Tag: talks

A few things going on, googley and otherwise

Posted on by jessamyn

I’ve been reading more, typing less. My super-bloggy friends told me lat year sometime that a lot of their friends were blogging less and Twittering more. I was surprised to hear that since it hadn’t really trickled down to my neck of the woods yet, but lately it has. While I still stay on top of my RSS feeds, I suspect that I can only do that because people are blogging less. I don’t know if they’re twittering more, having babies, buying houses or doing something else. I know what I’ve been doing: reading.

I’ve also been travelling which is probably not a totally fun thing to read about [if I could delete everyone’s tweets from airports, I would — unless they’re me looking for someone to hang out with when my flight has been delayed] but I go through periods of educating, followed by periods of learning, etc. I also made a resolution to myself for this year to write new talks (some similar slides okay, all similar slides against the rules) so when I give talks, they’re more work but also better, I think. I’ll be doing a 2.0 talk in upstate New York for NCLS and then a few talks at NJLA next week. Lots of writing, good stuff to pass on.

What’s been really on my mind lately is the Google Books settlement. I happen to be lucky that an old time friend of mine from the blogger days, James Grimmelmann, is one of the major players in the “explain this to everyone” field day that is going on. He’s also a keen legal mind and a great writer so it’s been a joy to read what he and others have been writing. Here are some links to essays that may help you understand things.

Some Vermont library statistics, fyi

Posted on by jessamyn

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.

what a super conference!

Posted on by jessamyn

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.

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.