IL2008 Wrap-Up

I’m always later with my conference wrap-ups than I mean to be. During the conference, I’m busy meeting tweeps and meeting librarians and then there’s the work catch-up to come home to. As a result, my wrap-up will be rather brief since almost everyone has blogged about sessions I went to.

This was my first Internet Librarian and I’m already looking for ways to go back next year. It was a great conference with some really good sessions and great people. The one thing I keep taking away from these conferences is that we really need to do more evaluation of the services that we keep offering. We are creating some great services but I’d be interested in seeing more on how often these new services are being used. In fact, it’s something I’d like to try to figure out with our own Second Life reference project. It’s not an always an easy task to get the data on how a service is being used, especially as there is a push to continue moving forward rather than taking the time to stop and re-examine.

I highly recommend checking out twitter for any conference you attend – I heard about a lot of really good sessions via twitter, not to mention the evening activites.

Creating 3D Reference

Thanks to all those who came to Amy’s and my session on Creating 3D Reference: Adventures in Second Life. It was a tough time slot – the last day, right after lunch on a sunny 31 degree day and up against the Pecha Kucha (which sounded like it was a blast next door). We were honoured to present with the Schanachies (and suitably awed). Here are the slides from our portion of the presentation from il2008. And a big thanks to Amy – a great presentation buddy! More to come on the conference when I return – it’s been amazing.

Blogs Abound

Yes, I read too many blogs (and often fall behind). I realize that I haven’t updated by blog roll since I started my blog, so I have added a link to my Google reader library list, in case you want to expand your own blogroll. Apologies if I’m not reading your blog … yet!

Warning Sounds for Librarians

First of all, apologies for the extended silence. Between IFLA, First Year Experience activities and a slew of beginning of term instruction, I have had little time to think let alone blog. Now that things are quieting down, I hope to be more on the ball.

I decided to title this post after an article I read on BBC News a while back, Warning Sounded on Web’s Future (speaking of which, I’m trying to read the Future of the Web and How to Stop It – may have more on it later). The line that caught my attention is in bold at the very beginning of the article “The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science, says the creator of the World Wide Web.” Sir Tim Berners-Lee is worried about disinformation on the web. This is where I hear trumpets – duh duh da na! Enter Librarians! This is us! We should be and are doing this! One of the main tenants of information literacy is the evaluation of information in any form. Many of us have been teaching this for years – the skills to evaluate and examine information. So why doesn’t Sit Tim Berners-Lee know this? Why doesn’t anyone seem to know this? How do we get out and teach everyone how to evaluate information? This is a fundamental problem for us. We’re great at what we do but no one knows. It’s partly a marketing issue. It’s partly an outreach issue. It’s also the fact that many people think they are doing alright on the info front and don’t attend a library session to improve their skills. I teach basic library searching skills and web evaluation classes. While I hope the students take something away from both sessions, I hear time and again from faculty that the students felt the web session was more valuable – they learned they didn’t know everything about the web and how to tell good from bad info and it speaks more to the way they tend to search. So how do we let people know that we can help them wade through information swamp that is the Internet? I’m certainly open to suggestions. Does your library offer web or info evaluation sessions?

On a complete aside, it’s conference time. I just helped plan and attended my first Access conference – a very good time and I highly recommend it. A very techy conference, which at times could be intimidating for a tech wannabe like me, but a lot of great content for those with less than stellar tech skills. Up next is Internet Librarian – maybe I’ll see you there!