Michigan Library Consortium

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. I gave a talk today about blogs at the Michigan Library Consortium’s special Program The Library Rebooted. You’d think there wasn’t much left to be said about blogs, but I found a way. It was an interesting day since I was also presenting with Meredith who talked about wikis, Aaron who talked about IM and Darlene who talked about social software. Big fun day and the tippy tail end of my long US tour. I’m going to dinner with librarians tonight, flying out tomorrow, staying with my sister and then taking the long peaceful bus back up to Vermont on Friday. Fifteen days, six beds, five talks, six cities, ten plane rides and one bag + laptop. Except for the lousy “we sort of misplaced your luggage” interlude last night, it’s been a really nice time.

My short talk Blah Blah Blogs: Why They Matter for You and Your Library is online in the normal place. update: Kathy, the well-rounded librarian has blogged my talk.

jobs for librarians

Posted on by jessamyn

I’ve been fascinated to see how the jobs for librarians have been changing, just over the time I’ve been a librarian. Check out this job for a Head Librarian in a facility that they are predicting will be “bookless” before too long. Information architect for the Veterans Health Administration (posted at MetaFilter jobs, whee!) doesn’t look too librarian-ish, but then you look and see that it’s all about metadata, 508 compliance (accessibility) and controlled vocabularies. It’s been a while since I was actively looking for work, but even scanning LISJobs now is a different experience than it was when the site started. Interesting times to be us.

HLA06 – Hawaii Library Association

Posted on by jessamyn

I gave two talks yesterday at the Hawaii Library Association Conference which were variants of other talks. HLA likes to keep the interest level up and so all the time slots were short. I gave one 45 minute talk and one that was an hour, both of which were seriously shortened from their original lengths. I felt like I really had to distill them down and this may have made them better. Here they are.

The second talk is quick becoming a favorite of mine since it’s a niche that’s not discussed too often at conferences and it’s full of practical information. I also sat on a Dead/Emerging technologies panel with Aaron, Wesley Fryer, Marshall Breeding and Victor Edmonds. It was a pretty meta panel — Aaron and Wes were both taking and posting pictures during the talk and I was responding to blog posts from someone in the audience who turned out to be Dr. Drew, a library professor at UH. He gave us a great recommendation for a good place to go to dinner, complete with bellydancer.

I’m on my way to coconut waffles. Check out the HLA06 tag on Flickr and Technorati for much much more.

confessions of a bookplate junkie

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. I’m in the Los Feliz branch of Los Angeles Public library where the air conditioning is brisk and the wifi is fast and free. Abby has an amusing wrap-up of her impressions of the WLA conference as well as some thoughts about Library Thing. It’s fun to hang out with other moderator/administrators of library-ish social-ish sites (LibraryThing for her and MetaFilter for me). A lot of the issues we deal with concerning identity, authority and content filtering as well as the sheer volume of the bits and bytes we move around mean that even though our sites are very different, some of the cat-herding aspects of being an overseer of a social software network are very similar.

Speaking of MetaFilter, here’s a fun link from there today: Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie.

it’s great when someone blogs your talks

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m on my way out of Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow. I had a great time at WLA, both giving a few talks and hanging out with some cool librarians. Tasha Saecker blogged both of my talks and you can read her notes on my talks, as well as the talks themselves.

Sensible Technology Trends in Libraries: my notes/slides, Tasha’s notes

Small Libraries and the Digital Divide: my notes/slides, Tasha’s notes