Why does nearly everything written in French have instant sex appeal? I was searching around for “blog people” references in French and I came across this: Les Blogs, Blogs and Social Software, a one-day conference happening in Paris next month. It sounds like a BloggerCon for the EU and it looks like some notable social software & networking names from the US will be represented (Flickr, Blogger, SocialText, PubSub, etc.) There’s also an entertainment factor happening that’s pretty cool. Reminded me of the lively MC antics of D. Scott Brandt at the Dead & Emerging Technologies session during CIL. The Gaping Void cartoonist and blogger will be drawing cartoons of the day’s discussion live. I like this one.
Our Reference Assistant Ed just alerted me to Gorman speaking at the GSLIS dinner at the University of Rhode Island (URI) on April 8th. I am soooooooo there. Looks like his topic is: The Library of Today and Tomorrow. Program. URI will also be inducting new Beta Phi Mu initiates, our Reference Assistant is one of them. I’ll actually get to wear my BPM pin (I was inducted at Simmons earlier this month). What I wouldn’t give for one of those Blog People buttons. Would it be bad taste to wear that with my BPM pin? Maybe if it said something like “Le Blogpeople” or “J’adore les Bloggers!”?
Today, I am working with a colleague on an upcoming instruction workshop. It’s for an Education class that will be writing annotated bibliographies after finding and critiquing several research articles. We’ve divvyed up the work and have been using Trillian to brainstorm and send files back and forth without having to be in the same physical space. Our offices are actually in close proximity but I’m a raging multitasker, so it works better for me if I can stay connected to everything from within my office (students walking in with reference questions, phone reference, etc.) Total coolness (warning, I occasionally talk like the 25 year old I am not, and overuse the parens; I am millennial-adjacent). Confession: Thanks to the unusual configuration of our offices, ( I like to call it the “Les Nessman” (WKRP) syndrome, except it’s the detached ceiling if that makes sense) I did have to restrain myself from just yelling out my office door. 
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Get the CIL 2005 ppts here:
http://www.infotoday.com/cil2005/Presentations/
Refresh the link periodically, there will be more uploaded over the coming weeks.
As Program Chair for the New England Chapter of ASIST (NEASIST), I’d like to alert you to our Spring program. If you couldn’t make it to CIL and live in the Northeast, this program could be just the thing for you:
Tuesday, 3 May 2005, 9am-4pm
Feinstein 400, Providence College, Providence, RI
(Directions, parking, train schedules and detailed program coming soon!)
The Tools We Hear About : Blogs, Wikis, RSS, Instant Messenging (IM), Chat, Browser add-ons, Bookmarklets, Folksonomies
The Questions We Ask Ourselves : How and when do these tools work together? How can I use them in my environment? How do I convince my boss that they are worth implementing?
2005 opens with an avalanche of new and maturing technologies. Free tools currently available can be configured and integrated to radically improve communication and simplify information retrieval, storage and sharing. These technologies, however, are currently being developed and presented incrementally and individually, and it is up to the user to keep track, download, install, configure, integrate, learn and determine which combinations will best serve a given individual, project, or organization.
NEASIST is pleased to present another timely event designed to make sense of this frenzy of technology and turn the chaos into practical tools for harnessing information and connecting people. Three recognized, early-adopter, information specialists have been exploring and experimenting with these tools in different environments. They will be sharing examples of how you can use these tools for:
* Personal Information Management
* Internal Staff or Project Communication
* Web site Content Development
* Making your Content Findable on the Internet at large
Individual presentations and a panel session will include case studies and techniques for enlightening others about the diverse value and application of social software and information management tools.
Megan Fox
Web & Electronic Resources Librarian, Simmons College (Boston, MA)
Adjunct Professor, Simmons College
Courses include: “Online Information Resources” and “A Taste of New Technologies”
Jenny Levine
Internet Development Specialist, Metropolitan Library System (Chicago, IL)
Author, “The Shifted Librarian”
Michael Stephens
Special Projects Librarian, St. Joseph County Public Library (South Bend, IN)
Author, “Tame the Web: Technology & Libraries”
Registration:
NEASIST website
I sadly had to return Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Design with Standards to my library on Monday (thanks to Nicole H. for the tip). I ILLed it, have renewed it twice and after carrying it nearly everywhere I go recently while building the blog, it’s a little tired looking. Something about working in a library makes you a little cheap about buying every single book you want. Not that I have curtailed my book buying habits, more maximizing my access. But I will be adding this one to my tech bookshelf. My CIL info hangover has pretty much worn off, so I’m ready to start thinking about other conferences I wish I could attend:
- SXSW (South By Southwest), I read somewhere on the web that Jeffrey Zeldman was speaking at SXSW Interactive in Austin (11March – 15March). When I think of I immediately think of the music conference that I never got to attend when I was a college music promoter. It’s reportedly the best indie music conference in the US. There’s also a Film component now, so it’s a true geek’s trifecta.
- Internet Librarian International This one is more in line with what I do. Yes, true, I absolutely love London, and I took the most recent London issue of Gourmet with me to read on my long train ride to CIL but it would be pretty cool to meet a few librarians across the pond to see if they have some of the same concerns and issues I hear about at conferences in the states. Right now, I know what I know from the literature and via the web, but it really is, as I can attest to from CIL, the one-on-one or small group conversations that are more meaningful. If you can go to CIL next year, get thee there. Christina Pikas, of Christina’s LIS Rant, posted some fun conference tips, a few of which I am too chicken to comment on here. Anyways, IIL is on an American holiday weekend in the fall and hopefully will not conflict with my plans to go to the ASIST conference in Charlotte in late October.
Just a few words on the final keynote. It was an IA flashback and information palate cleanser all at once. The refreshing talk put a nice cap on what I’ve already mentioned as the connecting theme of the conference: flexibility. Abram and Kennedy are currently doing a study of public library personas (hypothetical representations of average users) in an attempt to identify what drives users’ behaviors. A later phase will look at the personas in academic libraries. Important points:
The recent Pew Internet Studies will have a significant impact on our profession.
Can’t assume information seeking behaviors based upon socioeconomic status, gender, age.
We are entering a new phase of information design, need to get beyond usability.
They (Users) are not like us. We have historically expected users to adapt to our existing library interfaces.
The fact that the users are hitting the right button isn’t enough. We need to know the psychological reason/need for doing it.
We can get a world view through the lens of the user.
This presentation was given by Jason Clark, Web and Reference Librarian at Williams College. Clark was a little nervous during his talk, but there was still quite a bit to takeaway:
Planning
Define goals
ID risks
Track timeline and ability to meet goal
Get interested parties to agree to project and establish realistic schedule.
Have a Project Champion outside the team- someone who can support getting things done, as well as generate buyin and create momentum to move project forward.
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Search Tips from two Searching Pros
The last sessions on the last day of a conference are typically pretty empty. Not this time, there were plenty of us willing to stick around for one more thing to take away…
Topix.net – keyword rss is getting bigger. Has prebuilt 150,000 pages. Justdump it into Website Watcher and monitor for changes.
Jux 2 – a cool visual tool to show people the lack of overlap between search engines. Good instruction tool.
Multimedia tools…Try Singing Fish or GoFish – Can search for ringtones.
Spoken word becoming just as searchable as printed. See Speechbot.
This one is very cool. Visit Paris and other cities in France and Spain via PagesJaunes Photos de Villes. I hope no one in my French meetup reads this, but this basically means Yellow Pages with photos of cities.
A lean, mean Amazon Light.
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The second half of this session was the best. The first speaker, Nicholas Tomaiuolo, Instruction Librarian at Central CT State University, reported the results of his study on the student use of library resources. The surveys went out to faculty at a variety of institutions (it wasn’t clear how they were chosen) only with only 25 percent of the surveys returned (125 out of 500).
Some findings:
Libraries not seen as place for information or portal
Patrons judge websites by look and feel, and students unwilling to look into authoritativeness of library websites.
Pluses for using the web:
Good for sleuthing, general reference information and open access (eprints)
Typical complaints:
lack of authority
misinformation
dead links hinder info gathering
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I decided not to try to recap last Wednesday night’s Emerging and Dead Technologies session. You really had to be there to appreciate the humor, the visuals and the examples of technologies dragged out of the crypt (Apple 2es, the old floppies, walkmans, the Mapplethorped Schwarzenegger, etc.) Email was also thrown into the impending death pool, I’m almost done with it). There does seem to be a growing contingent of librarians (or maybe it’s just two really loud people) who are just tired of email as the main mode of communication. Aaron Schmidt and Michael Stephens, two librarians at public libraries in the Midwest are certainly willing to lead the charge for more widespread use of IM for both external and internal communication. Schmidt declared that it was hands down “the best return on no investment” [referring to free IM tools and multi-protocol chat hubs like Trillian and Gaim]. Benefits of using IM at your library:
- Internally, it builds a community of collaborators [the good kind]
- Reader’s advisory tool
- Great reference interview training tool
- Puts your library where the patrons are [see the oft-cited Stephen Abram’s Born With a Chip article in the May 2004 issue of LJ.
- Extends library’s presence beyond traditional reference services
- Helps build a sphere of trust with patrons
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I’m heading to one of the last sessions of the day on cool search tools and sites and then I’m off for a dine-around. It’s a fun, relaxing opportunity to network and talk shop with other librarians. The one I’m attending is hosted by Michael Stephens of Tame the Web and Steven Cohen of Library Stuff and Pub Sub. I’m expecting talk of blogs, library technology, IM and the like. I’ll also be posting write-ups about using IM as a collaborative tool in libraries, convincing users there’s more to life than the web, library web project management, delighting the user, and I’m sure there are a couple of more.
I still have about a half-dozen more posts to put up about the Computers in Libraries conference but just wanted to let you know that I’ll be posting a link to the presenter presentations when they become available. It usually takes a couple of weeks post conference to get them all up, but they will be prominently displayed on the blog when they’re ready. The CIL conference organizers are good about making as many of them available as possible.
I made it to the Teaching Roles for Librarians session this morning. The original presenters canceled, so the session was moderated by D. Scott Brandt, a very energetic speaker and a LIS professor at Purdue University. Brandt opened by playing this video (it’s a little large at 9Mb but it should work on Windows Media Player or Quicktime). It’s so bad, it’s good, and since I saw it twice today, I must share. After the laughter ended, Brandt gave a super quick rundown on some of the issues librarians face as teachers:
- Librarians aren’t necessarily natural teachers
- Today’s librarians need instructional design skills
- There’s more to teaching than F2F (face-to-face) interactions
The floor was then opened up for general discussion and questions. It is great to hear an audience of peers talking about their experiences, something you don’t usually get at your typical panel discussion. The theme running through most of the sessions I’ve attended so far is flexibility and keeping your skills current. Librarians need to make more time to get out of the library and go where the patrons are. It’s just a fact. This can include literally getting out of the building and making yourself known at campus or faculty events or it can mean creating learning opportunities via courseware, online courses, etc.
One interesting outcome of this session: hearing about Problem Based Learning. Problem based learning is different because the librarian presents a problem to the students, and the students have to identify issues and find the information necessary to solve the problem. This can involve group work and using peer review within the group. This type of learning has been proven successful with younger students (the millenials). Two related readings were mentioned within this discussion, the Educating the Net Generation ebook, published by Educause, and Riding the Active Learning Wave by Michael Fosmire and Alexius Macklin at the Purdue University Libraries. This article appeared in the Spring 2002 publication of Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship.
This afternoon session was really interesting and there was definitely a certain drool factor because it was a chance to hear about things that most of us working in libraries only have on a wishlist.
Rosa Liu and Nancy Allmang, librarians at NIST, discussed the development and implementation of an information commons at NIST. Liu stated at the outset: “Customer needs shape our future”. Right on. As a librarian at an academic library, I’m getting used to hearing that in reference to our student population, it’s cool to see it happening in other types of libraries. NIST wanted to create a space that included a physical and virtual commons, because it sees libraries as evolving into knowledge management centers and collaboration spaces that utilize highly specialized technologies.
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