Another place to share

I'm sure we're all running in to more and more resources that relate back to what we discussed earlier this week. The email list is one way to share these, but now that we are taking the process forward and requesting public feedback I thought it might be nice to have a public place to share.

If you already have a delicious account you can tag pages "for:acclibrarians" and "visioning" and I'll see that they get added to the list. You might want to add a sentence in the notes field about why you chose that page. I'll also be tagging items sent to the email list.

You can see the 5 most recently tagged articles under the Recently suggested articles section on the right. You can also subscribe to the feed.

Here are the items I just posted:

Online Programming for All Libraries: Events and Programs
Includes the Casual Conversations series - casual conversations with leaders in the field

YouTube - Ordering Pizza in the Future
Amusing/alarming take on national databases and privacy, something to keep in mind with social networking...

The future of your social software is already here - Bokardo
The need to design for personal value before social value

if:book: reading responsibly: nancy kaplan on the NEA's data distortion
Points out some serious data distortion in the NEA's findings that people aren't reading

Workgroup Discussion Notes Now Available

A number of items have been flying up on the Transforming Texas Libraries homepage. Check the links on the left side of the page for doc and pdf versions of the raw notes from the recorders.

Luncheon Keynote Presentation Now Available and Photos

The luncheon keynote presentation is now available as a PowerPoint with audio.

I'd also like to point out that Starr Hoffman has posted some wonderful photos from the summit to her flickr account. If anyone else is posting photos, please let us know and if you are using flickr add the tag transformingtexaslibraries.

Summit Wrap Up - What Next?

Julie Todaro took the floor to close out the day. She handed out a sheet on working with our stakeholders.

• We will have a variety of documents through the next steps
• 1st - info as it was created and pulled from each group
• 2nd - aggregated info that's categorized
• that doc will be posted back to this group for your comments
• that will be the output of this conference
• Take to stakeholder groups - content
• executive summaries - one page handout
• if you go to someone if you hand them 30 pages they will not come
• one page doc is the basis for discussion
• Handout - one page thing that talks about different ways to talk to your stakeholders
• level 1 - share the word
• bring back opinions
• handout is a series of steps we'd like you to go through
• Please adopt stakeholders
• decide how you want the info to come back to you
• do you want them to do it one on one without you vetting?
• do you want to gether it from them?
• we want to build on our existing situations - annual conference, assembly
• we'll keep our listserv together
• we are going to be doing a survey to gather data before legislative
• it's educational
• we'll have a program about this at annual
• this is a living group that will continue
• Access Texas - how we got TexShare
• people think nothing ever comes of these
• extraordinary realization to look at what we talked about and looked at what we've accomplished (with Access Texas)
• thinks it was an incredible success
• this is our beginning kernel
  
• incredibly exciting few years in front of us

Summit Wrap Up - Emerging Themes - Open Floor

After her summary Lou opened the floor to questions/comments.

• how to prove our worth to decision makers, value-added
• we have the greatest prison population, greatest dropout rates of high school
• we have a solution to this - this is the group that can change the literacy rate
• show people who write checks that we have a mission, especially those that determine economics of this state we'll get funded
• less focus on bibliographic control - thinks that dangerous
• don't confuse complexity of bib control as a barrier to convenience and quality
• place not things - stress that collections that we have one of our very great strengths. need to figure out how to play to that strength
• as we share our resources the whole world becomes a library
• they come to us for our things
• describing them and making them available is still a big part of our job
• we love to create systems and we love to show users those systems
• they are the backbone of our system - but they don't belong to the users
• they need to be completely invisible
• need to have a business plan
• needs to be in laymans language
• what's the bang for the buck?
• highly refined well developed tool, but still a tool
• you don't want to be in the tool business
• people use tools, but don't need tools
• need to accomplish something, use tools
• classification is not just for location, that's a byproduct
• we make connection in the intellectual content of things
• catalogs haven't been made content rich
• if you don't put that in there they're not going to use
• yes it is a backbone
• outsourcing it undermines the whole system
  

Summit Wrap Up - Emerging Themes

After the open floor, Lou summarized what she saw as the emerging themes.

• desirability of paying more attention to nuts and bolts of how we collaborate
• deepening and increasing our involvement
• leveraging existing partnerships
• partnering that would stretch our boundaries
• variety of types of collaborative partnerships
• building upon the collaboration we have - TexShare is a brand - how can we leverage that?
• a call to be more experimental - to try things we haven't done before. raise the risk quotient.
• recognition that incentives might be helpful
• call by all of you - where's the data? you want to base this on facts/research
  
• let's do our homework on this first
• find out who they are, attend, participate
• leads to an informed decision about partnerships
• cooperative programs - teaming of librarians with teachers - curriculum development -put these folks together in a creative environment
• user focus
• enhanced user focus, intense focus on our users
• self service
• personalized services
• flexible services
• improvisational - what do we want to do today? (parking cam)
• commitment to combine quality and convenience
• using wisely and innovatively the tech we already have access to to deliver the services we want to the users
• necessity for multiple types of access
• a new attention to variations in ways we might want to offer access based on demographics of our clientel
• what would you like, how would you like it delivered, instead of this is how we offer - you fit yourself into it
• leveraging of technology
• use social software - some effort to investigate and understand and help the library community to understand the power of all this
• community and conversation
• social networking software - we're just on the edge of that and the power of that is quite phenomenal
• take a look at the music video from fulton county library in Georgia [Ellie's note - I couldn't find this - if you have the link, please leave a comment. Thanks!]
• leveraging tech to delivery services
• make what we have feature rich
• encouraging user created content
• are we doing a good enough job of leveraging technology to train our own staff
  

Big Ideas:

• one stop concept - any user, any library, and format, anytime, any place, one card, all catalogs, all databases, all users
• TexShare, next? - statewide authentication. crawlable. both leverage and supercharge the existing partners into larger collaborative endeavors
• seamless lifelong learning
• the need to address literacy and info lit
• to address demographic changes in our state
• look at what the global environment is expected and what our demographics expect
• this is something we can address
• what about our staff? what about lifelong learning for those of us trying to deliver life long learning
• shorter more focused, what you need at point of use
• outreach - we're not doing as much or as well as we should and we should address ourselves to it
• marketing and advertising. could we share the cost by libraries banding together on the creation/delivery
• interest in small in place kiosk type of access
• thread that outreach will work best if we demystify library services and what we've got
• statewide large scale message - use big Texas brand combined with books as brand
• link bigness and books piece
• in terms of marketing and advertising - clearly distinguished by bob
• convenient and easy to develop and deploy
• emphasize community and library as place
• position library as social gathering environment that exemplifies what ...
  
• call to step up quality of marketing
• use professional level personnel; to help us do that inside and outside the organization
• need to do a better job of training and retraining staff to implemeent marketing
• define expectations of staff
• transformation - transforming how we think about the users
• move from looking at users as unfortunate individuals who, bless their little hearts need our help, to seeing them as peers and partners
• move from helper to peer or partner mentality
• most organizations would pay dearly for the goodwill that users have towards libraries
• we have it but don't seem to be leveraging that
• move from transaction based activity to experiences, laboratory, improvisational activities
• are our spaces appropriate for that? how would that work?
• the need to do it more like the rest of the world does it
• mainstream our service models so they don't look weird to people
• how do we move our service model closer to the mainstream of what people expect from other organizations
• self service one step
• transformation from a focus on things to a focus on place
• look more closely and learn more deeply about our communities
• what does it mean to be a library staff member in the new mode
• so people being asked to make that transition have a clear idea in mind
• idea of triage
• rethinking radically the user experience at the front line
• how would that work, what would we do, how would we move to a more mainstream model
• base it on research based on users and real data
• we want assessment
• we don't want to go it alone
• could we collaborate on getting this data?
• desire that we do a better job integrating customer knowledge

• much more to say, but those are the key pieces
• the themes you are interested in transcend all of the topics
• there is a common wisdom of the group

Summit Wrap Up - Open Floor

After the groups gave their summaries the floor was opened for questions and comments.

Someone from group 2 wanted one of their big ideas read verbatim:

Google calls TLA and begs to do the keynote saying, "We're not relevant without you!" and then compromises and settles for a mere breakout session.

There was discussion of a need for improvisation and flexibility.

Quit trying to expect them to learn the way we do things and start thinking about how they want it, what they think they need.

RE: Marketing - people have been saying "We need to sell this." - that's not marketing

Ask them what they want and then provide that - that's marketing.

How do we pull people in? There are all these suggestions about what we think they want - what we need to do is ask them what they want.

Give serious consideration to outcome assessment.

Important to show tangible values to society

Why do people go to Google? because they want to know

If we model on vendors marketing to people who want to know....
they create the excitement then come to us
it's the viagra model
Ebsco and those guys are fabulous at marketing, but they market to us - get them to market to the users.

Distinction between being an advocate and a player
advocates go out and tell you how wonderful they are
players listen
when you're players you're part of the community to really listen
we can be problem solvers

Empowering new librarians and staff to get out there
succession planning, administration looking at who upcoming leaders might be and encourage them to find mentors
we see that as top down, but see it as bottom up
feel empowered to seek out at their organization and in prof organizations

literacy czar - statewide level, someone to guide everything in that way
having all the systems work together