A few links and a talk

I’m wrapping up the end of “talk season” here at librarian.net. I’ll be speaking at the Rhode Island Library Conference on June 6th and the Connecticut Library Consortium on June 9th. Then I’m done except for ALA. Yes, I’ll be going to ALA, giving a presentation with the incredibly talented Louise Alcorn for the MaintainIT people. It will be the first time I’ve been funded to go to a library conference… ever. Exciting times afoot at the Disneyland Hotel.

This afternoon I finished giving a talk online for the Education Institute. It was called Collaborative Information Systems & Reference Service and I’ve put a lot of notes and links online. Basically I talk about the changing nature of how people look for information and “Ask A” type services like Yahoo Answers and, of course, Ask MetaFilter. I have some statistics there that I think are sort of nifty. It’s very strange giving a talk online. I basically sent people to tmy website and then did a talk over the telephone. Except for the convenor, Liz Kerr, I wasn’t really aware of other people being present and it was unnerving. I know that continuing education is important and especially so for people who are too remote to go to standard talks or conferences, but I still feel like we’re trying to find a good delivery mechanism for this sort of content.

my SAA talk, notes and photos

I gave my talk about collaborative information systems and blogs generally at the closing day of the SAA conference yesterday. Here are my slides: Capturing Collaborative Information: News, Blogs, Librarians, and You. It’s pretty picture-heavy — thank you Flickr — but you can click on the “printable version” link in the last slide to see my notes. You can also see a few pictures in my Flickr photostream under the saa tag. I went to another discussion on the link between archives and justice that I’ll be writing up later today as well as tracking down some of the reports from people who blogged about my talk yesterday.

delightful wikipedia timewaster/tool

Steven points me to the live recent changes feed for Wikipedia. This is sort of a neat way to look at how dynamic the project it [good news and bad news to librarians, I know] but also to get a ton of examples, an overview if you will, of what a good update looks like, or what all these updates are doing. You see logged in users, annotated changes, links to more information, and nonsense pages deleted so fast it can make your head spin. Fascinating.