Category: me!

be social – explaining social networks to librarians and parents

Posted on by jessamyn

I did a short tour of some New Hampshire libraries over the past few days. I did a little talk called MyWhat? Decoding social technologies.. It’s only about five slides but most of it was doing a tour of some of the more popular social networks [Facebook, MySpace, Flickr] and showing how they worked, how kids were using them and what parents and librarians should know.

Remember that a lot of the digital divide that we deal with now isn’t that people don’t have computers per se, it’s that they’re not in networks and groups of people that understand them and can answer complex questions about them. The library is often an integral link in this equation. A lot of my time at these talks is spent answering questions about how these social tools work, how I use them, how librarians might use them, and how kids and teens can use them safely and effectively. A lot of the print materials I’ve come across err on the side of caution which is not a bad idea but often there’s no “Hey you really SHOULD try this” couterpoint. I hope I was able to offer that somewhat.

ACURIL talk – Library 2.0 &c.

Posted on by jessamyn

I just got done giving my Library 2.0 talk Library 2.0 in Word and Deed at ACURIL. You’ll notice I made slides this time, real slides like PowerPoint (well, NeoOffice, but it’s about the same). I like giving talks this way, though I don’t think I’m ready to abandon my nifty slideware, just wanted to try it out. The talk went well despite a comedy of errors including

  • My name and talk being nowhere on the program.
  • My talk starting 40 min after the start time noted on the flyer that my contact was handing out.
  • My losing my cables for my laptop (stolen? lost?) and having to borrow another computer
  • That computer not having OpenOffice so having to actually use PowerPoint along with OpenOffice’s save-as-powerpoint feature. Worked like a charm.
  • My talk ending roughly 30 minutes before the bus was supposed to pick everyone up to take them on the Bacardi factory tour. Not a fidgeter in the room.

So, had I not been in a tropical wonderland, this might have buggd me some. But since everyone else here is exceptionally relaxed and friendly and the ocean is right outside my window, I’ve found some sort of inner fortitude and am managing to have a pretty good time. Only wish I could stay longer.

cross-site promotion, are you on metafilter?

Posted on by jessamyn

Me and the nice people from MetaFilter are starting an ambitious back-tagging project where a team of volunteers will be adding tags to the 42,000 posts that were on the website before we added the tagging functionality. We’re hoping that this will make it easier to track down double-posts and related posts and make browsing the site via tags a little more thorough. I envy sites like Flickr that have had tags since the beginning, doing it this way is hard and not at all optimal. In any case, if you have a MetaFilter login and would like to do a little volunteer tagging, please drop me an email or (preferably) an IM with your usernumber and I can get you set up.

VLA Wrap-up

Posted on by jessamyn

I just got back from VLA where I gave two half-talks over two days. It’s fun getting to hang out with local librarians. Most of the time I view conferences as a way to meet up with friends and see new places, but the VLA conference is actually good for old-fashioned networking (with new friends who I will see new places with in the future, I am certain).

My first talk was about CSS and I mostly did the intro while Jessica Allard did the bulk of the talk. My second talk was What’s What With Wireless. I gave an overview and then Carl Zeller from Teconic, who I had worked with when I was at the Rutland Free Library, did the safety and networking aspects of it. It was great to do split talks. I think the audience really gains a lot from multiple perspectives even if, as with the wifi talk, the presenters aren’t even always agreeing with each other.

Last night I went over to UVM and hung out with the Vermont Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts (VAGUE) and had pizza and talked about Ubuntu and yes, my little video which has now passed 27,000 views on YouTube, almost surpassing the population of my county. I talked to them about Koha and LibLime and Evergreen which no one there really knew about. They repeatedly apologized for the dark dank basement as if I was familiar with perhaps being someplace else, but I really like hanging out with nerds and geeks. I plan to go to the developers conference in Boston and let them know what library/librarian users might like to see out of an open source desktop OS. I encourage other librarians to go.

A few other things I learned:

  • The VLA Intellectual Freedom Committee is working on strengthening the library privacy laws in the state of Vermont.
  • The new incoming VLA preseident-elect is the assistant director of the library I used to work at, and I got to meet him at the conference.
  • One of the Department of Libraries’ Regional Consultants uses Ubuntu and has some experience in/interest in using Evergreen as an ILS.
  • The current (as of yesterday) president of VLA has some interesting ideas about new directions. I introduced myself to her and said “hey I’m short on tact, but I’m pretty good at getting technology projects working, consider letting me help out with the back end on your projects” and she seemed to think that was a great idea.

I’m sure there’s more but I’m operating at a sleep deficit and a keyboard overload so I’ll add in more when I remember it. Thanks to everyone who made my trip to Burlington fun and interesting.

My MLA Presentation

Posted on by jessamyn

I just got done giving a Tiny Tech Talk about good tech tools for small and rural libraries at the Massachusetts Library Association conference. In a country where “small” is often defined as libraries with 50,000 people or fewer, there is a real need for services that work for really tiny libraries serving populations of a few thousand or less. This talk is a variant of my Tech Tips talks but with a lot of the actual words being about specific things that work where there isn’t much access or tech know-how, much less cash. It went well. I enjoy library conferences.