Drucker, McGregor, and Me

I go through cycles in my work life in which I experience periods where I feel as though I am successful as a manager and times when I feel less than successful. Just lately, I've been feeling a little on the less successful side; no major debacles at work or anything like that but only a nagging feeling that I'm not having quite as positive effect on the organization as I feel I ought to be having. For purposes of context, I directly supervise 11 librarians and, through them, the operation of 11 different locations or departments comprised of close to 80 employees within a public library system of 27 branches and nearly 350 employees total.

As a student of government management, I have read a fair amount on the subject and, a couple of days ago, I was asked to take a test to determine how my management philosophy compares against McGregor's Theories X and Y. As I'd assumed would be the case, the test indicated that my style of personnel management is pretty far in the direction of Theory Y. What does this mean? In short, Theory Y says that employees:

• wish to be self-directed
• wish to participate in organization and personal goal-setting
• wish to accept increased job variety and responsibility
• are motivated in their work by far more than money

These are all, I believe, accurate statements about people in general. However, frankly, I was a little displeased at the extent to which the test rated me as an advocate of Theory Y. In other words, my answers to the test indicated some degree of Theory X management traits. I won't include a bullet-point list of these traits; suffice it to read the list above and assume the opposite for each point. Control, it seems, is the operative word for the Theory X manager.

While I've been mulling over my real or perceived management failings, I've been doing a little research about management philosophy. And what should I find but an article titled, Managing Oneself by the one-and-only Peter Drucker. Drucker, who seems to have been writing about all things management since the Spanish-American War, published this article only a few years back in the Harvard Business Review. As it relates to my earlier comments on management theories X and Y, this article outlines a path by which the manager (me, in this case) can identify personal strengths and weaknesses and react appropriately.

Drucker begins by stating that, even while most of us think we know our own strengths, we are usually wrong. If he's correct, this is an important piece of information; one would agree that having a more accurate picture about oneself would allow for greater success in both managing oneself (hence the title?) and managing within our organizational sphere of influence.

In answer to the question that asks after my personal strengths, Drucker suggests "feedback analysis": the act of writing down my expected outcomes each time I make an important decision or take a key action and revisiting these predictions after a period of time. Done in a comprehensive manner, a pattern of strengths will begin to take shape. It's an interesting concept, I agree; however, a known weakness of my own (lack of patience) leads me to cringe at Drucker's suggestion that such strengths and weaknesses will be revealed after a short period of time such as two or three years.

Nonetheless, I admit to a basic failure to reflect on past actions in the workplace. While I understand the need for evaluation as part of the planning cycle, I also admit that only those decisions that clearly have not worked as planned are those that tend to receive any attention from me in the following months. Let this be a lesson in paying greater attention to the results of all my decisions and actions both as I more fully exercise managerial responsibility and as I seek to better understand my own capacities as a manager.

Tying together what I learned about my managerial philosophy through the McGregor test and what I can learn about myself through Drucker's feedback analysis ought to prove useful. It seems as though paying explicit attention to the assumptions I make about those with whom I work (because I know how I want to view my co-workers and how they want to be viewed) is a practice to which I need to pay more attention. This boils down, I think, to what SPL's former director used to say about giving others the benefit of the doubt: they deserve it. Always assuming good intentions is a great way to build trusting relationships even if it is a hard thing to put into practice 100% of the time. And, to tie McGregor to Drucker, I need to be diligent about reflecting on how my decisions at work actually play out for my colleagues. Doing so will provide me with clues as to how I'm doing in making decisions from a Theory Y point of view.

Screencasting Through Twitter!

Sacramento Public Library recently began using Twitter as an integral part of how we reach out to our customers. Follow saclib on Twitter to see what we're up to. Because we follow virtually everyone who follows the Library, this method of interacting with our Twitter followers is already paying dividends. A couple of days ago, somebody the Library follows tweeted:

Screenr - Create screencasts and screen recordings the easy way http://ff.im/-6NrN8

I've been toying around with how we might somehow integrate instructional screencasts as part of our developing QR code program at SPL so I followed the link. It turns out that Screenr is an incredibly easy to use service for recording screencasts that can then automatically be tweeted from the Screenr website using your Twitter account. Very cool.

So cool, in fact that I spent the next 30 minutes or so "testing" Screenr and really driving one of my co-workers crazy with my annoying voice overs. Anyway, take a look at a very rough take on how twittering libraries might take advantage of Screenr:



If you watched the screencast, you'll know what I mean when I say this is a rough take but the concept has tremendous potential, I believe. Using short screencasts delivered through Twitter, we can provide useful tips about the Library to folks who have already expressed an interest in our services through their decision to follow us.

Off the top of my head, some other "Here's How at Saclibrary" screencasts might include how to place holds on items, how to subscribe to our RSS feeds, how to use any number of our databases, how to download media, how to subscribe to our Book Bulletin (reader's advisory) selections, even how to log into My Account (not MY account!). There are so many things customers can do in the library that aren't as clear to them as they are to us. This is an exciting new tool to use in making the library a more fun and useful service for our customers.

Know What They Want...and Give It to Them

A few months back, OCLC released a report called, Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want. I found this to be an interesting read from many perspectives; the fact that library staff have very different expectations from a catalog than our users do isn't surprising though I had not really given this question much prior consideration.

The salient point of this report for me, though, is how our users view the process of obtaining what they want from the library in general. We, as service providers, often think of borrowing items from the library in discrete steps; for example: getting to the library, searching the catalog, locating an item on the shelf, checking out. Thus, we tend to attempt to improve our services in terms of the environmental boundaries we perceive between these steps (we plan as though processes involved in searching the catalog have nothing to do with processes for checking out books).

According to the OCLC report, though, "end users expect a seamless flow from discovery to delivery." Our customers want direct links to online content and they want evaluative information like excerpts and tables of contents from titles accessible in the library catalog. This kind of information is so helpful in deciding whether the title meets their needs before going through the necessary steps to have an item sent from another location and making a trip to the library to check it out and, potentially wasting valuable time.

One way the library can provide this kid of information (beyond the LJ, Kirkus, and PW reviews now popping up in some catalogs) is through taking advantage of the work of others! The Google Books project has made so much content available online that now, many of the books owned by the library have significant sections of their content readily available as exactly the kind of evaluative tool our customers want.

I noticed in a slide presentation David Lee King put together for some library people down in Texas that Ann Arbor District Library is linking to Google Books content from their catalog. This is a great idea that meets the needs of our customers in a very satisfactory way. Because it's fun to toss out ideas like this to the folks with whom I work, I asked Sacramento Public Library's Systems Supervisor Sarah Smith if this was something we could do. What seemed like no more than a few minutes later (she claims it was two hours), SPL's catalog was up and running with the same feature. Take a look at the screen shot:













Quite appropriately, the first item I found in our catalog that had the link to Google Books content was one entitled, "Creating Public Value"! With "value added" services like this one delivered solely by the efforts of awesome librarians like Sarah (as opposed to our sometimes-hard-to-work-with vendors), we are taking one more step across the bridge that separates the experiences of our in-library visitors from our online visitors.

Don’t Leave Home Without It (An eBook, that is)

A couple of days ago, I complained that I was unable to blog about downloading an eBook to my phone because the data cable I'd ordered had not yet been delivered. Well, I got it yesterday and the wait was worth it (at least in terms of price). I paid less than five dollars including shipping from Amazon while the local AT&T store is asking $19.99! Anyway, I was excited to jump right in and start downloading eBooks to my BlackJack but my excitement quickly faded. For further context, I am talking here about eBooks compatible with the MobiPocket reader. Sacramento Public Library also offers Adobe eBooks but I haven't tried those yet. Here is a rundown of the good and bad of this experience.

The Good

Once you know how to do it, the process of loading an eBook onto your phone is very fast. The actual transfer of the eBook from my PC to my phone took a couple of seconds at most. And, though I've actually added two different books to my phone's library, I have still not used up even half of my available memory. That the books are so small in terms of data size surprised me. I have to admit, as well, that I fully expected to find the activity of reading a book on my phone to be less than enjoyable. Again, though, I was surprised. I read tons of email on my phone and am already used to this format. What's more, navigating through the book, is exceptionally easy. I can use the D-pad to move a page forward or back, I can use the hot-linked table of contents to jump from chapter to chapter, and I can also specify a specific page number to which I want to jump. I can view the text in multiple sizes and in full screen view. The book even reopens to the page I was reading when I closed it last time. All too easy. So now it is simple for me to bring a book along anyplace even to places I wouldn't normally want to carry an actual book. Having a book on my phone is so easy, in fact, I can even read while I'm driving! Well, maybe not, but this is definitely convenient.

The Bad

Allow me to preface my comments on the difficulties I experience by disclosing the fact that I did not read the instructions! But they are not easily noticeable on the website and, who reads lengthy instructions anyway? That said, the experience I had in successfully getting these books onto my phone worries me. I'm neither tech expert nor technophobe; however, I am very comfortable with computers in general and this process was a bit of a challenge. This makes me wonder how many of our customers will be able to manage this on their own. Generally, I don't think a service is all that useful if it is difficult to use. Of course, as I said earlier, once you've got the books on your device, it's great but the getting them there…not so much. My expectation was that I'd "check out" the book I wanted from the Library's catalog, download it to my PC, connect my phone to the PC, and load the book on the phone. Essentially, that is exactly what happens but I experienced several steps in between. In fact, I'm still not sure if I can do this on my PC running XP; I had to use my laptop running Vista to get it to work.

Basically, on my PC, my experience went something like this: downloaded the Mobipocket reader directly to my phone. At this point, I'd like to point out that one expects that downloading software to one's phone would happen from a website that is actually designed to be viewed on a phone. Not so at MobiPocket. I then checked out the book I wanted and plugged in my phone to the PC. I realized there was no way to send the checked out book from "My eAccount" on the library website to my phone so I downloaded the reader to my PC, as well. I downloaded the book to the reader on my PC feeling fully confident that I'd figured it all out. Nope. No matter how many times I tried to open the book in the reader, I was told by my obstinate PC that "The retailer website from which you have downloaded the eBook could not be identified, please re-download the eBook directly from the retailer website". I didn't like this. At this point, I was feeling a blend of emotions that primarily consisted of a desire to give up (which I'm afraid will happen often with our customers) and an overwhelming desire to conquer this annoyance even if it meant smashing my computer. By the way, I still had no way of getting the book from my PC to my phone. Then I noticed tab in the reader on my PC that suggested I add a device to my reader. Ah ha! I plugged my phone into the USB and tried. The reader wanted to know the PID number for the version of MobiPocket Reader I was running on my phone. What? So I dug around in every option I could find on the phone's reader and finally found something called a PID number. At last! But no; sorry. I didn't have the right version of ActiveSync on my computer. So I visited the website suggested by the computer and downloaded. I restarted my computer and again tried to add my phone to the device list in the reader. Sorry again. I still didn't have the right version of ActiveSync. I'm feeling frustrated just retelling this!

I finally decided that maybe my PC was jinxed so I tried on my laptop. This went a bit more smoothly. I knew I had to download the reader to my PC, I knew my PID number, and had the latest "Windows Mobile Device Center" (which is the Vista equivalent to ActiveSync, apparently). Good to go, right? Well, no. When I plugged in my phone and tried to transfer the book to my phone, my computer told me that I need to install the reader on my phone. I am not sure how to describe what I felt at that moment but, instead of doing anything rash, I tried uninstalling the software on my phone. I then plugged back into the laptop, tried to transfer the book, and, voila. The reader on the PC asked if I wanted to install software on my phone, I said "yes", it did, and next thing I know, I've got an eBook on my phone. That's really all there is to it! I hope I'm just a lot dumber than the average user that wants to read books on their phone but I'm not confident of that. This process should be easier.

Oh yeah, about collection of eBooks. I don't know if the library gets to select titles for our MobiPocket collection or if they give us what is available but, in browsing through the collection, it seemed like the majority of the 300+ titles were similar to All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire, Feisty Firefighters, and Close Encounters of the Sexy Kind. This isn't my genre, needless to say. Hopefully the choices will expand…

Six-in-One and Done

Alright, I'm going to knock out the final six commentaries I need to write up in order to complete Sacramento Public Library's 27 Things program. In this post, I'm going to touch on:

• the Library's downloadable media
• our newly redesigned website
• our new language learning database
• Twitter
• Thingfo
• my final reflections on the program.

Here goes!

Downloadable media at SPL
This is a very cool service and the Library has a ton to offer here. We've got audio books, e-books that can be read on your computer or your phone (I will be reading books on my phone if the USPS would ever deliver the data cable for my phone that I ordered on Amazon a week ago and, according to their online tracking has been sitting in West Sacramento for four days now...grrr), and even video. Fiction, non-fiction. Even music! And a lot of this stuff even works on iPods, now, too!

Providing this wealth of material online really demonstrates the degree to which SPL has committed itself to serving our customers in all of the ways that they want. For those folks who don't ever want to set foot inside a physical library, we still have an awful lot to offer them.

The new SPL website
First, take a look at our new website; what do you think? Personally, I think it is a tremendous improvement over our last site. While there is still a good amount of information provided on the home page, this new design does not have the same chaotic feel as the old and, a bonus, it is much more aesthetically pleasing, too. Kudos to everyone at SPL who had a hand in the redesign.

If I had to choose a couple of things that are my favorite features of the new design, I'd say first (this is really minor but really important at the same time), I like the way it is so clear and easy for customers to log into their account. We know that folks are requesting books like crazy these days so I want them to be able to find this information with ease. And, we've also added the capacity for our customers to pay any fines they've accrued online so making personal accounts easily accessible is doubly important. The last really nice functionality we've added to the "my accounts" feature is the ability to now use a user name for logging in rather than having to remember your library card number. I love this because you can make your user name whatever you want it to be and as easy to remember as you like.

I also really like the far right-hand column of the homepage where we are able to highlight in a very effective way some of the exciting current happenings at the library. A nice touch here is that the events that are featured in this column also show up in the same place on all of the pages on our site so the customer can't help but see what is going on at their library.

Mango Language Learning Database
Ni hao ma? SPL recently started subscribing to the Mango online language learning courses. I love these! The database is super easy to use and, with nine languages available all the time, there is never a worry about being able to find something on the shelf when folks need to learn a new language. And, especially cool, we also offer through Mango, English for Spanish, Polish, and Portugese speakers! If you work in a library, you know how popular the Sin Barreras series is! And these language lessons are really easy to use, as well. I'm very excited about how we've improved our services by offering Mango to our customers.

Twitter
I'm doing it. Follow me at www.twitter.com/civillibrarian. And not only am I a tweeter, but SPL is now on Twitter and garnering a lot of followers. If you want to see what the Library is up to on Twitter, check us out @saclib!

Thingfo
Hmmm. Making Thingfo our 26th thing is a good example of how rapidly things can change on the Internet. Here today, gone tomorrow. Thingfo is, apparently, re-tooling and has limited use of their social media aggregator widget to invitees only.

My Reflections on 27 Things
What can I say? I've loved it. I heard for a couple of years how much fun every library had that implemented this program and it went just as well at SPL as I'd hoped. I had the opportunity to learn an awful lot about the personalities of folks with whom I work on a regular basis and the organizational capacity both in terms of technological savvy and acceptance of change has grown by leaps and bounds.

Perhaps it is the building of a more developed technological skill set that will be the most important outcome of this program, though, as SPL plans to launch a similar program for our customers this winter. Planning for the public program reminds me of another thing I learned in this program: that 27 things (even though we have 27 branches and what could have been more clever than that?) is too many things. The public program, I hope will feature perhaps 10 things. It would be best, I think, if we chose things that are both useful for people and that can be demonstrated using resources we offer at the library (e.g. rss feeds, downloadable media, Twitter).

One Small Step...

Sacramento Public Library has "gone live" with our first application of QR codes! This is a small one but I'm excited nonetheless because of the great potential that QR codes have in improving our services. On our library blog, Grand Central, we now have a QR code posted in the sidebar that, when scanned, will load the contact information for our SMS reference service directly into the user's phone. Pretty cool! And thanks both to Megan Wong and Ann Owens for helping move us forward with this technology!

Here is the screenshot:

Podcasting in the Library

View my video podcast!

Some cool, additional podcast resources:

Library Podcasts from Library Spot

LIBWORM's list of public library podcast feeds

YouTube & 27 Things

I'm almost done with the 27 Things; really, I can see the finish line! This time it's YouTube. Hmmm. I seriously doubt I could say much about YouTube that hasn't already been said.

Because of ease with which anyone can post anything to YouTube, this site has the potential to waste a lot of time in mostly entertaining fashion. As a test of this, I thought I'd search YouTube for a subject about which I've been thinking a lot lately: QR codes. As evidence of the entertainment value of YouTube, check out this Japanese commercial featuring the power of the QR code:



Of course, many people post videos to YouTube that have value far beyond simple entertainment. A few months back, I blogged about the potential of QR codes in libraries and demonstrated one such use by creating a QR code pointing to a video that Sacramento Public Library has available on YouTube. Take a look at that post and give the QR code a whirl.

Other folks are posting to YouTube with information about the concept of QR codes in general. Because this technology (the QR code, not YouTube!) hasn't hit the mainstream in the U.S. like it has in some other countries, this kind of information is very useful. Here is one of my favorites:



I publish another post later today showing Sacramento Public Library's first for-public-consumption QR code.

Yelp!

So, first of all, before I talk about my thoughts on Yelp for Thing 19 of SPL's 27 Things program, I'll provide a little update from my most recent post wherein I was excited to discover that I could very easily publish to my blog directly from the Zoho Writer software. I thought this was just really cool so I mentioned my discovery to a co-worker. She was less than impressed. Eyebrows raised, looking at me like I'm dumb, scornful tone of voice: "you can do that in Word". Oh. So, I'm writing this post in Word. Cool.

Now, on to the exercise. I was supposed to take a look at one of the websites that had won an award for 2.0-ness on seomoz.org. I chose Yelp because, basically, I just really like Yelp. I think it is a fantastic tool for finding reviews from real people on any nature of organizations. I've used it many times to find good restaurants in cities I've visited where I didn't know a thing. For example, I love The Smok'n Pig BBQ in Valdosta, Georgia!

But, another real value of Yelp for us library folks is the ability afforded by this site to find out what our users are saying about us. Right now on Yelp, you can see several reviews for Sacramento Public Library. The guy who wrote this:

"This is a good public library. It's the main branch in downtown Sacramento. I once lost a book and owed $41 of fines. Once I found it and turned it in, they were nice enough to charge only $5 dollars for being so honest...it was a year plus overdue."

Gave us four stars! I guess because we were nice enough not to make him pay for a book that he had returned to us…

online productivity software Thing

Next "thing" on the 27 things list is the online productivity suite (a la Google Docs or Zoho Writer). This is just a tiny bit coincidental, I suppose because the last "thing" was the wiki. As I was writing my post for the wiki exercise, I was trying to wrap my mind around the difference between a wiki and a product like Google Docs or Zoho. After all, both technologies are great for online collaboration among people (or even just for one person using multiple workstations). I suppose the biggest difference is in the intended use of the end product. I envision documents created in Google Docs or Zoho as intended to be documents with a defined point at which no further editing is necessary and, likely, as a document that will be printed. Wikis, on the other hand, are collaborative pieces of information that can be revisited whenever an update is required (a la Wikipedia). I'm sure there are different perspectives on this but the two technologies do seem fairly similar to me. This post, then, is my first shot at using Zoho Writer. I must say, it is extremely easy to use (as is Google Docs) and the ability to import a document directly into my blog is kind of cool, too. Usually, I just write my blog posts directly in the editor provided by Blogger. This is because I rarely do any re-writing. If I could ever develop the (strongly suggested) habit of the good writer (re-write, re-write, re-write), I might find a tool like Writer to be of use. Anyway, as this is simply an exercise, I'm going to stick in a photo I took yesterday of Sacramento Public Library's newest library (set for Grand Opening on August 29!), the Valley Hi - North Laguna Library. Check it out; it's beautiful!

UPDATE:

Clearly, the photo I embedded in the Writer document did not make it from Zoho to Blogger. No worries, here are a shot of the new library embedded in Blogger:

As opposed to the difficulty in bringing a photo over from Writer to my blog, the process of exporting my Writer document directly into my blog couldn't have been easier. One click, enter my Blogger username and password, and submit. It even gave me the option of exporting the data as a draft post only. Pretty cool.

Still Finishing My "Things"

I will earn my custom SPL flash drive for completing the 27 Things on time! Today is an introduction to wikis. Like most of these "things", wikis are nothing new to me but I do feel as though they have failed to be as widely embraced as I would have expected. The potential of this tool to have utility across such a range of situations is impressive to me.

Obviously, most of us are aware of one use of wiki: Wikipedia. However, I think that the near universal awareness of Wikipedia has blinded many people to the different ways in which the wiki technology might be used. As always in their work, Common Craft does an outstanding job of simplifying the concept of wikis in Wikis in Plain English. In short, the wiki provides a place for folks spread across geographic areas to collaboratively create information on a given topic. This can take a form as informal as that presented by Common Craft or it can be used in much for formal settings. Durham County Library provides an outstanding example of the collaborative power of wikis at their strategic planning wiki, for example. Not only did DCL's use of wikis provide an always accessible place for the sharing of ideas and feedback during their planning process, I think the best thing about this example is the ease with which customer feedback was incorporated into the planning process.

At Sacramento Public Library, there have been a few attempts at making use of wikis for project planning but these attempts have not proven all that fruitful. I'm not really sure what actions or attitudes make a successful wiki experience more likely but I'd be interested to hear from those who have had positive experiences.

The m-Library is Now

For Thing 15 in SPL's 27 Things, the exercise is to read a few articles from a past issue of OCLC's NextSpace that reflects on Web 2.0 and what this shift in Internet user behavior and expectations means for libraries. While these articles are still interesting, the concepts brought forth by the writers are now several years old; we are well-entrenched in 2.0 and well on our way to the next level of library transformation brought about by online possibilities.

With that in mind, and because the NextSpace newsletter is consistently of high quality, I skipped ahead to more recent issues and found some fascinating stuff. The Labs section of the February 2009 issue showcases WorldCat Mobile; this gorgeous looking app (designed by mobile software developer Boopsie) provides a truly functional mobile interface to WorldCat. If you have ever tried using a library catalog on your smart phone, you are likely aware of how unserviceable most of these interfaces really are. WorldCat Mobile is different. It works well and looks great, too. And OCLC isn't the only organization that recognizes what most of us are quickly catching up to (the fact that folks will soon demand a workable mobile library interface): take a look at what DC Public and NYPL have been up to lately. These are both impressives first steps.

So, the kind of decision-making that results from embracing 2.0 concepts has been great for pushing libraries toward greater responsiveness, greater transparency, and for allowing greater control on the part of the user to determine what they can get from their library. And this kind of decision-making has to continue; it has proven itself. However, the m-Library is the best tangible development of this line of thinking that I have yet to see and when you get right down to it, if what we're doing doesn't have tangible results, then it's all just talk.

Comments by Michael Lascarides of NYPL Labs provide a good starting point if you are interested in understanding what some of the basic philosophical questions are that underlie the push toward the m-Library; and if you have any doubts that this push is real, check out the list of libraries on the LibSuccess wiki that have already developed a mobile presence. This is for real. As Lascarides mentions, prior to any real effort on the part of NYPL to optimize their site for mobile visitors, the NYPL site experienced a 300% in mobile visitors over the last year. Imagine what kind of traffic we could get on our sites if they actually worked on mobile devices!

Of course, just developing a mobile friendly site for our users isn't the end of the game, either. Paul Coyne talks about the impressive potential for QR codes in libraries, saying that, " the idea that one can be connected to the virtual world from the physical with a camera phone is very seductive." He's right. I blogged a few months back about the possibilities of QR Codes in libraries; the ease with which library users can be connected to everything the library has to offer online in this fashion is exciting.

Another still underutilized but widely available (Lascarides says that 65% of the world's population now has access to a mobile phone) technology on which libraries should focus is the use of SMS notices for requests and pending due dates. Text messages are more ubiqitous than email for a large segment of the population; why not communicate with our users in the language they're using?

I've presented a fair amount of information in this post but I'm not even scratching the surface of what is currently happening and what is surely to become more mainstream with each passing month. Sacramento Public Library is following this trend closely and hopes to be a true m-Library in the near future!

North Natomas Almost Has a New Library!

I'm just back from a meeting at Sacramento Public Library's almost finished North Natomas Library and it is beautiful! Take a look at a few photos and even a 12seconds video.

The building is scheduled to open in January, 2010 after a long and convoluted plan that started way back in 2003. As recently as earlier this year there were concerns that construction on the project would come to a halt due to the State of California's money woes (this building is being constructed with about 50% of the funds coming from the
State). However, these concerns have been allayed and we are full steam ahead.

The branch supervisor at North Natomas, Suzy Murray, is doing a great job of developing strong partnerships with the nearby high school and community college as this library is a joint use facility serving not only the general public but the specific needs of the neighboring schools.

Here are some quick facts about this gorgeous new library:

• At over 23,000 square feet, it will be SPL's largest facility besides the Central Library.
• This building will offer 120 public Internet stations; far more than any other location in the system.
• We anticipate receiving LEED Silver certification for this building.
• The lobby is designed to serve as alternatively as an art gallery/reception area and looks to be beautiful once the stained concrete floor is complete.

And, if you're still interested, take a 12 Second peek at the interior that I shot today on my Flip:


Check out the new North Natomas Library on 12seconds.tv

More Layout Changes

After seeing how easy it is to tweak my Blogger template, I thought I'd get a little more adventurous. I wanted to push the masthead up into the lefthand corner of the browser window, add a third column to my layout, and, lastly, I've wanted a way to display recent comments to my posts for a long time.

Moving the masthead was just something I toyed around with in the CSS of the template until I achieved the effect I wanted. It only took a few minutes. I'm enjoying the flexibility of Blogger that I previously had not thought was available.

Adding the third column (technically a second sidebar in Blogger-speak) was quite easy thanks to a very nice tutorial from the Beautiful Beta blog. I'm pleased with the results of this addition. Adding the third column is useful to me because I now can add a little bit more content for the reader without requiring any additional scrolling. Most importantly, I've been looking for a way to display recent comments to my posts. What I like about this feature on other blogs is the manner in which this lets the reader follow any conversations that are taking place about a given post. I also took advantage of this new "real estate" by moving my Twitter Updates widget from the left column over to the right.

In order to make sure that both Twitter Updates and recent comments are visible without scrolling, I tweaked the script for both widgets to reduce the number of items displayed and I also changed the script for the comments widget to display only the first 75 characters of any comment. Lastly, I reduced the font size in the third column altogether both to fit more content on the screen without scrolling and to de-emphasize this content relative to the blog posts.

I had two comments on my last post in which I "unveiled" my first round of layout changes. One commenter liked my "keep it simple" approach and the other thought I made better use of "real estate". I hope I didn't turn around and violate either of these improvements through the addition of more content...

A (kind of) New Look

I spent a little time this morning playing around with the Blogger template I use for this blog. If everything looks the same as the last time you were here, refresh your browser! I didn't change a lot but I was motivated to tweak things a little bit because I was really not happy with the masthead I created a while back that showed a sketch drawing of Sacramento Public Library's Central Library.

So, after using Photoshop to create a simpler masthead, I then just decided to see what else I could tweak in the template. Like I said, I didn't do much but I did find out how easy it is to change (or remove completely) the labels for the various sidebar widgets. I also discovered that you can use CSS to re-size your profile picture. And, I finally figured out how to remove the annoying Blogger bar at the top of the blog.

Overall, I think The Civil Librarian now looks a little cleaner, a little less obviously like a Blogger template (but it is still pretty obvious, nonetheless) and (maybe?) a little bit more professional. I hope you like the changes!