I know this, and thank you to everyone who has told me!  I have to admit I was shocked at the number of people who were trying to leave comments!  Of course, the one time people try, it won’t work.

btw, if anyone knows how to fix my comments…. please feel free to let me know!

Now, I just have to pick up the dogs…

I’ve decided to try this out…just because I don’t have enough accounts already…Technorati Profile

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.

So, here i am, at my very first session here at ALA Annual.  This panel includes our Eli (Gaming)from A2 and Angela Semifero (MySpace).  Also on the panel are Kitty Pople (Second Life, from the Alliance Library System) and Pathfinder Linden, whose RL name I can’t remember for my life.

Now, in typing this, I totally missed the name of the facilitator, hopefully I’ll pick that up later.

This panel is talking about all the cool library 2.0 stuff.

“People are learning thought conversations.  It’s an active and increasingly social practice.”  from the cool moderator guy.

I have to admit I’m the kind of person who skips through introductions and all that when I read.  I’m having a similar problem right now, I must admit..he’s basically speaking on how we must look ahead.  How we’re being fought by some, trying to lead, and that if we’re not pushing ahead, we could be in trouble.  We need to lead at the table or we’ll become victims.  Do you want shape the world, or what.

John Lester (Linden Labs) is starting by speaking on Second Life.  Otherwise known as Pathfinder Linden, he is probably the libraries’ biggest advocate, well, for education in general, in SL.

Wow.  Pathfinder’s background is in medicine, like, heavy brain stuff.  He’s the Boston Operations Director for Linden Lab.  They have offices popping up in other palces.

“There’s a real person behind every avatar”.  They’re all real people express themselves in different ways.

• It’s an international community, multiuser, persistent world .
• It’s not a game
• Linden Lab provides a platform adn tools for content creating.
• All content is created and owned by the residents.

One thing I liked is how he said “Think ‘Augment’ and not ‘Replace”.  It does not replace, it just augments your capabilities.

You need to think about  virtual environments like thinking about social spaces in physical world libraries.

Think about it as a space where you can create a space with tools to share with people that you can share in real time.

In SL everything is streamed via broadband.  There are 7 mnillion registered accounts.  SL is equal to about 250 square miles.  SL is used for Escape, Entertainment, Education, Work and Advocacy.

SL community is older and more gender blanced than typical MMO game.s

gender is neutral by hours of use

Median age of 35

The client is open sourced.  They plan to open source the server stuff too.

They’ve added voice in beta in SL.  You can hear where people are talking from in 3D space, including doppler effect, etc.

Things are built using 3D geometric primitives.  Any object can be given physical behavior, interactivity and can communicate with the world.

“It’s about the people…”

Emotional Bandwidth.  You constantly want to create emotional bandwidth.  You want to connect with people :(  Second Life meets the needs of Emotional Bandwidth.  I really like this term.

Some avatars are realistic, some are mystical, some are animals,etc.  It’s a playful mix of real and surreal.

People in SL mirror real life.  Please sit back and chat, dance, etc.

• IBM
• Reuters
• many companies

There’s a lot of live music in SL.  NOAA created a simulator that where you can ride in a plane through a hurricane

There are support groups for people who have disabilities and aren’t mobile, who can’t get out physically.

People are creating digital ecosystems

Models of physical buildings that show live audio from the RL building

Someone built models of ancient Egypt, pictures of artifacts, making a virtual replica of a city.

What will the workplace of tomorrow look like?

• digital native, bridging social cpital in new third space
• creators and remixers, not just consumers
• burring of play vs work, global community.

When you talk on the phone, they people aren’t really there, like in SL.  I LIKE this comparison.

• “We get Mired in Past Frameworks”
• What does a classroom look like in a virtual world?
• The telephone is not th e telegraph
• Movies are not plays.

Virtual world leverage the fact that our brains do five things really well.

• navigae 3D environments
• Communicate with others
• Learn through shared experience
• use tools
• take partial data and create something whole.

Over time, the screen becomes less of a picture, and more of a window.

secondlife.com/education

Eli 

Libraries as Conversations with Games

58% of the US adult population never reads another book after High School.

69% of heads of households play computer or video games.

There is a library rental industry because libraries did not respond to it.  There is no book renting industry.  Now, they are libraries’ toughest competition.

Only 31 percent of of gamers are under 18.  Adult women make up more than teenage boys in gaming.

More teenagers play games than participate in instant messaging.

In a pew study, they could not find a single college student who had never played a video game.  The use of email is going down.  “email is how you talk to old people”.

Pokemon games have more text than any games out there, and it’s the most popular game among that age group.

games bring teenagers into the library, which is very hard to do.

Seniors are playing wii!  It makes gaming accessible to those who have not grown up controlling an avatar.  They’re bowling in nursing homes, etc.

Storytime takes content and makes it into a social activity because it enable you to have a conversation with your patrons. You communicate with the kids and the parents, about the content.  Social interactions between all, kids and parents, happen.  If you switch the piece of content and swap it with a video game, it’s the same thing.  You can play together, you can talk about it, and then others socially interact with each other.  A2 has interactions with patrons of a quality that was not possible before.  They’re making a social even that has value for everyone.

“Video games are the gateway drugs for libraries”

Cook, Eli has a new book coming out, but I didn’t catch the entire title…gaming in the libraries…or something…

Kitty Pope 

The Alliance Library System.  Social Networking sites are the mall of the nineties, the roller rink of the 80s and the burger joints of the 70s.

• It’s a communication too
• int the virtual world, you’re dealing in real time, and that’s the piece that is making SL a phenomenal success.  It’s the fun factor piece.  It’s reaching out to new customers.  5000 people per day are coming to info island
• It’s really good to dialog with staff.  They’re staff meet in RL and SL all at the same time.
• ti’s a distance education tool
• it’s a training and learning piece, real people in real time
• 250 universities are active in SL.  Numerous programs exist, multimedia courses, lectures, etc.
• Distance education become really real.
• it’s an extended reference service

• it’s not all about books.
• The book and information all all else truly are what the virtual residents want.  The book needs to be there, but with everything else.  The conversation needs to be multimedia and multi faceted.
• it promotes community dialog.
• it creates a space where the community can meet and greet.

It’s not for every library.  It doesn’t fit in every community, but there are many communities that it does connect with.
Programs and exhibits are huge in SL.  Stephen King spoke on Info Island in SL.  It’s fun, and the fun generates curiosity, which generates learning.  Publishers want to do programs to promote their books.

Angela Semifero 

Angela is speaking on MySpace.  I don’t think she’s nervous, because I’m nervous enough for her three times over!  lol

How libraries are connecting to their patron in MySpace.

As a public services librarian, Angela is asked on a regular basis how to set up MySpace accounts, teaching MySpace courses, getting questions from parent on what MySpace is, etc.

80% of social networking traffic is on MySpace.  More traffic than on Yahoo or Google

Patrons are reconnecting, cruising, writing poetry, having book discussion groups, on all MySpace.  MySpace gives each person a voice, it tell who they are and what they like to do.

Libraries can use MySpace as additional web present and voice for their organization.  Forum for the patrons’ opinions, information the public of their collections, calendars of programming, educational opportunities for the patrons.

MySpace accounts can have blogs, search boxes for their library catalogs, you can leave voice messages, there are links to book reviews, events, calendars, everything.  You can have a Meebo window on your page.

Publicity:

• BLOGS
• BULLETINS
• EVENTS

Very cool session!

Btw, I’m heading out to ALA on Friday…keep your eyes open for some more live blogging. I’m attending a bunch of OCLC sessions (try hard not to yawn), but will also be stopping by a few fun things including Angela’s panel!!! Known to some of your as Semife Roar, Angela is sitting on a panel of WAY super cool people like Pathfinder Linden, Eli (if you need a last name, then you haven’t been paying attention!) and Kitty Pope! Yay, Ang!!!

I somewhat impulsively added a new link on my homepage. Check it out.  I realize that it’s starting out as being all mushy and emotions, and we all know that I have no emotions, but bear with me.  One of these days, something profound will end up there…maybe.

I admit to being somewhat of a freak.  I often get a few words or a phrase in my head, and I analyze the hell out of it.  One of my favorites is “Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.”  Correctly identify that one and you will be the lucky winner of 50,000,000 cool points.