Library Web Chic

Today was the perfect example of why I LOVE coming to Internet Librarian. My only commitment was to teach an afternoon preconference workshop on AJAX for Libraries with Jason Clark. Co-teaching a preconference workshop was a new experience for me. But I really liked the dynamic that it created. Jason and I would have conversations about AJAX issues as we taught. This encouraged the students to participate and be part of the conversation. Both Jason and I were a little surprised and how very interested people were in the code examples. We decided that next time we need to do several examples for different levels of complexity. For our students here is the revised handout I promised. Also there is a copy of the Powerpoint which you can download.

Besides the workshop the rest of my day was conversations with other librarians about what they are working on and technology in libraries. For me this is the best part of IL. Jason and I had a great discussion over brunch about both of our feeling that a significant number of newly minted MLS will not have the technology skills to be successful in the profession. In particular we both are concerned about filling "systems" type positions in libraries. MPOW has the problem of having no entry-level systems librarian positions. All the librarians in systems are department heads. Which basically means we don’t have any "new blood" to challenge us and infuse systems with new ideas. In addition, we don’t have a away for someone come in and learn the ropes. Since in my opinion the ability to be an effective systems librarian comes from experience, not only is our organization hampered by this, but the profession is not served by this practice either because we aren’t educating entry-level systems librarians so that they can take on more responsibilities and eventually become department heads.

Dinner and the evening was spent hanging out and chatting with Jason and Michael Sauers (Travelin’ Librarian). What is great about talking to Michael is he always has some new techy toy to talk about or show you. If you get the chance to see him speak, do so. He is very knowledgeable, enthusiastic, funny and always willing to learn more. The evenings discussion was all over the map from how to pay for IL and other conference to collaboration software. Michael got talking about Slideshare which is currently being beta-tested by invite only. Of course Michael is on the ball and already got an invite and an account! This got me talking about the application formerly known as Writely which is now Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

In the last few months, I’ve been using this application to collaborate on a book proposal with Jason Griffey. Using it was actually his idea but I suggested to some colleages I was doing collaborative writing at work with that we use it for that project as well. I really love this collaborative document editting concept. I’d previously got some experience with this type of software when UH was creating its stategic directions. We were using Basecamp at the point because it provides a project managment space that has a bunch of functionalit including collaborative document editing. However, if you just need the collaborative document editing and not the other functionality, Google Docs and Spreadsheets is great. Jason G and I used it to rough out the proposal before we took specific parts to work on. It was most helpful in creating the outline of the book which we worked on very collaboratively.