Social Media in the Springtime - Act III

Here's the last installment of Social Media in the Springtime!

Let's talk about blogging a bit. At Evanced, we clearly love our blogging. But blogging certainly has it's faults. Namely, you have to have something to blog about. And you can't be too lengthy (boring) and you can't be too brief (isn't that what Twitter is for?)

I was recently hosting a technology unconference where a librarian mentioned that if done right, a good blog can replace most, if not all, of your library website. Not recommended for large library systems, but for a smaller library it might just do the trick.

When used right, you can link your Evanced products, photographs, feeds, and other social media to your blog allowing them to interact almost effortlessly.

The most popular of blogging sites, when unconference attendees were polled, was Wordpress. Here at Evanced, we use Blogger.

If you're thinking of getting a library blog, expanding your blog, or changing your blog, you might find these articles that compare Wordpress and Blogger.

http://www.thoughtclusters.com/2009/01/comparing-blogger-and-wordpresscom.html
http://pulsed.blogspot.com/2007/07/blogger-wordpress-chart.html

And if you're looking for tools to add a new look or functions to your blog, take a look at some of these options:

For Blogger:
http://mashable.com/2009/01/16/blogger-toolbox/ (highly recommended)
http://www.allblogtools.com/
http://tools.bloggerbuster.com/

For Wordpress:
http://mashable.com/2007/08/16/wordpress-god300-tools-for-running-your-wordpress-blog/
http://www.crazyleafdesign.com/blog/top-50-free-wordpress-themes/

Do you have an interesting library blog? Have a blog you use in a unique way? Tell us about it!

Christine
Coordinator of Customer Experience
Evanced Solutions

Social Media in the Springtime - Act II

Thanks for coming back from intermission. It's time for Act II, in which teens that can't seem to get into the library use the Internet to participate in a whole new way.

I recently used an interesting product called Cover It Live.

Cover It Live allows users to develop a live, interactive blog and chat. You can lead conversation online and the web interface allows attendees to comment and discuss. If you're worried about content, there is even a feature that lets you accept or deny comments as they are made. Another neat feature is the ability to show pictures, videos, and create polls for users to take on the spot! You can also use the software to monitor tweets about your event/book club/conversation.

So if you are looking for something unique to do with teens or adults that just can't seem to get to the library, Cover It Live might be the answer. I've used it for conferences and discussion, but I have a feeling it would be a big hit with a book club or conversation group.

Give it a try - I'd love to know what you and your users think.

Christine
Coordinator of Customer Experience

Case Study: Prince William Public Library System

It was a small advertisement that led to big changes in the way Prince William Public Library System (Virginia) managed the 3,600 plus teens in its summer reading program.

Thousands of Summer Reading Participants – One Easy Solution
While flipping through a library periodical, Cathy Chang, Associate Director of Prince William Public Library System, saw an advertisement for Summer Reader – the web based summer reading management software from Evanced Solutions. After emailing Evanced and later attending a webinar, Cathy purchased a software subscription for her library system and her summer reading program took a new and improved course.

“We tried to create our own software program [in-house],” Cathy explained, “but it was clunky and staff intensive.”

The staff intensive nature of their former in-house program made it difficult for library staff to manage reader participation and extract statistics about their program. Using Summer Reader’s management tools, including patron self-registration, book and events reviews, prize drawings, and quick report generation, Cathy and her staff were able to respond to reader participation more quickly, and the easy-to-use patron interface increased teen participation – both day and night.

A Teen Friendly Summer Reading Site
“When the kids saw Summer Reader and its tools, they embraced them right away. The teens love being able to log in, it’s available 24 hours a day, and they can pick up their prizes at anytime because we enabled the prize features in the website”, said Cathy.

Teens quickly gravitated to the review feature and in the first year of using the product, the library had over 3,000 book reviews. “We thought that with Facebook and Twitter and all these other things, [the teens] would abandon reviews, but they didn’t. They love to write reviews and it’s nice because we know that the kids are writing and participating in a safe environment. The staff can easily review what they write and we can make a note that says “Spoiler Alert” if they tell a lot about a particular book and might spoil the end for other readers,” added Cathy.




6th-12th graders from the Prince William Library System write reviews of various detail and length. The newest version of Summer Reader 2009 allows readers to add titles to a reading list if a book review piques their interest.

A Staff Time-Saving Solution
Saving time and money was an unexpected but positive feature of using Summer Reader. “The staff wanted to save time,” Cathy explained, “Especially with this economy; we need to save staff time and Summer Reader helps us with that.”

The ability to create statistical reports quickly and easily has been a big help to the Prince William Public Library System. By running reports such as the book review report, library staff can easily obtain a list of the titles participants are reading to determine whether their purchases and collection development policy are matching reading trends. This feature decreased the amount of time the staff was taking to sort reviews and view reading trends.

Libraries and Schools Team Up
Summer Reader’s features don’t just help the library, they help community schools too. Local schools have asked the library staff to help them track summer reading statistics so their middle schools students can “compete to read” over summer break. And high school teachers are allowing students to print out their book reviews from Summer Reader and submit them for book report credit.

It was this review feature that demonstrated to the Prince William Public Library System just how responsive Evanced Solutions customer service is. When students asked if they could search for the book review they wrote by first name or title, Cathy called the Evanced Solutions support team. “We asked if that was a possible feature and the programmers came back and created it,” Cathy said, “Now it’s a standard feature of the software. It’s nice to see a company that’s responsive to suggestions for developments”.

Marketing and Design for Summer Reading Success
Cathy credits high participation in the summer reading program to the software, but also to the marketing of their program and the design of their Summer Reader webpage. Cathy and her staff used direct links from the library homepage to the Summer Reader site and additional links in the library’s email newsletter to increase teen participation. Making special outreach visits to schools to demonstrate the software and working closely with media center specialists also helps their program grow every year.

By collaborating with the local government television channel, the library has been able to create “shows” that tell the community more about their summer reading program and events. And most importantly, the layout of their site is filled with fun graphics and vivid colors to ensure that it is inviting to teens. “If we don’t used bright colors or if the Summer Reader colors we choose are dull, the teens make sure they let us know!” laughed Cathy.

Reaching Out to a Variety of Readers
While Prince William Library has focused on using the Summer Reader product for teens, other libraries across the United States (and now even across the world) create a variety of pages for different age ranges and needs. With the software, children, teen, and adult reading programs can be run independently of one another. Libraries also use the software to manage interest groups and to manage and promote other reading programs such as winter reading, Teen Read Week, etc.

View the Prince William Summer Reader Site
View the Prince William Library System Reader Site by visiting them online at http://host.evanced.info/pwc/sr/homepage.asp

A Look at Other Summer Reader Sites
View the slideshow below to see other Summer Reader sites:

Learn More about Summer Reader
If you’d like to learn more about Summer Reader and other Evanced Solutions products, contact Evanced at sales@evancedsolutions.com. Sign up for a free (and pressure-free) webinar by visiting us online at http://www.evanced.info/lyp.

Social Media in the Springtime...A Blog Post In Three Parts

Sounds like some sort of high-tech musical, doesn't it?

With Summer Reading just around the corner (next week for some of you!), it's time to consider your social media game plan. It's not just teens who are on Facebook, not just 20-somethings that are on Twitter and you'd be surprised at the library users who are embracing social media.

Here are some Social Media tips to help you freshen things up for the Spring Time!

Twitter
If you want to send Tweets out at consistent times/days, consider Hoot Suite -http://hootsuite.com/ - a great tool to help you preschedule tweets and even measure your tweet effectiveness.

Do you try to make story time a "kids only" event? Or want parents of teens to know what's going on at activities? Tweet photos of what's happening so they can keep track of what their child is doing - and have something to ask their teens about when they talk to them next! (It depends on your teen/parent crowd if that's something they'd be in to!)

"Jimmy, what did you did at library gaming night?"
"Nothin'."
"Really? Because I heard you were playing the drums like a wild man in Round Two of the Rock Band tournament..."
"Oh, well, yeah, there was that..."

Here are some photo sharing sites to get you started:

Twitpic - http://twitpic.com/
ImageBay - http://new.imagebay.com/
SnapTweet - http://snaptweet.com/
Img.ly - http://img.ly/
Yfrog - http://yfrog.com/

Facebook
I have a confession. Sometimes...I'm still confused by the "new" Facebook. So, let's help each other on this one; I know we can get through it.

I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here - there's a great article from Smashing Downloads that talks about the 10 tools and applications to enhance your Facebook Experience

And the lovely folks at Mashable posted a great article about top business tools on Facebook - some of which are very library friendly.

So the curtains will now close on this act of "Social Media in the Springtime". Stay tuned for more info coming soon! And be sure to friend us on Facebook and Twitter (Evanced)

Getting Through Tough Times @ Your Library

Back in March 2008 I wrote a brief article that listed ten ways libraries can help people get through tough economic times. What I didn't anticipate was the gangbuster response the article was going to get - from Texas to New York and back across to Washington state - the article has been reused, rehashed, and rewritten! It's been great. You can use it too, if you'd like!

You can view the original article on my personal blog:
http://mylibraryideas.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/get-through-a-recession-your-library/

Or on the I Love Libraries website at:
http://www.ilovelibraries.org/news/topstories/toughtimes.cfm

So if libraries help the community get through tough times - who helps the libraries? Well, it goes without saying that there is a bit of reciprocation from most communities by way of tax dollars and/or financial contributions. However, we want to let you know that we're here to support you too.

Here are ideas of how Evanced Solutions can help your library in tough times:

1) If possible, consider charging a small fee to organizations using library meeting rooms. You might only want to charge for-profit groups, or groups that require a lot of post event cleanup. If you're interested in using Room Reserve to help with that process, let us know. We can help you set up the fee feature in Room Reserve and provide you with ideas of how other communities have done something similar.

2) Use your software to the max. Our software is very flexible and has a ton of features. Contact me (Christine) and I can help review what features you are using, and let you know about ones that you're not! By using the software to its potential, you're not only increasing your return on investment, but you're allowing your staff to spend time doing other things they need to do while our software helps take care of the rest.

3) If you have software questions or are stuck on how to do something, contact us. Call our Support team and get the answers you need. We recommend that you pass out our contact information to your entire staff. We don't charge for support and we are always happy to help. You can call Support at 888-519-5770 or email them at support@evancedsolutions.com

4) Use our free training to learn more about our products and all of the features they offer. Take a look at what we're offering and see if there is a class that might help you! Visit the training calendar for more information.

Have a great week!
Christine - Coordinator of Customer Experience
cayar@evancedsolutions.com

I WENT Bald for the Cause

As some of you may know my 10 month old nephew Willem died in 2007 of childhood leukemia.  His parents (my brother-in-law Ted, and sister-in-law Chris) decided to start a St Baldrick's Day team to help raise money and awareness for childhood cancer, by shaving their heads.  I've joined their efforts and their team and put what hair I had left on the line (or to the shears) for this great cause.  

The mission of the St. Baldrick’s Foundation is to raise awareness and funds to cure kids’ cancer by supporting cancer research and fellowships.  This foundation will receive 100% of the proceeds of this fund raiser, and you can donate to this worthy cause in Willem's name and in support of my soon to be bald head here.

My before and after pictures are shown above.  Thank you so much to those who were able to donate.  I raised over $1,000 for the foundation.  It's not to late to contribute to this worthy foundation but if nothing else just peruse the St Baldrick's website to learn more about issues involving childhood cancer. 

You can also learn more about our nephew Willem from his CaringBridge site:  http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/willembolan There are pictures there of the rest of my family that shaved that day too.

Thank You!

Rob Cullin

CSO / Co-Founder

Evanced Solutions

Planned Maintenance - May 15 - 10:00 PM - Midnight

We want to let you know that on Friday, May 15 from 10:00 PM until 11:59 PM, our software might be down interemittently while server work is completed. This only applies to those customers whose software is hosted by Evanced.

We do not expect it to take longer than that, and you may find no change in your service during that time, but just in case it is spotty, we want to let you know not to panic!

If anything changes, we will be sure to keep you informed.

Christine Ayar - Coordinator of Customer Experience

How about the Maintenance/Custodial Department?

I was at the Long Island Library Conference last week and met a lot of great people! The theme was "Going Green" and the topics ranged from making your library LEED certified to developing off-the-wall teen programs.

While I was visiting with folks, I met the Head Custodian for a library that uses Evanced Solutions Events and Room Reserve products. He was part of the team that chose the product (he asked for something that would help he and his staff get the weekly setup schedule) and was a big part of the final decision to go with Events and Room Reserve.

He mentioned that he prints out the set-up requests each daily and posts them to a bulletin board. He also has a link on all of the public computers that custodial staff members can click on to view the calendar and log in under a specific "custodial staff" log in.

How does YOUR custodial or maintenance staff log in to Events and Room Reserve? Do they use printouts? The email function? Do they go online to view the calendar?


Let us know! Comment here or email me at cayar@evancedsolutions.com


~ Christine Ayar, Coordinator of Customer Experience

Drive Traffic to Your Events, Room Reserve, and Summer Reader Pages

Every library wants to increase traffic to their library website. When used correctly, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can lead people to your site.

There was a great article posted last week on FrogLoop.com that discussed the 10 Thing Every Nonprofit Should Know About Social Media and Online Communications.

It's a list of handy tips and ideas that can drive additional traffic to your Summer Reader, Events, and Room Reserve websites. Advertise events, let people know about your available meeting rooms, and build excitement about summer reading!

Not sure about the Social Media trend? Then use the FrogLoop Social Media ROI calculator to determine the value of social networking tools.

~ Christine, Coordinator of Customer Experience