So, I’m using my last little bit of juice for this posting.  I can’t wait to get home tomorrow and to have my CHARGER. GRRR.  Remind me to NEVER forget it again!  This has definitely been my most busy conference ever.  I went to session after session after session.  A few good things did happen.  I got to spend a lot of time with my friend Deb from MLNC.  She’s wonderful and a lot of fun.  We went to sessions and ate food and went underwear shopping.  You can always count on Deb to not only know everything in the world of OCLC, but to crack you up and just be a ton of fun!  I really enjoyed spending time w/her.  I think she might now be in my list of top 10 people in the universe.  Not that she wasn’t before…

Tonight I went out to dinner with my friend Jeanne, who’s the Chief of Binding and Collections Care at the Library of Congress.  We had an absolutely marvelous time.  I can’t think of many people that I enjoy that much.  No one can make you feel as good as Jeanne does.  She’s just has this positive radiating energy that soaks into everyone around her.  She always seems to know just what to say, and it’s always so poignant and touching and loving and wonderful.  To be honest, she almost made me cry.

I got to spend yesterday evening with Nathan and Kyle.  Nathan is an old friend from MSU whom I absolutely adore, and Kyle is great too.  We had a wonderful dinner at this really good Indian restaurant and then just hung out and talked for a while.

Today, i got to have lunch w/Angela and Pete, and although they live nearby, you can never get enough of Angela’s normally happy, bubbly demeanor.

Tonight, I’m going to hang out with some people as well, we’ll see how that turns out.

OMG, I can’t believe I didn’t even mention that I got to see Judy Blume and she was AMAZING!  I was less than 20 feet away from her, and let me tell you, she is one just…intensely sensitive and wonderful person.

That being said, I still can’t wait until I get to go home!!!

So, this is another program that I was very excited to see on the program list. I’m going to try my best of sit back and enjoy this. Unfortunately (and I don’t remember if I mentioned this earlier, but I forgot my laptop charger, and I charge my cell phone (PPC) through my laptop, so I’m terrified of losing juice, ugh. So, this is why I haven’t been calling, texting, or been on Meebo. Me disconnected is BAD. My friend Deb, from MLNC happens to have the same laptop as I do, and she has been WONDERFUL in letting me borrow her charger, but she’s leaving tomorrow, and I’m at about 50% juice. Yesterday I went on a quest for a laptop charger, but to no avail. I swear I almost cried. So, today, my goals are not quite so lofty. Today, I’m going on a quest (if I get a minute) to find a cell phone charger (the kind that I just plug into the wall and not sync to my laptop. Now, this horribly pisses me off because I have three at home. Oh well. I have three hours and 49 minutes left on this battery… I have to admit I’m suffering MAJOR social networking withdrawal…no Meebo, no blogs, no Second Life, no LinkedIn, no Ning, no MySpace. I have to stop talking about this or I’m just going to make myself more upset. I’m very seriously contemplating buying a second laptop charger and NEVER taking it of my laptop case.
Matthew Bejune (Purdue)

I’ve never heard Matt speak before, this could be interesting. He’s apparently done a lot of research in libraries.

Of course he begins by displaying logos of different social networking sites. There are a few that I haven’t heard of. Of course h includes things like flickr, Second Life, LinkedIn, skype, Google talk, YouTube, Bloggger and twitter. Surprising to me was moodle and a few that I’ve never heard of.

Webkins I’ve never heard of this one. It’s a 21st century Beanie Baby (?). Each of your pets has an avatar, and you can log in and your furry pet can have an electronic buddy. Weird. Strange what you learn when you don’t have kids and come to this session.

25 Perspectives on Social Networking - Marlene Charlotte Larsen.

• The genre prespective
• the consumer perspective
• the learning perspective
• the network perspective
• the friendship perspective
• the social perspective
• the sincerity perspective
• the group work prespecitive
• the anti-social perspective.

Very interesting…

He collected examples from several wikis. He searched in three areas. He found four types of wikis

1. collaboration between libraries
2. collaboration between library staff
3. collaboration between library staff and patrons
4. collaboration between patrons

A large majority of those that he found fit in the first two categories. 76% of then are used to work professionally among ourselves.

• St. Joseph Public Library, Indiana, has a subject guide created on a Wiki framework
• USC Aiken Gregg Graniteville Library uses a Wiki
• OCLC has one - lets users all reviews in Open WorldCat
• Biz Wiki - used for reference work.

1. Where are the wikis used in categories II and IV?
2. How might we allow users to build/modify library information?
3. In what ways will libraries next utilize wikis and other social networking technologies?

http://librarywikis.pbwiki.com - Where he has published examples of wikis in his articles. he wants us all to post our wikis on his wiki. Ruth? LWcontrib
Meredith Farkas (Norwich University)

Knowledge management

• All organizations want to make the best use of institutional knowledge.
• All librarians have different areas of interest and expertise.
• Our patrons have lots of knowledge that would be useful to other patrons
• We usually are pretty terrible at collecting this knowledge.

Information sharing is great! Now how do we keep all that information?

• One-on-one conversations
• Staff meetings
• Instant Messaging, Twitter, etc.
• Scraps of paper at the reference desk
• E-mail
• Blogs

Of course the A2 District Library is used as an example, as always. A2 has a “User’s who checked out this item also liked…”

It’s nice to have LC subject headings and the terms they actual use.

Hennepin(?) County Public Library has the best readers list according to Meredith (sorry for totally massacring PL speak. I have NO PL experience, and am not terribly familiar with the terminology.

They are allowing patrons to put comments about books and their patrons have been adding tons of comments. WorldCat also has this funtionality.

RocWiki - not created by any library, it’s a guide to the community of Rochester. There is information on everything. People have created guides for things like “life with kids”, etc. The have restaurant info and public transportation info, and people can ask questions and actually get answers. There’s no reason why a library can’t create something like this.

Wikis are searchable, you can assign categories, and they’re relatively easy to edit.

Penn Tags - you can bookmark and assign tags, organize them into subject bibliographies, etc. Great for organizing research, etc. The results show up in the library catalog.

Wikis are a great tool as an Intranet

• Share procedures and policies
• share basic info (printer is down, trials for new products)
• Share knowledge about reference resources
• Assignments students are coming to desk about
• Reference sources in subject…

Remember: it can take time to build knowledge management behavior into the organizational workflow. It takes time and persistence, but is “so incredibly work it”

http://meredithfarkas.wetpaint.com

Tim Spalding (LibraryThing.com)

LibraryThing is kind of like MySpace for librarians and book lovers. You catalog the books that you have, and these make connections. you connect people through this. you get to use high quality data, but also you can use tags. over 15 million books will be cataloged in Library Thing within the next few weeks.

“Social Cataloging” coining social and cataloging is a new idea.. LOL Yay, it’s good when the last speaker is amusing. Even though I’m finding this very interesting, by the end of a 90 minute program, I start to lose steam.

“The card catalog is not a conversation”. You read, things were referenced, and you read those. The library catalog is like an encyclopedia. The first step in research. Library Thing is like a conversation.

On an authors page, you can add the picture, you can add links to pages, interviews, etc. You can add variations to the name (like an authority file). You can have your own pages of your authors, including pics, etc.

You can see under each book under an author, the variations of the title of the book. LibraryThing is generating data. You can combine edition of a book.

They have a “thingISBN”, different editions, different languages. Library thing has less data, but really good coverage for paperbacks, etc. (compared to WorldCat). Regular people can do the work of previously specialized librarians.

LibraryThing gives you the related LCSH to the tag. They’re relevancy ranked. I LIKE this.

CyberPunk is related in Science Fiction, etc.

Problems of tagging: The Diary of a Young Girl has over 5000 tags. If a book has an incorrect tag, it washes out statistically (if it has a lot of tags).

They are now opening Library Thing as a service to libraries! Some library catalogs are now including library thing. Danbury Public Library is using it.

Questions

Wiki that supports a lot of pages and indexing - MediaWiki

Sorry, have to fly.