Simmons Tech Summit
July 24th, 2008
Last week, I was invited to participate in the first Simmons Tech Summit.
Organized and hosted by a few instructors in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, it was a small unconference of tech librarians discussing using web 2.0 tools to reach out to patrons.
It was fun. I was the only public librarian there (and, it seemed, the only one without an iPhone), and it was interesting to hear how academic librarians approach web 2.0 tools. Also, I like meeting other librarians, especially when they're doing cool things.
We created a del.icio.us account for the tools we covered - a lot I don't use, a few I'd never heard of, and some I need to investigate further. Check out the full list, but here's a few highlights:
- VoiceThread and Animoto are different, but similar in that they are both easy tools for creating videos. Animoto puts music over photos, to create fun music videos. VoiceThread is a bit more powerful, and is a tool for creating presentations with slides and voice - but best of all, viewers can leave comments on the slides. Great for interaction in the classroom, but questions/feedback is also great for instructional screencasts or collaborative creativity
- LibraryFind came up early in the day, as any meeting of tech librarians will quickly turn to lamenting the state of ILS software. LibraryFind is an open source metasearch/federated search tool developed (and in use!) by Oregon State University - definitely worth some play time
- ChaCha was new to me - it's basically a reference service for mobile devices. Send them a reference question via text message or phone call, and they send you back an answer. Registering your mobile devices means it can log the questions you ask, so you can see who answered it (the "Guide") and where they found the answer. It looks like Guides can be anyone, and are paid $0.20/answer
- Wordle.net was new to me, too - upload a block of text to it and it creates a pretty "word cloud." Like a tag cloud, but not linked, so it can be eye-catching but not inherently useful. But I like the concept, though, and it's fun: here's a wordle of the Tech Summit delicious feed, this blog, and the White House's news feed
Keeping up by reading journals and blogs is okay, but I usually learn a lot more by talking to people and hearing their ideas on tools. Yay for sharing and working together.
July 24th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
How did I miss this one? I’m a Simmons GSLIS Student and last weekend I was across the street at Podcamp, lamenting the fact that none of the cool tech stuff they were talking about were directly applicable to libraries. Sounds like the GSLIS Tech Summit would have been far more interesting!
July 24th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
This was pretty low-key and word-of-mouth, but next time it will probably be bigger. I have no idea when next time will be, but I’ll post here.
I’m sorry to hear that PodCamp wasn’t more practical. I went two years ago, and had fun talking to other librarians and just coming up with ways to apply podcasting to libraries. This year’s had that “commitment fee” to keep the riffraff away (like me, who go for the free t-shirt), but I’ll try to make it next year.