Unconference Uncovers Latest Tech Trends | Stacking the Tech

Ellyssa Kroski -- Library Journal, 6/11/2009

On Wednesday, June 3rd, librarians from academic, public, and special libraries gathered at the Brooklyn College Library for an informal professional event called LibCampNYC 2009 (see last week’s Newswire coverage here). This fully participant-driven “unconference” neatly reflected the current interests and prevailing concerns of many librarians.

The day’s sessions tackled both long-standing issues in libraries such as the future of the reference desk, mentorship, the library catalog, and information literacy, but also new trends that are engaging librarians such as the Semantic Web, social media marketing, and librarian-generated content. LibCampers represented a range of library types including 50% from academic libraries, 25% from public libraries, 14% LIS students , and 8% from medical & special libraries. The topics identified by the attending librarians serve as an excellent overview of the technology topics that matter most to the profession right now.

The Semantic Web
The majority of the information that is available on the Web today is structured in a way that can be read and utilized by humans. This information can be crawled by search engines, and through keyword searching can be accessed in the form of millions of search results. But the outcome is oftentimes high recall and low precision for many topics and necessitates that people scan the results to analyze, add context, and make a determination about true relevancy. Proponents of the Semantic Web suggest structuring the data that we put on the Web so that it can be read and utilized by machines which can conduct the necessary analysis, compute the answers to questions, and make our information much more useable. They propose to achieve this by using a simple data model to encode information such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) or OWL (Web Ontology Language), etc. and using URIs to identify and link Web resources.

This session discussed sub-topics of the Semantic Web such as Linked Data and microformats, metadata data models like RDF and RDFa, and finally Semantic Web projects such as DBpedia which extracts structured information from Wikipedia, Google’s Rich Snippets which will enable web site owners to include markup formats such as microformats and RDFa to make their content more findable, and the Library of Congress SKOS project which strives to translate LCSHs into semantic Web format.

If you are interested in learning more about the Semantic Web, here are a few recommendations:

• LJ’s April issue of netConnect on Linked Data: "Data in Context."
• The chapter-by-chapter presentations for MIT Press's A Semantic Web Primer by Grigoris Antoniou and Frank van Harmelen is a great starting point.
• Digital Inspiration's recent post about Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English provides numerous presentations which discuss the Semantic Web as an integral part of Web 3.0.
• The Talis Semantic Web Gang podcast series.

 Social Media Marketing
Social media Web destinations such as Facebook and YouTube are those that let users participate and create content and are among the most frequently visited locations on the Web today. Because of their high engagement level with diverse audiences, they make excellent tools for marketers seeking to develop relationships with their patrons, increase traffic to their websites, and expose their brands.

Representatives from The New York Public Library shared that they have found much success with their social media efforts by transitioning from a top-down administrative approach to encouraging staff to actively contribute to these websites. They consider their librarian blogs to be a particularly effective way for their librarians to share their subject expertise. Additionally they use Twitter to communicate library news and links to other library social media efforts to their 2,500 followers.

Several librarians raised concerns during the session about resistance to Twitter among library staff members and the difficulty explaining new assessment measures such as re-tweets to non-tech-savvy colleagues. Additionally, the question of who should be Twittering on behalf of the library—librarians or the library marketing department—was a point of contention. Many librarians expressed that they have encountered conflicts in this regard and that this may become a more prominent concern as libraries continue to adopt social media marketing strategies. Some librarians shared that their libraries have begun to draft social media policies for such issues.

To learn more about social media marketing, take a look at these resources:

• DoshDosh has a ten-part tutorial series on the Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing
• The Social Media Marketing Blog written by head of social media for Ford Motor Company.
• Mashable’s Social Media Marketing article directory.

 Librarian-Generated Content
Librarians have embraced today’s social media websites which enable users to create all manner of digital content including blogs, wikis, videos, podcasts, photo collections, screencasts, etc.  The ability to successfully implement such initiatives is quickly becoming a new and sought-after skill set among librarians who are creating content, promoting it, and using it to humanize their libraries.

This session looked at where librarians find their inspiration for such initiatives: other libraries, mainstream companies’ social media projects, and the technology field. Of course, the recurring issues of lack of interest from staff and resistance from marketing and IT departments was a point of major discussion, as was the question of whether librarians should be marketing themselves as well as their collections through these new social sites.

These are a few of the projects discussed during the session:

• The PolyThinkers Pad - the library news blog from the PolyTechnic Institute of NYU.
• The librarians who write for the NYPL Blog draw attention to interesting items in their collection by sharing their opinions about them.
• In commemoration of their 40th anniversary, the Dowling College Library created a year-long documentary in blog format called Born in the Sixties.  
• The WordPress library portal for the Libraries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The final wrap-up session with quick-fire summaries by attendees gave everyone a glimpse into the sessions they didn’t attend as well as a helpful recap of those they did. Many of these emerging topics as well as related issues (such as information overload strategies, staff training, assessment measures, and buy-in) were echoed throughout the day. As libraries continue to delve into the world of social media and explore the possibilities of Web 3.0, I expect we will see similar trends at future events. 

For even more unconference coverage, see Josh Hadro’s earlier report and the official LibCampNYC wiki which provides session summaries, press coverage, and an archive of the live Twitter feed from the day of the event.

Ellyssa Kroski is an information consultant, reference librarian, writer, and conference speaker, as well as an adjunct faculty member at Long Island University, Pratt Institute, and San Jose State University.  She blogs at iLibrarian.

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