Internet Librarian

Inspired by Daniel Cornwall blogging the Reference Renaissance conference, I'll be posting here about the sessions I attended at the recent Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, CA. You can find my posts on this topic (and other people's) by searching on the tag IL2008.

As you might expect from a conference with internet in the title, electronic sharing of conference content was popular. In several sessions, we found Twitter or Flickr postings from just minutes previously, and the conference Twitter tag (#il2008) showed up on search home page popular tag listings each day. So many people were typing away on their laptops, that a couple of speakers mentioned that they knew when they had said something good because the room immediately sounded like rain with all the tapping at keyboards. Maybe that's why I felt right at home (rain being very familiar to this Juneauite).

Two years ago, I went to this conference. Then, while there was much to learn on many topics, I found the biggest trend to be the increasing place of wikis to help communication and collaboration as content management systems, home pages, intranets and shared manuals and more. Since then, I've gotten the reputation at my library of being "all wikis all the time", which I find to be only a slight exageration. This time, the big trend seemed to be Twitter, and while I've been familiar with the tool for years, for the first time I finally saw how it could be valuable for my work. I'll mention details as I discuss it in my session overviews, but I think that this could be an important tool to watch over the coming year.

I'll try to post at least a few times a week until I've covered the conference, so watch this spot! For other people's take on the conference, check out the list of conference blogs on the conference wiki.