If you’ve heard of Second Life but wasn’t really sure what it was, or perhaps you’re feeling hesitant about learning “another” new thing, take heart. I’m here to provide information and guidance to this new social media tool. Check out this 3 minute YouTube video for a quick demo on Second Life and how it’s being used to teach university classes.

In a nutshell, Second Life is a software program that looks like you’ve entered a three dimensional (3D) world on your computer. It’s fantastic for demonstrating processes, displaying artifacts and information, interacting with other people, collaborating, building in accountability to distance education courses, teaching complex concepts, simulations and more. As if it couldn’t get any better, creating an account in Second Life and using their software is free!

Ok, there can be some costs involved. If you decide to use Second Life to create a museum display, hold classes online, run a simulation, etc., you’ll most likely need to rent some server space from the Linden Lab company. But to the public (your customers, clients or students), the use of the system is free. In future posts I’ll go into more depth about how to do a cost analysis and project plan for getting your business or institution set up in Second Life. If you’re already familiar with Second Life and need a little help getting your institution started now, shoot me an email at sjkmartin@gmail.com.

The key concept behind this 3D environment is that it’s entirely user created. You get to decide what you want to do with it. Several years ago I opted to create an interactive museum exhibit called the Black Abolitionist Digital Archive. Second Life visitors walk into a period court house, see portraits of black abolitionist speakers, link to the University of Detroit Mercy’sabolitionist digital research collection, watch informational slide shows and examine 3D artifacts. The most powerful aspect of the exhibit is the ability to reenact the actual speeches and have panel discussions with experts in the field. Communication is done through text chat or via microphone similar to a conference call. All this is done in the comfort of your chair at your home or office. Where else can you get access to that kind of information? If you already have the Second Life software downloaded, click on this slurl and it will open your software and take you right to the Black Abolitionist Digital Archive.

If you haven’t experienced Second Life yet, think seriously about giving it a try. My next posts will deal with interesting places and examples of how institutions and individuals are using the technology. Be prepared for some surprises!

In March, Rachael Clark discussed the necessity of completing a needs assessment as one of the important skills used in developing a digital collection. I would definitely agree that it is a vital skill for any information professional. Cliché as it is, one of my go-to phrases is, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” and performing a needs assessment is an essential part of the planning phase for any project. This includes diving into the world of social networking.

The first decision to consider with your team is what kind of social media outlet will be most beneficial. There’s more to the world of social networking than microblogging on Twitter. You can get your professional persona out there with LinkedIn, share attention-grabbing images of your collection using Flickr or post a webinar on YouTube. Consider your needs, speak with people who are fully immersed into the world of social networks and learn from them. There are many options from which to choose. Do a bit of research into what will work best for your organization before you spend too many “hit and miss” hours. Time is money, folks!

Once you’ve decided on the tools of choice, you probably think that adding social networking to your organization seems like such a simple thing. Go to your social networking site of choice, register and start posting, right? But before you dive in, stop and consider what kind of benefit you’re expecting from these popular tools. Do you want to reach out to patrons? Are you interested in generating buzz about your company? Do you hope to gain new clients? Perhaps you just want to keep in touch with colleagues around the world. No matter what your purpose, you’ll be doing a little writing and though this is writing on a small scale, the importance of writing for your audience cannot be underestimated.

More things to consider when creating a needs assessment are, how often and how much of information is being shared? How often are you going to use this tool? You will need to think about quality and quantity if you want to reach people and make the most of your social networking tool of choice. For example, if you’re using Twitter or Facebook, you will want to build an audience of people who read and repost or retweet your updates. If you want to attract loyal readers,  frequent, appropriate and relevant posts and tweets are vital.

Decisions will also have to be made about who will be the social media guru of your organization. You may find staff resistant to using these tools or you may have staff members who are ready to make it their full-time job. The right person will have enthusiasm for this new way to communicate, but it’s important that he or she will be literate in the language of social networking. They need to know that it’s “tweeting” NOT “twittering,” and they need to have the ability to tell the difference between useless information and great things to know. Many social networking sites have users who are spewing a lot more garbage than gems. The person doing the majority of work with social networking tools will have to do quite a bit of filtering.

In this day and age it seems as if everyone and their grandmothers have at least dipped their toes into the giant pond that is social networking. If you take your time to examine your needs, then plan and execute a process to get the most out of the social networking tool of your choice, you will add volumes to the intellectual value of your organization.

I have been using for the above phrase for many years. I say it with conviction in my voice while making sure to maintain eye contact. I believe it deep in my bones.

Why is the history business such an important issue for me and thousands of archivists across the country? Part of it is the growth in demand over the last 15 years by cable networks to fill their channel with documentary programming. Some of it is the keen interest I personally have in learning about the human condition and learning from those events. Mix that in with years of licensing negotiation and seeing how amazed producers are with what archivists can provide and I know that this is big business.

History as a hobby is having a surge in popularity as well. TV shows that put you in the historic moment or researching your ancestry are feeding from one of America’s top pastimes: genealogy. According to a Maritz marketing research poll back in 2000, 60% of Americans are interested in their ancestors. In 2002 the Internet genealogy market was estimated to be $200 million and as recently as March of 2010 the estimate of a $1 billion market was cited. When doing research about the history industry I found a title “Who knew the genealogy business would be so cut throat”. Articles and blogs are full of stats and predictions of this marketplace. The sheer volume of the discussion inherently points to the perceived value.

Couple the genealogy market with the thousands of documentaries about historic topics as well as original network programming about finding your ancestors and we have a distribution explosion! This great opportunity is open to advance the exposure of our collections and of history itself.

The caveat is that we have realized that licensing from these opportunities will not be the heaven sent funding that we hoped in the late 1990s. Licensing is more competitive now and budgets are tighter. It will provide funding but not at the Getty level.

What these historic documentaries and stockhouses also provide us is access to the public in ways that we would never have dreamed of 20 years ago.

Yes, the Getty licensed roughly 22 million images last year. Why not your archive?

The simple answer is money makes money. Most archives are not in a position of having excess cash, so the best advice is to work on collaborative venues for licensing, usage and copying your content. Many archives are working together instead of fighting for grant money. Cross-promotion and use of free and open source tools all provide things that only multi-million dollar organizations could afford 10 years ago. If marketing your collection allows generation of revenue for on-going preservation or digitization then this is a treasure you need to promote.

Many archives are even going into co-productions and signing contracts to put their imagery up with the big commercial venues. This leads to a bigger shot at wide distribution without the investment risk. As long as the contract provides for certain protections, this may be a viable option.

You have some real avenues for revenue generation these days, but you do need a niche, IT support, a marketing plan and most importantly legal advice!

More to come on this topic!

Sources:
Grow Your Family Tree in Salt Lake City
Genealogy: A $1B Market? Maybe
ITV, Mormons and Family Trees

I spent the last week writing and editing a book chapter on process management for digitization. My head has been trying to process all that I contemplated while doing such an intensive session.

I think that a lot of process management comes down to skills that we often no longer practice. These oldies but goodies are classics that we need some reminding about. The most important is…LISTENING.

We Twitter, we Facebook and we Blog but we are not necessarily listening to each other. Engaging colleagues in the process of digitization or any other information management process makes a huge difference in creating efficiency. More brains are always better than one!

The next skill is one that many of us are skilled at but do not have time for: analysis.

There was a great quote that I read ages ago “If you want to live forever, write something worth reading.” That has stuck in my head and inspired me to continue to write personally. The reason that quote is so powerful is because of its qualification “worth reading.”

How much of the information explosion is worth reading?

One aspect of self-publishing that is great is that anyone can post any wonderful idea for all to see, but it is also the great disadvantage. Who has time to qualify all that is out there? Librarians would love to direct patrons to well-researched blogs, but who has the time to research their accuracy? We fall back to well-known publishers, many of whom have had their own authenticity problems.

We have sites where Librarians assess other sites and compile them so that we can be assured that we have access to high quality tools. In my latest nights, I wonder…how much checking can we really do to ascertain quality? In this world of self-promotion and personal status sites, are we really examining the information? Are we slowing down enough to get this?

Lastly, is the skill of planning.

Many times librarians and archivists (particularly of the solo version) spend so much time feeling overwhelmed that we only react instead of proactively changing our state. After reading hundreds of interviews that my students have done with leaders in the field I see one common thread between success and failure…planning. So that goes back to being proactive, taking a breath and listening to what it is your users and your collection needs.

Listening to the content and the users means that you have a better plan. Maybe it is a stolen hour a week to consider this and shut out the information noise, disseminate the good research and plan how to get where you need to be. Ignoring for just an hour the budget pressures, lack of staff skills, and bureaucratic realities allows you to envision where you can be and as many great business leaders espouse, visualizing your success plays a big part in getting to it.

So in the words of the great Frasier Crane, “I’m listening.”

In the last month, I have had to replace a one year old refrigerator, a 30 day old phone, a two week old portable drive and a one-day old server. Technology is not always our friend!

When I first got involved in digitization (15 years ago!), I was sorely disappointed with the inefficiencies and struggles to get output as promised. I teach my students today that the information world is a difference place. We finally have tools that talk to each other, tools that can be modified through menus as well as hard-coding. This is a wonderful world of possibilities.

Tonight as I sighed and sat down thinking about all the time I have wasted on new products failing, I thought…”Am I right to be telling students that finally the tools are working for us instead of the other way around?”

In getting this blog up and running, we chose a simple template. We wanted it to be clean and easy for users and for us. So far, according to our change document we have encountered five unexpected problems that took a fair amount of time to fix (even with experts on staff). These problems all centered around incompatibilities to get information where, when and how we wanted. As information managers these seemed like simple moves and formats. We thought that we were not doing anything fancy.

I also tell my students to take as many technology classes as they can “stomach”, because the more that you know the smarter your decisions will be on which technology to use.

We are a pretty technical bunch but since each project is so different, and each institution is managing different types of information from any country and any time period in history, how can our information tools keep up to accommodate all human knowledge?

Open source is a start to integrating these tools but I still believe deep down that more librarians and archivists as programmers would make our tools much more common sense based.

I have seen many tools that sell well but their implementations are so short-sighted as to make the product unusable.

Here are some for instances:
1) All fields migrate from one database to another but only a portion are searchable!
2) The new Speech to Text feature gets every single word wrong and yet it is still for sale.
3) The new template for your site will not allow you to migrate data from your old template.
4) You can’t migrate your contacts from one phone to a new one
5) You can’t change your default directory when scanning.

These examples are counter-intuitive to good information management. Are there better products out there? In some cases, yes. This is why we need to be careful consumers. In some cases though, there are so many unknowns until you install your data that it is a painful “learning on the job” situation. In many more instances, your institution is already married to a technology and you just have to work with it.

Will things get better? Or is the question HOW will they get better?
I firmly believe that we (librarians and archivists) need to become more technologically astute and create our own products. The more we know will also allow us to push developers to better understand what we need.

We also as a group, have to really praise developers that are listening to us and that DO create products that are user and administratively friendly.

So, my question to you, is how best to do that?

One of the first things I did when I found out I was accepted into library school was to Google for blogs, wikis and podcasts from others like me: new to be librarians and archivists who were in or had recently graduated from their respective programs.

I figured it was 2008, surely there would be loads of blogs, Facebook groups, listservs to name a few places for this sort of thing.

I was wrong – there wasn’t really squat. Let me rephrase that, I found lots of things from other people looking to apply TO library school but nothing really detailing what it was like being IN library school. And what I could find on being IN library school fell into two camps: One camp was the very vague, mainly one-liners on random blogs and other social media sites such as, “I really like collection development.” Or there would be the opposite end of the spectrum where students used social media sites for research results or gave detailed accounts of their projects but then wouldn’t include reference materials of any sort for their readers to do further independent reading.

And the thing is, I didn’t really think I was looking for something really that vague or obsolete or unusual: I’m a new library and archivist student. I’m looking to connect with others like me. Why was this so difficult?

This is not to say, completely, that these type of blogs/wikis and the like were not out there; I eventually did find one or two that lead me to a few others, which lead me to a few moreand so on. But in reality, I felt like I was missing some super secret handshake that all my fellow students seemingly were totally getting. And it’s also not that I didn’t ask – I did ask on mailing lists, blogs and to my professors: What is the best place to keep up to date on library and
archival information? And you could almost hear the pin drop, at least on the mailing lists. Many others also asked the question before me on several lists and not a single person answered, even when others would pipe up, “Me too!”

By the time the school year was nearing to an end, I had joined (it felt like) a dozen associations from the ALA to the SAA to all the subgroups and student committees. I was receiving so much email, that I had to create a new Gmail account to keep track of it all. The Twitter explosion had taken off and I was obtaining feeds from
librarians and archivists through it and other social networks. At a tech unConference that was held shortly after I finished my first year, I posed the same question to the ending panel and was given a minute list of websites that I was already following and reading.

And it still, shockingly enough, didn’t feel like I had the pulse on of what the heck was going on in my chosen career path.

For nearly a year, I was chasing this library and archival holy grail of sorts to make sure I was in “the know” of everything was going on in these professions. I couldn’t read, listen or write fast enough to keep up. If I was honest, half the time I felt like I was missing out on huge chunks of “need to know information” because I wasn’t paying close enough attention.

Recently, after nearly a year of this kind of OCD behavior, I was having a conversation with someone when I was lamenting my thought process on this topic with her. “But Lisa,” she said, “You ARE it. Do you have any idea how many people look to you as you have the pulse on what’s going on?”

Oh.
OH!

I used this overly long example to illustrate a point: “IT” is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. In my quest to know “IT” in library and archival sciences, I had become “IT” without knowing it. Once I got my friend’s point, suddenly the need to seek out so much information didn’t seem as important as it used to. Sure, I felt vaguely disappointed there was no secret handshake but the pressure to get all that information that I was supposedly missing, lifted from my shoulders and I felt like I could breathe again.

This concept is very Buddhist, but it’s also very true. When new technologies arrive, whether mechanical or digital, the media and the tech evangelists tend to blow up that particular technologies importance while deeply underscoring that if you’re not using X technology, clearly you must be an old fart or not hip enough to get the lingo or the technology itself.

This is all poppycock, of course. No one can possibly know everything – it is virtual impossible to be an expert on everything; especially in the digital world. But what you, the reader, can do is to know that even by searching out for “IT” on the subject of your choice, you probably have a greater understanding than those around you on the topic.
Even the media, at best, is a neophyte of sorts in this regard.

AMPed plans to take a look at “What is it?” by examining aspects of this ideology from variety of perspectives and experiences. As each one searches of “IT,” so then does the definition of “IT” change – we hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as we do.