Science Library Pad

blog and wikis for conference coverage

What is possible with conference coverage seems to change with every year as more and more people become comfortable with web tools.  There seem to be just a few basic elements that succeed:

• People like to blog in their own blog space.  Ask them if they will be blogging as part of the conference registration process, and continue to accept submissions of new blogs.  Provide a list of conference bloggers.  Provide a blog aggregator with both inplace reading and an aggregated RSS feed.  Be inclusive.
• People will use tags if you provide them with a standard tag and with info on how to use it in various apps (Blogger, Typepad, delicious, Flickr).  Make sure you standardize early and clearly (Internet Librarian seems to have destabilized; people are using both IL2005 and IL05).
• Ideally provide a feed of Flickr images along with the blog aggregator.
• Wikis will not succeed unless you have a HUGE community to draw upon.  People still don't seem to feel comfortable contributing to a conference wiki.  It may work only for very large conferences.  This puts an onus on the conference organizers to provide basic information about the conference: hotel info, maps, Google Maps bookmarks and Google Earth placemarks, suggestions about local dining, events and sites.
• If you put the presentations up early, people will feel less pressure to use the "transcribe the powerpoints" conference blogging style and will be able to provide more analytical coverage.

UPDATE 2005-Nov-03: It's also worth mentioning that if you're going to encourage use of wireless, that means supporting laptops, which means you should try to provide lots of access to power outlets and run power strips everywhere.  Until we have wireless power, an outlet is a precious resource to a laptop user.

Anyway, those are my observations based on the conference coverage I have done and the different approaches I have seen.

Librarian In Black reports on the Blogs and Wiki Face-off at Internet Librarian 2005.
TravelinLibrarian - IL05: Blogs & Wikis Face Off.
Also see The Shifted Librarian: Blogs Vs. Wikis Presentation.

The conference wiki this year is at http://internetlibrarian.pbwiki.com/

web services and your library

I think we may see three levels of library technology development:
1 users and integrators: pull together end-user tools like Flickr, Furl etc. and merge them into library pages, implement but not extend frameworks and use toolkits
2 framework and toolkit builders: make easy technology interface layers to provide useful capabilities
3 infrastructure providers: provide Web Services or Web 2.0 APIs that can be used in frameworks and toolkits

The thing to be aware of is that above the infrastructure layer, you don't really need to know the details of how the underlying protocols are working.  So I think one thing to do as a library technologist is decide at which layer(s) your organization has the interest, resources and technical capabilities to participate.  If you're mainly working at the integration layer, for example, one role may be in requesting new features or new toolkits, to enhance your integration capabilities.  Or you might write documentation for frameworks and toolkits.

That being said, I am most interested in the framework and infrastructure layers, so it is nice to see a presentation on Web Services at this year's Internet Librarian.  Here's a presentation report I found from schwagbag - Internet Librarian :: Day 1 :: Web Services.

You can also visit the resources page for the presentation, or the presentation itself (HTML).

IL05 - Internet Librarian 2005 - blogging and such

I am not at Internet Librarian 2005.
However, there is a hefty list of IL05 Bloggers you can follow.
They have also proclaimed an official tag, which as you have probably already guessed is IL05.
(Last year I unofficially used IL2004, because as a computer science guy I worry about what will happen when the tags collide at Internet Librarian 2105.)

Using that tag you can check for activity on Technorati - IL05 or for photos in Flickr - IL05.

I find that an aggregation has already been set up by Andrea Mercado for IL2005 bloggers in Blogdigger Groups: Internet Librarian 2005 Group.

If for some reason you're interested in other systems I set up last year, there's
IL2004 wiki
Kinja aggregation of IL2004 bloggers

I was going to give a spiel about making a Blogdigger Group but you can't get a jump on the Internet Librarians these days; it has already been done (see above).

There were Blogdigger Groups created by others  for Computers in Libraries 2005: CIL2005, CIL2005-NC.

I also made one myself for Special Libraries Association 2005: SLA2005.