is thumb drive/backup hard drive.

When finding content in blogs or resource tools databases, most of the sources have the email friendly format icons or links. However, it is so tempting to email yourself an article for that "I'll read it later" instead of reading it right then. Chances are, If I don't have time for it now, I won't take time to read something later especially when it comes to blog posts or content on the web.

I have to admire two people who have due to necessity gone the opposite direction by abandoning email. Ronald Knuth (computer programming genius) who in 1990 gave up email due to so many messages he was receiving. The second is Luis Suarez (IBM Knowledge Management) a leader who is weaning himself off of frivolous email. Both of these guys seem to be doing well professionally after abandoning or limiting their use of email.

For me, I'm not giving up email anytime soon. Email is to practical to store reminders, documents, create a history of things, communicate with co-workers, friends, learn about milestones in lives of close friends, but I'm also finding sometimes it is just best to pickup the phone. Maybe someday, I'll put me email account on perpetual "out of office" mode, but until then don't look for me to try this anytime soon -- I like email way to much in the proper amount/form.

Photo Credits
1) CC credit

2) http://www.flickr.com/photos/frozenchipmunk/ / CC BY 2.0

3) CC credit

What is in My Librarian Tool Kit?

It is Sunday, a typical day of rest for most folks. But, I'm at work like many others working a service desk... The main thought of the blog post "What is in Your Librarian Tool Kit" by Jassmyn West got me thinking about mine. What follows are a few Sunday afternoon thoughts while at a service desk...

1) Patience.

Somedays, it is a lot of 'hand holding' such as helping people print documents. Today, it was how to change the font type, spacing, and sizing of text. The amount of traditional reference questions while on the face to face reference desk were limited to a book on costumes and the rules of basketball. There was also the inevitable: where is the bathroom and water fountain and several others...

2) Sense of What People Want.

It so much easier to help happy people, even when they are after something not easily findable. It is the grumpy ones that want "free money" and want it right now that are the challenge. Today, I was working with a patron helping her find info on halloween customes. Shortly into it, a second patron approached. I asked the second patron if he had quick question. This relatively quick two sentence conversation caused Patron one to retort. "That's not a quick question with a huff." I appologized and said I'll be with patron two in a few minutes... There is no way to keep everyone pracitically happy.

3) Sense of Understanding Information.

Thru practice, it takes me less to time formulate a search stragegy and find desired information or whether or not something is available. I would like to think it is an improved skill set of mine, but it also helps to have great resources available at my fingertips to draw upon.

4) Being Flexible.

Functionally, I spend more time on programs, outreach and giving talks then I did years ago and it is even approaching the time/intensity as one of my core work responsibilities. More outreach with less in-reach and staff development. My given priorities shift and change just like the goals of an organization. It pays to stay flexible. No one makes money as a buggy wip specialist any more or making card catalog cards on a large scale. Jobs change over time...

5) Applying What I Learn

Thank you Roy Tenant, Lorcan Dempsey, Stephen Abram, Jessamyn West and many others who blog about content taught at library conferences. Some of the most pracitical tips, tricks and tidbits come from talking shop with others around a meal about what is new in the library world at conferences. I'm so glad you guys take time to share your knowlege in blogs and other avenues....

Thankfully there are staff classes and occasionaly State Library training that comes to town. I'm having a blast learning about some open source library software and hope someday to develop a small home grown application I'm learning to write in a production environment. Lately, what I have been doing outside of work -- an exploratory library software project -- is keeping me challenged and inspired at work; and it has been a good sounding board by listening to the needs of people, and for me doing routine things like working service desks.

CharlestonRef is Branching Out on Twitter

CharlestonRef is branching out to twitter. The feed is intended to cover electronic research tools news and tidbits with info about outages, new features, and short announcements that don't need a paragraph or more of explanation. I'm going to place referrals on the twitter feed to the charlestonref blog when such depth is required. What you will NOT find on twitter.com/charlestonref is what I ate for lunch or that some celebrity just made the cover of People magazine.

Also, I have done some housekeeping on this blog. No longer does the marquee say "Charleston Reference" it now says: "CharlestonRef" to match the URL. Some of the widgets, such as the MyPlugoo IM service, Flickr library image pools and others have been removed to reduce clutter. There will probably be a few more tweaks to the blog and twitter.com/charlestonref feed in the coming weekdays as time allows…

Ferguson's Career Guidance - Practical and Useful

Ferguson's Career Guidance Center is a practical resource to help you find information about an occupation, getting or changing a job in that field and then excelling on the job. If your still trying to figure out what you want to do when you 'grow up' or are in the process of making career changes, SC Pathways website is probably the best product we have to help with that step. If, on the other hand, you know exactly what kind of work you want to do such as a job in the education or the medical field then Ferguson's Career Guidance Center is even a better resource.

The college section helps match up your education and abilities with the career you may be aiming for next in your life. There is information on picking a college, selecting your major, and setting goals to get there along with funding strategies for your education. The job hunting and workplace skills sections offer great advice. Many resources just provide sample cover letters and resumes, but this section goes into detail explaining what the purpose and reasons for using certain kinds of resumes and the overall goal explaining practical reasons and content that should be contained in a typical cover letter.

Overall Ferguson's Career Guidance Center offers practical advice for career decision making and job finding in easy to use form of encyclopedias, written guides and personal examples in various videos and essays. This website is recommended for people who have a fairly good idea of their own career goals and kinds of work they want to do.

Job Hunting Resource - Part 3 Picking a Specific Occupation

This is the third post in a series on Job Hunting and the South Carolina Pathways.org website. Previous posts on the topic are available in 1 and 2. This post covers the Occupation Sugesstion section of the website and the process of examing an indviduals interests, skills, abilities and values and then the survey tool suggests occupations based on those inclinations.

The assessment tool is divided into various segments
- from preference assessments in part 1 and by education level
- Previous skills from previous jobs
- Various self rated abilities you have.

The self assessment also involves ranking your own skill levels at such functions as public speaking, problem solving and numerous other areas. Each area, you self rate your skill level as being above average, average and below average. A list of occupations will come up that rank highly in your own interests, skills/abilities and values as illustrated above.

The second graphic is just a sample of a few of the occupations that generally my survey assessment matched me up with... All I feel are fairly accurate, I do have to chuckle that technical writing was listed. Technical Writing at times is a weakness of mine and I can't imagine myself doing that as a career. Blogging about database is helping to enhance that skill though...

Note: Graphics are available for viewing in an enlarged view by clicking on the image.

Job Hunting Resource - Part 2 SC Pathways Product

This is part 2 in a series on South Carolina Pathways tool available to all South Carolina residents. Part 1 is below.

In concrete descriptive and measurable terms, it is useful to know what you like to do career wise based on your own personality traits and skills or just confirm that your in a field of work you enjoy. Part 1 of the assessment tool of SC Pathways involves answering a series of questions to help measure in definitive terms what your interests, skills, and work values are. The series of questions develops a greater measure of confidence in knowing that your personality can actually match up with your career choices based on thousands of others who have taken this assessment and found reliable results. This assessment assigns numerical scores for your personality interest based on the kind of work you may want to pursue.

Your interests are assigned scores for a cluster of various kinds of work with the ranges being: High Interest 75 - 100, Medium 25-74 and Low 0 - 24. For example, I love tinkering with technology and my Information Technology interest sore of 96 on the survey bears that out. Also on the flip side, I don't like public speaking, but I can do it as a large part of my college studies were in communications classes. My interests in that are a definitive low, a score of 4 points points that out, as a career. A significant number of people will score low in certain areas and that is normal. You can be excellent, really good or do an average job at something such as "Arts, Audio-Video Technology, and Communications" areas, but absolutely dislike doing it and say score 4 points in that category like me.

An interest assessment survey such as this can be really useful in changing or confirming that the career you may be in now or in the future fits your personality and interests well.

EBooks are Reaching a Tipping Point

The eBook tipping point is coming. The tipping point is mass ebook adoption/usage. Bear with me for a moment. My wife still buys her music on CD's, but she starting to warm up to the idea of getting music over downloads instead of CDs. The tipping point is having to store the music, whereas I have reached that point where a music download takes up less space on my hard drive virtually then having to haul around the CD, case, and cover art and store the compact disk. My car has an Ipod adapter and able to play music/podcast in my car. My wife uses the CD player in her car and she won't give up cd's yet even though she has an ipod. The music experience is really no different whether it comes from the Ipod or from CD it still sounds about the same...

Same thing is applicable to books. If I and others, and this is the big if, can get the same touch and feel out of a book with the content in an electronic form there is nothing stopping me from switching over to books in electronic form. The benefits of not having to physically store the book and portability is what is driving the tipping point. Music formats have changed, think a-track, cassettes, dap (short-lived in the middle) and cd's now in similar quality to MP3's. Yes the drawbacks are hurdles, sharing materials, preserving digital rights to content, and ensuring providers are justly compensated. Technological change has served music well and it will work with ebooks. Only time will tell how...

I'm wondering if the tipping point, and making predictions about technology is a risky business? However, it is probably time to say 4 or 5 years from today book purchasing of content online will be definitely higher and maybe where the itunes market was in its' first few years. I know I'm willing to buy a cool ebook reader if it is practical, affordable and will improve my lifestyle freeing me up to do more with less stuff...

Bottom line, the following two articles via lisnews.org all occurring in the same month about Amazon selling ebooks to Iphone users and Barnes & Noble buying fictionwise ebook retailer are making me wonder. The time is short for the paper book being the only major format for the book. Long live the ebook... Both can coexist. Photo credit to: Wikipedia Commons

The Job Hunting Resource Helps Statewide...

A new resource is available for South Carolina residents looking for a job change, wanting directional help in their job search or returning to the workplace after an abscence. The SC Pathways website, which is powered by Kuder skills assessment testing and paid for by various state agencies/organizations, for SC residents is available to adults, students of all ages and businesses for people to find jobs that interest them and businesses to find employees. In the next series of posts, I'm going to cover the four main components of the Kuder resource. Keep in mind this product does require a registration process that takes a few minutes. SC Pathways is available for just SC residents and residents of other states who have paid access to the the following:

Skills/Interests Assessments Section

Occupational Interests

Education or Training Considerations

Getting Ready for the Job Search

= Creating Resumes Online

= Finding Employers

Note: SCOIS at this time is not available as part of SC Pathways for adults, but is available to most students state wide through individual schools.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas! I'm taking a break from shop talk to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'm also reflecting upon the year in the rear view mirror work wise and individually. On the individual side, I got married and overall had an interesting year of great events with marriage being the biggest. On the sad side, in Fall/Winter of 2008 the passing of Thomas Raines and former coworker Darryl Fraiser took place. It is my hope that 2009 will be a great year for you and your family. Enjoy this image, of Christmas tree where my wife and I spent part of our honeymoon in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Museum of Art.

Searching Fatigue Survey

A recent EContent issue pulled from Autobytel, Inc. and Kelton Research(KR), in "The State of Search" provided by toeMarketer, Oct. 15, 2007 on searching fatigue. Time Spent on Single Online Information [Topic]

Search by U.S. Adult Broadband Users Before Experiencing Search Engine Fatigue,

2+ hours 65.4%
3+ hours 37.0%
7+ hours 5.0%
Rarely or NeverExperience 27.0%
Note: n = 1,001 ages 18-plus
* May 2007(% of respondents)

* Search fatigue is when users feel impatient or frustrated at not finding the exact relevant information they're looking for right away. Reference Link Cover Source Link

Newsbank Gets Video Content

Video content is now available on Newsbank. Sources vary such as large market CBS, NBC and ABC affiliate television stations to traditional Newswire sources providing video content such as the Strange News Broadcast from the Associated Press (AP) to Chiiki.tv specializing in Life and Leisure.

Composing Email.

A few pithy thoughts from Jakob Nielson and useit.com and his 10/20/08 Alertbox on Transactional Email...

Good email that respects users' time and quickly tells them what they need to know can do wonders for your customer service reputation.

In general, you should write a message according to the users' priorities, starting with the information they're typically looking for.

..processing email is stressful. Users frequently told us that they were too busy to deal with certain email messages, and that they considered any fluff in messages a waste of time. When they check their email, users are typically dealing with multiple requests for their time — whether from their boss, colleagues, or family. People just want to be done with most email, and quickly move past anything that is not absolutely essential.

Jackob Nielsen also goes on to stress making subject lines relevant to users reduces the chances an email will get deleted in the process of pruning/deleting SPAM messages.

Charleston Walking Tour On IPhone

Charleston walking tours in a generic sense may be taking a large leap forward in technology with the Charleston City Slickers product. In reading an Apple News Release and another article, I was amazed to learn that the IPhone based product verifies places of importance by GPS while walking down Charleston streets. A person can also reportedly see additional images online of historic sites and read up on locations in history by taking a guided or unguided walking tour over the IPhone. If you have taken this Iphone app for a spin downtown on the tour please let me know your thoughts on it :) PS. I had been on vacation, busy and doing other things so I have not posted to the blog in a while.

Book Review: Punching In...

Puching In: the Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee by Alex Frankel is a great read. His stories as a customer and employee at Starbucks, Enterprise Car Rental, UPS, Gap and an Apple Store were rather informative as to how people are molded to fit corporate culture/image yet retain some individualism. The nature of who an individual is and how they fit based on character traits (sometimes widely different, but yet unified in delivering good customer service) into a business culture/image was informative.

His chapter on working at an Apple Store was the most useful to me. While getting training at Apple he covers a sales techniques of positioning, permission (asking customer to reveal needs) and probing (asking for more info to ensure satisfaction) in the sales process, but most importantly getting to know the customer's needs and then selling. Overall, this is a great book with a fresh perspective of working customer service jobs.

Powerless Camp a Library Conference Proposal

Library conferences are expensive, but worth it like the Summer American Library Association Conference or the less expensive SCLA Conference. I have not been to either in some time, but that is another story... The mix of a new proposed library based PowerlessCamp has me interested and curious. A library conference in the forest without electricity seems inspiring to me. No PowerPoint, no laptops (literally bring it and get it thrown into the fire one persons teases), no overheads, no dazling vendor exhibition halls filled with glitz but an unpluged library conference in the heart of nature covering technology with a fresh perspective and the opportunity to learn and share tech ideas... Various folks have posts on the Code4Lib listserve as I initially found out about it from Roy Tennant's blog. A website has already been setup exploring the idea at PowerlessCamp.org.

Stocked Photos for Use...

Digital Image Magazine has a blog post that lists 25 free image galleries online. This resource comes via blog posts from Phil Bradley's Internet Search Blog and Sara Houghton-Jan LibrarianinBlack blog. The images and websites are rather impressive from the Digital Image Magazine. My favorite thus far comes from ImageBase which has the embedded image in this article post of a book. The link to the original Digital Image Magazine post is here.

Making the Most of Opportunties...

Stan Garfield's Weekly Knowledge Management HP blog has a fascinating take on business maxims for individuals and as an extension communities. He posits "What advice do you have for leaders?" with three main maxims and one in particular that caught my attention being:

"Maxim #2: Three Rights
1. Do what is right – logically, financially, morally, ethically, and environmentally – with decency, integrity, and fairness
2. Do it the right way – honestly, accurately, correctly, and completely – with good effort, resulting in high quality, and meeting all commitments
3. Do it right away – don’t procrastinate, make excuses, or avoid what is unpleasant – the sooner you start, the better."

For full post click here.

Charleston Reference Turns 2 Years Old

Charlestonref is now 2 years old. July 20th, 2006 was the first post and it was on moving text from the web to MS Word documents. From that initial post, a lot has changed... Posts tend to be shorter, the topics mainly cover electronic resources, freely available websites and the occasional outreach event. It is hard to say what this blog will look like in the next two years, but one thing is certain it will not be the same. Happy Birthday Charlestonref - Steven S.

Six Sigma and Lean Borrowing a Page from Industry...

Yesterday, a friend of mine started 2 weeks of six sigma/lean manufacturing training. From that I thought, maybe I should look at this too, other than reading two books covering Jack Welch's/GE's use of the methodologies a few years ago, I found some applications to these approaches for public libraries and how we deliver our resource tools.

Six Sigma work, by general definition is approximately or less than "3.4 defects per 1 million opportunties for defect" Source: Wikipedia.org (yes I took the easy road instead of a more vetted source). Six sigma is also primarily a process to identify the most frequently occuring or big problems and work to solve those first, with specialized and skilled teams, then each additional item with the most amount of occurences or problems is then tackled. Ultimately striving for 0 customer seen defects.

The lean manufacturing is, quoting again from Wikipedia out of convenience, "is the optimal way of producing goods through the removal of waste and implementing flow, as opposed to batch and queue. " I did kinda sorta have an ah ha moment this morning when reading a quote from Barbara Wheat and Chuck Mills book Leaning into six sigma "If you go and make everything a Six Sigma problem, you're going to constipate your system and waste a lot of resources." MMM, food for thought.