David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

My Presentations for Internet Librarian 2018

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My presentations are up at the Internet Librarian 2018 site (yes, I was busy). Here are shortcuts to my slides:

Don’t stop at my slides – a LOT of the presenters slides, notes, etc can be found at the Internet Librarian 2018 website. Make sure to check them out!

Video in Libraries: my new Library Technology Report

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My newest Library Technology Report is out – it’s all about Video in Libraries!

Here’s the blurb about it (from the ALA Store):

In today’s fast-paced, multimedia-enriched world, video is everywhere. In this issue of Library Technology Reports (vol. 54, no. 7), David Lee King explores how libraries can leverage videos’ popularity to share information and enhance their marketing efforts. He explains why libraries should make and post videos and strategies for creating video content. Throughout this report, King covers varying aspects of making and sharing videos—from best practices to video content creation, including the types of equipment, tools, and staff resources you’ll need to start incorporating video into your library outreach and marketing.

If you or your organization are interested in getting started with video, or maybe you want to take your video marketing to the next level … this guide will help! It’s full of tips, pointers, and explanations about the types of videos you can make for an organization, video tools and software, and a lot of best practices on making better videos.

Important: There are a TON of links in Video in Libraries. A TON. Thankfully … I made a supplement! This supplement, on my website, has all the links to the videos mentioned in the publication, and to all the cameras, lenses, software, etc. that are mentioned, too – arranged by chapter. Hopefully, you will find that useful!

Want to see my videos or my library’s videos? Click the links and subscribe to both YouTube channels!

Emerging Trends at NLA2018

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Last week, I gave a couple of talks at the Nebraska Library Association 2018 conference. Nicely-done conference! I gave a 3-hour preconference on Emerging Technology Trends for libraries (slides included in this post) and was on a panel focused on neutrality in libraries. No notes from that, but it seemed to go well, and there was a lot of great discussion, different viewpoints, etc.

Anyway – I promised I’d post my slides … so here they are!

Chatbots and Libraries

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This is my continuing series on emerging technology trends and libraries. This week’s trend explores the world of Chatbots.

What’s a Chatbot? Chatbots are called many things besides just “chatbot.” You might also know them as conversational agents, intelligent chatbots, interactive agents, or talkbots.

Chatbots are pretty much apps that talk back to you (my definition). Here’s a better definition from Wordstream: “… software applications that mimic written or spoken human speech for the purposes of simulating a conversation or interaction with a real person.”

This interaction is mostly done via chat boxes on websites. But they can also be found in call centers. In a call center environment, chatbots take care of very low-level transactions, like changing a password, requesting an account balance, or scheduling an appointment without having to talk to a real person.

The same basic transactions can be handled with a text-based chatbot on a website.

Chatbots use Natural Language Processing, much like virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, or Apple Siri. They attempt to sound (or read) very “real,” so the transaction has a more human feel to it. Very different from a phone tree in a call center or typing answers to questions on a web-based form.

Examples of Chatbots include:

  • Health-based. Some chatbots are used in medical diagnoses, dementia patient monitoring, and basic information gathering.
  • Facebook Messenger and Twitter DMs – these are both good places to see chatbots in action.
  • Chatbots within mobile apps. My bank app has one (Erica in the Bank of America app). The Starbucks app has a chatbot that helps you order coffee. Lyft has one that works with Facebook Messenger and Amazon Echo. Fandango also has a app that works with Facebook Messenger.
  • eBay’s chatbot works with Google Assistant.

Chatbots in the library?

How about having a chatbot for the library? Chatbots answer basic, always-asked questions. A library chatbot could answer a variety of questions, like:

  • Questions about hours, locations, and upcoming events. Maybe it could even capture event registrations.
  • With a good API connection, a chatbot could tell a customer when their books are due, or take fine payment information.
  • Facebook Messenger chatbots. You could build your chatbots to operate within Facebook Messenger. If you get a lot of questions there, it’s definitely something to think about.
  • Chat-based reference. Have a chat-based reference service? It’s very possible your chatbot could answer basic questions, freeing up your staff’s time to answer harder questions or focus on other tasks.

Articles for more information about Chatbots:

Build your own chatbot! Here are a couple of chatbot builder tools to check out (all mostly built on the Facebook Messenger platform):

Does your library use chatbots? Please share!

 

Mobile App Saves the Day

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smartphone in actionI don’t always realize how odd the times we live in are, in terms of technology (yes, the times we live in are generally pretty weird – yay politics!). But in terms of tech – it’s changing pretty darn fast.

For example …

My youngest daughter is in college, and needed to type in pages of text from a book for a project she’s working on. My wife was helping her with this, and had a thought … so she asked me “do you think there’s some sort of app that will let you take a picture of this page and turn it into text, so we don’t have to type so much?”

Good question! That translated in my techie head to “look for an OCR app,” which I did, and which I found (look for the OCR Scanner in Apple’s App store). It worked great, and just like my wife described – take a picture of the text, push the magical “OCR” button … and we had text. Sweet!

It worked remarkably well. The app apparently didn’t like the letter J, but otherwise it did a great job of turning an image of text into actual text.

Which made me realize just how far we have come! I was an academic librarian early in my career, and we talked about doing OCR scanning of rare books. The scanners were (maybe still are) pretty expensive. It wasn’t always very accurate and definitely required some serious clean-up work.

But this? I already have a phone. The app? Free. Sure, the app could have been better – there wart a slightly wonky process of doing the scan, then copying/pasting the text into an email (there didn’t seem to be a “save” feature in the app). I wouldn’t want to repeat that for a whole book of scanning! But that’s just the first free app I found. I’ll guess there are others that might work better.

Just a realization that if you need something:

  1. Yes, there probably is an app for that.
  2. How weird that I can even say that!
  3. What once was time-consuming, pricey, and took multiple people to do … now fits in my pocket.
  4. It might even be free.