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Thinking Towards Johannesburg

This Thursday evening I take off on a very long journey to Johannesburg to present to the Special Libraries and Information Services Group. Today, most likely tomorrow afternoon and the weekdays this week, I’m pulling together a four-hour preconference, “Library 2.0 Technologies,” and a one-hour conference keynote, “The User Is Not Broken.”

I can imagine talking for much longer about both topics, and thanks to staying current (not to mention wonderful presentations by folks such as LibraryMan), I have no dearth of material (though organization is more of the challenge). But from what they say below, if you have specific examples to bring to the table, I’d love to hear about them.

“Some of the ideas that we came up with include: Librarians, image, and perceptions; Change – the right stuff for surviving as a librarian; Skills & competencies for the next 5 years; Professional development / self-managed development; Combating job burnout; Innovative marketing; Creating value-added research and analysis; Metadata and taxonomies; Technology trends; Information professionals / knowledge workers – the difference, if any? ;The value of the Information Professional … Your suggestion for keynote “The User is Not Broken“ and pre-conf “Library 2.0 Technologies” seems to have the potential to address many of these issues. … We are very much interested in the technology part – so the idea of incorporating RSS feeds, Blogs, podcasting, SMS, the latest gadgets sounds great and really relevant to where I think we want to move… Catalogues: we have to a great extend an enormous split between academic libraries working on huge MARC-compatible catalogues (via OCLC Connexion / WorldCat) and special, corporate libraries (SLIS) that mostly make use of smaller home-grown (non-MARC) catalogues (and have very little interaction with the SA cataloguing community). Neither one of the “groups” have started to enhance their catalogues with ratings and taggings.”

Whew! It’s fun–almost like shooting fish in a barrel. But as I begin the task of pulling this together in a memorable, useful presentation (or rather two), I’m definitely open to ideas.

The house is clean, we’re tuned to NPR, and I’m seated comfortably in front of the PC. Let the marathon begin…

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This was written by K.G. Schneider. Posted on Saturday, September 30, 2006, at 10:08 am. Filed under Library 2.0. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.