LibraryTechtonics

On a train back to Boston.

Hilton Garden Inn, Salon A/B
1100 Arch Street, Philadelphia

I’ll be listening to my friend Stephen Francoeur speak as part of a QuestionPoint panel of academic librarians. Should have some interesting bits for public librarians to learn from.

I’ll be at Midwinter in Philly Friday through Tuesday, and my schedule is now nestled comfortably in the right side navigation of my site (following me on Twitter will give you more up-to-the-second information on where I am and what I’m doing). I’ll be blogging and wrangling bloggers once again for the PLA Blog, so if you’re interested in joining me as a PLA conference blogger, drop me a line and let me know.

I’m hoping to have an outline of the PLWiki ready for the All Committee. Between my laptop dying and a bunch of other stuff, the work on the PLWiki has fallen to the wayside. I was also having a problem trying to figure out the best way to coordinate with the PLA committees: they have an internal group application that they use but it’s complicated to get access, etc., and setting up something external seemed like too much work. So, I’ll do what I *should have* done from the beginning: use the wiki to actually plan. So far, few of the library-related wikis I’ve seen use the Community portal feature as intended (help, news, things that need to be worked on), so I’ll give it a go and see how it works for the mostly-uninitiated committee members who have volunteered to work on the project. But we’ll see how I can reconcile the wiki work, plus the PLA blogging setup, plus regular work, and life, plus, say, sleep. Who needs sleep, right? ;D

I’m also going to be doing a little research for an article at Midwinter. Sarah Wurrey over at Media Bullseye has asked me to work on a piece about the state of social software in libraries (I’ll be focusing on public libraries for this particular article). While we might read and hear a lot about using Facebook or MySpace as librarians and in libraries on blogs, I find in my travels and through my presentations that the techish folks are not really in the majority in this arena, and that there’s an untold story. I’m also hoping to hit up some patrons for a user-centered perspective of how social software does and should fit into libraries. What do you think?

In any case, lots to do, people to see, sessions to blog, fun fun. If you wanna catch up with me at the conference (or before, or after), you can send me a message, and Piper, my trusty Crackberry/pocket secretary, will forward the message along to me. I’ll also be at the OCLC Blog Salon Sunday night… remember, you don’t need to a blogger to attend, you get to meet new people, there’s no registration required, and it’s free.

I’ll be at Ray’s Cafe & Tea House for a lunch meeting with some folks, and I hope to Yelp! about it afterwards.

These dates are approximate, but I’ll be there!