Checkups for the Girls

We took the girls in for checkups this week. Kaylee is doing well; she weighs in at 14 pounds, 2 ounces and is 2 feet, 1 inch long. This puts her in the 50th percentile for weight and 77th percentile for height. Rayna weighed 25 lbs.pounds and is 2 feet, 11 inches tall. She is in the 27th percentile for weight and 71st percentile for height. Both got shots but Kaylee got the worst of it with 4 sticks. Poor kid.

Nicole took Rayna back a couple of days later to have her eyes checked. Ever since she was born, we’ve been aware that one of her eyes tracks a little slower than the other. If you look on our photo page, you can see what I mean. We held off doing anything because kids often outgrow this. But now she’s two and Nicole has a history of this kind of thing in her family, so we decided to have it checked out. The doctor felt that it wasn’t very severe and she may well grow out of it yet. So, we’re going to wait a year and take another look. If she still is showing symptoms, we’ll need to start talking about treatment. Rayna withstood the tests like a real trooper and I’m told that she said “hi” to just about every patient in the Mayo Clinic as she was walking to the doctor’s office. Nicole said that she got a lot of smiles that day.

Dinner with the Girls

Here’s some video I shot the other night of dinnertime with Kaylee and Rayna. I’m doing this as a way of trying out blip.tv, so bear with me if the quality of the video isn’t outstanding. I’m new to all this and didn’t do any editing of any kind on this clip–what you see is what you get. It’s almost 30 minutes long but there is some cute stuff here and there in the clip.

RSS Feeds–23 Things Step #3

Step #3 of the 23 Things on a Stick program is about RSS feeds.  I’ve been using RSS for awhile now to keep up on news and other information.  Presently, I’m tracking 54 feeds in Google Reader; here are the ones I find most useful:

Libraries and Library-Specific Technology

• Intelligent Agent Blog
• Library Technology Guides automation update
• Tennant: Digital Libraries

Technology

• Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report
• I, Cringely
• Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows
• The Register
• Engadget

Parenting

• Ask Moxie
• Jumping Monkeys
• Parent Hacks
• US Consumer Product Safety Commission – Recent Child-Related Product Recalls

News and Politics

• CNN
• Democratic Strategist
• Slate

Fun Stuff

• Heavenfield
• Strange Maps
• NPR: All Songs Considered

Happy President’s Day!

Today is President’s Day, the day we honor the legacy and contributions of our two greatest Presidents:  George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  Here are a few links to get you started:

Mt. Vernon

Rediscovering George Washington

The Papers of George Washington 

Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library 

Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress 

More Pictures

I’ve loaded more pictures, including a few of Kaylee, visits to Santa, and shots from Rayna’s second birthday party. I haven’t added tags or descriptions but most of them are self-explanatory. Flickr messed up the order of the files in the photostream a little. Not sure how that happened, I just dumped them all into the uploader and let it run all night. Maybe I messed up.

C’est la vie.

Kaylee Discovers There is Food After Milk

Kaylee had her first solid food today!  It was just a few spoonfuls of rice cereal but it was still a red-letter day for her.  We took plenty of pictures and will get them posted soon.  First, however, we must post our Halloween pictures.

Yes, I know it’s February and Halloween was back in October.  Nonetheless, pictures from Halloween are uploading to our page at Flickr even as we speak.  Also a few more pictures from Kaylee’s first few days.  Since Kaylee was born we’ve been taking a lot of pictures but haven’t found much time to upload them.  I’ll be trying to fix that in the next few days.

We’re all just about over the colds and other ailments that have bedeviled us for the last couple of weeks.  The girls are still not sleeping well at night; being sick really threw them off.  Hopefully, that will even out now that they are feeling better.

It’s been snowing today.  Not bad but enough make me glad we don’t have to go out.  The girls are both asleep at the moment but that is subject to end any minute now so I’ve got to type fast. 

Pushing Paper Out the Door

Cross posted to SELCO Librarian

The New York Times recently published an interesting article entitled Pushing Paper Out the Door (free registration required). As you might guess, the article is about people using less paper as digital storage and access becomes more and more common. Among the anecdotal evidence and interviews is an interesting statistic: In the richest countries in the world, per capita paper consumption has dropped 6% from 2000 to 2005.

I don’t see paper disappearing anytime soon. Remember the promise of the paperless office? Having said that, the article struck a chord with me. In the past year or two, I’ve been striving to cut down my use of paper in my personal life and at work. Honestly, it wasn’t planned or carefully thought-out. It just sort of happened:

• Maps and phone books are largely things of the past as Google Maps and online phone books have become my navigational tools of choice. I still print out my maps from Google, mostly because I’m too cheap to spring for a GPS unit or smart phone with Internet connectivity. When the price barriers drop a little more, I’ll be all over it.

• I’ve become much more likely to take my laptop to a meeting at work and simply access relevant documents online from the SELCO web page or our shared storage drive. Anymore, I don’t even take a pen; any notes I take will be typed up in a text editor. Every once in awhile, I’ll be embarrassed when I cannot come up with a document quickly enough in a meeting; I still find it faster to shuffle paper than to shuffle documents in Windows. This hasn’t happened enough to make me go back to printing everything out before the meeting.

• I still tend to print out documents if I have to compare them side-by-side. That is changing, however, as I now have a monitor large enough to display two standard size documents side by side. The annotation tools in Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader aren’t second nature to me yet so I still tend to reach for my highlighter and Post-It notes when editing documents. The jury is still out on this one.

• Business cards last just long enough in my office to have their contents typed into Outlook. Then they are gone regardless of the fancy embossing or card stock they are printed on.

• All my finances are done online. If you don’t have a web page where I can access my account and make payments directly from my bank, you’re unlikely to get my business.

Two needs have driven me to trade electrons for ink:

• The need to find things more efficiently. I’m one of those people who cannot stick to a personal filing system and I constantly find myself digging through stacks of paper. I would much rather file this stuff electronically and use tools like Search and tagging to find data. In a similar vein, email has become my personal information management system. Any conversation I have in email gets archived where I can search it later. There are sophisticated software solutions for this kind of thing but email still works for me.

• The need to reduce clutter. My inability to stick to a personal filing system means I tend to have stacks of paper on every available surface. Yuck.

So it may not be a paperless world just yet but I think more people are going to embrace this way of operating as digital storage becomes more ubiquitous. What can libraries do to serve patrons who want to lose the paper?

• Make every communication from the library available electronically. Notices should be available via email, text messaging, instant messaging and whatever else comes up. Checkout receipts should be handled this way too. Wouldn’t it be cool if checkout receipts could be emailed as an iCal or Outlook appointment? The patron could just drop it into their calendar and get a reminder a few days before the item is due. I think most libraries have gotten the word on email but support for the other tools is uneven at best. Support from ILS vendors on this kind of thing has been uneven as well.

• We’ve got to find a better way to deliver online content like e-books. The existing tools are cumbersome and difficult for both librarians and patrons. I don’t have a better idea on this but I’ll look closely at any vendor who partners with an e-book provider to build this into their ILS.

• More public access computers for patrons trying to manage their lives on the run. I think that libraries have mostly gotten this and have put out as many computers as their buildings will allow. There are other ways to push the envelope, however. Making sure that all the public access computers are relatively new (thus fast) and not locked down to the point that patrons cannot access their data and applications is a place to start.

• Wireless is your friend. Wireless Internet has the potential to help rescue us from the pressure to constantly add more public access computers. Many patrons would love to use their own laptops if the library would just offer WiFi. And don’t stop at laptops; we also need to embrace other wireless devices like smart phones. It’s time to take down the “Please turn off your cell phone” signs.

None of these are new suggestions but they point the way forward. What other strategies come to mind? Are you looking to lose the paper or do you think this is just an updated version of the “Someday, we’ll all work in paperless offices” hype? Leave a comment and let’s talk about it.

A New Look

We have a new look here at The Lambrights.  After submitting my last post, I found that the old template does not display bullet points correctly.  Those of you who have to read a lot of my writing know that I use bullet points.  A lot.  In fact, I’m kind of shocked that this hasn’t come to my attention before now.

So now we have a new template.  One that displays bullet points correctly.  I’m a happy man.

Library 2.0

Just read John Blyberg’s blog post on Library 2.0 as part of step 2 of the 23 Things on a Stick program. He quotes Sarah Houghton’s (aka the Librarian in Black) definition of Library 2.0:

“Library 2.0 simply means making your library’s space (virtual and physical) more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs. Examples of where to start include blogs, gaming nights for teens, and collaborative photo sites. The basic drive is to get people back into the library by making the library relevant to what they want and need in their daily lives…to make the library a destination and not an afterthought.”

There is a lot in this article to respond to. I like Sarah’s definition but I think she leaves one thing out. Library 2.0 tends to focus on technological solutions as the way to make libraries “more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs”. I believe that much of the resistance to Library 2.0 stems from this focus on technology rather than disagreement with the basic goals.

John discusses the need to reorganize the library’s internal organization as implementing Library 2.0. I believe he is correct in his assessment but I would take it a step further. Simply increasing the focus of resources on the IT department and giving them a more public mission is not enough. Library 2.0 requires a change in focus for all staff, not just the techies. In fact, I see that one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 (from which we get the Library 2.0 term): it enables non-techies to use technological solutions to better achieve their goals.

Let’s use collaborative photo sharing as an example. Websites like Flickr allow people to post pictures online where they can be viewed and commented upon by anyone. If I had wanted to create something like this for my library a few years ago, I would have had to:

• Create a web page using HTML
• Upload that web page to a web server, possibly administered by myself
• Use FTP or some other protocol to load pictures to the web server
• Update the web page to display the new pictures
• Train my users on how to load their pictures to the server and make sure I know to update the web page every time one of them does so.

Clearly, this is a job for IT.

Now, with some of the Web 2.0 tools that are out there, I could achieve this same goal by:

• Signing up for an account at Flickr
• Use the software on their web page to upload my pictures
• Give the URL for my photostream to anyone who wants to see my pictures. I could even print the URL on that favorite library promotional tool: the bookmark.
• Show my users how to load their pictures to the Flickr account.

No IT staff were involved in the creation of the Flickr account. No hard-core technology skills were required; just a basic understanding of the Internet and the will to make it happen. In order to be effective practitioners of Library 2.0, librarians (I use that term loosely to include all library people, regardless of degree) must add these to the tools of our trade.