It's Monday afternoon and I'm just about to wrap up my time at ALA. What can I say? 20,000+ attendees, hundreds of vendors, 4 days of programs... If there were 2 main buzz concepts from the conference, I'd say "information literacy" is a very hot topic and in the Web 2.0 world "facebook" is very hot. In the info literacy world, everyone agrees that it's important, but I didn't necessarily see any consensus on the best way to collaborate, assess, market, etc. Lots of libraries are trying different things.
Regarding Web 2.0, facebook is hot in a lot of colleges as a way to interface with students. I assume we'll cover this in week 6 - social networking. Here's an article: chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2643/searching-library-collections-in-facebook
The Elmhurst College Library is doing something interesting:
www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2392193669&ref=s
and UIUC: www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2414276217
The exhibits are always fun to go through. Gretchen, you'd love it - lots of book giveaways, book deals, book raffles, etc.
All in all one of the best parts of the conference were some of the people I pleasantly ran into: some former colleagues at Northwestern and a former Dominican U. administrator. I also had a wonderful day trip to San Diego and Coronado island. Sorry, Marilyn, I didn't see you here at all! Hope you had a good time.
Well, if any of this babble has sparked an interest in ALA, you're in luck - the conference is in Chicago in July, 2009.
Adios for now.
(image generated through bighugelabs.com)
5 comments:
yes! we'll definitely cover facebook next week :)
btw, you should try adding links within your blog posts. oh, and another tip: you can take those long url's and shorten them with tinyurl.com.
did you like anaheim? i used to live near there.
Wow. All those book giveaways are making me jealous. You're right! I would love it. It sounds like you had a lot of fun. Thanks for the article suggestion. Library facebooks sound interesting. I'm sure we will learn more next week. Did they do any presentations at ALA on Thinkering Spaces?
If you don't know what I'm talking about, here is an article about it.
http://tinyurl.com/6p78bj
Gretchen
I like the effort the libraries are putting into integrating themselves in facebook - it's neat. But it seems like these applications aren't being used. Do you know how long they've been in use?
I just added the worldcat app to my facebook page and it's pretty cool. I definitely think that Facebook is the way to find those students!!!
I just updated the blog. In the last sentence I meant to highlight that ALA is in CHICAGO next July - good news for some people. Also, I did finally get the links to be active (it took a little work). I didn't see any presentations on Thinkering Spaces, but there were soooo many sessions it could have been covered somewhere. Karen - not sure how much or how long Facebook is being used. If they had statistics, I didn't see it.
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