“Howdy” JCPL

Originally uploaded by Hatchibombotar.

On Friday, I drove up to the Jefferson County Fairgrounds where the Jefferson County Public Library was having their annual All Staff Day. Thanks to a referral from Meredith Farkas, the Jeffco folks had asked me to talk about web 2.0 / social software stuff.

I did a session I called Social Software for Library People. I had a longish time slot of 90 minutes. I knew that many of the Jeffco staff would already have some familiarity with many of the sites I wanted to talk about, and I also assumed that if I just got up and ran through the usual suspects one after another, it would get old fast. So instead, I tried to talk about a few common features or ideas expressed in social software, and look at what that meant. I used a lot of library examples, but the idea wasn’t so much “what can this library system do with social software?” but “what kind of things might people who work in libraries want to know about social software?”

I took a lot of inspiration (and some of my section titles) from Ryan Deschamps’ post Navigating Online Cultures, and I owe a lot to the Library Society of the World, members of which have been very patient with me for the past few weeks as I solicited their ideas and opinions and generally nattered on about my preparations for this presentation.

There were three or four simultaneous sessions, and I ended up with group of about 50-75 people. I think they enjoyed the session–I know I did. They fed me, gave me a bag full of library swag, paid my mileage, and generally made me feel welcome.