The final keynote was given by Jenny Levine and Michael Stephens.
Jenny observed that a word she had heard a great deal at the conference was community. But if you make a social tool available, you don't automatically have community.
How will you measure success? Possible metrics might include numbers of comments, subscribers, wiki contributors, IM questions, downloads, but there are more complex ways to measure participation.
She highlighted a number of library successes, for example
Ann Arbor District Library, whose whole library website is a blog
College of DuPage, IL: who had the story of how the library changed a student from Burma's life
Superpatron: a library user who developed an RSS feed of books he has on reserve
Princeton public library who developed a booklovers' wiki
Arizona State University whose technology plan is a wiki (but I think internal only)
Earl Gregg Swem Library at the College of William and Mary who use meebo me: see http://swem.wm.edu/resources/subject-guides/american-studies.cfm but why the "Swem Library does not endorse Meebo" disclaimer?
Thomas Ford Memorial Library who offer story time as podcasts
Georgia Perimeter College Decatur Campus Library who offer podcasts of what's new in the library
Bloomington PL who offer gaming
Crazy hats day at Homer Township Public Library in Flickr.
Lansing Public Library Celebrity Read: Flickr photoset
Jenny made the point that all these were free to create apart from the staff time involved, that there were now low barriers to experiment and adoption and decreased learning curves.
At the end she showed us an example of La Grange public library using Suprglu.com to create a combined picture of resources (but I can't find it)
Finally Michael Stephens spoke and here I 'm afraid my notes fail me, as he spoke with tremendous energy, and threw numbered lists at us relentlessly. He started with a cover of Newsweek who ran a story on Web 2.0 earlier this year and mentioned once more the
one day in history initiative.
How does one get get buy-in to new services? How does they best serve the library? He suggested we should read the OCLC survey of perceptions of library and information services. He cited a user of Lawrence Library in Kansas who claimed that libraries were inefficient, limited and obsolete. He suggested we should "expand the library brand", citing Starbucks who are now selling books [their books are as bad as their coffee, I should imagine-TR].
He suggested five things to consider when implementing a change: does it erect a barrier? Is it library or user-centred? Does it add more rules? Does it make more work for users? is it a damage control exercise?
He gave some frightening examples of unfriendly notices banning mobiles and games consoles.
We should go where users are; as Karen Schneider put it, "the user is not broken" Libraries need to be in myspace and YouTube
We should adopt a 2.0 philosophy, and create librarian 2.0, Collaborative services and trust: build culture of trust
He then gave five phrases to beware of: "we've always done it this way", "he or she is a roadblock", "IT won't let us", "there's no time" and "the director doesn't like technology". We must plan, dream and innovate and keep the library learning.
Plymouth State Uni Lamson library: OPAC as blog
It is now up to us, and the new wave of library school graduates will be important [his confidence in this was interesting, And I'm not sure one can be quite so sanguine about the situation i the UK; I wonder if in the US they do not have the difficulties in attracting bright young people into the profession that we have here. He referred us to the Squidoo library lens.
And here my notes run out; sorry, Michael, if I've traduced or truncated too much.
Technorati Tags: ILI2006, internetlibrarianinternational, library 2.0
