Tag Archives: Web 2.0

Be in control: participate in the new age of school libraries

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On May 24th, SLAV hosted ‘Be in control: participate in the new age of school libraries’, a conference for library teams. In this post Cindy Tschernitz, SLAV Executive Officer, reflects on the day. The Bright Ideas team also interviewed delegates at the conference and you can listen to the recording here.

What a fantastic day for all delegates. We embraced the year’s theme of ‘Participate, engage, shine – you, me, us’ with a great level of engagement, interaction and enthusiasm. Delegates don’t want to be passive receptors of information and we need to engage, challenge and involve which we did at this conference. It was particularly heartening to see and hear from library team members who learnt from each other and spread the word beyond Melbourne Park through Twitter.

You can see a Camilla Elliott’s Storify of tweets from the day here.

Speakers were outstanding. James Laussen Principal of Overnewton Anglican Community College and Joy Whiteside, Head of Library (a very active SLAV member and John Ward Award winner) did an excellent job setting the scene for the day. Jim gave us an overview of where education is going and Joy followed with her well researched paper on where school libraries are going. She told it as it is, no holds barred and really allowed all to reflect on their role in the school library and greater school community. We had a solid basis for the rest of the day.

Michael Jongen discussed the issues around how we can best provide access to all types of digital content. What struck me was the complexity of improving access and the more Michael spoke, the more issues were raised. As many of the delegates were involved in technical aspects of school libraries, like cataloguing, there were many many questions raised. To some degree it appears that the new cataloguing rules, RDA (Resource Description and Access) will need ongoing revision and adaptation to keep pace with digital content.

From the feedback we received, the concurrent sessions were very engaging. Thank you to Joyce, Michael and Renate and the one I attended, Management 101 presented by Janet Blackwell. Janet spoke with experience, wisdom and honesty. Telling it like it is should have been the theme for the day. Janet led us through her toolbox, showed us the tactics that she has used to ensure that the school library she is responsible for gets the credit and dollars that it  deserves by making it an indispensable part of the school community. Jane gave us some fantastic quotes which I would encourage all to look at via the days Twitter hashtag #SLAVconf.

The partnership between SLAV and the State Library of Victoria was highlighted by the afternoon’s session led by Kelly Gardiner and Cameron Hocking. The panel discussion of PLN participants and stakeholders gave some insight into the value of the PLN. It was great for those of us who are PLN dropouts to know we’re not alone and even more importantly that there are ways we can improve our time management strategies to help complete the course next time. The hands-on demonstrations exploring search strategies, curation, social media and workflow were also excellent. Next conference we will make sure that we have more time so people can attend more than one practical session.

To finish the day and highlight the importance of SLAV’s partnerships with both ALIA and other state school library associations in the Australian arena, Sue McKerracher spoke about a number of initiatives particularly the The Future of the Profession project and the 13 Project. These projects bring together government, school library associations and other agencies in an initiative that will support the school community but will also provide an important platform for advocacy for school libraries.

If I had only one word to describe the conference it would be ‘invigorating’. I am looking forward to the next one on August 15 Transliteracy: who do you ask and how can you participate? which features Professor Kristin Fontichiaro, University of Michigan, School of Information in her first Australian visit. Hope to see you there.

The danger of a free lunch

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Closing Down - Last Day

Closing Down – Last Day by _4cryingoutloud

The imminent closure of popular blogging platform Posterous highlights one of the drawbacks of free online tools. Trusting any online service with your data or even your time in building a site means that it is important to be vigilant and well informed so you are not inconvenienced further down the track.

The development team behind Posterous has been acquired by Twitter, and Posterous is due to close down on April 30th.  This leaves many users looking for another site to host their blog and an easy way to migrate their data. Fortunately in this case there are a number of options for migrating a Posterous site into similar sites like WordPress or Tumblr.  Posterous users will surely miss the easy to use blogging service, but the minor inconvenience of migrating their site is a much better outcome than facing a task of manually exporting data, or worse, losing your data entirely.

In the online world, the theory that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’ is clearly evident. It’s an important lesson that should be considered when evaluating the use of any online tools. Many of these services host large amounts of data and require constant maintenance, meaning that all free services still have the cost of providing server space and employing staff. The business models of most free online services tend to loosely fall into the following categories:

  • Building a strong user base and then being acquired by a larger company (as in the cases of Posterous & Instagram). This model probably makes a service more likely to be discontinued. Users can only hope that a service will be acquired and continued (like Facebook’s purchase of Instagram), rather than being acquired merely for the talent of the developers (like Twitter’s purchase of Posterous).
  • Making money by serving up advertising to users. Google, Twitter & Facebook are the best examples, and all three services analyse your data to serve up targeted ads. This has led to some backlash from users about invasions of privacy. However, those with a more reasonable view realise that advertising supports the service. My advice is this, if you use a free service (or even visit a free website) then advertising is a fact of life. The cost of a newspaper or magazine is subsidised by advertising, and the web is no different. Our personal data makes an attractive proposition for advertisers, and if that is a problem for you then it may be best to avoid these sites.
  •  The ‘freemium’ model, which offers premium paid services to power users and limits the features offered to free users (Evernote’s premium accounts and Dropbox’s paid storage upgrades are good examples. Google Apps also falls into this category). In some way this may be the best option for users and providers. Data tends to be better protected, paid users get important features and innovative new features are added as a way of enticing people to upgrade.
  • A fully paid model. One interesting new site using this model is Pinboard, a bookmarking site that is a paid service. The developer promises that this will provide a level of privacy and data protection not found in free services. 
  • No business model at all and no way to make income from a service. I’d advise you to avoid using any service like this, particularly if investing your time or data (read about the closure of Megaupload as a classic cautionary tale). 

When using any free service, it’s important to consider these models and the implications of storing your data with them. Check out a site like How do they make money? for a guide to the models of popular services. Always read the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and explore the options for exporting your data before you invest a lot of time and energy into a site (this is doubly important if you are recommending your students use a service).

Every time you commit your data to a site you need to do some risk assessment and consider ways to reduce the risk. For example, if you use a service like Google Drive, Evernote or Dropbox then your data can also be synchronised back to your computer as well, so at least you have a local copy of the data. This is particularly important for files like photographs. Also consider using a tool like If This Then That  to automatically back up your data from one service to another.

Remember to also consider the type of data that you are uploading to online services. Do some research about a service to see if they have had privacy breaches in the past, and think about the implications of the data you upload being accessed by someone else. For example, if you want to use Evernote to record student data then make sure it is only stored as a local notebook on your computer, rather than being uploaded. It’s not as convenient, but it’s an important step in protecting data.

Online services provide an amazing level of convenience, letting us stay organised, share our lives and work together. This convenience does also require us to stay informed and consider our use of these tools. In this way you’ll ensure that you’ll never lose that important data that means so much to you.

 

Bright Ideas user guides

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While we’re always looking out for great new web tools here at Bright Ideas, we know that sometimes it can be difficult to have the time to learn how to get the most from a new tool or service. To help you along we’ve recently launched several user guides which will help you get started with some of our favourite tools.

You’ll be able to find all of the guides in the menu bar at the top of the site, or on our Guides page. All of the guides have been built using Storify and feature either screenshot or video tutorials to guide you along. We’ve aimed to keep the video tutorials to no more than 90 seconds each so you are able to quickly find the tips you need.

The first video guides are for Historypin and Twitter (both getting started and taking Twitter further). We’ll be adding more user guides over the coming months and would love to hear you feedback or requests for other guides that you’d like to see here.   Next we’ll be adding guides for Evernote, Diigo and  Twitter apps like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.

We’ll keep you posted about new or updated guides here and on our Facebook page, so follow us there to stay up to date. You can also keep track of any new video tutorials by subscribing to the Bright Ideas Youtube channel.

Feel free to let us know about any other guides you’d like to see here on Bright Ideas.

How connected are you?

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Connected: the film

Hamish Curry, Education Manager at the State Library of Victoria, explores his feelings about the film Connected:

It was back in early September at a Gathering ‘11 event organised by David Hood that I first watched ‘Connected’, a film about “love, death and technology” by Tiffany Shlain. The film stimulated a whole bunch of complex thoughts and ideas I’d been having around the ways in which we relate to one another, and the tools of technology we’re using to help improve these relations. A tweet response from Tiffany afterwards, along with some email networking led me to organise the State Library’s own screening of the film on November 23. I’ve seen Connected four times since September, and each time something new resonates. I love the shock value of Albert Einstein who said that “if honeybees were to disappear, humankind would be gone in four years.”

Connected weaves a myriad of personal, historical, and global issues and challenges together, showing us that patterns are emerging amongst these random pieces. From the evolution of language, to our reliance on machines and the demands we’re placing on the hemispheres of the brain, humans are making more and more rapid decisions, connections, and discoveries. The film’s premise is that while technology is changing the way we communicate, relate, work and consume, it is having unintended impacts on our well-being and that of the planet around us.

I think all of us familiar with technology sense this, and no doubt all those who have been involved with the VicPLN program experienced various levels of anxiety and excitement around the tools of the web as well. Yet the film also highlights how technology is enabling us to make better and faster connections to issues confronting us and to the people who share our passions. Technology has helped us visualise data, trends, thoughts, and images in new ways. As such, the film promotes deeper thinking and reflection. There have been some great posts from people like Judith Way and Jenny Luca. Some see Tiffany’s story being quite self-indulgent, others see her experiences as being symptomatic of our struggle to connect.

For me it has stirred up a passion around a radical rethink of how we approach education. The traditional system broke learning down into disconnected but measurable chunks and pieces, which mirrored our thinking around literacy, numeracy, and sciences. Now more and more educators are realising that we’ve reached a point where we need to put these back together, creating an integrated, blended, and connected education system, where the school is simply a node in a much bigger community, both locally and internationally.

Another big node is libraries. They are at cross-roads too. Their ability to be hubs of information and community connections is beginning to be leveraged in new and exciting ways. It’s a nice time to be part of libraries and education; change is an expectation. So in closing, I’ll leave you with a Connected thought for 2012 from John Muir, who said “when you tug at a single thing in the universe, you find it’s attached to everything else.”

SLAV Web Elements Engaged Project

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For Victorian Schools only.

Are any of your students and teachers involved in using interesting and innovative online tools?

Have you been working with students and teachers on copyright, creative commons and Intellectual property?

Are you interested in helping your students to build online resources to share their discoveries with others? If you answer YES to any or all of the questions above then the SLAV Web Elements Engaged project might be for you. We need a number of schools to be involved in the development of online video/audio resources to help share knowledge, skills and links that make use of online technologies and help educate others about copyright and IP.

Being part of the project will provide schools with:

  • on-site professional development activities for teachers,
  • some additional equipment and software, and
  • the opportunity for your students to create online resources for other students.

Those involved in the project will also become part of an online community where project resources, ideas and learnings will be shared, discussed and reviewed.

The following are some of the areas we would like to cover as part of the project:

  • Basic Searching Skills
  • Searching skills explored
  • Creative Commons basics
  • Creative Commons – classroom application
  • IP for schools
  • Online Safety
  • Digital Publishing Tools
  • Digital Publishing Responsibilities
  • Google Tools
  • Google Forms
  • Google Docs and Collaboration
  • Google Sites
  • Animoto
  • Wall Wisher
  • Glogster
  • Copyright Free Images
  • Copyright Free Audio/Video
  • Mind Maps
  • ccMixter
  • Evernote
  • Edmodo
  • Prezi
  • Social Bookmarking
  • VoiceThread
  • Avatars
  • Please Note this is not a definitive list and if your school has been working on other areas we would love to hear and see what you have done. If you are interested in being involved please fill out the following online form.

If you are interested in being involved please fill out the following online Expression of Interest Form.

Expressions of Interest close: Monday 13th September 2010
To send any additional information including audio or video clips to show us what you have done, please contact the SLAV office on phone: 9349 5822 or email: slav@netspace.net.au for uploading instructions.

Timeline: Project will run from September 2010 until May 2011.

Feature wiki – Our Lady of Mercy College Heidelberg – information wiki

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Our Lady of Mercy College, Heidelberg, teacher librarian Michael Jongen was inspired to introduce social media tools into the school library after hearing Will Richardson at a School Library Association of Victoria professional development day in 2009. Michael explains:

I work at OLMC Library as a teacher librarian. As part of my Professional Learning Plan for 2009 I was asked by Tricia Sweeney, Head of Library, to look at Web 2.0 and its applications in teaching and learning.

In March 2009 I attended a SLAV conference entitled Perspectives on Learning featuring Will Richardsonfrom the United States.  Will is a leading educator in the understanding and implementation of Web 2.0 strategies in schools. He argues that

‘Learning in the 21st century is all about networks and the connections we can make to other learners and teachers both in our communities and around the globe. But being literate in this new learning environment requires more than knowing how to read and write, it requires us to edit, publish, collaborate, create and connect in the process of building our own personal learning spaces’

Inspired by Will I decided to blog and work with the teachers at my school and make them aware of Web 2.0 and its potential for learning.  I started a Library Web 2.0 Wiki page on the School Portal where I explored some of the issues, tools and personalities raised by him in his keynote address and in his featured workshop. I feel that my role has been to inform, collaborate and apply, and I looked at practical examples of how social media can be incorporated into assessment or used for communication.

OLMC wiki

Tricia and I had another discussion and we decided to set up an information wiki. With the new school year just starting we will promote the wiki through our Years 7 and 8 reading programmes.

The appraisal of my year’s self learning project was on using Web 2.0 in the classroom and it was agreed that my goal in 2010 is to work in the classroom with teachers and students more often by using practical web 2.0 applications in assessment and presentation.

It is wonderful to hear that the SLAV conference held less than a year ago has had such a positive and practical impact on Michael and Our Lady of Mercy College teachers and students. Congratulations and well done Michael. Thank you to Tricia for supporting his endeavours to introduce social media to the school.

The OLMC information wiki is the first of the resources that Michael has developed that Bright Ideas will feature. I’m sure we’ll all look forward to experiencing his other efforts.

It’s not about the tools, it’s about the skills

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Author of the wonderful award winning Langwitches blog Silvia Tolisano (Twitter name is @langwitches), has written a must-read post. Looking at the advent of Web 2.0 and the way it is perceived by parents, Tolisano addresses the skills developed and used by students in using tools such as blogs, creating podcasts and adding to wikis rather than the tools themselves. To read this post, go to Silvia’s blog now!

The Future of the Library, yet again

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One of my personal gurus, US teacher librarian (Library Media Specialist) Dr Joyce Valenza has written an important post about the future of libraries.

Seth Godin, a marketing wunderkind has turned his attention to libraries. And he doesn’t like what he sees. Dr Valenza explains:

Seth Godin and Mike Eisenberg and me on the Future of the Library

January 9, 2010
I am a huge fan of Seth Godin.

Seth . . .

  • writes the most popular marketing blog in the world;
  • is the author of the bestselling marketing books of the last decade;
  • speaks to large groups on marketing, new media and what’s next;
  • and is the founder of Squidoo.com, a fast-growing recommendation website.

Seth’s brief blog post this morning on the Future of the Library certainly got my attention:

What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age?

They can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.) More librarians are telling me (unhappily) that the number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals. That’s not a long-term strategy, nor is it particularly an uplifting use of our tax dollars.

Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.

Once again, the net turns things upside down. The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books. What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.

Clearly we haven’t marketed our own message effectively.  Today’s leading expert on marketing, and many others, need to know that job one, for most of us (I HOPE), IS being:

leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.

Is Seth saying that we need librarians, but not traditional libraries?

(Make sure you click on the survive link above to see that Seth read Robin’s brilliant post in her CCHS Learning Commons about steps necessary for school library survival.)

We need to make sure that folks who matter get the memo that we are not about circulation alone and that circulation itself is happening online.  (And that some of those reference books and ebooks are available–nearly invisibly–through library-funded databases.)

And that they get the memo that describes the many ways librarians address literacy and equity each and every day.

That they get the memo that physical libraries are evolving to become learning commons or libratories.  (See Library as domestic metaphor and My 2.0 Day.)

That we find multiple ways to show what the school library of today looks like in action.  (See 14 Ways K12 Librarians Can Teach Social Media.)

We haven’t done our job to market ourselves and our programs.  People don’t know what they look like because we haven’t shared loudly enough.

It may also be that some libraries aren’t yet there.

In case you were sleeping, over the past two years, stuff happened.  Big stuff.  Stuff we should have led. I’ve been watching as other professionals in education grabbed turf we should have grabbed or tred together.

It reached the surface this spring with the Twitter discussion on librarians as social media specialists.

The game has changed dramatically.  The changes we talk about are not bandwagons. They represent profound changes in the way we do business, the way we do libraries, the way we must educate.

Teacher librarians, as information and communication specialists must lead change in their buildings and districts or face irrelevancy.

Something Darwinian is underway.  Adaptation is essential.  And if we are to thrive, leadership is essential.

School library practice must adapt to complete shifts in the information and communication landscapes.  Folks who believe that Web 2.0, or whatever we next call the read/write Web, will go away are hopelessly mistaken.

Mike Eisenberg allowed me to share excerpts from a discussion we engaged in this week with Lisa Layera Brunkan. Mike wrote:

It keeps me up at night too – but to me it’s not will the librarians be in a position to be a logical choice, but rather will librarians grab the opportunity. Any librarian employed today IS in the position! They need to embrace a role that focuses on meeting people’s information needs through any and all media, systems, formats, and approaches.

Joyce helped me to see that information literacy is both using and producing information. Librarians – particularly those in schools – should be at the center of this: to ensure that students are information literate – to ensure that students are effective users and producers of information.

What we need are opportunistic librarians – using every interaction with kids, fellow teachers, parents, administrators and the public to PROVE that they are right at the center of the action – of making sure that every student is super-skilled in information seeking, use, production, and evaluation. And, also at the center of making sure that all students have access to resources, services, technologies, and networks.

You both instinctively know how to take advantage of opportunities. You see them everywhere. That’s what we need to help the librarians to see and then to know what to do with them. . .

The slow but steady attrition in the school library field is no accident. It’s not because “they don’t understand us.” It’s not because “we haven’t gotten the message out.” It’s because many programs aren’t delivering.

Many of you are out there leading change.

The revolution can happen.  And it can happen in our blogs, through our tweets, in our libraries.
It will not happen if we are asleep at the wheel.  It will not happen if we do not assume responsibility for our own retooling.

This is the year of redefinition.  Frankly, it’s definition or death.  Some of you thought I was cold when I suggested that folks lead, follow, or get out of the way.

I know many of you are out there are working hard.

But it is not about working hard. It is about working smart. It is about marketing. It is about redefining. Before it is too late.  This is the year.

Seth Godin’s post was generally addressing public libraries, but all librarians can take note and possibly take offence. As Dr Valenza states, stuff is happening. This blog is evidence of some of the kinds of wonderful stuff that is happening in school, public and academic libraries in Australia and around the world. This blog is evidence that there are many wonderful librarians and teacher librarians who have embraced change and developed what could only have been dreamed of a few years ago. The Twitter community to which I belong and contribute to is a testament to the incredibly committed professionals that are librarians and teacher librarians. They contribute so much, that I often worry that they are not having holidays, not having weekends and not having enough downtime to recover from their hectic work and personal lives. This cohort of hardworking and sharing professionals blows my mind. And many of them are from Australia. We may be only a percentage of educators, librarians and teacher librarians, but hour after hour, day after day, we are proving Seth Godin wrong. However, we need everyone to jump on board and help define the future of libraries. Be a part of the change. Drive the change. Make a difference. Enjoy the change. Enjoy the challenge. Learn. Share. Listen. Talk. Lead.

Of course to be able to implement change effectively, we need appropriate staffing and budgets in public and school libraries. Although many Web 2.0 tools are free, we need appropriately qualified and trained library staff to investigate, develop and maintain any sites that are relevant and useful to their students and staff.

Buffy Hamilton, author of the Unquiet Librarian blog has added her thoughts and collated a list of other bloggers  (including our own brilliant Jenny Luca) who have responded to Seth Godin’s post.

Seth Godin, thinker, social media expert, and marketing guru, set off a firestorm yesterday with his post, “The Future of Libraries.” While the post is directed toward public libraries, librarians from all walks of life jumped in with their responses:

Other posts include

I would love to have some comments on this issue, but let me leave you with a few quotes about change:

  • He who rejects change is the architect of decay.  The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.  ~Harold Wilson
  • If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.  ~Mary Engelbreit
  • It is not necessary to change.  Survival is not mandatory.  ~W. Edwards Deming
  • When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.  ~Victor Frankl
  • Change is inevitable – except from a vending machine.  ~Robert C. Gallagher
  • Change always comes bearing gifts.  ~Price Pritchett
  • If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.  ~Author Unknown
  • We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.  ~Harrison Ford
  • Our only security is our ability to change.  ~John Lilly

Any stories of change within your library and how it came about would be more than welcome.

Connect and Web 2.0

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Russell Blackie from the Victorian DEECD’s eLearning Unit presented the following information to the recent SLAV conference; Skills for School Libraries V2.0.

There are some familiar tools there for readers of Bright Ideas and some nice new ones you may not have tried yet. Did you notice that Russell used Edublogs.tv to host his presentation?

Thanks to Russell and SLAV for making the presentation available to the wider school library community.

The future of libraries, with or without books

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CNN recently published this article on the future of libraries. Although focussing mainly on public and academic libraries, there are implications for us schoolies too.

The future of libraries, with or without books

  • Story Highlights
  • As books go digital, libraries are reevaluating their roles
  • Some say libraries will soon act more like community centers
  • Most say the physical book will stay in libraries, but with less importance
  • Some libraries use futuristic tools to attract new patrons

updated 8:14 a.m. EDT, Fri September 4, 2009

 By John D. Sutter
CNN

  (CNN) — The stereotypical library is dying — and it’s taking its shushing ladies, dank smell and endless shelves of books with it.

 

Libraries are trying to imagine their futures with or without books.

Libraries are trying to imagine their futures with or without books.

Libraries are trying to imagine their futures with or without books.

 

Books are being pushed aside for digital learning centers and gaming areas. “Loud rooms” that promote public discourse and group projects are taking over the bookish quiet. Hipster staffers who blog, chat on Twitter and care little about the Dewey Decimal System are edging out old-school librarians.

And that’s just the surface. By some accounts, the library system is undergoing a complete transformation that goes far beyond these image changes.

Authors, publishing houses, librarians and Web sites continue to fight Google’s efforts to digitize the world’s books and create the world’s largest library online. Meanwhile, many real-world libraries are moving forward with the assumption that physical books will play a much-diminished or potentially nonexistent role in their efforts to educate the public.

Some books will still be around, they say, although many of those will be digital. But the goal of the library remains the same: To be a free place where people can access and share information.

“The library building isn’t a warehouse for books,” said Helene Blowers, digital strategy director at the Columbus [Ohio] Metropolitan Library. “It’s a community gathering center.”

Think of the change as a Library 2.0 revolution — a mirror of what’s happened on the Web.

Library 2.0

People used to go online for the same information they could get from newspapers. Now they go to Facebook, Digg and Twitter to discuss their lives and the news of the day. Forward-looking librarians are trying to create that same conversational loop in public libraries. The one-way flow of information from book to patron isn’t good enough anymore.

Don’t Miss

“We can pick up on all of these trends that are going on,” said Toby Greenwalt, virtual services coordinator at the Skokie Public Library in suburban Chicago.

Greenwalt, for example, set up a Twitter feed and text-messaging services for his library. He monitors local conversations on online social networks and uses that information as inspiration for group discussions or programs at the real-world library.

Other libraries are trying new things, too.

The Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, in North Carolina, has a multimedia space where kids shoot videos and record music. It also runs a blog dedicated to gaming and hosts video game tournaments regularly.

Kelly Czarnecki, a technology education librarian at ImaginOn, a kids’ branch of that library, said kids learn by telling their own stories.

“Our motto here is to bring stories to life, so by having the movie and music studio we can really tap into a different angle of what stories are,” she said. “They’re not just in books. They’re something kids can create themselves.”

Czarnecki believes that doesn’t have to come at the expense of book-based learning.

The Aarhus Public Library in Aarhus, Denmark, takes things a step further.

The library features an “info column,” where people share digital news stories; an “info galleria” where patrons explore digital maps layered with factoids; a digital floor that lets people immerse themselves in information; and RFID-tagged book phones that kids point at specific books to hear a story.

“The library has never been just about books,” said Rolf Hapel, director of the city’s public libraries.

Community Centers

Jason M. Schultz, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley Law School, said libraries always have served two roles in society: They’re places where people can get free information; and they’re community centers for civic debate.

As books become more available online, that community-center role will become increasingly important for libraries, he said.

“It depends on whether we prioritize it as a funding matter, but I think there always will be a space for that even if all the resources are digital,” he said.

Some libraries are trying to gain an edge by focusing on the “deeply local” material — the stuff that only they have, said Blowers, the librarian in Ohio.

“How do we help add that value to a format like the Internet, which is expansively global?” she said. “So we look at what do we have here that we could help people gain access to by digitizing it.”

That material can be used to start community discussions, she said.

Librarians

This shift means the role of the librarian — and their look — is also changing.

In a world where information is more social and more online, librarians are becoming debate moderators, givers of technical support and community outreach coordinators.

They’re also no longer bound to the physical library, said Greenwalt, of the library in Skokie, Illinois. Librarians must venture into the digital space, where their potential patrons exist, to show them why the physical library is still necessary, he said.

A rise in a young, library-chic subculture on blogs and on Twitter is putting a new face on this changing role, said Linda C. Smith, president of the Association for Library and Information Science Education.

Some wear tattoos, piercings and dress like they belong on the streets of Brooklyn instead of behind bookshelves. They’re also trying on new titles. Instead of librarians, they’re “information specialists” or “information scientists.”

Libraries like the “Urban Media Space,” which is set to open in 2014 in Aarhus, Denmark, are taking on new names, too. And all of that experimentation is a good thing, Smith said, because it may help people separate the book-bound past of libraries from the liberated future.

“It’s a source of tension in the field because, for some people, trying to re-brand can be perceived as a rejection of the [library] tradition and the values,” she said. “But for other people it’s a redefinition and an expansion.”

Funding woes

In the United States, libraries are largely funded by local governments, many of which have been hit hard by the recession.

That means some libraries may not get to take part in technological advances. It also could mean some of the nation’s 16,000 public libraries could be shut down or privatized. Schultz, of the Berkeley Law School, said it would be easy for public officials to point to the growing amount of free information online as further reason to cut public funding for libraries.

Use of U.S. public libraries is up over the past decade, though, and many people in the information and libraries field say they’re excited about opportunities the future brings.

“I came into libraries and it wasn’t about books,” said Peter Norman, a graduate student in library and information science at Simmons College in Boston who says he’s most interested in music and technology. “Sure I love to read. I read all the time. I read physical books. But I don’t have the strange emotional attachment that some people possess.”

“If the library is going to turn into a place without books, I’m going to evolve with that too,” he said.