Librarianesque Session Description
A version of this description of the Librarianesque Session at BloggerCon II is now on the BloggerCon blog. I’m posting it here, too, to market the session.
j Baumgart, moderator
Plans for the session are still being developed. Please comment below, as I am interested in feedback about this session.
The main goal of the session is to provide a forum where people interested in how librarians, archivists, and other similar information professionals can use blogging and blogs in the course of their work can discuss this topic. Anything can happen; anyone could bring up any issue related to the main topic.
The format is a room of people with a moderator to facilitate the discussion. There is no panel per BloggerCon rules. Please don’t hesitate to add to the discussion or ask a question. The only stupid questions are the questions people don’t ask. Chances are, someone else in the room is wondering the same thing and is too afraid to ask.
Who should attend?
The session is geared toward librarians, archivists, and other similar information professionals and their needs regarding blogging. A number of local special librarians have expressed an interest in this topic and may be in the audience. I have heard that librarians in academic settings, an archivist, and perhaps a public librarian may also be present. I hope some indexers might join us as well.
Anyone interested in the issues surrounding these information professionals and blogs can join us, whether they are in the profession or not. It would be interesting to hear from library users or other clients regarding some of these issues, too.
Anyone with any level of blogging experience and those who haven’t blogged, but are curious about blogging, should be able to learn something from this session.
Potential Topics:
- why blog
- what a blog can add to your organization
- how is a blog different from a Web site
- knowledge management and blogs
- convincing managers that blogging is a worthwhile activity, selling blogs to management
- marketing blogs to the library’s/librarian’s customers
- what to do with the blog/what content to select
- RSS/Atom feeds and aggregators
- who within the organization should blog
- blogs for internal use vs. public blogs
- how librarians’ clients can benefit from a weblog
- how librarians can use weblogs to inform themselves and others
- what do library users want from a library blog
- features of blogs that meet libraries’/librarians’ needs
We will probably not go through this list in any particular order during the session and we probably won’t address everything on the list. A lot of the discussion will depend on who’s in the audience and what kind of questions they ask or issues they raise.
Rumor has it that the session will be Webcast and the audio will be archived. There may also be an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel for people within and without the room. Someone will be monitoring the channel during the session, so IRCers can contribute remotely to the session. Addendum: I may not know about either of these things for certain until the session begins. Details about any Webcasts and IRC channels will be available on the BloggerCon blog.
Miscellaneous
Depending on the number of people in the room, we may begin by going around the room to do introductions and solicit topics people want to learn about. If the room is packed (oh please oh please), it may not be possible or practical to do that.
I’ll try to remember to do some “raise your hand if …” kinds of things to get an idea about who is blogging, who isn’t blogging, etc.
I’ll also kick off the discussion by giving an incredibly brief introduction to the topic.
I would like to create a blog roll of sorts for the blogs of people at the session because I imagine some people in the room will be curious to see what others are doing with their blogs. It’ll probably end up on the scratchpad somewhere after the session.
More details and some information about the name are elsewhere on this blog. Before you whine about the use of the word “librarian,” please read that blog post.
It’s a free conference, but it does require registration before the conference.
Addendum 3/31: Tell me about it. I’m excited about meeting all the librarian blogger types, too. And maybe some others who are interested in or deal with these issues who aren’t necessarily part of our small chunk of the information profession.
There seems to be a lot of interest. Every time Jessamyn links to me, my traffic spikes greatly and I get a lot of referrals from her site. (Well, a lot compared to other sources of traffic to my site, anyway.)
March 29th, 2004 at 8:15 pm
I am really happy to see that the session will be Webcast. I’m particularly interested in blogging and its relationship to knowledge management since I’m taking a summer course on the latter. I took a special libraries course last fall and many of our guest speakers mentioned or spoke at length about KM in respect to special libraries, so it piqued my interest and made me determined to learn more. I’m looking forward to hearing more about it and listening in on the session.
March 29th, 2004 at 11:35 pm
I don’t know for certain that the session will be Webcast. I probably won’t know for sure until the session is in progress. The tentative plan is to Webcast all of the sessions and have four separate IRC channels for each of the rooms, but we don’t know whether those things will actually happen. Like I typed above, rumor has it the session will be Webcast and there will be IRC, but it’s really just a rumor.