Category: me!

RILA and bellydancing

Posted on by jessamyn

The talk I gave at RILA yesterday, a variant on my digital divide talk (though with the same name) is online here: The Information Poor & the Information Don’t Care. Small Libraries and the Digital Divide. I have a few pictures of the social hour afterwards including the bellydancing how-to session. Actually I have a short video of this event — librarians shaking their things to Wyclef Jean and Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” — which I may try to put on my MySpace account as I figure out how that all works.

While you’re at it, librarian MySpacers, read David King’s cautionary notes. I find the confusion he describes happens with my email students who use Yahoo email accounts. They sign up for an email account and the first thing that “Yahoo” tells them is that they need to lose a few pounds and get a mortgage. It doesn’t take much to explain the concept of banner ads, but it’s easy because I’m sitting right there. There are a very wide range of ways that people understand the web, many more than I would have thought of before I started working with computer newbies every day.

Hello from the Ohio Small Libraries Conference

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi from Columbus Ohio. The Ohio Library Council IT division has their own blog and you can read a bit about the conference there. If you look around at some of the other blogs the contributers from that blog also post to, you’ll find great stuff like Library Geek Woes and the Spotlight on Ohio Libraries blog. My two talks are here:

The Information Poor & the Information Don’t Care, Small Libraries and the Digital Divide (a slightly updated version of my favorite talk)
Until We’re All Robots: Sensible Approaches to Technology in Libraries (a more philosophical talk that I’m afraid wasn’t as accessible as I thought it would be)

Tomorrow I’m sitting in on a few talks as well as participating in the closing summary session, Then I’m getting a late flight to the airport and arriving home at midnight, after most of the Sampson family has already arrived for the graduation festivities. My family and Greg’s sister get in on Friday. You can see the bug I found in my shower on Flickr here. Other than that, I’m having a pretty nice time.

Ohio Small Libraries Conference May 17-18

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m on the road again next week to give a few technology-related presentations at the Ohio Small Libraries Conference. If anyone reading this is attending, please come up and say hello. There are a really neat set of talks at this conference and I’m particularly hoping to see 10 Things You Need to Do to Your Computer Today to see if there is anything I can bring back to all of my microlibraries.

libraries build communities, don’t you think?

Posted on by jessamyn

Ten leading library experts were posed this question in the Spring issue of [SirsiDynix’s] Upstream: "What is the best example of libraries building communities that you have come across or experienced? How will libraries in the future be empowered to play even a greater role in their communities?" One of those experts was me (1.2 MB pdf), and at least a few other people you’ll probably recognize.

While I feel a little weird acting as if this library/community thing was something we’ve all recently discovered, it’s still great to hear everyone’s take on it, and I’m always happy to be able to say nice things about my favorite libraries.