Legal Research

Computers in Libraries 2010

By admin

Here’s a copy of my slides for the Computers in Libraries Conference last week.

Content Containers: Can we be more open-minded about permeable containers?

This presentation was also the foundation for the questions I asked industry leaders at the panel we hosted at Buying and Selling eContent 2010 in Scottsdale AZ this week too.

As usual it was one of those conferences where you can see the evidence of a sea change a little early. Twitter was so normal this year that it reached trending topic status for the second year in a row. Of course, the LoC archive was announced during the show, via tweets mostly.

The big experiment was with the number of people who were using Gowalla and Foursquare for the week. It was a great learning experience to see how folks ‘played’ with these geo-social apps. Why is ‘geo’ important to libraries? Just ask yourself why you have branches, or why it’s important that you be close to users. If it isn’t then you may not need space. Geo-social apps let you encournter the boundaries of your service geography.

Lots of people had the free Gale AccessMyLibrary iPhone app or downloaded it there to search Gale databases from DC and Virginia local public libraries. They were excited to see the coming K-12 schools app and hear about our iPad app and other plans. I bought an iPad in DC but have to wait until I return to Canada to download the same free apps as the US app store. (Stupid use of geolocation – #AppleFail).

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on April 21, 2010 (boomark / email).