3 Keys to Engaging Digital Natives
Keynote by Michelle Manafy, Director of Content, Free Pint Limited
You can view the entire speech here.
- public opinion, not private lives
- knowledge sharing, not knowledge hoarding
- interactions, not transactions
- Use options such as Social Sign-on to blur the line between your environment and their environment.
- For a good example of knowledge sharing, check out Digitalkoot from the National Library of Finland. It’s a very cool cultural heritage project — users play games that help improve the indexing accuracy of the library’s archives.
- Listen, respond, and react: digital natives are engaged by genuine communication.
- We have to think more like the digital native in order to survive.
Learning from Inspirational Libraries
This session was mostly visual, with photos of libraries from all over the world. I didn’t take very good notes, but here are a couple:
- The Yonsei Samsung Library in Korea embraces Web 2.0 in how their building uses space — interactive with digital maps and digital signage.
- The library in Medellin, Colombia has book pick-up and drop-off locations at subway stations. They also built new library facilities in the “worst areas” of town, which ended up transforming the neighborhoods.
Metasocial: Making Online & Mobile Interactions Rock
Speakers: David Lee King, Sarah Houghton-Jan, and Nate Hill
- Libraries should friend and follow people in their local area — focus on your customers first, not on those in the librarian community who don’t live in your area and won’t be using your library.
- Treat your foursquare mayor!
- Augmented Reality (AR) combines a mobile device’s GPS, camera, and accelerometer to provide a digital view of the physical world connected to digital objects (or a digital world).
- For examples of augmented reality layers, check out Layar.
- The San Jose Public Library created the San Jose Now mobile app using Drupal 7 CMS, HTML5/CSS3, Google Maps API3, and jQuery mobile framework.
New Alignments, Structures, and Services
- Don’t have a service model where your clients or patrons only see you when they want or need something.
- Increase your visibility within your organization by attending other meetings and adopting the same accountability measures as other projects.
- Adopting a pilot mentality lets you evaluate between different products or services, allowing one to rise above the others by seeing how they would actually be implemented (instead of making a decision based on paper or theory).
- The daily “scrum” meeting: your team meets every morning for 10-15 minutes to share what everyone worked on yesterday and will work on today — provides accountability for project goals.
- Using a variety of commercial sources is difficult because they don’t all work well together due to restrictions.
- Moving to a model of open source programs gives you much more control (you can get exactly what you want), and data can be more easily used in multiple contexts.
Integrating iPads into Learning and Libraries
- The Ryerson University Library and Archives in Toronto started a research project to see how students can use ipads for school. Four students were selected from their library Student Advisory Committee, and in order to keep their ipad at the end of the research project, the students must participate in meetings and blog weekly. The research project is not over yet, so more analysis is to come.
- Because of the number and variety of available ipad apps, students from different majors and fields were able to find ones to fit their studies. For example, the myPANTONE app lets one student color match items in both digital and print forms.
- If considering conducting a similar study, be sure to get ethics approval early. Consider other tablets (now that there are more on the market) and providing participants with peripherals such as a keyboard or stylus. Decrease blogging frequency to once every other week to allow students more time to reflect.
- Is the ipad useful on a temporary basis? For information and book consumption, yes. Loaning ipads also introduces people to new technologies, letting them test it out to decide if they want to get one or not. If producing work or using it as a personal device (using app for email, calendar, etc.), the ipad is not ideal for a temporary loan.
- The ipad is a hybrid device — used for both consumption and production.
Getting to the Eureka Moment
My notes for this session also aren’t very thorough — for good reason, though. The speaker (Julian Aiken, Access Services Librarian at the Yale Law Library) was so funny, it was hard to take notes. If you don’t believe me, check Twitter.
- Every librarian should have the opportunity to experiment with a “rummy” (odd) but potentially brilliant idea.
- Incorporate Google’s 80/20 innovation model in your library as a staff reward.
- Allowing a scheduled time to work on another project can greatly benefit the staff member’s professional development in addition to the library.
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