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10/24/2006

The day's recap & a most pleasant ending ...

(Note: I still need to update this post with more links, but the next conference is calling, so I gotta go...)

Wow what a day… and what a pleasure to share the stage and program with Jenny Levine & Michael Stephens this am and talk about Learning 2.0 It was disappointing that Michael Casey couldn’t make the conference, but I was happy to finally meet Laura Savastinuk , the co-author of Library 2.0 book that is soon to be published.

Anyway, I spoke about Learning 2.0 and was happy to discover (& meet) some of the bibliobloggers that I have been following for awhile. Several blogged the 1st session and as usual Michael Stephens rocked !

For the majority of the day I hung around the Public Library Futures track and took in…

  • Stephen Abrams talk on Persona in Action – I’m fascinated by this concept and am really interested in the study process that goes into developing these. I myself probably best fall into the Mommy persona that he identified.

  • Sarah Houghton-Jan (aka Librarian in black) talked Online Outreach for Public Libraries and covered a 16 ways that libraries should be extending themselves virtually to make sure they’re where their customers can find them. I found the item that talked about scanning the peer reviews sites a good one. Note to self - haven’t done this in a while for PLCMC- need to!

  • David Lee King followed Sarah excellent talk with a session on Web-based Experience Planning and use several great examples of companies that focus on the “experience” The Build-a-Bear one really hit home for me, since it was just over a week ago that I took my girls to BaB for a wardrobe upgrade (I found it’s cheaper to to convinced the choopas to bring their old bear and buy one new outfit than to let them acquire a new stuffed friend that they don’t really need.) Anyway, the neat thing at BaB when you do this, is that tagged your old friend with a special pass called the VIB -Very Important Bear. Yup! clever marketing and again, it’s all about the experience. David also showed how Flickr took a system failure message and turned it into a positive fun experience for users. I really loved this one and it made me think… if we do another huge ILS upgrade that requires takes our catalog offline for a day or two again, what could we do to trun the experience into positive one for our users. … hmm… [ thinking ]

  • Lori Bell, Michael Sauers & Tom Peters spoke on Second Life and this for me had to be the most memorable session of the day. Lori is just delightful to hear speak and left the audience including myself in stitches with comments about avatars loving Info Island because they are tied of “sex and gambling”. And she’s completely right, the online pornography and gambling business does lead the way in innovative developments and Second Life isn’t an acceptation. Later in the evening I joined the SL folks (including Matt Gullet) for dinner and enjoyed lively conversation. I’m truly impressed by what the SL Info Island folks are building in both a 3D universe and partnerships with other organizations with SL.

  • Last but not least I joined in the audience for Kathyrn Deiss and Matt Gullet’s talk on developing Synergy between IT & Library Cultures and enjoyed their open discussion on building building better services. Matt put up a great slide about definitions that distinguished the differences of how different cultures define and look at their user-base. User, Patron, Customer, Public. I’ll need to get definitions again, but it was excellent point that rung home.


Wow! What a lot to pack into one day… and to top that off, I also got to meet the coordinators and presenters who will be contributing to the 5 Weeks to a Social Library program early next year. This program sounds like it’s going a be a great opportunity for libraries all over the county, since all the training materials (podcasts, screencasts) from the program will be archived and available for free.

Anyway it was long day, but a very enjoyable one and the best surprise the entire was this little find in my RSS feeds (after just giving a talk this morning about Learning 2.0 and how other libraries could use the site and duplicate it) …

The Missouri River Regional Library is doing their own Learning Library 2.0 -- 29 things, 11 weeks … Awesome! Thanks MRRL for making my day


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