Is two days the longest I’ve gone without writing? I managed to meet both my deadlines, but I was completely wrung out by Friday night, due to too little sleep and not enough relaxation time, I think. Have been trying to make up for it this weekend.
The Thursday deadline was completely non-negotiable, as it was for a presentation I had to give which was open to all my colleagues. We gave the presentation in our library theatrette, which seats 50-something people – and it was full! We even had the Uber Boss and one of the Deputy Uber Bosses in the audience. (I wasn’t expecting them to attend this session, which was just one of our regular staff training talks.) It was a deadline for me as I had all these things I wanted to incorporate into the talk, and not as much time as I would have liked to dedicate to preparation. The presentation was an hour-long overview of New Technologies and Libraries – with my colleague SGS we talked about blogs, RSS, podcasting, wikis, mobile phones, PDAs (and tablet PCs), and screen capture software (View-Its) and finished it all off by mentioning…Web 2.0.
I decided, on the spur of the moment, to out myself to my colleagues by showing them my Librarian Trading Card, the librarian bloggers’ Frappr map, and LibraryThing. The trading cards amused some people, and the fact that it took a while for all the pins to load on the Frappr map had the effect of reinforcing how many librarians blog! There wasn’t the time to show people how LibraryThing works, so I showed them the Zeitgeist page, which is a good overview of how many private collections there are out there. I don’t know if I did a particularly good job of demonstrating why you would bother to play with or use such applications because I got completely caught up in the ‘fun’ aspect of it, which is not always enough to convince skeptics. M pointed out that I could have emphasised the information sharing aspect of all these ‘toys’ – which is quite true. M was sitting next to our pre-eminent cataloguer DW, and M said that when he saw LibraryThing, DW muttered “Why on earth would people want to use such a thing??” (Must see if I can actually show LibraryThing to DW.)
Oh, and the entire thing was recorded! The Boss wanted to make sure that all staff who couldn’t make it could have access to a version of the talk, if they were interested. We ended up using Camtasia to do a screen capture and recorded our voices. I think it’s a bit unpolished, given that we didn’t have the time to do any rehearsing beforehand, and we didn’t focus on the screen as much as we could have, but hopefully it gives an idea of what we talked about (I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring myself to listen to myself carrying on…).
I think it went well once I got over my beginning nervousness, which always makes me blather on a bit. I actually quite enjoyed myself, because it’s always fun to talk about something you like and enjoy and know a bit about. It was gratifying to see the smiles, nods and full attention from my colleagues – and there were even questions from the audience! It was exhausting though – I think coming down from the adrenaline high really leaves me flat and tired.
I suggested to my colleagues that if they wanted to learn more about all the tech they can look out for information on Web 2.0 and social software and perhaps even think about what this means for The Library – Library 2.0?
technorati tags: Web2.0, Library2.0, blogging, RSS, wiki, podcasting, screencasting, LibraryThing, Frappr, Flickr
2 Comments
I’ve no doubt you did a good job. Unrehearsed it may have been in parts, but your enthusiasm would’ve carried you through. I’m surprised you managed to squeeze all that into a mere hour, though.
Thanks 🙂 I’m sure it was my enthusiasm that made it work, actually. That, and the fact that I have been working on all this ‘stuff’ for months anyway!