Category: Professional Development

With day two drawing for a close, my brain is full again. I need one of those pools of memories like in the Harry Potter books…

Today the most memorable quote of the day goes to Gao Tao. He was explaining Joomla and how they’d implemented it at his library. In the midst of telling us about decisions and meetings and other such fun stuff that you have to go through when implementing a major change in a library, he said, “The bad news is that you may get frustrated. The good news is that I just saved a bunch of money on car insurance.” Wow. The room erupted. And this was even after we’d grown to love him when he said to “please let me know if you’re having trouble hearing me, or if I start speaking in Chinese.”

Later I attended a presentation on Hennepin County Library’s inclusion of patron and librarian “comments” (reviews, annotations, etc.) in their catalog. Funny that I traveled all the way to DC to hear a guy who works just up the road… The most important thing I learned, though, was that rating and commenting should BOTH be present. I’d always kind of dismissed rating catalog records, but Hennepin has found that they end up with numbers (like “7/10” or just “5”) written in their comments. So obviously people want this feature.

Oh, and there were ponies in Michelle and Meredith’s presentation, as promised. But the theme had evolved by presentation time, so it wasn’t just a pony…. it was a pony with a monocle. I’m not clear on how the monocle thing started (even though I was in the room when the scheme was hatched the night before), but Jason donated his photoshop skills to add the monocle. It was cool. Oh, and the presentation was good to. :)

After coffee, I sat on the stairs outside of Steven Cohen’s “What’s Hot with RSS” presentation. Why the stairs? Because the overflow room was full… After we’d colonized the stairs people started sitting (in neat rows, for some reason) down the hall. Amazing. I wished I’d had internet access during that one because people around me kept asking to see the stuff he was showing, or wondered about alternatives to the tools he showed. But I didn’t. But I did get somebody else started on Twitter, and explained blogging to somebody else. Fun stuff.

technorati tags: cil2007

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There was a last minute substitution for this morning’s keynote. I don’t know what happened, so no juicy details from me, but whatever happened it resulted in a great talk by Andy Carvin (of PBS Learning.now fame) about how “Old Media” giants (such as NPR, CNN, and USA Today) are embracing the social web to extend their coverage and reporting power. And beta isn’t just for the web any more. NPR is releasing pilots early for comment and criticism here at Roughcuts.

In fact “participatory” and “transparency” were the real themes of the morning. “The people formerly known as the audience” (Carven quoting Jay Rosen) are becoming more and more instrumental in determining what gets reported and how it gets reported.

But I think he really hit the nail on the head when he said that as much as participatory environments really get things done, enrich “standard” content, and are generally recognized as a great idea, organizations are reluctant to “go social” because, and I quote, “People aren’t always comfortable sharing how they make sausages.”

But I think there’s more to it than that organizations (or individuals) think it’ll be embarrassing or icky or gross, or any of that. I think there’s at least as much of a perception that what happens behind the scenes isn’t interesting to people. At least, I know that’s true of my job. Almost every time my grandma asks what, exactly, I do at work (which is often, mostly because I’ve never been able to actually explain it well) I have trouble saying anything because I’m always sure that most of the day to day stuff I do and think about isn’t “interesting” (especially not to people who don’t live in library land).

Anyway, Carvin had a rich set of slides (PowerPoint file here) filled with an impressive number of examples. He didn’t get to all of them in his talk, but they’re definitely worth visiting. There are lots of links. Lots.

technorati tags: cil2007

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‘Twas a good day. So many new thoughts bouncing around in my head…

OCLC’s new report (coming in June-ish) has found that as librarians “we are a different tribe.” We read more than the general population (even when you clump online and offline reading), and we’ve been using the internet longer than most people. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see any of the data she displayed, or read the legends on the charts. But I’m looking forward to reading the report when it comes out, especially to see if this difference translates into differences in thoughts about privacy online (that seemed to be the thrust of several of the charts, but I couldn’t tell).

Ironically, many of the survey results answering a question about whether or not libraries should build social environments online indicated that the library is “only for books” and “shouldn’t be a dating service.” (This was from librarians and patrons alike.) Then the next talk in the very same room (by Michelle McLean) highlighted a library date night… Seems to have been rather successful.

I also liked a quote from Karen Huffman of the National Geographic Society. She says that building online communities helps people to “work within the white space of the organizational chart to get stuff done.” That’s a really neat image.

Also, Rob Cagna says that they want to make PennTags open source! YAY! I also love it that they call their user-generated reviews “Annotations.” Excellent idea.

Oh, and I haven’t been taking as many pictures as other people have been. Don’t know why. Just haven’t. What I have taken I’ll try to get up on Flickr soon-ish.

technorati tags: cil2007

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