This morning, I took a trek over to Springfield, MA for the Massachusetts Library Association Conference where I spoke for a little while about some of the programs I did back when I worked at the Bushwick Branch of Brooklyn Public Library.  I spoke about focusing the collective expertise of your community, user-generated collections, and a great blog post I found about the innovative corporate culture at Zappos.com.

Lucky for me, I was speaking with these folks:

A great presentation from Monica Harris and Mandy McGee from Oak Park Library (IL).  I’ve spoken of their awesomeness before on this blog, but do check out their innovative programming for 20 & 30-somethings.  Word is they’ll be presenting at the ALA Annual Meeting in Chicago as well….

After a swell lunch with Michael Spelman and Christine Schonhart of Boston Public Library (down in Brooklyn we call that the other BPL), I dropped in on the technology trends discussion where I wisely kept quiet about the New York Yankees.  For me, there were two stars of that group. The first was Scott Colford (Web Services, Boston PL), who shared some interesting tools: Prezi as a presentation tool that totally smokes the widely-hated Powerpoint, and Bumptop as a 3d desktop space (if you are on a PC).  Also great was Bonnie Pierce of the Dover Town Library.  Bonnie is a champion of QR codes and other 2d barcode systems, and she clearly sees the opportunites associated with linking objects and physical spaces with information and virtual spaces.  Check out her site. Expect to keep hearing about this technology- Bonnie has something exciting brewing in Dover, and I’ve got a QR code project in the works down in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Finally, here’s another futurist gem for you.  I got home a few hours ago, still sort of buzzing from the interesting HCI stuff that Scott and Bonnie got me thinking about, and stumbled into this video of an electrostatic gestural interface found via Create Digital Motion which was in turn found via Kicker Studio.  Enjoy.  Thank you to all of the kind people at the Massachusetts Library Association.

3D Computer Interface from Free Flow on Vimeo.