Things are looking good for Web 2.You

Registration for Web 2.You is now closed, and the response has been great! 56 people are registered (not including speakers and volunteers), which is perfect because we were planning to cap it at 60 – in other words, we’ve filled the room without having to turn anyone away. Amanda and I have been working hard, but it looks like it’s all going to pay off.

I’m super excited to meet Michael Stephens, and I’m also looking forward to hearing Stephen Abram and Amy Buckland, who I know from experience are both fantastic speakers. The three McGill student presentations look promising as well, two of which will broaden our LIS scope by touching on the use of Web 2.0 in knowledge management.

To everyone who’s registered – see you on Friday!

2nd Annual Web 2.You Conference – February 13, 2009

Attention all library folk who will be in the Montreal area (or able to get here) next month: McGill’s School of Information Studies (SIS) will be hosting the 2nd Annual Web 2.You Conference on February 13, 2009. I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to organize the follow-up to the event that first inspired me to start blogging. This full-day event will feature presentations about Web 2.0 in libraries and the LIS field from a few of my favourite people:

Michael Stephens

The Hyperlinked Library

Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois

http://tametheweb.com/

Stephen Abram

Shift Happens 2.0: What on earth is happening and how will it affect libraryland?

Vice President of Innovation, SirsiDynix, Toronto, Ontario

http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/

Amy Buckland

Joining the discussion: Using social networks for professional development (or developing into a professional)

Liaison Librarian, Howard Ross Library of Management, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec

http://informingthoughts.com

There will also be presentations from some of the best and brightest students SIS has to offer.

I would absolutely love to meet some ILSS readers, so be sure to drop me a line if you’re able to come. I’ve put a lot of work into organizing this event (along with my co-organizer, Amanda Halfpenny), and it’s shaping up to be a great day.

Registration is very affordable and now open – for more info, check out the Web 2.You wiki.

See you there!

FriendFeed

Do you have trouble keeping up with all the online content produced by your friends and the people you admire? Many people who interest me post to blogs, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, and more, and it can be a pain having to visit an assortment of different sites to see all of their updates. I’d been hearing about FriendFeed for a while, so last month I went ahead and created an account. FriendFeed publishes all of your friends’ updates in one convenient location and makes it easy for your friends to do the same with your content.

What I like about FriendFeed:

• It’s easier than having to run around to different sites – sort of like using an RSS feed reader instead of visiting all your favourite blogs individually
• It allows you to comment on all types of items and even gives you the option of quickly indicating which posts you like (you can also see which other users have “liked” the same item)
• If you’re interested to see what a particular person has been up to lately, you can easily see all of their updates

What I don’t like about FriendFeed:

• It can be a bit overwhelming – especially because, by default, FriendFeed includes updates from friends of friends. Even after whittling down the number of types of posts that appear, it’s still a lot, and this is especially worrying considering the following point:
• Not many of the people I follow use it. Naturally, this is always the case with new technology (would you have bought a telephone in the days when most of your contacts didn’t yet own one?), but it means that I have to continue monitoring the individual sites to catch updates from my FriendFeedless friends.

Overall, I definitely think it’s worth a try, and if you go for it, don’t forget to add me.

ILSS Book Club: Library 2.0 and Beyond

I spent the weekend at my parents’ house in Toronto to see my brother, who’s visiting from Vancouver. The train ride from Ottawa takes about four and a half hours, which was plenty of time to make my way through the short but sweet Library 2.0 and Beyond: Innovative Technologies and Tomorrow’s User, edited by Nancy Courtney.

This collection of articles revolves around the ideas of (surprise, surprise) Library 2.0. For those who don’t know and can’t wait to open the book for a more detailed explanation, Library 2.0 is essentially the application of Web 2.0 tools (and more importantly, Web 2.0 concepts) in libraries as a way to become more responsive to the needs of the user community. For those unfamiliar with Web 2.0, I’ll direct you to Wikipedia, but here’s a hint: leave a comment on this blog post, and you’re participating in it!

One major strength of the book is that each article tackles a certain tool by first explaining how it is typically used on the web and then providing specific details of how it could be used in a library setting. As such, it will satisfy readers with a general interest in the future directions of libraries as well as librarians looking for advice they can put to use immediately.

Highlights for me include Looking Toward Catalog 2.0 by Michael Casey, which discusses improving library catalogue interfaces by taking advice from Google and Amazon.com; The Wonderful World of Wikis: Applications for Libraries by Chad F. Boeninger, which covers the use of wikis for internal communication, institutional collaboration, and research guides, as well as suggesting best practices for library wikis; and Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging by Ellyssa Kroski, which weighs the pros and cons of user-based categorization and offers examples of libraries that have already made use of tagging.

So if you’re interested in where libraries are headed (or at least where they will hopefully be headed soon), I recommend Library 2.0 and Beyond – even if you’re not trying to pass the time on a boring train ride.