8:00 am - Do you know where your cell phone is?

The first session I attended at OLA was one of the most fun, and I give it full marks for using an upbeat format to get us going first thing in the morning. This all conference event titled Do you know your on-line patrons? (Session 200 Feb. 1) used a game show format and brought together a public librarian, a school librarian and an academic librarian as contestants to guess the results of an OLA online survey of 5000 customers conducted in 2006. Contestants' guesses were recorded in real time and projected onto huge screens at the front of the room.

Some of the most revealing things I learned include:

• 20% of our public library customers say they spend 2 hours or more daily on the Internet for personal use (however, this was an online survey....)
• the 1st priority for service for pl users is free borrowing (let's keep our focus on those collections)
• A whopping 98% of pl respondants said that an e-mail reminder of overdue materials would be very or somewhat helpful (let's get that e-mail service going asap!!). (this reminds me that in another session the ALA President who is also Library Director at the Princeton Public Library admitted to using her customers' e-mail addresses to send them an e-mail newsletter without asking them to subscribe first. They were given the option to opt out.)

The session had a time where we could also take part in the contest by text messaging from our cell phones, and I admit I never was able to figure out how to send the message before that part was over, even though there were helpful assistants to try to guide us through this part. I was annoyed about it all day, and before day end finally figured out where I had gone wrong and how to actually send a text message.

So the organizers' goals were met for at least one participant. I have been brought to some small degree into the Web 2.0 age, and here I am on a blog...

Judi