David Lee King Workshops

I had the pleasure of attending two workshops last week at NEFLIN, led by David.

Emerging Trends, 2.0 & Libraries

Fishing in the Rivers of Change...while Wearing Your Hip Boots

A few thoughts...

"Where do you invest your time with these new 2.0 technologies?" (No easy answer, but that was kinda the point of the morning class...to figure this out for yourself)

Web 2.0 = Community (Communication, Conversation, Participation)

Church 2.0 (when your church has a blog, twitter account, Facebook page)

Picnik (great site for photo editing)

2.0 things David did while traveling to NEFLIN: Took photos of his trip to the airport (blizzard!) and uploaded to YouTube. Checked the weather and airline status. Upload photos from recent trip to Flickr. Posted to his Blog. Read and responded to e-mail. Check in on Twitter and Facebook accounts. Read news via RSS Feed. Got more flight updates. Did all this via his iPhone. Whew!

Encourage Blogs by staff as part of your library website. See examples at David's library. This has been a big hit for them. They have hundreds who follow the staff blogs by RSS or just checking in periodically. Another example: 10 people attend a monthly book club discussion. 200 people read the Book Club Discussion blog and comment on it.

Twitter = Transparency. Hypothetical. The mayor asks the community to name the new library. After months of surveying it is a surprise to the community that the mayor lets his dog name the library (The Really Rood Ribrary).
By using a 2.0 tool like Twitter the process of surveying becomes "transparent" and you could have seen what all the responses were and what was really the favorite choice for the new library's name.

Change. "Stop putting out food for the dinosaur, he won't be stopping by".

"The transition causes grief, not the change itself"

"If they came today and took away all the books, would you still be a library?" To me this was the most interesting discussion of the day.