November 14, 2006

11:00 a.m

LiveMeeting Webinar through SirsiDynix

Stephen Abrams, Chief Strategist for SirsiDynix Institute, conducted a one-hour webinar today.  50 minutes was spent on describing 25 technologies that should be used in libraries today and 10 minutes was for questions.

The twenty-five technologies included

1. RSS

a.        Keep your patrons connected to the latest news

2. Wikis

a.        Librarians should be designing wikis ie: retiring reference librarian takes with her a wealth of knowledge – put it in a wiki for others to benefit from

3. Blogs

a.        Blogger, technorati, movable type,

b.        Staff blog to keep items under discussion out in the open

4. Digital Photos

a.        Flickr, Picasa

b.        Librarians should go nuts taking photos of programs and areas of the library and plaster them on the web

5. Photo Blogs

a.        Bulding construction – kept it posted weekly through a photoblog

6. Storytime

a.        Teen & Senior Citizen project – teens photographed historic buildings and posted them with write ups from senior citizens

7. Tags

a.        Allows you to find information and allows others to find your information – extends your program

b.        Del.icio.us  social bookmarking

8. YouTube

a.        coolest thing going”

b.        Movie, tv, and video clips

c.        Library dominoe – some librarians don’t like it – Abrams thinks it is hilarious

9. MP3

a.        iTunes, Kazar, napster, Pandora, overdrive, limewire, mp3.com

b.        death of DVDs and CDs

10. Streaming Media

a.        Death of DVDs

b.        Spiral frog, jodscopi, podzinger

11. GoogleOffice
12. Instant Messaging

a.        Becoming dominant form of communication

b.        Librarians must start IMing

c.        Chacha, AOL, Yahoo

d.        Meebo, Trilliam and GAIM

e.        Consolidates IM platforms

f.          Play with it first then open to target audience

13. Visualization

a.        Visualnet, Kartoo, touchgraph

b.        Visual rich catalog: Belmont Abbey College, North Carolina

14.  Second Life

a.        Library 2.0

15.  Avatars

a.        Need to know Avatars to do SecondLife

b.        Librarian trading cards

16.  Retrievr

a.        Using pictures to search

b.        Find pictures without words

17.  Podcasts

a.        Record storyhours, reviews by students, presentations

b.        Load them on iTunes for all to podcast

18.  MySpace

a.        Library MySpace sites

b.        Average age 31

c.        Get cards, put your catalog on myspace

19.  Facebook

a.        Sustainable social notebook

b.        Young people keep contacts from all areas of their lives

20.  Skype

a.        Free long distance – even overseas

21.  Library Thing

22.  Endeca

a.        Powers barnes & noble site

b.        Being used in libraries (NCSU)

23.  Virtual Reference

a.        Dpcitel. E-learning

24.  Folksonomies & Tagclouds

a.        Tagclouds show most searched terms (bigger the font more often searched)

b.        Shows patterns and trends

c.        Technorati, flickr

25.  Blinkx, SingingFish, etc

a.        Blinkx – allows to search for audio & video (spoken word?)

b.        6 million hours of video

Abrams recommended spending 15 minutes a day on one new Web 2.0 technology so that we stay abreast of what is out there to enhance libraries and assist patrons.  He also mentioned a program that suggested you learn 23 new things in 9 weeks.