Are You a 2.0 Library?

Presented online for METRO (www.metro.org) on 13 April 2009.

View more presentations from Michael Sauers.

Searching 2.0 presentation

Thanks to everyone who attended either via EI or PEN today. Here’s the presentation for those that missed it.

Searching 2.0 (EI & PEN)

View more presentations from Michael Sauers.

Embedding YouTube Videos into PowerPoint 2007

These instructions were originally posted on Clay’s Blog. I’ve modified them a little and added screenshots.

1. First turn on the Developer Tab on the Ribbon by clicking on the Microsoft logo at the top left of the window and selecting PowerPoint Options all the way at the bottom of the menu. Next put a check next to the unchecked item to show the Developer Tab
    
   
2. Go to YouTube and select a video to embed
3. Copy the URL
   
   
4. Open Notepad and paste the URL
   
   
5. In the URL delete "watch?" and change the = sign to a ⁄
6. Copy the new URL
   
   
7. Back in PowerPoint, on the Developer menu choose "More Controls"
   
   
8. Select Shockwave Flash Object
   
   
9. Click and drag on the PowerPoint slide to draw a box in which the video will appear
   
   
10. Right Click the box and select properties
    
    
11. Paste the URL into the Movie Property field
    
    
12. Adjust the options for Looping or AutoPlay if desired
13. Close the Properties window
14. You can now adjust the size of the video by dragging the corners as needed

Your YouTube video will now play directly in your presentation provided you are connected to the Internet.

I’ll be speaking in Las Vegas next week

Thanks and thanks again

Just a quick pair of thanks to the librarians at Love Library on the campus of University of Nebraska, Lincoln and to the attendees of the Southeast Library System (NE) 2008 Training Extravaganza, both of whom I spoke for last week. Both groups were fun and my hosts were a pleasure to work with. Below is a photo of some Wii Boxing fun which will link you through to my other photos from the SELS event. (My presentation was on LibraryThing and it was not recorded nor were there handouts.) Video, audio, and the slides from my UNL talk are available through the NLC blog.

Oh, and UNL librarians: Yes, Diana will be one of your students this fall. Got any work-study openings?

Spring Speaking Schedule

March

• 11 - Rapid City Public Library, Rapid City, SD, Social Web Workshops
• 12 - South Dakota Library Association Spring Forum, Rapid City, SD, Keynote (Social Web) and closing (Observations from the day)
• 14 - South Dakota Library Association Spring Forum, Brookings, SD, Keynote (Social Web) and closing (Observations from the day)
• 19 - Library Camp Kansas, Manhattan, KS
• 20 - University of Nebraska Council of Libraries (UNCL) Staff Development Day, Lincoln, NE, Social Networking & Library 2.0

April

• 6 - Computers in Libraries 2008, Crystal City, VA, Gaming Preconference (attending)
• 7 - Computers in Libraries 2008, Crystal City, VA, Moderator for Track A
• 8 - Computers in Libraries 2008, Crystal City, VA, C202: Libraries a-Twitter & del.icio.us
• 9 - Computers in Libraries 2008, Crystal City, VA, eBooks & eInk Cybertour
• 10 - Computers in Libraries 2008, Crystal City, VA, RSS Postconference
• 17 - Nebraska Library Commission, Lincoln, NE, Get Your Game On! The How and Why of running a gaming tournament in your library
• 24 & 25 - 3rd International Conference on Information Warfare and Security (attending), Peter Kiewit Institute, University of Nebraska Omaha
• 25 - Lincoln City Libraries Staff Day (unconfirmed), Lincoln, NE, Library Signage

May

• 7 - Prarie Area Library System (PALS) Day, Starved Rock State Park, Il, Reference 2008
• 20-23 - NLC Workshops, Chadron State College, Chadron, NE, Topics TBA
• 28 - NLC Workshop, Lincoln, NE, XHTML
• 29 - NLC Workshop, Lincoln, NE, CSS

Map via Dopplr

Integrating RSS Into Your Web Site

And here's the final bit, the slides for my RSS preconference @ Internet Librarian 2007.

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LBI @ IL2007

In case you missed "the Dutch boys'" presentation, here is my 10 edited version of the live portions of their presentation.

Second Life, Second Thoughts

Here's my Second Life presentation from Internet Librarian 2007.

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(I'm having a little trouble uploading my other two presentations to SlideShare at this time. I'll get them up as soon as I can.)

Participating in the Creative Commons

Here's the first of my two Cyber Tours from Internet Librarian 2007.

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The Sony Reader: eInk has arrived

Here's my second presentation from NLA/NEMA 2007. (I'm posting it early as I know what my post-presentation schedule is going to be and if I don't post it now, it might never show up.)

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What is Second Life?

Here's my Second Life presentation shown yesterday at the NLA/NEMA 2007 conference in Kearney, NE.

(Especially for those of you that attended and wished to actually see the videos that refused to play during my presentation.)

Who Drives Change?

Dr. Melmer from the SD Department of Education spoke at SDLA2007. At the end of his talk he drew an analogy between how banks have changed and how libraries need to change. I took that and made it a smidge more visual. Here's the result:

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What's Hot... Not.

I've been to a lot of conference presentations. I've been to presentations where the content was very out of date (a 1998 presentation on Gopher usage in the campus library), presentations that have contained factual errors, presenters that have mispronounced common words (yes folks, .gif is pronounced "jif" regardless of how you or I think it should be pronounced), and presentations in which I didn't agree with the opinions of the presenters. In most cases, mainly since I'm a presenter myself, I haven't complained. Crud happens. It happens to all of us. And presenters always seem to be at the bottom of said hill the crud is rolling down. (Projector problems anyone?) But a presentation I sat in on yesterday crossed a line and I've got to say something about it.

Here's the title and description of the session:

What's Hot in Library Technology
In this session you will discover how to make emerging trends in technology make your library come alive. We will discuss the basics of web browsing interfaces, trends in communicating online such as chatting and video conferencing, we will also look at blogs, great websites, web 2.0 and virtual worlds such as Second Life. The session will wrap-up with a Q & A session.

The session was in two parts with a break in the middle. It sounded like an interesting presentation so I went. Heck, I might pick up something new. I usually do. If nothing else I might learn something from how the speaker presents the material. What I got was my jaw on the table for an hour. (The second hour was very different so I'm going to just talk about the first half.)

The presenter introduced herself and started to go over her agenda. She quickly asked wether the audience were PC or Mac users. Everyone I noticed indicated PCs and she acknowledged that the room was PC dominant. She explained that she was a Mac user and that she was going to focus on Macs and cover them a lot since it "would be good for the audience to understand the differences and know the history of Macs vs. PCs." I got a little nervous at this point as I didn't see how that fit into the topic as advertised but then again, I've done similar things to help people get the larger picture of an issue so I sat back to see what she'd do. Little did I know what we were in for.

What we all got for the better part of the hour was an anti-Microsoft, anti-Windows verbal screed.

Early on the presenter was comparing Mac vs. PC hardware and said that Macs were better because they were "all one machine" and therefore "had no CPU." (She meant that many Macs had the CPU and monitor in one unit instead of a separate CPU box and monitor but that's not what she said.) Besides being a completely nonsensical statement, there are all-in-one PCs and there are Macs with non-built in monitors. (Never mind that fact that all laptops of any type would fit into the all-in-one category.)

Next she pointed out how the Mac OS was shown by Steve Jobs to Bill Gates and then Bill Gates proceeded to "steal it" from Apple and develop windows. Ok, but didn't Apple "steal" the idea of a GUI from Xerox PARC?

She mentioned Vista and how "it's had so many problems" and that upgrading to it is difficult at best and that on a Mac you can just upgrade the OS without upgrading your hardware. (Yeah, let's try to run OSX on a Mac Classic.) Meanwhile I was running Vista on my laptop in the back of the room.

Throughout the presentation she included videos to illustrate her points. Some she's created herself ("on my Mac", implying that this was impossible on a PC), and some that she's downloaded from YouTube (again "on my Mac" using some cool tools that she didn't cover in any detail.) Every single video showed not only how much better Macs were (the Mac vs. PC guy over upgrading to Vista), but were specifically chosen, or edited, to make Bill Gates look like a bumbling, humorous, techno geek, and make Steve Jobs look like the second coming. The single worst video was a three-minute edited version (the original was about an hour long) of the recent joint interview of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates from the D5 conference. Other videos included the famous one of Gates getting a BSOD during a demo and a scene from Frasier.

At one point she did show an "early Windows commercial" which she believed was for "Windows 96 or something". (For those not sure, no such OS ever existed.)

I, nor anyone else in the room, should have expected nor deserved such a presentation. Macs may be cool technology but arguing over platform when, I assume, few in the room had any control over what platform their library uses, serves no purpose. Never mind that fact that such issues are not relevant to "What's hot in library technology."

Even if the session had been titled "A comparison of Macs and PCs", "Windows vs. MacOS", "Why your library should use Macs", or even "Macs Kick Ass", what was presented was unprofessional at best, and did nothing more or less than a disservice to everyone in that room.

All conference presenters have a duty to the conference attendees to present their content in a balanced and professional manner. It's ok to have an opinion and to advocate for that opinion but what happened here was neither a health dose of advocacy or excited evangelism. It was "I'm right, you're wrong. I'm cool, you're not. Get a life, get a Mac."

(My comments should in no way be construed as a criticism of anyone involved with the set up or running of the conference. Presenters are, in most cases, solely responsible for the content of their presentations and the organizers generally have no way of knowing exactly what any presenter will say. However, I would not recommend that this particular presenter be invited back next year.)

Reference 2.0

Here's today's SDAL2007 presentation.

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My SDLA2007 Keynote

In an effort to stop myself from making further changes to my presentation, here it is, my opening keynote presentation for the South Dakota Library Association 2007 conference to be presented this afternoon at 4pm CDT.

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Presentation ideas

Today's Unshelved proves that publishing and presentation ideas can come from almost anywhere.

On presenting copyright

On Saturday I attended a training day for school media specialists. The three afternoon sessions were on Flickr & Blogging (presented by a co-worker of mine), Copyright (presented by someone I don't know) and Podcasting (presented by YT). I caught the end of the flickr presentation, sat through the whole copyright presentation and then did mine. At the request of a couple of folks who read my tweets during the copyright presentation, I've written this post.

Important note: I am not criticizing the presenter. Her presentation style was just fine and her information was accurate in the strictest sense. So please, do not view this a anything vaguely related to a comment on the presenter herself.

The first problem with presenting an issue such as copyright is the fact that it's a legal issue and the final arbiter of whether you're violating copyright lays with a judge or a jury after presenting a bucket-load of facts. Those situations generally require lawyers to sort out the details and several times the presenter reminded the audience "I am not a lawyer". This is not to say that she shouldn't present this topic. I've attended presentations on copyright with a panel of lawyers, and they couldn't do much better since many times the answer to a given scenario is "it depends".

Because of this, most copyright presenters will err on the side of caution, especially when presenting to people from schools as, after all, you don't want to do something that will get your school sued by a copyright holder. So, for example, the presenter mentioned this example from the flickr presentation in which the Westmont Public Library is using flickr to promote new materials. According to the presenter, before doing this, the library should "check the license" in the book to see if this "use" is allowed and, not finding such permission in the item, contact each of the publishers individually, get permission, file that permission away, and then proceed with photographing the item and posting it on flickr.

O.k. that might follow the letter of the law but I would hardly call that a realistic course of action. (In fact, School Library Journal would say that this falls under fair use.) Granted, that is the exactly the technically correct advice to give and I don't blame her for it. But such advice, in my opinion, needs to be tempered with a bit of reality. Maybe something along the lines of "this may, or may not, fall under fair use and be prepared to stop doing it should a publisher object." However, no such advice was given and I could tell that by the end of the hour, every school-media specialist in that room looked a bit more paranoid than they did at the beginning of the hour.

I am not trying to say that this is the fault of the presenter. She's presenting on copyright and therefore does not want (I assume) to run the risk of giving someone "bad advice" and getting in trouble for it later. That's natural. However, the fact that she's in the position she's in, shows just how screwed up the current copyright law is.

P.S. I will give the presenter kudos for pointing out that Mickey Mouse is the driving force behind copyright updating.

P.P.S. From NPR's Morning Edition today: Stanford Center Advocates for Fair Use on Web

NLC Vendor Day 2007

Yesterday several dozen librarians from throughout Nebraska joined NLC staff and about a dozen library vendors at the Cornhusker Marriott in Lincoln, NE for the second annual NLC Vendor Day.

Overall I'd say it was a success. All of the sessions were well attended and many great questions were asked of the vendors about their products. Both of my sessions, Second Life and Hot Topics in Technology" were also well attended.

More specifically to me, my use of YouTube as presentation platform seemed to go over very well. All of the feedback I received indicated that it worked well and gave everyone an idea of what it was like to be in Second Life without actually going there. (That, and I didn't use PowerPoint at all so that's a guaranteed plus.)

From the presenter's persepctive YouTube did leave a bit to be desired. Due to the fact that all YouTube video pages force you to scroll to see the whole video window and each time you move to the next video in a playlist you have to re-scroll, I decided to use the playlist that I embedded in my blog the previous day. This way I could scroll down once, click play, and let it run, pausing when I needed to address something specific. Unfortunately, I didn't test this plan fully in advance. It seems that embedded playlists will play the first four videos and then force you to click over to the YouTube site to play the rest. (For purposes of ad revenue I'm sure.) So, due to this I was back in YouTube, scrolling to align future videos on the screen. It wasn't a complete breakdown of the plan but it did catch me off guard, something I try to avoid during a presentation.

The only other comment I would make about this method of presenting is not to go over the 30 minute mark when showing video. I pretty much kept to exactly 30 but I started to get the feeling at the end that if I'd gone any longer I would have started to loose some of the attendees.

Overall I'd give the day a 9 out of 10 and my YouTube experiment an 8 out of 10. (My photos from the day can be found by clicking on the photo in this post.)

YouTube as Presentation

Tomorrow is the Nebraska Library Commission's Vendor Day and as part of the festivities I get 30 minutes to introduce Second Life. So, with the discovery of the video I posted earlier today I decided to take a different approach and assemble 30 minutes worth of YouTube videos and use them. (I'll most likely cut short the Vega song short as I'm using it more as an intro to the video on building her SL guitar.) I've still got handouts but I thought this would be an interesting experiment. The videos are presented for you below and I'll report back afterwards as to how the audience liked it.

In-service Day

On Friday I was honored to attend and present at the Lincoln City Library's In-Service day. I haven't had a faster or more fun Arbor Day in my life. I was great to meet so many librarians from my new home town and to see how excited you were about all the new technologies I was presenting. At one point during my Flickr presentation someone asked for more specific examples of how to use Flickr in a library. Well, here's one. Use Flickr to post a slideshow of an event on the library's blog/Web site.

Embed Slideshow

Being introduced

Being introduced
Originally uploaded by Travelin' Librarian.

I'm now giving my flickr session to Lincoln City librarians.

SirsiDynix Institute follow-up

The MP3 and PDF for my Second Life presentation are now available on SirsiDynixInstitute.com.

Post Its as PowerPoint

I've got to try this sometime.

Second Life & Info Island presentation

This morning Rhonda and did a SirsiDynix Institute presentation on Second Life and Info Island to more than 300 attendees and have both received several post-presentation e-mails already so keep them coming. For those that missed it, there are several ways to get copies of the material.

• The audio and video recordings along with a PDF of the slides will be available via the SDI archive page in the next few days.
• The raw PPT file is now available on my presentations page.
• I've embedded a Web-based version (sans audio) of the PPT files below.

Thanks to everyone who made this a success. Please feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions.