What I Learned Today…

I arrived late to this session (somehow I thought it was starting 15 minutes later), so I missed Geoffrey Kirkpatrick’s introduction, but here’s what I got after arriving. He told his team, “if you’re not playing 10% of your time you’re not doing your job.” Some of his staff understood this right away, but others weren’t sure what he meant by play, saying things like, “you don’t want to see  [ Read More ]

Yesterday I was on a live webinar hosted by NCompass with several other Internet Librarian presenters talking about what I learned at the Internet Librarian conference this year. The recording will be available soon via the archives if you’re curious to listen. One of the things we talked about was what made the most impact on us, or left us thinking, from the conference. The one thing that has stuck  [ Read More ]

Deeann Allison and Lorna Dawes spoke to us this afternoon about Pixel a chatbot that is used at the University of Nebraska. First, what is a chatbot? It’s a software application that designed to emulate conversations with human beings. It’s frequently text based, but it can include sound and visual effects. The software is usually developed on top of a database so that the bot can match metadata from questions  [ Read More ]

Up first for me this morning is a talk about baseball and shopping! Seriously though, the speakers were from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and were talking to us about parallels between retail and libraries and what we can learn from the retail industry. Consumers have changed! People are using mobile devices while in stores today. We’re scanning barcodes and checking prices online to find the greatest deal  [ Read More ]

Michelle Boule, author of Mob Rule Learning, started the session on how to engage staff with crowdsourcing. She started by reminding us that to get people to use crowdsourcing, you have to give people a purpose. Stick people in the room and give them a problem and tell them to solve it. Give direction, but leave the rest of the stuff up to them. The the crowd choose their own  [ Read More ]

David Weinberger was up as our keynote speaker to talk to us about the library as a platform. David is such an awesome speaker and cover so much ground quickly in his enthusiasm that I’m sure I’m skipping some major points below, but here’s what I could type while he was talking David starts by pointing out that while digitization is great, the real power is in the network, connecting  [ Read More ]

This weekend I head to Monterey, California for Internet Librarian 2012. I’ll be doing a workshop on the WordPress open source content management system with Polly-Alida Farrington on Sunday, speaking about open source trends and issues with Marshall Breeding on Monday, signing copies of the second edition of The Accidental Systems Librarian on Monday night at the opening reception and then participating on a panel Tuesday evening about the transforming  [ Read More ]

Up this morning is Lee Miller from the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library. Lee has asked us to close our laptops for the start of her talk – but I am the exception so I can blog her talk! She wanted us to be left without a connection during her talk to show that there are people out there who are not as lucky as us to have broadband. Discovery also  [ Read More ]

My colleague at ByWater, Kyle Hall, was up next talking about the Koha Offline Circulation Tool. Kyle wrote the first offline circulation tool in 2006 and within the last year rewrote the whole thing to make it work with latest releases of Koha. With 3.8 we also have another offline circulation tool to use – this one is a Firefox plugin. Kyle started with a demo of the desktop application.  [ Read More ]

For those who were unable to attend KohaCon (or those who were there and want to see them again) here are the slides from my two presentations at KohaCon this week. Open Source: Freedom and Community View more presentations from Nicole C. Engard Training on Koha View more presentations from Nicole C. Engard Technorati Tags: kohacon12, kohacon, koha