PLA Blog

ALA Session held Monday 1:30-3:30

OK, I’ll be honest and say that although I found the summary of this program enticing, I wasn’t sure if I’d spend the whole time at the session. It appeared to have an academic focus, and come on - it’s technical services and I am SO not a technical services kinda gal, so I staked out a seat close to the door so I could make a quick, unnoticed getaway if necessary.

It wasn’t necessary. This session grabbed my interest, piqued my interest, and held my interest for the duration. This was due to some great presenters -all of whom approached the topic differently, but with equal levels of engaging style. I’ve located copies of all slides used, and you can access them here.

The session began with Matt Barnes, a consultant with R2 consulting. He was throwing out ideas and applications left and right - and I was wishing I’d taken shorthand at some point in my life. Sure, he touched on the usual concepts like Wikis, tagging, and mashups - then followed these with more exotic (at least to me) things as the new “Geotagging” phenomenon, the Croquet Consortium, IBM’s Web Fountain and web outsourcing using the overwhelmingly amazing/cool/can’t really even get my head around how innovative Amazon Mechanical Turk Wow, wow, and wow. Other Matt nuggets:
- (re: OCLC OpenWorldcat) “Don’t get stuck thinking the only devide is the PC. Think cell phone, PDA, iPod, etc.
- 2.0 isn’t just about deploying new technology. Use Web 2.0 to solve problems based on your mission and goals
- There isn’t a final solution or correct answer - only continuous change. (Preach it, brother!)

Next up was Beth Picknally-Camden, who reported on the University of Pennsylvania’s successful “PennTags” program. The folks there created their own social bookmarking tool for their students and faculty to use. This allows them to tag catalog records and articles, and to create annotations. Beth said that in addition to the benefits of sharing and collaborating, she saw this as an excellent way to reinforce the “playing to learn” concept that is so important to web 2.0 tools (and is so undervalued in many of our organizations, I feel). She also learned very quickly that “people are watching” - meaning that she was encouraged to contribute because of the responses and connections her own contributions were making in others’ contributions. They use a tag cloud to highlight the popular tags. You need to have a “Pennkey” to contribute, but anyone can observe. Check it out at: http://tags.library.upenn.edu/

The final presenter was Elizabeth Winter, from Georgia Tech. She began her session with a slide that stated: PLAY v. PRODUCTIVITY. She then asked:

What if playing with new technologies was increasing our productivity? She also asserted that it’s OK to throw something out to “see if it sticks”. (Say it again, sister)
She then told us about their recent “see if it sticks” pilot - a GTJournals wiki. Using the easy and free pbwiki web tool, the folks at Georgia Tech set out to find a way to accomplish their goals of: cutting down on email volume, allowing all staff to share and get involved in a “common area”, track their progress, and avoid duplication of effort - relating to changes and cancellations of their many journals. They’ve locked it down, because they are including pricing and other sensitive informaiton, but you can see screen shots of their wiki in Elizabeth’s slide presentation here

An excellent presentation that sparked more than a few ideas in my “public librarian” head. Thanks academic folks!

Tags: ALA2007, Library2.0, PLA Blog, social networking, technology, wikis

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 3:19 pm and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.