LibraryTechtonics

About a week and change ago, I gave a presentation (many thanks to Jessamyn for referring me) at the day-long continuing education workshop “21st Century Libraries: Making Technology Work for Library Users,” which also featured Linda Braun and Casey Bisson.

I retooled my presentation from NH, adding the fabulousness of William Shatner as Your Beta Hero (many thanks to Neil Gorman of Comicology for that), as well as a neato interactive Human Bingo game that helped illustrate social networking through actual play. However, the true thrust of the presentation remained that knowing the culture of sites is knowing the tool: having an account isn’t enough, and playing with the other kids (not just the librarians!) in the different Web 2.0 playgrounds is totally key. I also, once again, pimped the idea of 23 Library 2.0 Things, because my instructor brain loves bite-sized, self-paced stuff, and I think librarians do, too.

I think overall the presentation went really well, and I think it’s my best presentation to date. At some point, I’ll record the audio and make a slidecast out of it, since it really makes more sense with the audio. In the meantime, I’ve had at least one request to do the recording live streamed, so if there’s anyone out there who wants to sponsor that, I’d be game (alternately, I may set up a WebEx trial just to do it, we’ll see).

It’s a bit spooky how well all 4 presentations dovetailed together (Linda spoke twice, the keynote and an afternoon presentation, Casey and I spoke once each), it was almost like we all sat in the same room and figured out how to make them relevant to and flow cohesively into each other. If I had to tag the day, I’d use: social, community, beta, culture, literacy, fun, new, different.

In the course of the other presentations, Linda showed off a whole lot of awesome sites, Casey talked about serving users online and how community is beneficial to the library, I was recorded singing [link added 4:11p] Jingle Bell Rock care of Linda’s computer and The Sims On Stage (see pic left care of Casey Bisson; great for karaoke night or afternoon at the library for teens and up!), and people asked a whole lot of questions. Judging by some of the things I heard at this session, librarians are still looking for some level of control in a community controlled environment, which will make for rough waters in the online Library 2.0 future, but librarians very much want to learn. I’m hoping our presentations offered a place to start in reconciling these bits.

Many thanks to Karen Mellor and her team for setting up such an excellent day!

So Jessamyn, Lichen, and I presented to a group of New Hampshire librarians about Web 2.0 technologies, and I think it was a wicked good time.

As promised during my presentation yesterday, the simple Technology Planning Timeline document that supplements is now available for download (.doc file). (photo c/o Jessamyn West)

Some bits worth sharing:

• Jessamyn reminds us: Don’t forget that you can search Flickr (scroll to the bottom for options) for images with Creative Commons licenses for, say, kids working on class projects at the library, craft projects, whatever makes you happy. You don’t even need an account or anything. Just make sure you abide by the license, to accrue happy internet karma.
• Lichen says, “A library badge, wouldn’t that be rad?!” Seriously, like a badge of titles or recent borrowings, straight from the catalog. Or, imagine a list of your 5 favorite books in the catalog, and then the ability to instantly blog those titles to a blog, a la Flickr “Blog This.” You know it.
• Did you know you can integrate LibraryThing fun into your existing catalog (for a fee after 60 days) using Library Thing for Libraries. Only issue is that your mileage may vary (YMMV) if you’re in a consortium. I do that that Innovative is planning significant updates, and if there are others, I’d be interested in hearing about them.
• I got to show off Miro, a free, open source video aggregator I’ve been playing with for about a month now. I’ll do a separate post on that, with a list of the techie shows I watch that help me stay current. I also got to show off my new Blackberry 8830, who I’ve affectionately named Piper, but that’s a whole other post, too.

When we were setting up the workshop many months ago, I mentioned the speed geeking idea to Andrea Thorpe, and she loved the concept. She tweaked it a bit to just be a timed session where people could just wander around to the different speakers and ask questions, instead of the time-then-move model, and it worked out really well. It was a really nice alternative to the endless end of session nightmare when you have the one person who monopolizes the Q&A with their very specific comment/question/kvetch about their very specialized situation, keeping other people from asking questions.

This was probably the best presenting gig I’ve done so far. It was relatively small, which was cool because there was the ability to have contact with all attendees, it was interactive, and had a nice, open feel to it. Everyone was so open to learning, and it was super keen. And, well, any event where I can give a presentation on technology planning and actually keep people engaged while making them laugh is a win in my book.

A final testament to the coolness Andrea Thorpe and NHLA: *right after* our presentations were over, she blogged the locations of our presentations right away on the NHLA blog.

Rock. Star.