This Saturday, I’m honored to be moderating a panel of Pratt Alumni at the Pratt Student Chapter of ASIS&T New Media Symposium. It promises to be an amazing day, featuring keynote speaker Alex Wright, information architect at the NY Times and author of Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages!

What I’m most excited about: the fact that I’m a PUBLIC LIBRARIAN getting an opportunity to pose questions to some brilliant voices in information architecture, usability, taxonomies/ontologies, and content strategy.  On a daily basis, at the Greenpoint Branch of Brooklyn Public Library, I do my best to facilitate productive, satisfying relationships between library patrons and information objects.  (Um, yeah, by ‘information objects’ I mean books for the most part.)  All of the alums that will be speaking at Pratt this Saturday do the same thing I do, only for private enterprises: they also strive to create meaningful relationships between users and information.

Speakers:

Vincent Au- Information Architect, ROKKAN
Terence Fitzgerald – Taxonomy Systems Analyst, AOL
Sari Harris – Senior Information Architect, ThumbPlay
Tim Salazar – Assistant Vice President Client Experience, JP Morgan
Erin Scime – Senior Content Strategist, HUGE
Marc Wendell – Human Factors Engineer, Elsevier

I’m hoping I can reach out to you PLA Blog readers to give me some ideas for questions I should ask these people, or even topics you think it’d be useful to steer the conversation toward.  I regularly yammer on about how we need to create an innovation culture at public libraries, but the truth is that most innovation happens in the private or academic sector.  I don’t hate on that.  As a public librarian I always look to design firms, academic libraries, artists, and everyone else for ideas that I can adapt for use in libraryland.  Can you all help me pick these people’s minds?  What do we as PUBLIC LIBRARIANS want to learn from these successful people?