Here’s an update to my post flickr at IL2006 which I posted on 27 October 2006. I’m not quite sure why but I’m interested in seeing the number of photos from Internet Librarian conferences uploaded to Flickr. I imagine the totals are likely a bit high because some photos are tagged with both ILxx and ILxxxx.

il2005 - 326
il05 - 564
total - 890 (as of 27 October 06)
total - 705 (as of this post) < ---- less photos! huh?

il2006 - 1,880
il06 - 117
total - 1997 (as of 27 October 06)
total - 2190 (as of this post)

And this year?

il2007 - 2410
il07 - 131
total - 2541 (as of this post)

I made an attractive graph because it is really easy to do in Keynote.

All I can conclude from this data is that librarians are finding it increasingly fun to photograph sea lions.

Tuesday morning’s keynote was given by Liz Lawey. Her talked rehashed much of the social software stuff going on outside of libraries and inside libraries. This boosts Jenny’s thought that “2005 is the year that libraries got it”

Lawley stated that “Libraries have always been good at the long tail.” For instance, we can go beyond the NYT best seller list and promote books that have been tucked away. Rick loves finding hiden gems when he goes through the deselection process. All of this social network software is trying to do this through computers. Which method is easier and which is more successful?

Another interested tidbit from her talk is the idea to use popular tagging sites to find out what people (not librarians - ha) call certain things. This could be of help when naming library services.

I figured that most people at IL2005 would be attending and blogging the primary keynote, so I snuck away for the alternate: “The New Read/Write Web: Transforming the Classroom” by Will Richardson. We’d be better off spending more time thinking about the information gathering/processing/producing of young people. They should be served by libraries just like adults, and they are our future taxpayers, dig?

He made a few points that really got me going:

-The web isn’t about technology anymore. Technology is fading into the background. This was echoed by Jessamyn in the social software session when she stated that Flickr is so easy that every living member of her family can use it. So, the playing field is leveling out, the web is being democratized, however you want to put it. HTML is no longer a requisite skill for getting text, pictures, and video on the web. Richardson emphasized that digital documents are not only easier to make, they are easier to publish.
For libraries, this means we can get more of our staff, people that might not be able to write a page out of HTML, to contribute.

-The read/write web builds confidence and encourages people to do more. He told the story of his daughter who drew a book about weather, which is now a photoset on Flickr. It has been viewed over 500 times, which is a great distribution for a young person.

-know what :::> know where. Richardson wants to forget about “just in case learning.” He thinks that when facts are readily available, it is more important to know how to find them, rather than know them all. He must get a ton of cross looks in the school systems. As a reference librarian, this was music to my ears. Nonlibrarians often ask me, “How do you answer all the questions people ask? You must be so smart” to which I respond, “No, I’m smart because I know where to find everything.” Knowing the process is vastly more powerful than one just one outcome, isn’t it?

-We must teach our kids to have discussion about truth. Librarians have been ranting about this for ages, it is called information literacy. The New York Times, Wikipedia, Britannica, magazines, whatever: for anything serious, more than one source needs to be consulted. Nothing should be taken as the Absolute Truth. The importance of this skill increases as the amount of extant information in the world increases. Again, thinking critically about information is more important than memorizing a fact.

-Teachers must be creators as well. Kids need models for how to blog. If they don’t have guidance, they’ll be “blogging” on MySpace, and not practicing very good Web safety. Banning blogging in schools is shortsighted. Flickr is banned in the school system of Kentucky. So students use the tool on their own time, rather than receiving instructions and teacher added value.

-Richardson prefers “publish your homework” over “hand in your homework.” Students’ output should be on the Web to be part of the conversations going on. Instead of doing homework for their teacher, they could do it for an audience, and be motivated to do well by the idea of reputation. This would certainly approximate the adult world a bit more.

-Let’s not contain our ideas in text, let’s spread them around with links, IM, flickr, blogs, wikipedia, etc. This meshes perfectly with what Jenny and I independently mentioned during the “Future of Public Libraries” session. We need to get our libraries’ content out into the swirling online world, interacting with itself, people, and the web.

Take a look at his blog, Weblogg-ed: the read/write classroom

For the participants, and anyone else interested:

Smart Computing at Your Library: Saving User and Staff Time (and Keeping Sane) or Geek to Live, Don’t Live to Geek.

This morning Michael and I gave a workshop on planning for technology in libraries. One very interesting thing to note from the morning is that 100% of the people in the workshop have WiFi in their institutions. How’s that for saturation, right? I found this encouraging. Out of all the technologies we mentioned, here are the few that people found the most interesting.

Here’s a barebones distillation of IM in libraries. I’m going to use it as a starting point for my upcoming cybertour at IL 2005.

1. Instant Messaging is free (minus staff time)

2. Millions of our patrons use IM every day.

3. For some, not being available via IM is like not having a telephone number.

4. There are three major IM networks (AIM, Y!M, MSN)

5. Y!M and MSN will be interoperable at some point.

6. Trillian is a multi-network IM client, meebo is a web-based multi-network client. Use them.

7. Having practice sessions in-house is a good way to get staff excited about IM in libraries.

8. Staff can communicate in-house using IM.

9. Libraries can choose to have one IM point of contact, or they can choose to divide it departmentally.

10. IM is user-centered and builds relationships with library users.