Tag: me!

What is up with me? Some talks and notes.

Posted on by jessamyn

I just got back from Albany, New York where I was a presenter at Albany Public’s fifth annual Reader’s Advisory Conference. It was a fun day. I’m a night owl so I missed Nora Rawlinson’s talk in the morning. She runs the website EarlyWord which is a nifty blog+more about publishing and libraries. My talk was about Library 2.0 and what tools and tips there are in there for Reader’s Advisory.

I’ve been talking about 2.0 stuff for a while but I put together a whole new talk from the ground up just so I could get current links, examples and maybe some snappier slides. I’ve been using Keynote for more of my talks lately which allows me to have versions available for people in Keynote, PDF and PowerPoint formats. Anyone who wants to grab a copy of the talk, please feel free. I also uploaded a hyperlinked version of my Colorado Association of Libraries talk along with the slides so people can follow along and see what I was talking about.

Now that that’s all taken care of, I can say that my public speaking for 2008 is officially over except for some lingering receipts and invoicing. I really tried to push myself this year to say “Yes.” to as many people as possible and meet as many librarians as I could. It was at times totally exhausting, incredibly rewarding and, as always a huge learning experience. Next year I’ll be doing probably slightly less of the same as I help a local library here with their automation project and spend more time with my boyfriend and many good books. I will be at the Superconference and Computers in Libraries, among other places, so I’m sure you’ll be seeing me around.

Thanks to everyone who has ever been an audience member, a conference coordinator or an agreeable boss or co-worker as I’ve been doing all this stuff. It’s been a really rewarding year on the road and I hope I’ve been able to direct some of that positive energy outwards as well.

talk: technology + libraries what are we doing?

Posted on by jessamyn

I gave a talk and did a little chitchat breakout session at the South Central Kansas Library System on Thursday. I’m in Colorado today so this is just a quickie update to say that slides and notes from my talk are available here: Technology and Libraries: What are we DOING? As always it was a pleasure to get to come to Kansas again.

Why Kansas is my favorite state I will never live in

Posted on by jessamyn

Kansas is too far from my family, and from the ocean. That said, I love my travels to Kansas and while I try not to pick favorites I think they are doing some great things with libraries and technology statewide. I just got back from a flyby visit to Lawrence where I gave the keynote presentation at a NEKLS’ Reaching for Excellence Training Program. Much love to the NEKLS people, they let me give a keynote in the afternoon. I also got to eat a ton of BBQ with Josh Neff and family which was another trip high point.

The notes for my talk are here. They are available in Keynote slides, PowerPoint slides, and printable pdf format. I made a custom theme for Keynote so the slides might look weird, the pdf might be easier to read. As with the last talk, I have also included hyperlinks to most of the websites that I discussed, and credit links to all the photos that I used. My talk was beamed to two other sites using an HDTV setup and while it was a little tough getting all the bugs worked out, we persevered and I think it went really well. Big thanks to Shannon from the state library for inviting/hosting me and Heather for doing all the awesome tech work.

You may have noticed that I’ve been travelling at a breakneck pace this year. Since my drop-in time and teaching were curtailed thanks to budget cuts, I’ve been spending more of my free time on the road. I enjoy travelling a great deal and think that getting the word out about sensible new technologies is really a good use of my time and efforts. It’s always a balance between staying put and working within your community and travelling to tell other communities about what works in your own community. I’ll be back in Kansas in a few weeks.

continuing ed class: web 2.0 search tools

Posted on by jessamyn

I’ve been MIA the past few days because I’ve been preparing and presenting a Continuing Ed class called Beyond Google: Using Web 2.0 Search Tools. I gave this class at the NAHSL conference in Lowell, Massachusetts yesterday. It was a long class, four hours, and while I was putting it together I was a little concerned that it might be too short, but it wound up maybe being a little too long (I breezed through some stuff at the end that I would have lingered on, but did end everything on time).

While the documentation for creating the class required me to prepare a “handout” I mostly made a slide show and then a corresponding page of every link I’d mentioned during the talk. It was time-consuming work, but ultimately more useful to participants than a printed page full of URLs. I gave out handouts that were mainly for note-taking in addition to some short lists that I thought would be good takeaway points. I’ve said it before but I really think empasizing handouts over web resources when we’re talking about the web is a smart way to move forward. That said, my handouts are downloadable in PDF format in case anyone wants to repurpose them.

The class itself was a mixture of some talk about Google and what sort of things they do besides their basic search portal, looking at what I think of as “2.0 search” and why I think some sites fit the description and a discussion of collaborative information tools like wikis, question and answer sites and “ask an expert” sites. I finished up with a talk about Firefox and why I think librarians should be using it. At least a few class members were unable to use any other browser in their workplace so I put in a plug for Portable Firefox as well as listing my favorite add-ons, themes and plug-ins. We even installed a script just to show how terrifically easy it was.

My flyby trip to the UP

Posted on by jessamyn

UP in case you don’t know, stands for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I had been there before, but merely driving through, though I did manage to get my second highest bowling score of all time there (164!). This time I went up to do a half-day talk at the Upper Peninsula Region of Library Cooperation’s annual conference in Marquette, Michigan. I decided to add a few days to my trip since I rarely get to the UP and it’s lovely. Someone from MetaFilter noticed that I was going to be up near Michigan Tech and invited me to do a public talk there, so I got to take a nice drive out to Houghton Michigan and meet some folks there and see the public and MTU libraries. I took a few photos: here is the Portage Lake District Library. I’m still uploading my photos of the MTU archives. Thanks to everyone for showing me around.

My page of notes from the talks is here. I tried to go the extra mile and not just link to keynote and pdf versions of my talks but also hyperlink the specific sites I mentioned so that people could click through to them relatively easily. We’ll see how this goes. One of the things I enjoyed doing was checking out the digital archives that were available online: Keweenaw Digital Archives and the Upper Peninsula Digitization Center Collections. I love this photo for example, with all the people commenting on who the people in the photo actually are. I used this photo in one of my talks.