librarian.net

I spent Friday at the NELA-ITS CMS Day. I gave the keynote in the morning, just talking about what CMSes are and why they’re useful with a little overview of a few, and then hung out to see other librarians talk about how they’re using their CMSes. It was a great day. We had a wonderful, if chilly, room at the lovely Portsmouth Public Library and I learned a lot about how some New England area libraries are running their library websites with Drupal, Joomla, Plone and Wordpress.

Having the actual people behind these websites talking about what worked and what didn’t work — and people were very candid about what was good and bad about these CMSes — made for a fascinating day of show and tell. Add to this the fact that all the software demonstrated was free and open source and I really think we sent people away with some great ideas on how to save money and still deliver good web content. Not having the chilling effect of a vendor’s stink-eye [or lawsuit threat] was also delightful. I’m now done with public speaking stuff until October I believe. Glad to end this season on such an up note. Thanks to NELA-ITS and Brian Herzog for coming up with the idea in the first place. Notes for my talks — links to slides and a page of links to what i was talking about, are here: Website 2.0! why there is a CMS in your future. Thanks to everyone for showing up. Here are the links to other people’s presentations and websites.

I’ve been really lucky lately that the talks I’ve been giving have been at conferences that I’ve really enjoyed attending as well as speaking at. This past week I was in Athens, Georgia giving the closing keynote talk at the Evergreen International Conference. I was able to show up a day early and went to a full day of programs where I got to learn how the Michigan Evergreen project is doing and heard about a multi-lingual Evergreen instance in Armenia which will have documentation and catalog entries in not just three languages, but three alphabets! As you probably know, the library that I am helping automate is using Koha, not Evergreen, so I talked a little about our project and the things that make FOSS projects more similar than different.

There was a real excitement to being part of the first annual conference. People were really jazzed about Evergreen generally, and Equinox Software did a great job as one of the co-sponsors both talking about what they were doing, but keeping the conference from being a single vendor-focussed event. Karen Schneider was my main point of contact for the whole big shindig and did a wonderful job with preparation, communication and high energy on-the-ground cat herding during the conference. You can see some of the slide decks over on slideshare and I know they recorded video at many of the talks. It was so darned relaxing to be among a group of people committed both to libraries and open source projects, I almost forgot my day-to-day library job fighting with Overdrive, OCLC and Microsoft. It also fortified me for my long trip home. Here are my slides, available in the usual formats.

• A big fan of open

Thanks to all the sponsors and all the people who showed up to make this conference terrific.

I gave a talk at MLA on Social Software and Intellectual Freedom. It’s hard to sum up the topic in 75 minutes. I did about an hour of talking and opened the floor up to questions which seemed to go well. If my talk had a thesis it was “Make sure your privacy policy expands to include social networking; don’t chastise people for what you know about them online; don’t be frightened.” but I think it was a little rambly. It did, howerver, come with a huge list of links which is what more and more of my talks lately have. I talk about 30 things and then give a lot of well-curated “and here’s where to go for more” sources. In case anyone is curious, the sldies and links are here

• Social Software & Intellectual Freedom

Thanks to MLA for having me down to Springfield. It was a nifty conference in a nice new building.

So, my resolution to write all new talks for 2009 is meaning I spend a lot more time on them. “All new” may be a bit of a stretch since one of my recent talks contained a part of an earlier talk, but they’re all revamped and recontextualized. I was away for eight days. I did a training at the North Country Library System — a consortium that serves many tiny libraries just like mine, only in upstate New York instead of Vermont — that was a lot of fun. I then drove down to the Jersey Shore for one of my favorite library conferences, NJLA.

I don’t know exactly why NJLA is always so fun. I think it’s a combination of a well-organized and fun conference put on by an organization that doesn’t seem to be going broke and held in a neat location. The New Jersey librarians I have met there are a mix of older and younger librarians who seem to work and play well together. Maybe it’s just that they get my jokes. I did a talk about how to do some advanced stuff on YouTube and then also did an expansion of the Firefox talk that I did at Computers in Libraries.

As always my slides, notes and links are online and you can see them on these two pages.

• Engage Your Patrons with Web 2.0
• Two talks for NJLA

Enjoy and if you came to any of these talks, thanks for being such a great audience.

I forgot, with all the hubub about 4/20 [Hitler's birthday, the Pirate Bay decision, other stuff] that my blog is now ten years old. Older than most, younger than some. I’ve become a much less frequent updater, and often on Fridays for some reason, but I’m still enjoying writing it, reading it, interacting on it and being immersed in blog culture generally.

Thanks readers, for a decade of sharing library information here. Here’s a link to the first ten days of librarian.net.

So, I gave a short talk at the Library 2.0 Symposium at Yale on Saturday. Put on by the Information Society Project, it was a gathering of people ruminating on the nature of future libraries. Only a few of the participants seemed to know our profession’s definition of Library 2.0 but that didn’t seem to matter much. There are some great summaries of the panel discussions on the Yale ISP blog. Most people there were academic, but I did get to hang out with Josh Greenberg from NYPL and see Brewster Kahle talk about the Internet Archive’s book scanning project. My general angle was that while we talk a lot about the “born digital” generation, there are still places here in the US — hey, I live in one — where the sort of network effect that is necessary for 2.0 sorts of things still eludes us. We each got about ten minutes and I could have used twenty, but you can look at my five slides if you’d like.

The whole day was worthwhile, but it’s somewhat ironic that we were encouraged to use twitter and blog our reactions while the room the panel was in had almost no wifi and no outlets. I don’t know why this sort of thing still surprises me, but I just felt that a high-powered panel would be able to receive high-powered tech support and handle things like this. Not so.

Today we got notification that public library statistics are available for Vermont and got a link to this page. No HTML summary so I’m going to pull out a few things that I thought were notable so maybe other people can link to it or maybe I’ll crosspost on the VLA blog.

• Vermont has 182 public libraries, the largest number of libraries per capita in the US.
• 174 of these libraries have Internet access; 160 of these have high speed access. Do the math, that’s 14 libraries with dial-up and eight with nothing.
• Half of the public librarians in the state have MLSes or the equivalent.
• 73% of Vermont library funding comes from local taxes; 27% comes from other local sources (grants, fundraising)
• Eleven public libraries filter internet access on all terminals (as opposed to some libraries that offer a children’s filtered option)

The library that I work in serves about 1300 people and is open nineteen hours per week. We’re the only library at our population level (serving 1000-2499 people) that loaned more books than we borrowed via ILL. Ninety-six percent of the service population have library cards. I’m still reading for more details, fascinating stuff really.

I’m at Computers in Libraries and it’s a whirlwind of good folks, good information and some terrible rooms (and a few good ones). Wireless is working decently, so I’ll be around on Twitter and the chatmachine. Say hi if you see me. My talks, the one I gave today and the one I’m giving tomorrow, are available at this URL.

http://librarian.net/talks/cil2009

For any librarians attending SXSW — which I’m gathering will be at least a few judging from the chatter I’ve been hearing — I’ll be there starting tomorrow night. Here is the short list of events I’m committed to

• Librarian meetup at the Iron Cactus on Saturday at 12:30 – more details, or here
• MetaFilter meetup Saturday at 6:30 at Mother Egan’s – more details
• The panel I’m on about community moderation — with folks from Flickr and YouTube and Etsy and CurrentTV — Sunday at 3:30
• Fray Cafe Sunday night from 8 – midnight. I’m a featured performer, come hear my crazy story.

I leave on Tuesday. Monday is an open day and I may go to the Ransom Center to see what’s nifty there.

I was interviewed for Slate about Ask MetaFilter. I like the way the article came out. When the hive mind works, it’s a beautiful thing.

I’m getting a little R&R in after a busy day bustling around the OLA Superconference. This is my first time at this conference and I’ve really been enjoying myself. I did a variation on a talk I’ve given: Smart, Tiny Tech. As always, the slides and notes are online along with links to the things I was talking about.

I made a sort of personal resolution for 2009 to write new talks for every event I’ll be speaking at. I talk about similar things often, but I want to be a little more cognizant of my audience — showing off a 2.0 “border wait times” mobile app was fun today, for example — and a little less “Oh here’s Jessamyn with her digital divide talking points again…” Today’s talk was fun and the audience was interesting and interactive.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned lately how much I love being in Canada and talking to Canadian librarians. Today I got to have lunch with the lovely and talented Amanda Etches-Johnson and the talented and lovely John Fink. I had to miss a talk by John Miedema because it was at the same time as my talk — along with maybe 15 other presentations — but I did manage to see some of John Fink’s talk about Evergreen. Hoping to run into Walt around someplace, but I’ve been a little behind on planning since out I was out sick a lot of last week.

I’ve also enjoyed just being in the big city now that I’m healthy again. I’ve already stopped in at Toronto Public Library and asked them for help finding this museum which, alas, appears to have been closed for some time, cursed internet! Tomorrow evening there’s a librarian get together (C’est What, 6:30 pm) and then there’s a MetaFilter meetup on Saturday night (Bedford at 7 pm). If you happen to see me wandering around looking slackjawed at all the big buildings, please do say hello.