Monday was the annual conference for OK-ACRL, on the theme of 2.0 in libraries. There were two keynote speakers, David Silver, media studies professor, and Lynn Connaway, consulting research scientist for OCLC.

Silver used this blog post as the outline for his talk, and here are some of the more interesting of my notes from it:

  • in complete crisis state (philosophical, pedagogical, societal) — he got silence when asked students who their heros are — due to info overload (can’t reflect and think—plugged in to IM, facebook, ipod all while writing that comps paper) — student body that’s product of standardized tests (info rather than knowledge) and with an online consciousness shaped by viagra ads
  • majority of his students are not actually highly wired — 70% don’t know what RSS is, although they are Facebook addicts
  • 2.0 didn’t discover conversation; libraries are perfect places for conversations — book displays as point of entry; suggestion box (students contributing to the library’s collection through blog posts saying “why didn’t they have X?”—harnessing collective intelligence)
  • wikipedia as greatest piece of art of our time, continually growing piece of literature
  • all 70 of his students this semester had used wikipedia, 3 had contributed, and 20 knew they could contribute
  • give-and-take knowledge: students and faculty take from the library (text, services, wireless); what would a library look like if students gave to the library? similar to user-driven, but not — have to go into the library in order to give to it; this generation thinks of knowledge as a give and take — have students create the book displays based on their own interests
  • can the students annotate resources based on their experiences? (a student who goes to Lima expanding on a scene in a dvd); students teaching students

And from the questions and comments portion:

  • how do we get students engaged in the conversation? get faculty to help by requiring it! (we need allies)
  • idea of commenting still kind of odd to students (like with wikipedia) also, liblogs need a focus—what’s starting the commotion? what does the audience want to know (track the posts that get the most hits, even if not the most comments—watch your stats)
  • writing standards: need to teach appropriateness of communication forms
  • intimidation factor if blog is prof/library/institution: f2f encouragement in initial library visit and in classroom visits (hey, we have this blog, please comment on X after this session) because it’s the first comment that’s the hardest; they’ve grown up with info handed to them, need to get them to contribute their own knowledge
  • reminder that communication is one-on-one, not everyone talking at once: pace can be slow, and that’s ok! we want student to ask for help, but not 500 at once (quality over quantity)
  • question of authority—what is authoritative in the long run? it’s one thing to have 120 people commenting on the quality of sushi, another to have those comments be on heart surgery; the problem is that we’ve gone on a raft away from classic authority (no Walter Cronkite) but we don’t know where we’re going yet

Connaway talked about two of her research projects. The first was on how undergraduates, graduates, and faculty satisfice (scroll down for the slides to various presentations based on this research), while the second was on virtual reference.

The most important point she made was, to me, that information silos are a bad idea because it’s the whole idea of the network that people love about 2.0, and that libraries need to make their information more accessible to users by emulating current 2.0 technology as used by Amazon, Library Thing, and others.

I also attended a very nice talk on blogging given by Adri. Her links and notes can be found here, and the only things I can add are my notes from the comments and questions afterwards:

  • try using Facebook to see what your students are talking about, then tie into that in the library’s blog
  • MySpace works well as a push technology
  • yackpack: free two-way radio for your blog
  • don’t forget older web technologies (like web rings) since lots of folks still use them
  • it’s ok to fuse the professional and the personal as long as you do it thoughtfully
  • if you want to own your copyright on your blog, just remember that you have to be the copyright police for your stuff—are you willing to do that?

Oh, and while all this was going on, David Lee King posted some thoughts on how allowing comments shows that you value customers that are very in keeping with the whole “2.0 as conversation” idea that David Silver kept reiterating.