The Choice is Yours - YRCA

I always order the nominees for the Pacific Northwest Library Association's Young Reader's Choice Awards, but I have never introduced this contest to our students. After attending Sara Saxton's sectional, I believe I will!
Students, teachers, parents and librarians in the Pacific Northwest ~ Alaska, Alberta, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana and Washington may nominate books for this award. Fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, animae and manga that are 3 years old are eligible (no sequels). The deadline for nominations to the state YRCA representitive is Feb. 1 of each year.'
After the finalists have been chosen by the representitives, a ballot is ready for voting. Only students may vote between March 15 and April 15. The winners are announced in April, just in time for your spring orders! Sara stated that Alaska has not had much participation, and encouraged us to have our students participate. There is a wiggio set up for a discussion group for title nominations.

AkASL Top 25 Speed Session!

What impressed me the most about this presentation was watching the presenters collaborate with the LiveBinder product in the restaurant the morning of the session as they prepared. Any product that easy to work with in a collaborative setting, which can in turn be used for the presentation is worth investigating! While they did cover a lot of ground, maybe even too much for those of us wanting to look at the products on the computers they invited us to bring along, with the information housed in the LiveBinder it is gathered together nicely and easy to revisit.

As for other favorites from the presentation I latched onto BeFunky.com because it doesn’t require setting up an account or having an email, which will be so handy for our students. I also took the plunge and set up an Edmodo account. Now I need to get busy and give it a good trial run! And I want to look into the LiveScribe smart pens.....when I have a minute!!

Ebooks Legalese

In the session Ebooks Legalese, UAA librarian Jodee Kuden, gave a concise rundown of the multitude of different ways of acquiring digital content ranging from subscriptions to databases to the purchase of access to ebooks. She mentioned the different formats of audio and text ebooks with the possibility of buying individual titles or packages of titles, which are sometimes more economical. Discussed was the need to understand whether you as the buyer are hosting the content yourself or more likely linking to a vendor or publishers platform. In that case it is important to look at whether you are paying for annual access to the content or site or perpetual access and what does that mean if the vendor or publisher goes out of business or is acquired by another company. It is very important to look at the licensing agreements, which can and should be negotiated.

The unfortunate news is that there is still no standardization of formats either in the ebooks or the ereader platforms. She mentioned a few of the different approaches publishers are trying such as HarperCollins limiting books to 26 checkouts before requiring the purchase of a new copy.

Jodee mentioned Trisha Davis of the Ohio State University Libraries as a resource on licensing information as well as a post by Rick Anderson on what he calls the “Seven License Terms of Death.” His advise, while a little old (2006) still seems sound to me and might be well worth looking into. Jodee mentioned that among other things he recommends changing the jurisdiction of the license to be according to the rules of your own state and no others.

With the current continual upheaval in the ebook world I foresee the need for sessions similar to this at each and every conference to some time to come.

Battle of the Books - High School

This is the line-up for the 2013 High School Battle of the Books!
A group of high school librarians from around the state choose the books shown above from a list of 30 determined by recommendations from students, teachers and librarians. These recommended books were checked for availablity, popularity, reading level and other official BOTB guidelines. Librarians volunteered to write questions which will be organized for next year's battle.

The Anythink Libraries

Pam Sanderlin-Smith was my favorite speaker at the conference, and I had never heard of her or The Anythink Library System before!

When she started in 2007 the Ridgeview Library District in Colorado was the worst funded library district in the state.  They raised some money, then it became second worst funded.  The district covers 320,000 people and a large area of rural and suburban Denver.  The funding was 3 million a year.  The collections wereover 20 years old, there was very low staffing, and old buildings.

They got bonds passed to build four new libraries and renovate three in the last four years.  Sanderlin-Smith's philosophy is you only get a chance and money to build and remodel once.  These were some of the concepts they came up with:

• Old ideas: Books and periodicals, shhh, homework and schoolwork, interaction of people and information.
• New ideas: Community connections, open doors and unlimited imagination, curiosity and empowerment.
• The spaces needed to be built around these new concepts, not the old ones.
• Design for people in the space, not the books.
• They call themselves an experience library, want people to feel welcome and at home.
• The library system was renamed Anythink.
• Bookstore like, fireplaces, and LEED certification—all of these were requirements for their library buildings.
• Information desks are now smaller and called perches.
• Library assistants are called concierges.
• There are tree houses in the children’s section.
• There are zones for children to wander around and touch and play in different areas.
• They want to make people want to live in the library.
• It is an indoor/outdoor library.
• They call their bookmobile Anythink in Motion.
• Changing the building is easy.  Changing the culture is harder.
• They had to change the culture of the staff, and rebrand themselves.
• They believe they are the heart and soul of the community because they help people find the information that creates that spark.
• The technology staff aren’t hired for skills, but rather personality and spirit of service, and teamwork ethic.  Then they train them.
• Qualities they want from their employees: understanding compassionate, self starter, strong work ethic, flexible and can change, communicator, problem solver, emotionally mature, continuous learner, innovator, leader, responsible and honest.
• Wranglers (shelvers)—part product placement, part inventory control, part display technician.
• Concierge (front line staff)--part customer service, part tech assistance, part product promotion— refluff displays so they look fresh and great.
• Guide—part customer education, part reference advocate, part event planning.
• Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side.
• We’re in a people profession.
• Doesn’t have a quiet library because people need to collaborate.  Shhh is a four letter word!
• Got rid of Dewey used BISAC (bookstore standard).  This is also used by Maricopa Co. Public Library.
• It's like Dewey, but instead of having numbers on the spine you have words.
• Transitioned in one year while opening branches and renovating.
• BISAC is a mapping system.

Search Like a Pro

Nancy Warren gave us many tips on how to search more effectively and efficiently since search engines are constantly changing.

• Spiders crawl and find different pages and makes a schedule to revisit the page.
• Crawl rate—5 years ago was 4-5 weeks, sometimes less, now pages are crawled at least weekly, many times more frequently.
• Google and Bing have proprietary crawlers, other search engines are covers of these two.
• When you search for things like Olympics or presidential campaign, they assume you mean this year.
• Evergreen—when the time doesn’t matter like recipes, etc.
• If you want to search for past Olympic years you need to be specific.Your prior searches are tied into your current searches. Bing goes 90 days back, Google now tied into all your accounts forever.
• Your prior searches heavily influence your results.  Everyone gets different results from each other.Flash cookies will reinstall cookies, even if you think you erased them.  More about that tomorrow.
• Algorithm changes: freshness, your prior searches, your accounts.
• Bing also indexes your information on MSN, Facebook, and Hotmail.
• Google indexes all of their 64 services (Gmail, Picasa, Blogger, YouTube, etc).  If you’re logged into any of their services while you’re searching it will influence it.
• IP address and location are very strong influences in your search too.
• "And" is part of the search if it part of the search term, ie: Johnson and Associates.
• "Or" is trouble, for example or means Oregon, it no longer matters if you capitalize it.
• Search engines now make synonyms like dining for restaurants.
• Synonymization is a formal process where they are coming up with lists aof synonyms and incorporating them into their search process.
• "The" is now a search term.  WHO vs The Who.
• Hyphens are treated differently like part time, part-time and part –time.
• Put $ in search term if you want prices.
• + not used in google anymore because they are using it for google+   + used to mean use this word like it is, no synonyms, keep this spelling.
• “ “ weren’t useful for a while, but they are useful again.
• Put quotes around a word that is misspelled, like “dimond”.
• Put quotes around a common name like “business fasteners inc”.
• Google Verbatim is like searching in the old days.
• Things Google will do for you: math equations, unit conversions, time, weather, sunrise and sunset, package tracking, flight tracking (airline code and flight code), movie listing (title and zipcode).
• Site: is a good search term for searching on certain type of sites or domains.  Don’t use the insite search bar, just use google and site: (name) + term.
• Filetype: doc, ppt, etc.
• Will HTML5 affect search results?  It’s like flash.  It is mobile friendly, multimedia friendly.  We'll find out!
• People can get extremely different results depending on their known political viewpoints, for instance on an issue like abortion.
• If you put in negative search terms like bankruptcy, foreclosure, health problems, unsafe hobies, hate sites, and that goes into your search history and is sold.  This can influence things like buying insurance online!
• Anti personalization search engines: 1. Duck duck go uses bing, can change location to world wide.  2. Ixquick and StartPage are worlds most private search engine, encrypts searches, no IP recorded, view through proxy. IxQuick is both engines, StartPage is Google only.

Battle of the Books

Every year at the AKLA conference librarians meet to determine what next year's Battle of the Books will be.  I have helped out every year I've been at the conference for the last six years.  This is a great way to give input into what my students will be reading next year for Battle of the Books, and to help shape what students all over the state will be reading since I care that they are exposed to the best, most interesting books possible.  There were 27 books that we could choose from, that had been preselected for suitability and being in print.  There were five of us there this year, all middle school librarians.  One from Sitka, one from Unalaska, two from Mat-Su, and I'm from Anchorage.  We discussed which books the students would like best, and made sure it was a balanced list appealing to both girls and boys.  There are mysteries, humor, an Alaska story, fantasy, multicultural fiction, non-fiction, and classics!  The other great thing about being on the selection committee was that I was able to tell my students right away what next year's books would be.  I updated my school's website that night!  Students told me Monday morning that they checked the website over the weekend to find what the new books were.  What are they?  Check them out on our library website!