Categories
Conferences

Recent Presentations

I don’t have the files or correct metadata yet, but if nothing else, a placeholder for a few recent conference appearances. My online CV in all its manifestations is pretty ugly.

At IACRL 2012, I co-presented with Ariel Orlov and Ken Orenic “Creating Pedagogically Meaningful Work  for Student Workers”. I moderated and talked about Library Labs, about which you will see quite a bit more soon. We say: give people interesting work to do and train them accordingly, and you won’t regret it.

Also at IACRL I talked about technical implementation of consortial institutional repositories in “Say You Want An Institutional Repository” with Caroline Sietmann, Jacob Hill, and Julie Wroblewski. My advice: DSpace, you can do it! (But you might not want to.) (See recent posting to dspace-tech if you doubt me).

On a totally different track, I appeared on the Grown Homeschoolers Panel at InHome Conference. This is a panel I once attended as a teenager and found really helpful. (The conference is for non-religious homeschoolers). There were mostly parents there, and as the one person who was old enough to be graduated from college with a master’s degree and doing a normal-ish job and life trajectory, I think I was very reassuring to them. My main message was: no one else will even remember or care 10 years on who went to school where.

These all were, by the way, within two days of each other. I napped a lot after this.

Categories
Conferences Libraries

Midwinter Report

This year marked my first ALA Midwinter Conference. I’ve been to Annual a few times (twice in DC and once in Chicago), and numerous smaller library conferences, but I’d always been curious about what Midwinter is like. This year I finally had an opportunity to attend, since I am serving on the LITA Education Committee and participated on the Drupal4Lib IG “FAIL!” panel with fabulous MC and librarian Nina McHale. The FAIL! panel was lots of fun, though pretty intimidating because I was sitting at a table with some incredibly smart people who have failed in what seemed to me more exciting ways. Either way, I got to talk about fishing cats at the National Zoo. And, you know, Drupal. Which I need to work on this weekend.

My favorite part of Midwinter is the fact that it’s mostly sitting down at a table with like minded people talking about issues, whether they are practical projects or general theoretical questions. It’s also small enough that you have a chance to run into people, unlike Annual where you can’t even find the people you set out to meet. For instance, walking by the Networking Uncommons I spotted Andromeda Yelton, whom I met though this blog and talk to on Twitter fairly often but had only met at Internet Librarian karaoke, where it’s hard to talk about web development.

I attended the Library Linked Data IG meeting on Sunday, which was a nice mix of people and ideas. Linked data is something I know about a lot more in theory than in practice, so it was good to get an idea of what some of the practical issues are. One concern/issue is bringing the library linked data world into the rest of the semantic web world–we have the coolest data, so we need to be a part of the conversations. Another issue is actually consuming linked data in libraries, which doesn’t have as many tools or examples available but is something that is more appealing to administrators.

Another topic was how to share information about available tools and data sets in something like a clearinghouse. One potential on ALA Connect is linked from the ALA page above, but the DLF already had a Zotero group, so that’s another potential. I mentioned to someone or other I was going to put myself through Linked Data bootcamp before Code4Lib in a few weeks so I can get beyond the beginner stage. I know I always say I will blog about things and then never do (silly clothing catalog is one major example), but maybe I will blog about this.

Either way, in the future will definitely try to attend Midwinter.

Categories
Conferences

Social Networking the Catalog: LITA National Forum 2011 Presentation

Lots of excitement this past weekend as I was able to present the Read/Write Library (in the process of changing names from Chicago Underground Library) at the 2011 LITA National Forum. I talked about our new model, our plans for the future, and our catalog, which is a social network of books and ideas rather than a traditional catalog.

Even more exciting: the presentation won the “Risky Business” contest, as the project that most exemplified risk-taking and experimentation. I am honored by how nuts everyone thinks we are.

On the matter of slides, you will find that I am all over the place on where these things are posted. I hope to make this somewhat more streamlined in the future, but for the moment:

You will note that the slides do not have a CC label on them, but they are also a BY-NC-ND, cause I’m a jerk like that. They do contain copyrighted and trademarked images for which I have no permission if we are to consider it carefully, and so I would like to encourage everyone to rely on the text if you care to cite me. These are posted on the ALA Connect site for LITA, and will shortly be posted on Dominican’s IR as well.