librarian.net

I went to library camp in Montrèal and had a very good time. This was the second library event that I’ve been to recently where I stuck around for the whole thing and I’m glad I did. I even woke up early so that I could see John Fink and Jason Hammond’s talks which were before mine and worth getting up for.

The promo materials said I was going to be “inspirational” so I tried my best. I basically did an anti-pecha-kucha talk with six pictures slides that were each on the screen for about eight minutes each. And I wrote out a talk, with all the words not just my usual “now talk about the digital divide” notes. I was pleased with it, though the informal no-podium nature of the event meant that I still wound up riffing a fair amount and doing weird things like this. Plus it was 100 degrees [37.7 C] but people were nice and stayed awake. The Library Camp event was in the Cyberthèque in the basement of a McGill building which was an awesome place to have an event. Big tables, lots of computers, working wifi, nearby bathrooms and snack machines, good screens and projectors and AV. Big big pros to Amy Buckland and Amanda Etches-Johnson for creating a terrific event and to everyone else for coming out and participating.

My talk — NOW I WILL INSPIRE YOU — is available in a few formats.

• The main page where slides are available in various formats (not super helpful)
• The actual words from the talk itself
• some live-blogged goodness which I had to make a real effort to not read while I was talking

I managed to do two talks in two days from the same set of slides that were, in many ways, totally different.

I talked about Library 2.0 stuff to McGill SLIS students on Thursday and then to professional librarians (mostly) today. Good talks, interesting people, all followed up with some delicious food and grand socializing in Montreal, one of my favorite places. If anyone would like to see my list of links and handout, you can see them on this page: Library 2.0 – links & resources. The pdf is sort of large, but the list of links goes to almost all the websites I talked about, and the handout is the standard “places to find me online” if you want to explore a little but don’t know many people using the tools yet.

Thanks to everyone who came out and listened and responded and limboed and chatted with me.

Montreal gets a big downtown library, to house the public library collection as well as Quebec’s National Library collection. Not as fancy outside as, say, Seattle Public, but pretty feature-rich nonetheless, lots of nice photos. [thanks aaron]