A Wandering Eyre

Happy Halloween 2006

Originally uploaded by Wandering Eyre.

Happy Halloween from the Rochesters! Pullo is barking at the trick or treaters, Mr. R is holding Pullo from eating the naughty children, and I am handing out the candy. So far, I have seen vampires, Superman, a couple of princesses, a bat, a monkey, a cat, and some other various things that I have already forgotten.

–Jane, loves Halloween

Plugged In

Originally uploaded by Wandering Eyre.

Internet Librarian was a wonderful conference. The atmosphere was completely different from any other conference I have attended. There was a congenial, light-hearted mood in every session. All of the sessions were packed with Library 2.0 goodness. I felt at home in the sea of laptops gathered around the nearest plug. If no plug was to be found, we sat in the front, the best distance for heckling.

If you search Flickr tags for IL2006, you might get the impression that all librarians do at conference is walk around outside, eat food, drink, and take idiotic pictures of each other. You would not be entirely wrong, but I did learn a bunch of new tricks that I am going to try at my library.

The people I met and was able to connect with again made this the best conference I have ever attended. We laughed, traded ideas, and made fun of each other (not too hard a feat). It was nice to talk with others in the profession working with technology, even if most of our conversations revolved around the hand drier in the bathroom of the Crown and Anchor.

–Jane, will definitely be there next year

No One Cares That You Have a blog

Originally uploaded by Wandering Eyre.

My favorite slide from Aaron Schmidt’s Internet Librarian Presentation.

–Jane, no one at all

Elizabeth Lawley title 1

Originally uploaded by Wandering Eyre.

This slide is a draft title of Elizabeth Lane Lawley’s closing session.

Social Computing and the Information Professional

Elizabeth Lane Lawley contributes to four blogs:
mamamusings
many2many - a group weblog on social software
misbehaving.net
terra nova

Michael Stephens’ tight jeans in Second Life were mentioned explicitly in the keynote.

Games are not just about computer games.
OOF! - Reverse scavenger hunt - Your team must go and gather 10 items, you come back, and then you get the list of things to find. Each team must justify how the items they collected relate to the items on the list. For example, one team had to prove how a plastic bag is a renewable energy source.

Games are a powerful way to build an emotional connection.

Elizabeth Lane Lawley talks about another game, called Werewolf. [When I was in college we called it Mafia.]

[I do not think we use enough games in instruction and training. Are there ways that we can integrate more game play into our instruction sessions?]

An example of libraries using games? PLCMC Learning 2.0 training program

What are the incentives for people? [People need incentives to learn, even if the incentive is a paper due tomorrow.]

Other games she mentions are:
I love bees
Cruel 2B Kind
All In - Tombstone Hold’em Poker
Maple Story

Games are about the experience. What is the experience we are creating for our users?

www.42entertainment.com/see.html - a group that creates games for different things
Fletcher Library Game Project
Bibliographic Gaming - a blog for librarians using video games to teach

Gaming will change the way people use your tools.

Elizabeth has some concerns about Second Life - It is not a game. There are no rules. It is an interesting starting point and the movement of library experimentation is good. Her kids can not go to look at it because of the age restrictions and adult content. You need a credit card to set up an account. Freshman in college who are 17 would not be able to attend class in SL. Second Life is like AOL. [I thought that was a very telling metaphor. AOL is the devil.] The first five minutes of any game are very important and most games have the new user tutorial built in to the experience. Second Life has no such tutorial.

Currently, Elizabeth is working on setting up a wiki for people in guilds of different games. [Very cool.]
–Jane, games

Internet Librarian 2006

In the MySpace and Facebook session on Tuesday afternoon, Cliff Landis posed one of my favorite questions to the audience. “Who owns the library?”

Who indeed. Though Cliff was unaware of it, he was up on my soapbox. The library does not belong to us. It belongs to our users. Period. If we are doing things that serve ourselves we are missing the point and need to find jobs elsewhere.

Even before pointing out my favorite obvious point, Cliff had already won me over because he is a fellow Alienware owner.

The Tuesday afternoon sessions on social software were all fabulous. I did not really take notes since much of it was review for me. I did enjoy watching the antics of the presenters though. They were a fun and lively bunch though I did see someone actually sleeping in the audience.

Here is a roundup in three sentences:

Flickr is awesome, there is a booming community on the site, and there are many, many fun tools for Flickr pics. MySpace and Facebook can be powerful tools for outreach @ your library. RSS and JavaScript are easier then you think.

–Jane, halfway through the last day and exhausted

The rumor is:

The Crown and Anchor is the place to be.

–Jane, enough said

Sorry for the weird bolding on some of the posts. I will try to figure out what is going on and fix it.

–Jane, perturbed

Internet Librarian 2006

The RSS and JavaScript Cookbook

Paul Pival and Meredith Farkas are displaying are world of fun with RSS. The best part of their presentation? It is all online! On a wiki of course! This is a great resource with their handout, slides, and other resources. Hooray!

One thing I learned from their presentation that I did not know previously:

I learned about Grazr which creates a widget for your website that contains links to multiple RSS feeds. Sweet!

I think that libraries have not even begun to harness the abilities of RSS. There are so very many things that we can do with this technology. As Meredith and Paul point out, there are a ton of tools that make RSS and JavaScript easy for librarians who do not know any coding. Their wiki is a resource that will be an indispensable guide for libraries wanting to jazz up their sites and push dynamic content to their users.

–Jane, lurves her some RSS

How a Conference is Done

Originally uploaded by Wandering Eyre.

Information Today provides wifi at their conferences. It has a seat limit, we think, but I am listening to Cliff Landis talk about Facebook and writing at the same time. Fabulous.

Cliff Landis has an Alienware computer, thus he is awesome.

Alliance Second Life
Library 2.0: Going where the users are

Lori Bell, Tom Peters, and Michael Sauers

Overheard:
Pornography and gambling tend to lead innovation.

Even though we are all adults, the giggling is all over the room.

They have 4-5 thousand visitors a day to the Second Life Library. This is a great project with infinite possibilities. I know I did not take copious notes, but I wanted to watch and be very engaged. I have never been in Second Life, but I think now I will have to take a peek. To get a glimpse at Second Life, you can look at their Flickr group pool.

–Jane, wants to get a life