Welcome, Ken Bicknell who comes to us from the Los Angeles County metropolitan transportation authority library and archives.
And I wanted to give a quick shout out to how we connected with Ken.
The project brought together librarians, ARSL ciefists and museums together to explore how the  learning that happens in those different environments can be shared and the common learning that we all have.
So we're really excited and I have actually posted a wonderful white paper on the event page that Kenn and his colleagues created to dive a little bit deeper into the collective wisdom that they explored and shared, and I'll put that in chat.
But I'm also really excited to have Kenn here, he's been traveling around the world presenting on this topic, and we're so pleased to have you here, Kenn.
Welcome.
 it sounds like --
>> I want to confirm you can hear me.
>> Yes, now I can hear you.
>> Thank you so much for that nice introduction.
It's a pleasure to speak to all of you today.
I appreciate you taking time out of your day to listen in and I hope you find it worthwhile.
Before we get started, I wanted to address a couple of other things to be sure we get the most out of this webinar.
My responsibilities as a metro transportation library include our web presence, 14 social media properties, a robust digitization program, and strategic collaborations.
I have the honor of working with great colleagues and a wonderful collection and a special library, but I recognize that we have folks listening in who work in all types of roles from across the spectrum of libraries.
I want to make sure this webinar is about how we can all think about possibilities for each of us and not be just a show and tell of what I was able to accomplish in my own environment.
I'm hoping we can stop at a couple of points along the way to check in regarding questions being submitted Via chat, but we have a lot of ground to cover in 50ish minutes, so I'm going to save time at the end to see if you would like to ask questions and begin sharing ideas, process some of the information covered, and begin to generate some conversation.
In order to keep it to about 50 minutes or so, I have to be somewhat brief in areas, and -- so please do feel free to contact me if you think much a question or would like something clarified down the road.
I may be speaking somewhat quickly in parts, so please forgive me if I sound rushed.
I just do want to be sure we have time to cover everything.
A lot of what I've been able to accomplish here at the metro transportation library is the result of thinking strategically about what we had been doing and what we wanted to do and how we could get there.
Make no mistake, we've also been very fortunate and perhaps pretty lucky for things to have worked out as well as they have.
In other words, we embarked down a road that sound promising, but even though we weren't sure what was over the horizon, I wanted to position our library and our products and services to be as responsive as possible if not proactive in best serving our users and our potential users as well.
One of the themes that runs through this presentation is that things are not always what they appear to be.
I work in such a unique environment, as I'm about to explain, that I learned very early on that we can't take things for granted and I would have to dig a little deeper to unlock the potential for my library and its collection in so many aspects of planning my work and outreach.
So in preparing for this talk, I wanted to combine a sort of 30,000-foot overview of what I see as exciting direction was some real world practical stuff.
Many of the images are from my own collections, and I'll be telling you about them.
This is an image of some of the first bicycles used in larchtion.
This is western Avenue in Hollywood in 1905.
Again, things are not always what they appear to be, right?
Allow me to dive into some context that helps explain the rest of the webinar.
Your idea of Los Angeles may be what you see on the left, one giant traffic jam.
In reality, L.A. is quite beautiful and multifaceted.
When I tell people from outside the area that in winter you can reach the snow in less than an hour, they're usually pretty surprised.
This is just one example of being able to do some myth busting or telling those untold stories that draw people into wanting more information.
This goes for both our institution as well as our collection and the stories we try to tell.
The metro transportation library is sue neek.
We're the most comprehensive transit operator-owned transportation library in the United States.
Which is to say we're the largest collection at a transit agency.
We have more than 200,000 items in our collection, and a recent analysis showed about 41% of our collection is unique, which I think is a pretty high percentage for a collection this size.
Anyone studying L.A. cannot ignore a few essential defining elements.
The role of water, the film industry, and transportation and the development of the city and what makes it unique.
The city that people most associate with the automobile and traffic had the largest streetcar system in the world in the 1920s, and by the early 1960s, it was entirely gone.
So what happened?
That story along with many others is what I attempt to address with our services.
Los Angeles is studied around the world, not just as a subject but an archetype for diverse international cities, loosely defined, Los Angeles is made up of 10 million people speaking well over 100 languages.
It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and we now have the most ambitious mobility agenda of any city in the world, perhaps outside of Dubai, so there's a great demand for transportation history, information related to this subject, and someone to provide the context for the role of transit today.
We attempt to serve that very broad and disparate audience from the 15th floor of a building in downtown Los Angeles.
It's really not the most accessible place for the public.
This is a view from my office.
You can see some reflection in the window.
The challenges of working in a very complex resource challenged environment is somewhat offset by having a great view every day out across downtown and Hollywood to the ocean.
We serve 9,000 employees, plus an incredibly diverse range of external users, as you see listed  here.
And everything we do is accomplished with just two full-time librarians, and my supervisor, the other librarian is over records management, so we're quite strained despite giving incredible help from as needed staff, interns, and other departmenting.
Furthermore, in the economic downturn of 2008, our library took a 57% budget cut that we managed to come back swinging more successfully than ever, and this presentation is the explanation of how that was accomplished.
When I started working here about nine years ago, I had no transportation background.
I spent most of my time in technical services and public libraries, but I was ready to take on new challenges.
I have to say, I really didn't realize how big those challenges would be given how the last recession hit just two months after I started work.
But I used this challenge as an opportunity to begin thinking differently about approaching our services.
I always had been interested in gauging what's happening elsewhere in society because trends and developments and technology, for example, eventually end up impacting all of us anyway, right?
And I believe that goes for media, social media, and traditional media, entertainment, gaming, business innovation, and the private sector and so forth.
I've come across a blog piece by a gentleman named Kevin Kelley, the founding executive editor of  "wired" magazine and it spoke to me in terms of thinking about what we did and why and how to think about them differently.
And I want to review that today and explain how it informs what I've done at metro.
The image you're looking at is an illustration from a 1946 proposal to remove all of the sidewalks from downtown L.A.
It's sort of a fun image, but it's more than just fansful.
This was proposed by a steel company, they were trying to get the city to make more room for cars.
They even suggested having two floors of retail windows would be better for the stores downtown and their economy.
Giving it more thought, it's 1946, World War II had just ended and a local steel company was probably looking around for business opportunities.
So why not hook up an idea like this and throw it against the wall and see what sticks?
You can imagine that one engaging image like this, is about more than just sidewalks, and it may inform a larger piece of our history in the 1940s.
So you see, again, things are not always what they appear to be.
Back to the piece by Kevin Kelley.
In the interest of time, I'll explain that it informs my thinking for developing eight  considerations which inspired what I call our better than free values in launching new  projects.
Free information is a wonderful thing.
But our library archive embraces these eight values to greatly enhance the information seeking experience of our users.
It's better than free, allows you to contribute vital value added service for our employees, the public and other research institutions who are also our customers.
And they are as you see here, meet si, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, findability, embodiment, and patron edge.
-- patronage.
So I want to take a quick review of these.
Regarding immediacy, sooner or later information seekers may find what they want, but getting a copy of something delivered to their email box the moment it's released or better yet, produced, by its creators is an incredible asset.
We live in an expectation economy, and if you're like me and you're yelling at the microwave to hurry up, you understand that some people may feel overwhelmed with what we need to learn to keep up, and we know we have to be doing everything faster, so I try to have the library an archive embody values -- engaging our users, and communities, and anticipating their needs rather than just reacting to them.
Personalization is an important consideration today.
I just am realizing some of my slides may have British spelling on them as I lifted them from a talk I gave in April at the national library of norway.
So regarding personalization, free information comes in the form that you find it, but the library and archive can customize information delivery tailored to the needs and proficiency of the  user.
It requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and the consumer, producer, and the user, the distributor and the fans.
So while the internet may function like a giant copying and distribution machine, you can copy  the -- you can't coipt personalization that a relationship represents, so in marketing terms, both sides of the relationship are invested in this asset and our relationships grow stronger as both the library and archive as well as our users evolve.
As I mentioned, we work in a really come milks interdisciplinary environment.
Interpretation and providing context is -- are essential considerations as well.
There's an old joke that goes, the software is free, but the manual will cost you $10,000.
Providing information in today's world of information overload isn't enough.
Easy access to all of human knowledge has become just as confound as limited or no access.
And anybody who does Google searching can relate to that.
We add the price list free benefits of subject expertise, evaluation, and context to information providers -- provided to users, and I'm sure you do as well.
Authenticity is an important value for us, especially since we're the keepers of an irreplaceable archive.
And, yes, there really was a proposal to develop an underground road network for buses in Los Angeles in 1953.
Most of us realize the ability to edit or change various digital media brings peril to any information providers claim of providing original, unaltered information.
Who hasn't considered the power and the dangers of photo shop in the era of fake news and everybody having their hands on this technology?
Authenticity for us goes hand in hand with accuracy.
Our comiet commitment to accuracy lends significant value to providing authentic print and visual resources related to our mission.
Free information is great, but when it comes from a trusted source, it's even more valuable, because our users researchers, and scholars can't put a price on piece of mind.
Information seekers have increasing demands, but ownership and upkeep of those resources are not among them.
Possessing information requires organization, keeping things current, security, and in our  increasingly mobile world, portability.
Our library and archive constantly strive for new and I'm proved methods of access for our unique and valued resources.
Our users can take in what they -- smartphone, or in person.
And as time goes on, the demand for everywhere 24/7 access will continue to grow parallel to the desire for the library and archive to collect, preserve, and present everything relevant.
By the way, this is the opening day of the first freeway in Los Angeles.
It's December 1940.
Get a load of all that traffic.
Providing access is one thing, but findability is something all together different.
Again, think about Google searching.
Information resources have no value unless they're findable.
In the increasingly crowded information marketplace, getting information into the hands of those searching as well as those who would find it and discover it is critical.
The library and archive continues to render work discoffable through appropriate and consistent methods including cataloging, key word tagging, aggregating similar works from other sources, and channeling attention to new and timely resources.
So while our resources are free, their value increases exponentially once we get them into the hands of who needs them.
Keeping and maintaining original items in our collection is just as important as the continuous improvements and access to them.
New versions, mash-ups with other data, or enhanced copies.
At our library, our historic photographs and match ew scripts are irreplaceable resources valued by researchers and subject specialists worldwide.
We've made a professional commitment to the proper preservation and storage of our original works, especially when one considers no permanent preservation method is the Multnomah media storage solution.
Finally, the only thing better than free service is the ongoing patronage of our consumers who keep coming back, who refer us to their colleagues, and who use word of mouth and viral marketing techniques that money can't buy.
Providing excellent products and services makes this easy and pleasurable for them.
The payoff is priceless, and magnifies the importance of the other generaltive values already mentioned.
Maximizing our return on these qualities requires being flexible.
We value our traditional products and services, while we learn about and provide new ones.
New skills are adopted, new media are assayed, and new questions of ownership, intellectual property and copyright are constantly being raised.
In conclusion for this section, one thing is irrefutable -- these eight generaltive qualities demand an understanding of providing information resources in new ways as a sharing and collaborative mind-set.
It's vital to our mission to cultivate and nurture the qualities of service that cannot be  replicated with the turn of a page or the click of a mouse, and so after careful consideration of where we could go with this, I settled upon three distinct strategic directions.
I'm going to speak to you briefly about these three strategic directions that inform our priorities in a high demand yet resource challenged library.
Of course you may take some time to think about the better than free values I just discussed and come up with much different directions to go in than I did.
But even though my institution, collection, and user base are unique, I think there's value for everyone in looking at what we cooked up and launched based on these better than free values.
So I'd like to provide an overview for them.
News aggregation and dissemination.
Community curation.
And strategic collaboration.
>> Ken, before you head into that, I wonder if I can -- there are a couple of questions  that came up and I'd love to chime in right now with those questions.
>> Sure.
>> So there was a quick question that perhaps you would even touch on later when I know you're going to talk a about collaboration, but there was a specific question about whether or not you work with the photo archive department at the downtown Los Angeles library.
>> Yes.
>> Excellent.
So I know you'll touch on collaboration.
And then Beth had a question for the interpretation value.
Do you do any crowd sourcing of metadata or community members relationships to historic photos?
>> Dabbling in it.
>> Dabbling is a good answer.
Excellent.
>> The attention that needs to be paid to curating publicly viewable comments, whether it's on blog posts or whether it's on a description about resources, is not something that I can really support right now.
So only with our historic photos, because that area usually draws comments from people who for lack of a better expression, know what they're talking about.
And it's also a place for them to share their memories.
Even if they're not helping identify an element of a photograph online, there may be -- it's a place for them to say I remember riding that streetcar with my grandfather, or something to that effect.
So we are doing a little bit of that, but not as much as I'd like.
>> Excellent.
And I know a little bit of that happens with some of the other tools you use, like history bin, so we can hear a little bit more of that as you move through.
>> For sure.
>> Excellent.
And there was somebody that chimed in that remembers you speaking to the -- their master of management class in -- back under Ken haycock in 2013 when you were just getting start the.
So excitement to see where you've come to.
>> That's great.
Okay.
Let me continue.
Let's start with this first strategic direction, which is news aggregation and dissemination.
You may be asking why would a library want to get involved in this?
For me I believe libraries and journalism have a lot in common.
We're both in the business of providing information.
As libraries strive to position themselves in an increasingly technological world, it's not just relevant but vital, one strategic direction is to leverage our expertise -- professionals in gathering and pushing organizational or community news from a variety of sources into a  must-read digest.
So what are we looking at here?
On the left you see a traditional newsstand circa 1950s, and to the right of that is a contemporary or modern newsstand.
Really what's so modern about it?
The housing of the structure holding the media, not the type of media or the way in which the consumer accesses the information contained in it.
The consumer still has to make their choice based on past experience with a particular publication, or what they see on the cover, given you're not supposed to really stand there and read.
The consumer has to take their chances on what they find inside will be important or interesting to them.
And with broadcast news, it's whatever fits into a predetermined time period, and you may not find something relevant to your life.
The new tools allow libraries to break down those restrictions.
This isn't about replacing news stories, the news sources or even newsstands.
It's about contributing to the quality of life of our users.
Aggregating news and information helps them do their job or live their lives better without the distraction from or labor of finding information they want, needs, or maybe don't even realize they need.
Recent Pugh research center study shows about 65% of social media users are now getting news from Facebook and twitter.
Why not capitalize on that existing behavior and push out information to our users and give those platforms as well?
But a little bit more context is needed here.
Again, transportation is a very complex interdisciplinary subject area, covering land use, planning, construction, social justice issues, even paleontology for us, because we're tunneling through fossils.
And we dipped our toe into the social media ocean by blogging way back in 2005.
Bloging about news.
This was 12 years ago.
So it was basically like the Stonehenge of the library social media era.
My colleague knew he could pull together news stories that would be of interest and benefit to our urban planners, stories that would have taken them a long time to find if they had even knew where to look.
Each day he published half a dozen stories from print and televised media regarding what was happening with transportation in Los Angeles.
My computer just went dark.
Okay, here we go.
When Los Angeles County passed what's known as measure R in 2008, it was a tax measure, it created a perfect storm of converging factors that slammed the library in the face.
This legislation raised our sales tax one-half of 1% to raise $40 billion over the next 30 years to build out the system that was slowly dismantled in the 1960s.
Another transit measure was passed this past November as well, so what all this means after it  trickles down to the library is more citizen advocacy, more attention being paid to multiple transit projects, and proposals and a range of planning construction and operations and more opportunity to inform people.
So we knew we had to involve and go mobile, and blogging was really becoming unsustainable.
Over time we realized we had now a growing list of 50 to 60 headlines and links every single workday that were critical to our employees.
But it wasn't sustainable in terms of labor, nor visually appealing for the reader to continue  blogging this information.
So I migrated our blog to the paperly online newspaper.
This is pair.LI.
One method is to have it take your twitter feed and have it published daily or weekly as a tweet digest.
It's like the old infomercial, you set it and forget it.
It's an automatic process.
With the frequency you choose, and then you have a draft that you can cure rate to rearrange the stories as you like.
So the image you're looking at here is what it would look like in its raw form.
I know it's blurry, but it just assembles it based on a predetermined category.
It's a framing service.
We pay about $9 a month to remove the ads, which is important as a government agency to not appear to be endorsing anything.
To brand it with our own treatment, you see a nice banner across the top.
And to insert links to our social media properties and other resources on the right side.
So by gaining this system with cure rated twitter feeds and crafty front end customization, we got rid of clutter and began publishing our own newspaper that's been hugely successful with our subscribers.
Now we have several thousand.
They're not just staff members, but the public and prominent elected officials, and our lobbyist in Sacramento and Washington, DC.
And we're really dedicated to this product, so we only miss maybe one or two education a year when we can -- when either of us is incapacitated and we can't publish it.
When that happens, we get these frantic emails asking, are you sick?
Did you stop publishing this?
Are you in the hospital?
So it's really become a service that we can no longer afford to stop producing, which is a good thing.
Because it's so valuable to our users.
So selecting, cure rating and disseminating relevant content, before our users know they needed it, nobody came to us to ask for this.
It makes this a better and free endeavor.
I want to get back for one second, I want you to take note of the black box there with the date on it.
I'm going to refer to that down the road.
The middle left.
We use a widget now to add stories to our daily feed, and we're not tweeting the story as much anymore, so we have a pinned tweet that always refers to the link for the daily digital newspaper and how to subscribe to it.
So whenever you come to our twitter you'll see it at the top.
Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery is a nice thing, and I was speaking at a conference about this project, and we can now count the San Diego zoo as an institution that has taken our model and run with it.
They have reduced their workload sharing information and the way they were doing it by 50%,  collecting and disseminating research to their scientists.
And it doesn't hurt that we get to tell our executive team that an internationally renounced institution ask emulating little old us.
We're now talking with the academy of motion picture arts and sciences, the Oscar organization, about how they can use this app to cure rate their extensive clippings file, which is moving in a digital direction.
I love that we're not only inspiring other libraries who have completely different collections and audiences to try things that have been so successful for us, but that it's working.
And we can create a small community of library users, and maybe create a users group to influence and development, so it would be more hopeful for libraries.
.
>> I know I'm speaking quickly but I'm keeping an eye on the time.
Basically this involves a number of direction.
You can pursue to both build community and get them to share some of your hard work for you.
You don't have to do it all by yourself.
But some strategic legwork up front will position you to get some great results.
The first theme in this direction is local history advocacy.
I love history.
I imagine most librarians do.
I felt in a time of public libraries becoming increasingly similar with centralized collection development and universal borrowing, it's more and more worthwhile to take a look at what  really sets every library apart from others.
One of those things is our own unique local history and unique user base.
We now have some amazing tools and resources at our disposal to amplify the importance of those histories and celebrate everything associated with them.
One way to do that is through collaboration.
Two decades ago the Getty museum in Los Angeles launched the L.A. subject project, to identify the less visible collections in southern California which focused on the history and culture of the region.
Over time, this evolved into a network of libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other organizations sharing best practices on preservation, resource sharing, and other issues.
Many of these collections are very small, but a rising tide -- together we achieved wonderful  things.
And I don't have time to tell you about all of them, but -- one is our host institution.
It's the University of southern California libraries, and they have partnered along with us with local public television station KCET to produce 15-minute-long documentaries about very interesting things in L.A. that are no longer here.
It's compelling educational programming utilizing primary row sources from our libraries, archives, and so forth.
The members of the L.A. network.
So we don't even have to do any of the work, we just offer up the resources now to public television and the University to take advantage of our great stuff.
Just yesterday the California library association announced lost L.A., the name of the television series, received a very prominent award, and I've been speaking with colleagues in Atlanta at Emory University who are looking at similar activities and they're really inspired now to do sort of a lost Atlanta series.
So it's really taking off in some exciting directions.
So I wanted to really be sure that you know that I realize this sounds lofty to some listeners, but here's how you can start with just an individual library.
We started digitizing our photograph collection and sharing our images on Flickr about seven years ago.
We have a pretty cool collection, but as the saying goes, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
We go beyond just providing accessibility, which is one of our better than free values, by providing interpretation as well.
Let me explain.
Here's a photo of opening -- the first opening day of sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1904.
This is one of the most iconic streets in the world, and these are the very, very first cars to drive on it, going from downtown to Hollywood.
Themmage shows downtown traffic just 20 years later.
I love this photo for a number of reasons.
First of all, it's just interesting and obviously a mess, but it also shows Los Angeles was a multimodal city nearly 100 years ago.
You can see cars, streetcars, pedestrians, and even a horse-drawn carriage on the lower right if you look carefully.
And it really speaks to L.A. in a period of transition with all of these modes of transportation and clearly not terribly functional traffic control.
So when you compare it to the previous photo, you get a sense of how much changed between 1904 and 1924.
Together these two images begin to tell the story of the rise of the automobile from HBCUist trapping to an element of everyday life.
In fact, one of the key early traffic plans of L.A. is a document that notes that during an  eight-year period in the 1920s, the number of cars quadrupled in L.A., which can you imagine now, four times as many cars eight years from now?
That's more than just a fun fact.
You can imagine the streets, traffic lights, and other types of infrastructure were not ability to accommodate that change very easily.
And you can see in this photo the streetcars are stuck in the middle of it all, leading to the first phase of the downfall of that largest streetcar system in the world, because it wasn't getting anywhere very quickly, right?
A use -- I used a number of tools to explain these local history stories, and here's some of the most dynamic yet scalable for your consideration.
One of them I discovered is called ticky to by, it's a free interactive time line tool that our super star intern built and launched to tell a very complex story of transportation here going back to the 1870s.
It allows us to share some incredible if a sits of our collection, multidimensional stories in one visually appealing resource.
I don't know how well you can see this screen shot, but it features a traditional horizontal time line where you can drag through the decades of the bottom, and click on any of the text bubbles that feature thumbnail photos linked to a corresponding Flickr photo set within our online collection as well as individual yoarks digital documents, other digitized resources.
We had all the primary -- we have all the resources in house to plug into a time line with hyper links out to those resources.
And ticky and it's an opportunity to share things that would not normally be able to be pushed out to users easily.
There is cable cars in L.A., just like San Francisco, but they lasted less than a decade.
The sister product is called people plotR, it's in the form of a family tree rather than chronological time line.
So we used this tool to help people better understand at a glance our crazy history, dozens of predecessor agencies that moved and split apart to lead to our current metro organization.
Again, each data point links out to dpij tall resources  that allow the user to explore as deeply as they wish very complex information that would not appear very compelling or engage the user if presented to them in just a narrative text no matter how complete it was.
The upper right you can see there was a Los Angeles ostrich farm railway company.
That was -- ostriches with a huge tourist attraction 100 years ago in L.A., but that story is for a different presentation for sure.
So you'll recall that we're on the 15th floor up in the sky, and it's not the easiest place to get to.
So another strategic direction I've been moving in is what I call our exO library, take our  resources to our users, where they're more -- you can encounter them more easily, so they can discover us and learn as they move through our transit stations.
A few years ago we celebrate the the 75th anniversary of our historic union station, it was a huge event, they were expecting 15,000 people, 100,000 people showed up.
It's on the national register of historic places, it's a gorgeous building, and that event was an opportunity for the rollout of interactive transit kiosks.
They tell you how to buy a ticket and how to get from point A to point B, and information about public art.
But our director of web and mobile asked me if I wanted to contribute any content, and I said of course I do.
So I knew the ticky talky time line would be one that covers from the birth of the architect all the way to the current master plan.
And here you can see them Mounted on a four-sided toe tum with touch screens to move through history as you experience the station.
So community cure ration has also seen its share of consequences, just like the digital newspaper.
By leveraging historic images our two-person library has become a national leader for user engagement of digitized photos.
We currently have just about 11,000 images on our Flickr site, and this chart is actually a little out of date.
We just surpassed 13.7 million all-time views, and on any average day we get about 12,000 hits.
So how did this happen?
It's not because pictures of old buses just became sexy all of a sudden.
It's because we leveraged these images beyond just putting them online.
We refer back to our better than free value to consider what other activities can drive their exposure consumption amongst our internal employees and external users alike?
So before I go on to the third strategic direction, I'll pause to see if there's a compelling question.
But maybe just one so we don't run over time.
>> Okay.
There have been a couple good questions, let's go with looking to the future and potential trends, knowing that with the trends that I've been changing as you mentioned, even just weren't last 10 years, where do you see that first strategy, the digital newspaper, where to you see do you see something like that 10 years from now?
>> Oh, my gosh.
Really putting me on the spot.
I really think that this could -- I would love to answer this question at the end, after putting more thought into it, but I really think it will be refined, easier to use, easier to share, and publicize and share, and I think it could be an incredible tool for libraries to use to combat misinformation and fake news phenomenon that we're discussing.
Because libraries are one of the last truly trusted single-family I can institutions, and so if they can put their sort of good housekeeping seal of approval on information that is news that's going out, I think that could be an incredibly powerful opportunity.
>> Yeah, and I'd like to throw a question out to the group as you've been presenting, I've really thought about, well, how -- let's say a local public library decided to be a news aggregator of local news in some way, whether it's historical news -- news of the community's history or current events.
That sort of role as curators of community news in and of itself seems like a great opportunity.
>> And can I just expound on that?
>> Yes, please.
>> An awesome point.
I thought about some of the smaller communities, you know, a lot of newspapers aren't covering what happened at the planning committee meeting, or public works agency.
If there's just no money in it.
But it ends up falling through the cracks.
If you think about the productivity of the timing, it would take -- to seek out that information, if that was repackaged and the library positions itself as maybe a different kind of news, maybe news isn't the right word, but really collecting that information and working in tandem with other city or county regional entities to cure rate that information and be responsible for it, that's very powerful.
I think the city of Kansas city is starting to do something like that.
They have a newish web presence where librarians are curating the civic information and open data portal where everything comes together, and librarians are responsible for maintaining that.
>> Excellent.
And I -- we did a webinar on technology for trustees, and in that session she talked about some of the ways in which they're using online platforms to collect meeting archives and conversation related to that.
So it could be even as a microcosm within your library, it could be with your trustees, or your staff, even.
So I think thinking about that aggregation of information in the smallest of circles all the way out through to your broader community is great.
>> Yes, and I think about academic libraries too.
They have a community, and it may just be a campus, but there's a lot going on that isn't all covered in one place.
I'm going to move on, because there's quite a bit more to talk about.
The third strategic area of focus today is collaboration.
We have so many opportunities today to find partners to work on things together.
And technology has enabled that.
But there's still some good old fashioned peer-to-peer relationships that we can exploit as well.
I mentioned L.A., themmage is from our annual archives bazaar, held every October in national archives month.
It's a one-day event where libraries, archives, museums and historical societies bring resources to the public, where it's like visiting 90 museums in one day.
And in a city as sprawling as Los Angeles, that's a godsend.
Scholars, all of the history enthusiasts, students, classes, and others mix it up amidst lots of great conversation, incredible programming, there's genealogists there, so that's another  angle.
And form new relationships and friendships.
So after 21 years, L.A. is such a still going strong, it can't really be considered innovative necessarily anymore, and we've influenced other cities to emulate the archives bazaar.
I served as executive director of the organization for four years and I really was trying to push, look at other models and push us out to other places that were looking to do collaboration as well.
One of the things we've collaborated on that you can work on as an individual library or partner up with somebody is historypin.
This is where things get interesting.
Up to this point I've shared tools I've used by myself here in the library, but what happens when we start playing in a shared sandbox?
Historypin in a nutter shell was developed by a gentleman named Nick Stanhope in London, and he was looking at old family photos of his grandmother and asking her who is in this picture, where was this taken, what are they doing.
And she started giving him all the stories, the metadata, if you will.
And he realized if he didn't record that or know that, those stories are gone when people are no longer with us.
So he created this site which act like a photo sharing site with geo location features, but it also features a chronological data layer.
So you can search for images across place and time.
So when I heard about that, I was really thrilled, and we became a global launch partner, our tiny little library was a global launch partner for this product, which is now all over the world.
And we uploaded about 200 images, and I wanted to cluster them in downtown and Hollywood to be sure we had a more robust presence.
I am not done talking about that.
On the left you see a zoomed-in map of central Los Angeles where our images cluster.
As you zoom in, they disperse and at the top you can see some tabs that show you can search images as a feed, as a list, grouped by collection, there's even tours.
So in 2012, when the London Olympics was going O. I used that as an opportunity to tell the story of the 1984 summer Olympics in L.A. and the 1932 Olympics, and there's a lot of interesting things about that.
So it's a spring board for pushing out those stories that we know people would be interested in.
What's even cooler is on the right you see an image, a 1950s photo of the intersection of Hollywood and highland, this is a famous intersection, and it's a multimodal picture with streetcars, pedestrians, and bus.
And so you can superimpose themmage -- it interact with Google street view, so you can move the image to exactly overlay what it looks like today.
And then at the bottom center you see it says fade.
And there's a little button you can slide back and forth, so the historic images fades in and out and it provides the user with an augmented reality experience.
So this is an extremely appealing experience.
We can offer users and trust me, if you turn this loose on teenagers, they're going to be a lot more engaged for a lot longer than if you had handed them a book.
You can create an account and upload your photos and view them through your own channel or mashed up with contributions from other individuals and libraries.
It's really a great thing.
And this is the resource list on the webinar now.
So it's free, you can let your imagination run wild, and how is this for a collaboration idea?
Get your content on a site like historypin and partner with historic walking tours, or a local architecture preservation group or another organization to feed off each other and build those win-win relationships we were just talking about.
I'm thinking of here, this aim.
>>> , she's holding a tablet with this loaded, so you can imagine the docents leading you around and you're getting an enhanced audio visual experience nature to what they're telling you.
Here's another example.
Do you recognize what this is?
Old timey newspapers used to tell you what happened on that date in history.
Our internal spreadsheet of significant anniversaries and dates could be put to use online in the same way.
Over the years we built up a ready reference file answering the same old questions that I had come to rely upon since I didn't have that transportation background.
When did this streetcar line open?
When did they build that freeway?
When did the board of directors vote to do something in particular?
If these are the most important questions being asked, why keep all that stuff to myself?
So I built a this date in Los Angeles transportation history feature for my blog.
And here is two examples of how that works.
On the right side of each screen shot, you can see a calendar with an accordian style monthly list.
When you click on a particular month, it opens up so you can select a particular date.
On the left I've embed ad digital document, and also linked to various other digital resources in our collection.
On the right I have embed ad clip from our YouTube channel.
If you're going to go to all the trouble of scanning and storing your valuable resources Y. not leverage them in this way and cut down on the wear and tear of people using the originals in house, right?
So this makes your resources available 24/7 in a different way.
Remember earlier, I asked you to take note of that black box in the upper left corner of the digital newspaper.
When I create the digital newspaper, I put the -- this date in Los Angeles transportation history item in that featured story space.
This serves to remind our readers this product emanates from the library.
It also allows us to shine a spotlight on some constantly changing most important resources and kind of get in everyone's face a little bit about the library and the archives every day.
You can see that we are playing one innovation off another, and creating a sort of true occasion of digital content to reinforce consumption of products.
Some of our most interesting stories are too long or complex to push out in their entirety.
One example is what happened with Shirley temple in 1937.
She was an 8-year-old mistress of ceremonies at a major city event, and it's too long to tell you now, but when you play the video, this comes from you can hear someone say something to her, and I have listen to this video about a hundred times before I heard this person say something to her, so I turned the tables on my users and asked them what they thought of what was said and what it meant.
So I just used this as an example to point out that we don't always have to provide just answers.
Sometimes engagement is about us asking questions.
And this platform really facilitates that.
At any rate, local history goes viral, our this date in Los Angeles transportation history gets tweeted every day along with the news.
It's the first thing I send out because I think it's the most important.
But when you get picked up by the L.A. history twitter account and then Los Angeles public library, you quickly have thousands and thousands of -- and lots of awareness of what you're doing.
And since I mentioned Los Angeles public library, we work with them, they have been one of the content providers for some of the time lines that we've created, and they also are a subject member.
Quickly, I'll mention a couple of other win-win strategic directions.
I've begun digitizing our historic traffic plans for L.A. going back more than 100 years.
Some of them aren't in our collection, so I have interlibrary loaned them and provided the digital surrogates to the lending library when I return the prints.
So I can -- and then I have these digital resources that I can extract information from -- for reference questions, things that I can add to historypin, things I can put in our calendar.
So it's creating this self-contained environment of everything informing everything else.
The image on the right represents a long-term project, I'm working with two universities, it's a  44-year publication covering all of highway planning in California, which is critical to our research needs.
After I borrowed the material from one, I send it to the other University for scanning, and then I do the optical character recognition on PDF so I can create a great text searching tool when I make those files publicly accessible.
Google custom search is incredible for people to use, if you have a lot of PDF you want to turn loose with free text searching.
And I can edit the OCLC record with links to both that custom search link and the file directory, so everybody can take advantage of what I do in house, anywhere in the world.
This allows for someone at home to either review issues chronologically or do key word search, and both universities are giving digital copies.
So it's a win-win-win situation.
Sometimes your best resources are right under your nose.
I've been system allically going through our collection to digitize and share important stories I was talking about, and sometimes they look really mundane and boring, but you can find an oyster that has a pearl in it, so here's a rendering of a 1968 proposal for a metro port in downtown Los Angeles.
At the top you see helicopters, right?
Those helicopters were proposed to have claws under them to pick up a bus with claws and carry the buses across the city from downtown to Los Angeles international airport.
That's a distance of about 15 miles.
Now, can you imagine being inside a bus, flying across the city, being held on to by a helicopter with claws?
It's ridiculous.
And I couldn't believe this was anything more than an unbelievable proposal like removing all of the sidewalks from downtown L.A.
So I reached out to some archival colleagues just to tell them this story, and one of them said oh, yeah, that was totally a real concept.
We have an image in our collection that proves it.
So here you see the model from the UCLA special collections of the prototype.
It was really something seriously considered, which is crazy.
But the point of the story is that partnerships evolve, reaching out to your colleagues and sharing ideas, and really just going the extra mile to look for those new relationships and collaborative endeavors.
We can now, this person and I can look at other items in our collection that compliment each other, and there may be strategic projects in our future as well.
You never know where it's going to lead you.
I have begun sharing old monorail proposals online.
After Disneyland opened their monorail in 1955, everyone thought, okay, this is it.
Monorails are the future, so there were several ambitious proposals for replacing the outdated streetcars with these futuristic transit systems.
Check thissismage out.
Another opportunity to ask our users a question and create a conversation.
Why does this monorail car have tail fins when it has no need for any aerodynamic features?
It's moving on a fixed rail.
Was it to make people feel more comfortable because it looked more like an automobile of the day?
We know that Angeline 0s needed to be reassured they were not going to be electrocuted when they boarded the very first streetcars, so is it the same dynamic?
It's just an opportunity for engagement and to ask questions of our users, and in addition to providing answers.
Themmage was discovered on our Flickr site by two architects who were curating a museum exhibit titled "never built Los Angeles."
An overview of conceptual infrastructure that never came to fruition.
Ultimately it wound up on the front of the museum on Wilshire Boulevard, the most prominent street in L.A.
So one resource from our little collection that I digitized to set it free really flew the coop and ended up having much of L.A. looking at it on the front of this building.
The same thing happened with our -- those digitized traffic plans.
Boring.
But the Getty museum wanted to borrow them for an exhibit, and we couldn't say no, so that was a great opportunity for us to participate and then I got a phone call from the national building museum in Washington, DC asking if they could rephotograph the resource, and that's because they wanted to blow it up to be 12 feet tall at the entrance to the exhibit.
So having one of our resources in the nation's capital was a thrill.
Of course some of this is luck.
And some of it is working with unique resources in a specialized collection.
But I truly believe that we're all sitting on untapped wells of compelling material that could be unleashed in new and exciting ways.
And in addition, we don't even know what technologies, platforms, and opportunities will be available to us, just a year or two from now.
10 years ago the question about the -- why not begin at least begin the conversations in your library about how you can at least take advantage of free and low-cost web tools now that could help you possibly engage your users more?
It doesn't thowrt carve out a little bit of time to experiment in the sandbox, and one of the most important things to remember is that you can learn so much from not being successful.
Trust me, everything we do doesn't necessarily work out.
We were early adopters of second life, thinking AH, yes, this is the future.
Not so much.
We had a mislaunch of the knowledge-based product, and sometimes social media platforms just collapse.
If you allow one of your values to begin to learn from every experience, I think you're headed down the right path.
I am going to skip the next slide because we're just a little out of time.
Moving forward, I'm going to be focusing on what we can do with our archival and museum colleagues.
We have mutual interests, blurred distinctions between our professions, converging missions, and shared threats regarding funding or even existence.
So it's a really important time to be looking in that direction.
If you follow me on twitter, @StrategicLbries, which is on the final slide, you can stay abreast of plans I have to launch a new website focusing on library innovation and inspiration from outside of libraries.
So stay tuned.
I want to leave you with an example, in conclusion, of something that happened on February 27th this year.
It was the day after the telecast of the Oscar ceremony.
I love the story even more, because I spoke a few months ago ago in Norway, and of the European commission in Brussels, and every person in both audiences was aware of what had happened at the end of the broadcast.
The biggest scandal in recent memory for the academy awards.
I'm going to assume all of you are now familiar with what happened with the announcement of the best picture award at the end of the show.
So the next morning someone asked the public library in platville, Wisconsin, population 11,000, give or take a few, created a book display in their children's room.
This book display consisted of only three books.
But it was brill yabt.
Someone took a photo of it and it went viral.
It spreads so quickly amongst other librarian and then to news outlets and beyond.
The real story of this book display and photo are not that people in New York or other faraway  places saw what little platville library had done, it was that those stories came back to  platville and told the people that live in that community that their library is creative place, a place with a sense of humor, a place that might just be capable of doing big things without a lot of resources, a place that they shouldn't forget about, because it's an essential part of their community.
And that even though this is a considerably small town and small library, the impact of this one piece of creativity that was sent out proves that things aren't always what they appear to be.
So I hope you take this information I've shared with you today and the information from this example as well, and spend time thinking about how you might be impactful on a large scale, or a small scale, or somewhere in between, because you never know what you'll learn about yourself or -- I want to thank you, feel free to email me or follow me, and if you'd like for me to speak to you in person that's a possibility as well.
And I know we're maybe a little over time, but I'm happy to take questions if you like.
>> Thank you so much, Kenn, so many ideas, thanks for your help in pulling together the learner guide too, there are other ways for you to explore this of the questions that have come up today, there were a few other questions I would just ask -- there were a couple folks that asked about copyright issues.
Are all your resources open access, or how do you deal with copyright news.
>> Well, fortunately we have a couple of things working in our favor.
We're a public agency, so the collection belongs to the people that are in our -- under our control.
We are very careful with copyright.
A lot of our oldest stuff isn't covered by copyright, but we operate for the most part under creative commons licensing.
>> Select.
And then I'm going to ask one more question, because I think you talked about this at the beginning with such a small staff, how -- I guess how long did it take, and how do you continue to operationallize the content creation, content management with such a small team?
It seems like it's not easy to stay on top of that, all that information, and creating compelling content, so what -- let's just hear your top tip for how to operationallize.
>> If you're not a multitasker, it's going to be really hard.
>> Excellent.
Well, within the session a couple things came up that I thought, oh, wow, this is a whole other webinar and someone just said hope there's a part two.
We'll definitely follow up with other outstanding questions and have Kenn provide a few reflections on those.
I'll add those to the event page, and I will send you all an email once all the bits are posted  later today with the recording and chat and the captions.
And I'll send you all a certificate within a week for attending today, and I'll also ask as you leave, we're going to send you to a short survey to provide feedback to Kenn and help us in our ongoing programming and we really appreciate your feedback there as well.
So thank you all, and thank you so much Kenn and your community is definitely very lucky place, and we're so excited you're there doing all this great work.
>> Thank you so much.
Have is a great day, everybody.
It was a pleasure.