Last week I gave my first ever webinar as part of the American Library Association (ALA) Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) Mobile Computing Interest Group (MCIG) virtual meeting.* It took place instead of a physical meeting at ALA Midwinter to enable more people to attend and present. There were five presentations in 90 minutes so we each had 10 minutes to present and 5 minutes of Q&A. If you’re interested in the topic, you can watch a recording of the webinar – see the blog post I wrote for our m-library community support project blog.

I thought it would be useful to reflect on my experiences of presenting a webinar – I’m noticing more and more webinars set up to enable more people to attend virtually across different time zones and without the expense of travelling, so I imagine presenting at webinars is something we’ll be seeing a lot more of in future.This is my setup – home office with laptop for webinar software, headset for listening/speaking, iPhone for timing, and iPad and notepad for presentation prompts (and all important glass of Ribena!):

Webinar setup

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I’m a creature of habit, so I’m continuing the tradition of posting an end of year blog post (see 2008, 2009, and 2010). It’s actually really useful for me to look back and see what I did each year. So, what has 2011 involved?

1. My ALA 2011 badge complete with ribbons!, 2. Louisiana State University, 3. Osney Building at University of Oxford, 4. CILIP signage Read the rest of this entry »

At Online Information 2011, I presented in one of the European Librarians Theatre panel discussions. The discussions are hosted by EBSCO and SLA Europe and bring together librarians from different parts of Europe to discuss a topic and the experiences within their country. My session, ‘Everyone is talking but is anyone listening?’ focused on social media. It was chaired by Sara Batts (see tweet below), and my fellow panelists were Katrin Weller and Dennie Haye.

Last fun duty of my year as SLA Europe president: about to chair today’s #elt2011 with @joeyanne @obnoxiouslibrn @kwelle #online11

— Sara Batts (@Batty_Towers) November 30, 2011

I think the panel discussion flowed well – there was largely agreement across the board on a number of different factors, suggesting that libraries across Europe are at a similar stage with social media (the panel had representatives from UK, Germany and The Netherlands). There were some really interesting examples from my fellow panelists – one example of Yammer being used for internal communication (in an international organisation with staff dispersed geographically), and one example of Facebook being used by a University before students arrived to help answers queries and help them begin to make friends.

The main messages I took from the session were that libraries and librarians should experiment with social media to see what works, and should aim to understand more about their users as no two libraries will use social media in the same way.

You can see the tweets from the session at the #elt2011 hashtag (thanks to @WoodsieGirl and @EBSCOUK for such comprehensive tweeting!) and there is a write up of the session on the SLA Europe website.
As mentioned before, I decided to get  information for my section of the discussion via a brief survey – many thanks to those who gave feedback. The main themes emerging from the results of this are shown below. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been asked to take part in a panel discussion as part of the European Librarians Theatre at Online Information next week titled ‘Everyone is talking but is anyone listening?‘. I’ve got some ideas from my own experience and conversations with others, but as I’ll be representing the views of the UK I wanted to open it out and ask you to help me.

If you work in a UK library, please complete the form below (or complete the online version) to let me know your views. The feedback is anonymous – though if you have something you are particularly proud of which you would like me to mention as an example of good practice – please feel free to include links in your response, leave me a comment on this post, or email me.

EDIT: Thanks for the responses, I have now removed the form as the panel discussion has passed.

ILI 2011 (apologies for poor photo!)

Last week I attended my first full Internet Librarian International conference. It’s an event I’ve often followed virtually and this year was really pleased to be able to attend and present on using web tools to improve productivity for librarians (see previous blog post for more information).

I attended really interesting sessions, met great people and had engaging discussions.

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Last week at Internet Librarian International 2011 I gave a presentation on productivity for librarians. I’m a fan of the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology and like to utilise online software to help organise my work and increase my productivity. I thought I’d give a brief overview of some of the tips I’ve picked up along the way as well as sharing some of my favourite productivity tools. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, what a day! I really enjoyed Library Camp UK 2011 yesterday, and wanted to jot down some quick thoughts from a personal perspective whilst it’s fresh in my mind.

One of my sessions - really enjoyed the conversation at this one

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  by  Bev and Steve (Almost back in the USA) 

Tomorrow I’m joining 174 other people interested in libraries at the first Library Camp UK. I’m hoping it’s going to be a little more civilised than the photo above – at least it should be drier as it’s indoors. It’s being held in Birmingham so I don’t even have to travel far (although getting up early on a Saturday will be a bit of a shock!). Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today I gave a presentation at the Oxford Social Media 2011 event hosted by Oxford University Libraries. The brief was to discuss ways to market yourself as a librarian using social media, and rather than just update my previous presentation on a similar topic, I chose to change the focus slightly and concentrate on the marketing and personal branding side of things rather than the fundamentals of social media.

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from misterbisson on Flickr

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was invited to present a session at the 2011 Colleges of Further and Higher Education (CoFHE) conference last month (Staying positive in difficult times: Maintaining quality services). My session focused on mobile technologies. I probably spend about half, if not more, of my online time on mobile devices – usually on iPhone or iPad. I use a lot of different apps for various different purposes – document creation and editing, emailing, blogging, photo management, planning travel, time management and more. But how can we utilise these technologies in libraries? Many of our users (and staff) already have mobile devices, so it’s useful to consider how we can use these to support the library service.

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