Librarian in a Banana Suit

You know it’s going to be a great workshop when you’re given a paper-bag stuffed full of chocolate as you walk through the door!  This Tuesday morning I drove an hour to Independence, Missouri, to attend a KCMLIN workshop called “Web 2.0 in Your Library: Web Applications that Facilitate Interactive Information Sharing.”  Beth Willis, Public Relations & Marketing Coordinator at Mid-Continent Public Library, taught the all-day workshop.

As promised, the workshop offered a “sampler” of several oft-used web tools: WordPress, Delicious, Flickr, Twitter, RSS.  I’m already using most of these tools in my personal and professional life, but I think it can be enlightening to view them through someone else’s eyes.  I’ll share some of the new tips and tricks I picked up with you below, but first I have to take a moment to gush about Beth’s teaching style!

This workshop was especially useful in terms of thinking about how to teach this content to others.  As a technology instructor at my own library, I will definitely take some cues from Beth.  In the first five minutes, she walked us through the process of setting up our own WordPress blogs (which was brand-new to most), and then she had us post to our blogs periodically throughout the 6.5 hour workshop, with ideas we could take back to our libraries about the content we were learning.  This helped participants a) reflect on some practical applications for what we’d learned, and b) get hands-on practice blogging.  It also broke up the 6.5 hours by offering some variety and making the class more interactive, and gave our instructor key down-time to recharge.

OK, now for the content!  Here’s what we covered; you can click on any of these headings to go straight to that portion of the workshop:

I. What’s “Web 2.0″?
II. Blogs
III. RSS Feeds
IV. Social Bookmarking and Tagging
V. Wikis
VI. Social Software in Libraries

Or, just continue to view notes from the entire workshop: (more…)

This morning I’m attending a great KCMLIN workshop about Web 2.0 at the library.  I’m really enjoying hearing about some of the different options and strategies for libraries to explore when starting blogs of their own.  We’ve been talking about niche blogs that could be fun to try, such genealogy blogs, book blogs or events blogs, and I’m looking forward to suggesting some of these ideas to my colleagues back at home.  I think a genealogy blog could be a fantastic way to highlight our Helen Osma Local History Collection.

Check back in a day or two for an update on what we discussed at the workshop!

I’ve already written about why I don’t like Readers’ Advisory here on this blog.  Yet I was still pleased to get a lot out of Jody Wurl and Michele McGraw’s presentation — “Readers’ Advisory 2.0″ — at last week’s Library Technology Conference at Macalester College.

Wurl and McGraw kicked off by asking “why should Readers’ Advisors care about Web 2.0 anyway — what does the Internet have to do with books?”  Trick question!  On the Internet, Librarians can go where the readers are and connect with them there.  The Hennepin County Library system, where both Wurl and McGraw work, has developed an online presence called Bookspace (powered by Adobe’s ColdFusion software) where Librarians can do just that — and for popular titles, the conversation often starts before the book comes out, from the moment it’s been cataloged.  Here are some of the other tools they like:

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