Wednesday...and an attack of nerves

In theory, I was going to go to at least part of the two morning sessions, but the attack of nerves I inexplicably developed before my Cybertour short-circuited that. Which was annoying, because it meant I missed Mary Ellen Bates and Casey Bisson talking about their favorite and best topics. Rats.

The Cybertour itself went fabulously, with about 25 folks in the audience. A few came up afterwards to tell me how useful it was to get all of those organizing tips all in one place, which was the whole point. Of course, I managed to get the best feedback possible: "I really wish I could stay for your talk because it sounds great. Could I have your contact information?" Neat.

Remember, if you want to see everything I've done on the Infoclutter presentation, just click the tag over there on the right or follow this link. The slides are there, along with some ancillary material.

I did attend the afternoon sessions, but neither one was quite what I was looking for. (Here are the notes.) I've heard Chad Boeninger and Paul Rival both speak before, and their last session was a quick tour through the various free tech tools they use with their students. What they did that others didn't was a walk-through and demo of Jing, a downloadable multimedia snip-and-share program that seems like a breeze to use. It's definitely up high on the sandbox list for me, my copious free time of course.

The last session was originally about visual display search engines (neat!) but it was replaced by a lecture on meta data and topic maps. Interesting, but not what I was looking for.

And thus ended the conference. I hopped on the Monterey Airbus back to San Jose and slept the whole way home. Overall, it was a less heady experience than IL2006 had been, but in the year between I've gone from being amazed at what librarians are doing to being excited to see what I can help make happen myself.

But not today. Today I rest, and tomorrow...I'll see what comes. Enjoy!

IL2007 -- Tuesday presentations

A much better day of it today -- lots of fascinating programs and great speakers. And, to cap things off, an honest West Coast earthquake during the evening session! 5.6 on the scale, just north of San Jose. We felt a jolt, but not much more. My wishes for safety amongst those closer.

Here are today's notes.

First of all, if you can have Rebecca Jones come and speak to your senior management team about the importance of being a 2.0 organization, do it. She has an energy and a conviction about the process of being Library 2.0 that translates beautifully.

Equally engrossing, Meredith Farkas and Helene Bowers explained the ins and out of staff training via Library 2.0-type initiatives. As someone who's trying to be a part of such an initiative at my home institution, I paid close attention and got some excellent background thoughts. Now it's just time to turn it into a proposal and results.

In "I"m at Web 2.0, Are You?", Amanda Palmer of the American Bar Association outlined ways in which she enticed and supported non-tech-savvy folks into learning and applying 2.0 tools in their work. Given the potential audience for my trainings back home, this was vital information. As part of the same session, David Alsmeyer from BT Libraries went through the steps he's engaged in to reach an older, but already tech-savvy and well-educated population. After the session, I told him about my "Librarian with a Laptop" idea; it seemed to go over well.

The other speakers from today were less relevant, but interesting. Now, I must pack my bags and get a good night's sleep before tomorrow's presentation. More on this after the show!

IL2007 -- Monday presentations

Chalk it up to poor sleep or that cold I've been fighting off since last week, but focus just was not my friend at today's session. Nor was the wireless in the conference center that just kept falling off my Mac's radar. Sigh.

As a result, the notes from today are a bit spotty, but you can find them here.

Blending In: Librarians in the Networked Community with Chrystie Hill & Michael Porter
I think I thought that this would be a more in-depth look at how librarians can be an active part of online communities on an individual level, but it was more about how the library website/institution can be a part of their patron's local lives.

Putting Evidence-Based Practice to Work, Frank Cervone, Northwestern University
Glitchy network connections interrupted the beginning of this talk for me, then I realized that it just wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know about the importance of showing your work.

Information Literacy in the Public Library, Alan D'Souza & Carol Bean
I really wish I'd gotten to this panel on time, but my watch stopped working during lunch. (Not my day for technology, apparently.) The second half of the presentation was useful, discussing different ways to train tech trainers and to work with older generations.

Integrating Libraries & Communities Online, Glenn Peterson & Marilyn Turner, Hennepin County Library and John Blyberg, Darien PL
An in-depth look at Hennepin's Bookspace.org and the present and future of the social OPAC. Good, useful stuff.

Now, I'm off to dinner and an early night. Tomorrow, more presentations. Ciao!

IL2007 - Sunday Preconferences

Hi all! It's the beginning of the first full day of the conference, and we're about to kick things off. I just wanted to post my notes from yesterday's preconference workshops.

Training Adults: Getting and Keeping Attention
Rebecca Jones
Jones discussed the role of the trainer, different learning styles and ways of engaging these styles, dealing with resistance in the training session, and other challenges. I feel like this could have been a full-day workshop and it would have been more fulfilling -- Training 101 in the morning and 201 in the afternoon. However, I did get a number of useful tidbits from it overall.

Tips for Effective Change Agents
Roy Tennant
What an astoundingly useful workshop. Tennant covered the ways that change agents can work within their organizations, the attributes of change agents, coping mechanisms, dealing with recalcitrant staff and out-of-touch administrators, and more. The best thing for me was a checklist of tech and communication skills to work on over the next year:

Build a Basic Skill Set
- Know a programming language, just enough to do the basics of anything you want to do (Perl, PHP, Python, etc)
- Know XML, XHTML, CSS
- Know a basic indexer and/or database -- MySQL, SwishEnhance/Swishie, others?
- Have a place to work -- laptop/home machine, a server if you've got access to one

Build Communication Skills
- Summarizing and writing simply (re-read On Writing Well)
- Ability to simplify and show practical applications for technical topics
- Create diagrams & other modes of expressing visual information
- Facility with basic office software
- Ability to speak IT language, library language, administrator language and plain English or whatever the language of your key users is

Neat.

Okay. First presentation is over and it's on to the next room. Enjoy!

Internet Librarian, Ahoy!

Yup, I'm in Monterey at Interent Librarian.

Just for context, I'm sitting here in my first preconference workshop on training. I'll be blogging the conference, but I'll be doing summaries and highlights of each piece rather than a explosion of non-contextual information. I'll put all my notes up on a Google Docs page later on.

More later. But now, I mindmap!

IL2007 CyberTours list published

Here's the complete list of CyberTours at Internet Librarian 2007. (I'm down near the bottom, on Wednesday the 31st.) If you're at the conference, stop by and say Hi!