AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!! Ah Bin Bizzy!

The original plan was for me to do a blogpost everyday during October, specifically on teaching tools. Well, not only has that not happened, but I have fallen way, way, way below my normal frequency of posting. What’s going on? Am I sick? Did a family member get hurt? Some sort of crisis? Nope. Well, what then? Ran out of ideas, lack of inspiration? No way, José.

The problem is that there is TOO MUCH to say, too much going on, too many great ideas. The dam is clogged with leaves, and the river is about to burst through. Very very briefly, here are some of the things that have been keeping me away from the blog, each of which I hope to post on eventually (but no promises).

It all started when I saw Danah Boyd. I came away wanting to talk about (1) her presentation, (2) the back channel conversation during her talk, (3) a profound comment by Ed Vielmetti about groups behaviors in online social spaces, and (4) a curious conversation with Danah after the talk about limitations to use of Creative Commons images in her presentation. That’s four blog posts I wanted to do, right there. At this point, I still thought I was going to get one a day on teaching tech!

Next, I attended two meetings in one week about ways to use augmented reality on campus, in libraries, and for education. One was the Instructional Designers group on campus, and the other was the Library 2.0 SIG, both of which have monthly meetings. My other similar monthly meeting is with the campus Web Accessibility team, that haven’t yet talked about augmented reality, but, well, probably ought to. I actually started that blogpost, but haven’t finished it yet. Basically, if you aren’t paying attention to augmented reality, if it isn’t on your horizon as something worthy of attention, START paying attention.

The CCMB/HIRO group on campus has a regular invited speaker series on the topic of informatics, almost always bioinformatics. Yves Lussier was the most recent speaker. While his talk focused on stuff for bioinformatics geeks, there was a persistent thread on the importance of science collaboration across discipline and geographic boundaries. He said some really important stuff that connects to the whole open science / Science 2.0 movement that I am so passionate about. Not only did I want to blog about what Yves said, but this reminded me that I promised several people to blog about Garrett Lisi, and haven’t done it yet.

Speaking of Garrett Lisi, there was the first meeting of the Open Educational Resources reading group (basically a journal club). It was a really great conversation! Many many ideas, provocative conversation, issues to explore. A focus was on not just the changing environment of higher education, but also on the changing roles of educators and mutating concepts of professionalism. Garrett was mentioned again (I really need to do this!), as was my daughter, who has a 3.9 GPA from the University of Michigan which is completely (98%) irrelevant to her professional work and mostly ornamental. That’s the hook, line and sinker later.

A couple days after that, I attended a presentation at School of Public Health that was billed as being on risk science and emerging technologies. Sounded pretty relevant to this Emerging Technologies Librarian, so I went. Want to blog about that, too, so much! Short story, there are some really amazing opportunities for applying emerging technologies librarian skills, environment scanning, information filters and stream management skills, and social media to identifying potential public health risks and disseminating relevant information. If you aren’t already following Andrew Maynard on Twitter (@2020science), well, good stuff. I was already following him long long before he hit campus for this talk.

It felt like as soon as that happened, I attended the local Public Forum to funnel ideas to Obama’s team working to revise the National Educational Technology Plan. That turned into an opportunity to repeat the forum in Second Life and build up the national conversation.

While all this was going on there was, of course, life “as usual.” The #HCSM meetings on Twitter every Sunday evening always generate at least enough content for 2 weeks of blogposts, and I never get time to do any of it. Metanomics and ISTE Eduverse in Second Life are also weekly events that are provocative, informative and blogworthy every single time. We have the School of Dentistry Bootcamp series starting up again, which means I’m both recruiting other presenters and promising to present myself. Working on the grant for Delta Dental, guest lectured in a School of Information class on systematic review searching, supporting the Health Literacy Month events here, and got the IRB approval on our consumer health for seniors project.

Speaking of teaching, there is a new project I’m involved with that is a collaboration between the University Libraries and the Office of the Vice President for Communications and the Communicators Forum. The focus of that project is to provide teaching and training on social media tools and best practices. More on that later, but suffice it to say that there are a lot of project team meetings both with the Forum and with the Library team, as well as having started to develop some of the classes and implement them, and recruiting experts to teach from other parts of campus.

Collaborations are just crawling out of the woodwork. I am a pretty intense supporter of collaborations and conversations as both productivity tools and consensus building. Our administration seems to agree. There are new projects going on with the School of Public Health (I provide backup support, and am not a lead on that one, thank goodness) and with the Office of Medical Education.

There is more, but my brain hurts even trying to think of what all is on my plate, so … I think I’ll go back to pulling my gray hairs out of my coffee cup.

Future Librarians and Immediate Challenges

I don’t feel ready, but I am going to try another blogpost-a-day on a theme, like I did in August, and hope I finish the month out this time. Why do I keep picking long months to do this? It is the timing of the need. A lot of the blogposts I write are in response to questions I am asked here or projects that are going on. Today, I attended the first part of a local initiative called FutureLibCon. The theme of the whole event is roughly what is the future role of academic librarians, what should we be doing. The topic today was on social media, and what role, if any, is appropriate for the librarian in supporting education. People talked about whether social media is appropriate to use in education, and whether librarians:

(a) should teach social media skills,
(b) should teach digital literacy skills as they apply to social media,
(c) should teach digital literacy skills more generally,
(d) should use social media to teach digital literacy,
(e) should use social media only as it comes up in order to support education in whatever form it takes,
(f) ….

You get the idea. The discussion was wide-ranging. I tried to mostly keep my mouth shut and listen, since this is a topic on which I have more practical experience than well-thought out opinions. I started teaching Delicious almost four years ago, I think. I started not just with how to, but also why, what it did for personal and professional productivity, and also touched on ideas for how you could use it educationally. Heck, I still think it would be interesting to have students select quality resources on a topic, tag then for the faculty to review, select appropriate description tags thinking of specific audiences (self, peers, general), and practice writing well-crafted brief annotations. That is a substantive assignment right there.

Anyway, I didn’t think so much about whether or not I should do it, I just did it. There was a tool I was using and finding useful, I could imagine many other ways it might be used, and wanted to share the tool and ideas with others. People liked it, and I was asked to teach the class several years running. That was the first social media tool I taught, but it sure wasn’t the last! My current position as the ETechLib derived directly from doing this type of work, from discovering the tools, and applying them, to sharing them via communication and education.

One of the questions that came up today in the small group discussion was what is the role of the librarian in this environment. I can understand why folks are asking, and it is a good question to think about more deeply, and someday I should do that. Today, I’m afraid my response (inside – I didn’t say it) was a bit on the glib side. We do the same thing librarians have always done!

I firmly believe that these roles (discover, select, collect, organize, husband, access, preserve, assist, share, teach, outreach, research, advocacy, create) persist in all information and education environments, irregardless of the technologies or tools. These are core values of the profession, not simply tasks. There is the potential for an almost infinite number of examples, but what I hope to do this month is perhaps build a new tech blog equivalent of the annotated bibliographies that librarians were making before I went to grad school, like the old Oryx Press series edited by David Tyckoson who I knew back in Iowa. David was great at this. You’d have a topic or question, review what’s available, select la crème de la crème, provide clear information on how to find it, and note clearly specific reasons why the item selected was valuable. In certain of these bibliographies, you’d also include information on other matters such as recommended audience, and possible uses.

In keeping with that general goal, the topic that is burning in the brains of most educators this fall is the flu, specifically H1N1, and how to keep things going if either the students or faculty take ill, or if it becomes bad enough that people are told not to congregate. I seem to hear something along these lines several times every day, from all different kinds of people. “Continuity of learning” seems to be a popular phrase.

ASCD. H1N1 and Continuity of Learning. Sept. 24, 2009.

ASCD. H1N1 and Continuity of Learning Webinar. September 30, 2009.

ED.gov. H1N1 Flu Information.

In higher education, there a some nice things being done in many places to try to help faculty be prepared to teach remotely if necessary. The concept I’m hearing here is referred to as “social distance-ready courses” or “social distancing teaching format.” For myself, I prefer the former, so that is what I will try to use. UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison have both provided some particularly good information, as has the University of Denver. Each of these is distinct and different, and if you keep looking you will find many other schools that have done likewise. All I’ve seen are good, I am just selecting these three as useful illustrations of different approaches.

University of Denver. H1N1 Continuity Plan Teaching Support Page.

UW-Madison. Instruction in Time of Pandemic.

UW-Milwaukee. Academic Continuity.

All organizations are recommending preparations that enable teachers to engage students who cannot come to class, teach when they cannot come to class, and have alternative assignments and lectures prepared in case they are themselves too ill to teach and need to call in a substitute. UW-Milwaukee and UW-Green Bay has developed or mention a particularly nifty set of guidesheets to support what they are calling D2L conversion – Desire2Learn. They are also providing a series of workshops (similar to our own Teaching and Technology Collaboration-TTC) focusing on various useful skills for engaging students remotely, creating online-only assignments / projects / collaborations, and adjusting existing courses to alternative formats. Here are some of the workshops they are offering to help their faculty increase their preparedness for teaching in health emergency situations. Here are some of the workshops they have selected as being particularly relevant to this situation.

• D2L: Just the Basics!
• Using D2L discussion forums for effective teaching and learning
• Developing small group work in online and blended courses
• Grading your students: Assessment in online and blended courses
• Using Respondus to import quizzes and test banks into D2L
• Redesigning large enrollment courses for online and blended learning
• Using voice‐over PowerPoint presentations to deliver content online
• Digitizing video content for online and blended courses
• Facilitating real‐time interaction in online & blended courses
• Introduction to clickers
• Develop easy‐to‐use online activities and games for student engagement
• Second Life for teaching and learning
• Digital storytelling workshop

Around the University of Michigan area, I’m impressed with the guidelines from LS&A that were put in a wiki, making it easy to update and modify, as well as making it possible for multiple people to take on editing responsibility if the main person can’t do it for any reason. Excellent thinking! They have broken out a lot of the most likely uses, and selected just a few appropriate tools in each category. Really, this is a very nice starting point.

LSA Teaching Through The Flu: Just-in-Case Options for Handling Flu-based Absences:
http://g333.pbworks.com/LSA+Teaching+Through+The+Flu%3A+Just-in-Case+Options+for+Handling+Flu-based+Absences

You probably thought I was digressing from the topic, so let me circle back. In each of these collections of resources for preparing “social distance-ready courses” they quite rightly include just a few basic tools that their particular campus is recommending and prepared to support. There are a few ideas for how to adapt assignments and learning opportunities, but for the most part they expect the individual faculty member to come up with this on their own, as it is after all their own content! I’d like to see a little bit more in the way of creating an idea bank of non-standard distance-ready tools and innovative or creative ways these could be used in support of learning. Our Cool Toys Conversations group has been doing some of this each month, looking at unusual tools and brainstorming ways they can be used. What I hope to do this month, is each day highlight a tool or type of tool, and in the annotations give a few ideas of ways this could be used in distance learning. I hope that the readers of this blog will contribute additional ideas in the comments. This is a little ambitious, but I think it would be really useful, even if it fails. So, fingers crossed, here we go, and do please help with more ideas and comments!

Farmers, Cowboys, Scouts & Librarians

Yesterday’s Ado Annie song got stuck in my head. I have always loved Roger’s and Hammerstein, with Oklahoma and South Pacific leading the way. In the past few days I’ve also had a few conversations about how the heck it is I do whatever it is I’m doing. And why. So I’m pondering Oklahoma and at the same time pondering my job.

I’ve said before that I think of what I’m doing as being a scout, out on the fringes of the territory, hunting for what’s important to know, then coming back and telling the leadership what’s out there that they should know about. Some years back one of the dentists explained to me why dentists don’t become doctors. “They’re cowboys,” he said. He went on to explain that doctors work in large organizations with lots of rules to follow and records to keep to watch and prove that they follow the rules, while dentists work in private practice and can, within reasonable limits set by government and other stakeholders, set their own standards for record keeping and rules. That seemed very insightful and profound at the time.

Scouts are out there solo for the most part. Where they are going, they don’t see many folk at all, and if they did see a bunch of folk, they’d be in the wrong place. When they come back, they only talk to a couple people and then skedaddle again. [For a disclaimer, I have no real experience with tracking or scouting in real life, just having been raised by a rabid Boy Scout and reading tons of Westerns. So I'm making up the bits to tell a story, and please just go along with me, ok?]

Cowboys tend to be mostly solitary, but not as much as scouts. Takes other cowboys to manage a herd. So cowboys want some space and room, but also come back and horse around with their friends, gab and sing at night, party at the rodeo or small town bar. According to the histories, there was a lot of volatile change and risk. Cowboys would make friends, and then have to make new ones as they moved on or friends were injured or died on the trail.

Scouts and cowboys both knew where they were in one of two ways. Either they figured out the relatively vague sense of plotting a position relative to other places by the stars or how far north or south they were, or they went somewhere they’d been before and knew specific features — the shape of an outcropping, the quirky shape of a particular tree, things like these.

Farmers? Well, farmers weren’t breaking new territory but establishing stable spaces within territory that was already fairly well known. They’d mark out the boundaries, draw the maps, name the specific features and quirky trees. Then they’d build fences, towns, schools, make laws and set up the infrastructure that supported communities.

You can take this back further to the early Greeks, when they shifted from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agrarian lifestyle. There are researchers who believe that the famous Eleusinian Mysteries were actually a celebration of becoming agrarian marked by taking the time to return for a week to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle so people would remember and appreciate what they’d gained. If people didn’t remember the hardships of the “cowboy” life, they didn’t appreciate the “farmer” life. Then you ended up with conflicts like those noted in the famous song.

Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends,
Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.
One man likes to push a plough,
The other likes to chase a cow,
But that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends.

Now I am thinking of this with respect to librarianship. A great deal of librarianship is husbandry of sorts. Nurturing intellectual discovery and creation is like planting, and collection building like harvesting. I could spend more time extending the analogy, but I’m sure you get the idea: Librarians are rather like Farmers. But are Emerging Technologies Librarians like other librarians? I hazard they are perhaps more like cowboys and scouts, and which one will depend on what kind of emerging technologies is their particular focus.

As an Emerging Technologies Librarian the boundaries that are part and parcel of most of librarianship don’t necessarily apply in the same ways. It is really hard to go exploring new territory if you are paying a lot of attention to the already existing boundaries. In my own experience, I’ve noticed that connections that seem odd or off topic often circle back to my home territories. One example was the support I was giving to computer science and engineering this past year, which connected me to researchers working in game design and programming, which then gave me exactly the background and connections I needed when the hospital wanted information on serious games for staff training. You don’t know exactly how the pieces are going to connect, or if they will, and there is a certain amount of instinct required, and a tolerance for failure on the part of both the ETech librarian and their managers. One trick is to diversify. As the old saying goes, don’t put all your eggs in the same basket.

What I don’t want to see happening in librarianship is the sort of conflict or divide that showed up between the farmers and the cowboys. Librarians, where the ETech folk are working might seem silly at first glance, but give it time to ripen, there just might be something to it. ETech folk, you’ll need those friendships and partnerships to help spread the word, build skills, and teach classes. When the wave crests for any given technology the demand will outstrip what you can do alone. Librarians, if an ETech librarian says something is going to be important, don’t pooh-pooh them, but take a moment and listen. Even if it doesn’t make sense to you right then, give your colleague the respect of a fair and courteous conversation, and a willingness to reserve judgment. ETech folk, when you are engaging with the community of users who value your work, don’t forget your librarian colleagues — keep trying to reach them as well, and bring them into the discussions with the crazy folk who fancy your stories. And librarians, if you know any of those crazy folk who might appreciate those cool toys, introduce them to your ETech colleague. They can use your help, they are trying to cover a whole lot of territory. Keep building bridges, both of you, work together, collaborate.

And when this territory is a state
And joins the Union just like all the others,
The farmer, and cowman and the merchant
Must all behave theirselves and act like brothers.

9-11 & Twitter: The Stories Around Us

Often, as I think back to the day of September 11, 2001, I think of the social technologies we have now, especially Twitter, and how things might have been different THEN. Maybe more people could have been rescued, for example. I imagine that people trapped in the rubble could have texted, and the people around the world could have helped crowdsource to triangulate where they were. Applications of social media for disaster response is a topic for another series of posts.

This morning, I opened my computer to find an email with a powerful essay from Col. Holly Doyne of the US Army and author of Kuwait Diary (about her work in the Iraq conflict). She highlighted some of her personal losses in the 9-11 disaster, recommended Exhibit 13 by Blue Man Group, talked about the losses of the day, the losses that followed, and the losses to us all from the changes made to keep us safe. She closed with this quotation.

“And the work of the righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness and confidence forever.” From the Prayer Book for Jewish Personnel in the Armed Forces of the United States – 1984 JWB

When I opened Twitter, the discussion was already raging – people remembering, telling stories, personal experiences and more. I captured the following slide images in the space of just a few minutes. There is much much more in Twitter, but these few selections give a sampling of the stories being shared and the memories being relived. The power of Twitter (specifically) as well as microblogging and social media in general for storytelling, healing, sharing and disaster response ought to provoke further thought and what we can and should be doing with these new technologies, as well as what the risks may be at the personal level from not developing the competencies to make effective use of them.

Of Videos and Blogs and Other Beasts

Elliot Greenberger, the Communications Manager at See3 Communications, wrote a pretty nifty blogpost a couple days ago. I was sharing it with people today at SOLO09 (Science Online London 2009), and thought this was a good time to try to explain here why I thought it was so relevant and useful.

What Elliot wrote was about how to make the most of your video. I’ve been telling folks for months (and have some video to post on the topic) about why it is so important to get your science and research videos into Youtube. It was over a year ago that I was looking for some cell division videos for my high school aged son, and found instead an astonishing number of hard core science teaching and research methodology videos. This included stuff like how to do an ELISA blot, methodologies for immunofluorescence, nano mass spec techniques, protein crystallization, all kinds of stuff. What I noticed was that some of the videos had originally been placed on the web sites of the originating research lab, but not in Youtube. I assume this was because someone felt uncomfortable releasing their content out into the wild, and thought they could control it better on their own website.

So how did these get into Youtube? Someone or several someones had been seeking them out, scraping them off the original websites, splicing out the beginning and ending credits, replacing them with an ad for their website, and adding a banner add for their website across the bottom of the video. They covered themselves by adding a notice that these videos were not their content and they did not own copyright in them. I found this, shall we say, very interesting? Especially since these esoteric and relatively uninteresting videos (uninteresting to the general public anyway) were getting thousands and hundreds of thousands of views.

Since I originally noticed this, I’ve also noticed Youtube really cracking down on this sort of activity, but it really helps if someone brings it to their attention. You need to know your videos, and check to see if they are out there wandering around. I’ve been arguing that the best way to control your content is to put it in Youtube yourself. Some folk complained that videos in Youtube aren’t very high quality. So put it in Vimeo, too, ok? And put a copy of the original on your website. Link the Youtube posting to your website.

This does a few things for you. First, if someone steals your video and tries to put it in Youtube, yours was there first, establishing precedent and already gathering link-backs, comments, embeds and views. If you see your video elsewhere in Youtube, you complain and theirs will be removed by Youtube. Second, Youtube is way up there in the rankings. If your video is in Youtube, people are more likely to find it in a Google or Yahoo search, and if they find the video, they are more likely to find your website. Third, Youtube is one of the leading places people do web searches in general. Not just video searches, but on concepts and topics! This means whatever you have to say is going to be more discoverable if it can be found easily on Youtube as well as Google and Yahoo.

OK, now all this is great for video, you say, but you are not exactly in the video business. So what does this have to do with you? Think about it a second. These same basic ideas and strategies apply to anything you have to say. This is what I liked about Elliot Greenberger’s blogpost. He was talking about how to get more views for your videos, but the same ideas and strategies can easily be applied across social media. Take a minute and go look at Elliot’s post, then come back here and I’ll explain what I mean.

Greenberger, Elliot. How to Get More Views for Your Video. Frogloop, Care2’s nonprofit online marketing blog, August 19, 2009. http://www.frogloop.com/care2blog/2009/8/19/how-to-get-more-views-for-your-video.html

EG’s #1. Optimize Your Video for the Web

This applies to text as well. Remember that there are a lot of different potential audiences on the web. If you are trying to reach multiple audiences either write your content or design your media at different levels — interested outsider, novice, expert, and all the way along the range.

In general, for consumer health and legal documents the plain language experts recommend writing anything that really needs to get out to the general public at a level of American grades 4-8. In the UK this translates in practice to roughly ages 10-14. That could be a whole post on its own, but you get the idea. This is harder to do than it sounds, but if you provide the same content at multiple levels and think of your potential audiences, you are on the right track.

Writing at different levels isn’t enough, though. To optimize your text for the web, you need to also think of how it is laid out, design features, and make sure you pay attention to the use of white space. Short paragraphs, short sentences, short words.

EG’s #2. Recruit Your Email List

What Elliot said here is really really good. Use pictures and graphics. Give color in both visuals, media and stories to engage interest. Make your message something people want to talk about, and tell them briefly what would help most — forward a message, share with friends, retweet, comment, bookmark, what do you want them to do?

EG’s #3. Get It On Your Site

In libraries there is this idea about how to protect and preserve content without having it be a huge burden on any one library. One popular way of expressing this is LOCKSS – Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. Same idea applies here. Ultimately, your most important message is going to be on your site, not out in the social media. So make sure the important stuff is all on your site, and make sure all your social media stuff somehow sooner or later guides your audience and friends to your home.

EG’s #4. Create Relevant Tags

If you have content out in social media, there are often ways to tag it. Even if the system where you put your content doesn’t allow tagging, as long as you have an URL you can always bookmark it and tag it there. For tagging strategies, I use a couple. First, I tag it the way I think of it to ease refinding for me personally. Second, I look at how other folks are tagging similar items and throw in those terms. You would find that most items in my Delicious stream have a lot of sloppy tags. This is because I want to facilitate finding by others as well as finding by myself. So I combine a tight structured approach with a loose sloppy approach, on purpose.

EG’s #5. Don’t Stop at YouTube

This could say don’t stop at your website. Or don’t stop at your blog. Or don’t stop at Facebook. Or Flickr. Or Twitter. Or Slideshare. Or wherever. It is all a big mesh, interweaving. You don’t put everything in each place, but you do for the big stuff, and anything substantive should probably appear in three places. Where you put things will depend on what you’re putting out and who your community and audience are. If you are working with predominantly visual content you will place that content in different places than if you are working with written ideas, but both will overlap.

EG’s #6. Reach Out to Bloggers

Again, I’d extend this a bit broader. Where is your community, who cares about your content? Talk to them! First find them. Know their names/IDs, what they care about, what they’re working on. If you’ve built a history of sharing good stuff with them (not just your stuff) and really being a valued member of the community, they will do the same for you. Reciprocity. If you are doing good and doing good work, you are on the right track.

EG’s #7. Talk About it Offline

My ideal social network is a2b3. You’ll find a2b3 all over the web, but ultimately it comes back to face-to-face, those weekly lunches with a different and fascinating crowd each week. In my previous job I felt really well connected with what was going on, with regular lunches and coffee meetings, informal social situations with individuals or small groups. People complain about the inefficiency of informal communications, but when you really think about it, try taking away the informal communication paths and see just how efficient you are without them.

EG’s #8. Run Online Ads

This one applies to marketing. It is an extension of #6 and #7. It can be taken a bit broader, though. Even if you are an educator, the basic idea is that sometimes it is worth putting money into something you want said well and that it is important to have people hear. Think of going to a conference and looking at a warehouse sized floor of poster presentations. You can tell which ones are “homegrown” versus the ones where they hired a graphic artist to help with the layout. Where do you tend to spend the most time looking at the content? The ones where the content is easy on the eyes. So maybe the money you put isn’t going into an online advertisement if you are teaching or presenting research, or maybe it is if you are doing enterprise marketing. It all depends. Just don’t be afraid to put your money where your mouth is when it really matters.

EG’s #9. Link Link Link

OK, I can’t say this any better than Elliot did, or at least not significantly different. “That means putting [your link] in your email signature, posting on Facebook and Twitter, including it in your next byline, and sharing it in forums, online communities, and comments.” Yeah. What he said.

Fundamentals Don’t Change (Details Do)

I saw this making the Twitter circles, and thought Wow. More about why Wow in a minute.

I don’t know who you are.
I don’t know your company.
I don’t know your company’s product.
I don’t know what your company stands for.
I don’t know your company’s customers.
I don’t know your company’s record.
I don’t know your company’s reputation.
Now, what was it you wanted to sell me?

Part of the point of this is pretty obvious — if your target audience can’t answer any of these questions about you, well, you aren’t going to get very far unless they are astoundingly naive and gullible. Let’s take a second look at this.

I know who you are.
I know your company.
I know your company’s product.
I know what your company stands for.
I know your company’s customers.
I know your company’s record.
I know your company’s reputation.
Now, what was it you wanted to sell me?

Very different picture, isn’t it?

Let’s say you’ve done a lot of work to get the word out. You’ve done a good job. You’ve followed up and surveyed your target audience, and they say, yeah, we know these folks, we’ve heard what they’re saying. Answering the questions doesn’t mean your target audience will buy in to your world view or goals, but it means they can make an informed decision and position your communications within the framework of their own goals, resources, ethics, etcetera. That isn’t the end of it, though.

For example, I’m working in libraries and have almost my whole life. We talk a lot about marketing problems with libraries, how people don’t understand us, don’t know what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do. That isn’t the real problem, tho, really. Think about it. If you talk with people about libraries they are likely to say:

I know who you are.
I know your company.
I know your company’s product.
I know what your company stands for.
I know your company’s customers.
I know your company’s record.
I know your company’s reputation.
Now, what was it you wanted to give me?

Right, good. So what’s the problem then? Ah, well, here we get to the crux of the matter. Here is a parable, sort of. In today’s sermon at my church, our local priest talked about when the people of his hometown had little faith in Jesus and he could not perform miracles, because they thought they knew him. He was performing miracles, but the folks at home didn’t know about the miracles, they knew him, his mom, dad, brothers and sisters. They knew his day job, the work he does, his weaknesses and foibles. Miracles were not part of the picture. So they weren’t buying it.

With libraries, IMHO, we have something more like this situation.

I think I know who you are.
I think I know your company.
I think I know your company’s product.
I think I know what your company stands for.
I think I know your company’s customers.
I think I know your company’s record.
I think I know your company’s reputation.
Now, what was it you wanted to give me?

They are probably right about knowing libraries with these part:

I think I know who you are.
I think I know your company.
I think I know what your company stands for.
I think I know your company’s record.
I think I know your company’s reputation.

Libraries have great reputations — passion, commitment, desire to serve, freedom of access, freedom of information, strong ethical foundations. Librarians are GOOD people. Everyone KNOWS that. This part is a little tricky.

Now, what was it you wanted to give me?

We like to give things away, but unfortunately it takes money to give things away. That means we have to first sell folks the idea of giving us money so we can give things away. This gets even trickier when they think we are giving away the same things they are getting for free somewhere else. That’s where we are getting in trouble. These bits might be a little hazy.

I think I know your company’s product.
I think I know your company’s customers.

It isn’t that our audience doesn’t know us, is that they think they DO know us, but what they know about us is fairly accurate in the large view and inaccurate in the details.

Just a little something to think about.

From Skepticism to Citizen Journalism via a Tea Party

I was involved in a discussion on friend’s blog, and found that my comment was too large to post as a comment. So I am moving it over here. The discussion started with a post about a news article on a Department of Defense exam that identifies protests as terrorism for the purposes of their employees, and the conflict with the First Amendment right to peaceable assembly.

The discussion there, when filtered through the convoluted network in my brain, evolved into an introduction to citizen journalism and its value. Separately, I’ve been pondering the evolution of citizen journalism and the challenges to traditional journalism as being parallel to the challenges to traditional librarianship. I hope I find time to talk about that in a future blogpost, but for today, let me offer the following, just a trifle out of context.

Skepticism is a gift the individual brings to the community, one way to get the outside perspective incorporated into the decisionmaking and thought processes of the group. I read some of the early articles of David Horrobin that evolved into his book The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity. He defined an essential role for schizophrenia that is in my mind related to skepticism — an essential quality for the survival of the species in that is contributes to our species ability to balance between rewarding behaviors and strategies that encourage survival (herd mentality) and allowing the species to develop new behaviors in response to novelty in the environment (adapting to change). Now I am not saying that skepticism is related to schizophrenia, rather that both make it possible to step outside the larger group or society and see things you can’t see if you follow the common or popular view without question. So irrespective of government or the press, I see skepticism as a quality that should be highly valued and respected.

I could go on for a long time about Horrobin, schizophrenia, skepticism, etcetera, but let me try to navigate back to the topic at hand. OK, perhaps navigate in a wiggly sense.

Yesterday I spent much of the day with a friend who is a self defined right wing extremist at a Tea Party government protest.

I am a self defined moderate (which to him pretty much means bleeding heart liberal or leftwing nutjob). I work in a community that is largely leftist – academia. I’ve found when you spend time in a community where most people tend to agree that it is harder to find balanced information and develop a truly informed opinion. Being a moderate also tends to mean being unpopular with either side, and not really having a community of your own, since moderates will by definition have different reasons for reaching the same decision. I also found that the closer you come to a well-balanced view the harder it is to make a choice, as both options will have major drawbacks and you are choosing the least awful of the worrisome choices available.

I like to spend time with people with a variety of perceptions, knowledge and opinions as part of gathering information and finding a balanced point of view. As part of seeking intellectual balance on controversial issues, I tend to drive everyone around me nuts sometimes by arguing whatever is the opposite point of view from what they hold. I find this a great learning experience for me, but many people seem more comfortable with folks who just agree with them. Oops. The other thing I do is to find value as well as concern in BOTH sides. There are always (so far) ideas and opinions that I respect and agree with on both sides of whatever controversy is being discussed. I believe it is important to value these common elements.

Yesterday, in listening to the speakers, looking at the signs, and hearing conversations around me, I noticed great passion, good intentions, a sense of pain and betrayal, a strong desire to do good for others, a commitment to working for the common good (a lot of spice), some alarming information and concerns that were new to me, some old chestnuts that had already been beaten to death ages ago, and a general flour of rhetoric (preaching to the choir) that glued the cake all together. If I had been at a leftwing event it would have been similar, but perhaps harder to see (since my personal experience tends to be more in common with that community and their views) unless one has experience with both views and communities.

I mentioned this blogpost to a few people there. The event started out reminding my of the Independence Day picnics from when I was a kid. Food, community, music, laughter, conversation, and lots of red, white and blue. A passion for our country. I found it utterly ironic (and a bit frightening) that because the party was called a Tea Party protest that the Department of Defense would consider all the kids and old folks sitting in their lawn chairs shooting off their mouths and patting each other on the back to be terrorists.

I learned to mistrust the US popular press several years ago. A friend of mine is positioned high enough in the military to have a sense of the big picture and low enough to have a sense of what is going on in the lives of the “grunts”. It is an interesting point of view, and I have found little tidbits that cropped up in conversation to sometimes be wildly different from what was reported by our media. I learned to use the online resources and search engines available to access news media reports from around the world, and have also found that the richest information often comes not from the big name feeds but from the small town local press where the events unfolded. It is a natural extension of this to take a serious look at citizen journalism, the shift toward reporting major events and news from the viewpoint of the common person.

I am fascinated by the evolution of journalism (learning a lot from following folks like Jay Rosen) and citizen journalism — man on the street reporting through not just blogs but aggregator news sites not from the commercial press, like NowPublic, iReport and the newest interesting experiment – NewAssignment. NowPublic is one of the originals and most authentic. iReport is affiliated with CNN. There have been reports of news pushed from iReport to CNN without adequate review. I worry that iReport attracts people reporting simply because they want attention which can potentially compromise the content. On the flip side, it is a great example of crowdsourcing! NewAssignment is an effort to evolve hybrid journalism – real professionals using social media to inform their research and writing.

The hybrid journalism idea is very exciting. Citizen journalism has its own issues. Basically it lacks quality oversight and the big picture view. The best illustration I’ve seen of this was blogged last year with the Toronto explosion.

Propane depot explosions expose shortcomings in breaking news coverage by newspapers living in a Web 2.0 world: http://ideas.typepad.com/webu/2008/08/propane-depot-e.html

What the propane depot explosions taught me about covering breaking news on the web: http://ideas.typepad.com/webu/2008/08/setting-aside-m.html

I guess, in brief, I share the skepticism expressed at Angular Unconformities to some extent, and I could have said that a whole lot faster. Except then I would not have had a reason to say that NowPublic used my pictures in their reporting of yesterday’s Tea Parties. Citizen journalism – is your voice being heard?

Video: Who, Why, and How We Serve

I am delighted with the short highlights video version of my presentation for the MLGSCA group in March in Cerritos California.. The complete talk will be put on the Health Sciences Libraries website fairly soon, but in the meantime, please enjoy these excerpts.

The talk focused on a vision of collaborative librarianship, based out of the history of the profession and extending through potential applications of new and social media.

Obama National Day of Health Care Service

First, my apologies for going missing for so long. My home was broken into and things stolen (like my main computer, so data missing), and I’ve had a few business and personal trips, so am swimming in offline duties and troubleshooting.

Now, the exciting news. Last weekend I attended a planning meeting related to the upcoming National Day of Health Care Service requested by President Obama. “What?!” you say, ” I hadn’t heard about this.” Well, unless you are heavily engaged in social media, as well as closely paying attention to the White House streams, or had sponsored an event for MyBarackObama.com, chances are that you didn’t hear about it. I talked with a couple folk who work in healthcare for the government, and they were vaguely aware that it had been mentioned, but even they were largely unaware of this rapidly approaching and exciting event. Here is the most important part of what you need to know.

More information is available from Obama’s social networking site, which has returned to powerful activity since he formally took office.

Health Care Action Center: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/health-care-action-center/

National Health Care Day of Service: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hcservice/

I’ve been told that if you want to be part of the conversation, if you want to know what is REALLY going on, get yourself an account on MyBarackObama.com. Please note that this is true for detractors as well as supporters. If you disagree with something the government is doing and want your voice here, this is a good place to comment. Personally, I find this a little puzzling, and am baffled that the communication is coming through relatively personal channels rather than through official channels, but that is an exploration for a different post.

Organizing for America: http://my.barackobama.com

Now, back to my story. June 6th, when the folks in the know were having Kickoff events around the country, I was attending one held in Second Life coordinated by Siri Vita, one of my wonderful neighbors and friends on Cedar Island.

Here is more information about the event in Second Life.

Obama Health Care Reform Plans Discussed: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-268777

This was when I learned about what was going on. As a medical librarian, I am enthusiastic about any opportunity to provide outreach, information and support. The idea of the leaders of the country reaching out to hear from the people of America and listening to them is particularly encouraging. I hope that many will be able to participate. During the earlier social media conversations about health care reform in America, I heard a few themes that leaped out at me. One was the obvious access and costs of health care. A second was that both access and costs could be more effectively addressed through broader employment solutions — if people have good quality jobs, the health care costs might be more manageable. The third point surprised me at first. In each of the earlier meetings, I heard people say that there is not enough good quality health information vetted and synthesized for public consumption to help support personal health decisionmaking, and that people want the government to do more in this area. Having seen so many advertisements on television for MedlinePlus.gov, this surprised me. I could easily diverge into suggestions of resources, but since I’ve been asked to repeat a presentation on this topic for the events on the 27th, I will save that for a separate post.

We are planning what I hope will be a great series of events in Second Life on June 27th. I am hoping to see some local events on campus or in the community as well. There will be more information on this as plans solidify.

How do you get involved or find out more? In addition to the links mentioned above, you might also want to check into these.Remember – read the comments, discuss, say your piece, join the discussion.

Organizing for America: Events in Michigan: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/search_results?type=advanced&orderby=day&state=mi&limit=50

VolunteerMatch: Obama’s Summer of Service: https://www.volunteermatch.org/?_kk=obama%20service&_kt=77eeb43c-a40c-417d-8c5a-0a88c52bf95b

Health Revolution Petition for Health Reform in America: http://www.healthrevolutionpetition.org/citizensincharge.html

MedlinePlus vs. healthfinder: Must We Choose?

On the MEDLIB-L list, someone was recently asking why there are two major consumer health information sites supported by the government — MedlinePlus and healthfinder.gov.

I love them both, as well as a variety of other consumer health websites. Here is my reply, slightly edited to fit this blog format.

You might as well ask why does the government supports websites for both the CDC and the DHHS, or for Cancer.gov and CDC.gov/cancer, or many other examples. Basically, they aren’t doing the same thing, they aren’t targeting the same audience, they aren’t used in the same way, they aren’t providing duplicated content, AND having multiple sites maximizes the likelihood of general public searchers discovering quality information.

How I promote these two resources to my patrons and students is with something like the following rationale.

MedlinePlus

MedlinePlus is a wonderful gateway one-stop-shop for the person-on-the-street with a new diagnosis or who has a casual health question. They have assembled an excellent suite of information resources, and the librarians follow rigorous criteria in the websites they select and include on the topic pages. MedlinePlus is very responsive to consumer input, tracking search queries and developing new information guides in those areas being sought but for which a guide does not currently exist. The inclusion of a variety of dictionaries, encyclopedia, drug resources, media formats, images, local information, and tools to find clinicians make for a mature and comprehensive site. In the niche they fill, I cannot think of anything better.

Because health information needs are rarely if ever one-size-fits-all, it is this very expertise in meeting the needs of their target audience than makes them not always the best match for other audiences. This is only proper. Individuals may want more detailed information, be frustrated with searching for health information in general search engines, but still not be ready for the full clinical information experience we would provide to a healthcare provider. Some people have searching preferences or different information seeking styles that are not a match for having information provided in a package. Some folk just want the next step up — they’ve already reviewed the information in MedlinePlus, but it didn’t answer their questions or they simply want more. People with complex medical conditions or rare diseases may need something different than MedlinePlus, but not be sure where to look. Last but far from least, there are the contrarians, people who feel compelled to second guess the approved information, who want to select from the broadest possible pool of information resources, who have had experiences that have sadly led them to a lack of trust in the mainstream health professions.

healthfinder.gov

healthfinder offers that next step. Even if you just look at the numbers, it is obvious that healthfinder is targeting a broader audience, with MedlinePlus having 750 topics and healthfinder over 1600. Because the information in healthfinder is not as strictly selected as that in MedlinePlus it offers a fluidity and flexibility that is attractive to some people. It offers them a somewhat broader range of content, a sense of personal control in searching and selecting content. Their interface seems to do a very attractive job of focusing on health promotion and behavior change. I adore their collection of online checkup tools. These are great in empowering the person seeking health information while still steering them to appropriate healthcare when it really is necessary. These online screening tools serve a secondary purpose as educational tools — as you answer the questions, you learn what the important issues are for a given condition or concern. I love that they include quizzes and little health games. I love the health promotion e-cards. I love the little value-added content pieces they offer, like National Health Observances Calendar.

My very favorite part of healthfinder is their search tool. They have the most amazing custom search engine (CSE) I’ve ever seen for consumer health information, absolutely beautiful. This CSE has preselected the finest in consumer health information from the best sources, and excluded the non-consumer health information from the same sources. “You can search for resources on a wide range of health topics selected from over 1,600 government and non-profit organizations by using healthfinder.gov’s Health A-Z topic and text search.” When you use their search tool, everything you get back is quality consumer health information. I consider this very powerful, sort of the best kept secret in consumer health. Just enter a term on their search box, and go. It isn’t obvious that you are searching beyond their site, which is why I call it a “secret”. For more information, check here:

healthfinder: Search Tips: http://healthfinder.gov/search/searchtips.asp

But I don’t stop with even MedlinePlus and healthfinder. I keep going. Here are more of my favorites, matched to the types of questions for which I find them valuable.

What can I say? There is genuine value in the old adage “Different strokes for different folks.” It is disrespectful of individual differences and individual needs to try to force healthcare consumers to accept only one source. Rather than think of MedlinePlus and healthfinder as competing products ( a misguided view if I ever saw one!), I would prefer to think of them as companion resources, each expanding on and filling a niche that the other does not, friends that balance and expand on each other’s view even when they agree to disagree, respecting and embracing those differences.