David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Lots of Blog Posts Headed Your Way!

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BookExpo AmericaJust a head’s up about next week for y’all. On Monday-Thursday, I will be frantically attending three concurrent conferences in New York City:

BEA Bloggers ConferenceAnd if you can believe it, I’ll attempt to blog the whole thing! Well, my view of the whole thing, anyway. So – look for a bunch of session notes type blog posts next week about anything from ebooks and publishers to how to improve a podcast. Maybe even a video or two.

My posts will be heavy on the Blogworld side of things, but there are some really interesting-sounding ebooks/publishers/libraries talks going on too, and I think both you and I will find those interesting!

Yessirree, I will be in geek heaven. Just sayin 🙂

Blogworld Expo

Check out LISEvents

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The always excellent Blake Carver, who runs LISNews and LISHost (they do an awesome job of hosting my website), has recently created a new tool for us library types – LISEvents.

Here’s what Blake says about LISEvents:

“LISEvents is a community-based site intended to aggregate listings of library-related events of all types, sizes, and locations. The site also helps speakers find gigs and event planners find speakers.”

Blake’s goal is to list every conference,large and small, that might be of interest to those of us working in libraries. There’s also a place for speakers (just added myself).

So – check it out, add your library-related events, and add yourself, if you like that public speaking thing!

Organizing a Podcamp

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This past Saturday, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library co-hosted (with WIBW Studios) our first Podcamp  – Podcamp Topeka. Don’t know what a podcamp is? It’s an unconference dedicated to web 2.0 tools and social media (read more about them here). It was a blast! You can some of my notes from the day here, watch my video about it above, and you can read Brandon Sheley’s notes here (he attended and lead a session or two), and even watch a quick video from channel 49 news.

So – how did I organize this thing?

OK – first things first. It’s a podcamp – there’s really not much conference planning to do. The details revolve around meeting rooms, food, and potential schwag – not the actual conference schedule. The important planning revolves around how many people you hope to attract – you have to have enough space to accomodate them. Also how long each session should be – and be able to accomodate that. Then, it runs itself (more on that in a minute).

Use your contacts for help. I poked around a bit on the interwebs, and found out Ryan Deschamps, cool librarian and blogger at The Other Librarian, had organized some very successful podcamps. So I asked him for tips, and he emailed me some great advice on how to run a podcamp.

Sponsorships – the library provided meeting rooms and our other sponsor, WIBW, paid for food and t-shirts. How’d that happen? In this case, I know Jim Ogle, the general manager of WIBW, and also know he’s excited as I am about social media and 2.0 stuff. So I asked him if he wanted to help plan the podcamp, and he did … and he ended up being a sponsor, too. For future events, I’m told that some local organizations might potentially be interested in sponsoring the event.

Ask for Specifics. Know how much money you need up-front, then ask specifically for your needs! Much better to have a plan for what you need (and what they’ll get out of a sponsorship) than to vaguely ask for “a sponsorship” hoping someone will provide what you need.

Registration: it was a free event, but I asked everyone to register, since a head-count was involved for t-shirts and food. Eventbrite worked GREAT for this! Free and easy to use – we had over 100 registrations. I was able to email a reminder to all attendees 3-4 days before the event through Eventbrite’s admin side. They actually sent me a couple of pre-event emails making suggestions on how to run an event (ie., do you have nametags?), too.

What actually happened?

People goal: our goal was up to 150. We had over 100 people register, and approx 50-75 people actually attend. Not bad for a first time.

Interestingly, we had an odd but fun mix of people. We had a variety of skill levels from experienced user of 2.0 tools to extreme novices and an age spread from probably age 20 -85 (someone actually came up afterwards and told me how old she and her friend were). So we improvised a “Basics of Social media” session that turned into one of our larger sessions.

Food and t-shirts: I went ahead and ordered t-shirts and food for 150, not knowing how many would really show up. So we had … a LOT of food. And I have a box of Podcamp Topeka T-Shirts in my office…

Schedule: You can see it here – we ended up with quite a few great topics and sessions!

Planning details: PBWorks (used to be PBWiki) worked great. Here’s our Podcamp Topeka Wiki.

Advertising: This is interesting. We advertised in our library newsletter, in 2.0 tools (twitter, facebook), on our website, at a social media group’s Ning site, and were lucky enough to get a TV spot or two (since WIBW was a co-sponsor). We asked attendees to fill out a “how you heard about this” flyer – only 22 people filled it out. But look at their responses to where they heard about our podcamp:

TV – 4
friends – 2
twitter – 2
facebook – 2
our website – 2
didn’t say – 2
social media KC Ning group – 2
online – 2
invite – 2
Google – 1
tscpl email – 1 (guessing it was our enewsletter)

That’s a pretty large spread of responses!

And finally, Feedback. What did attendees think of the day? Honestly, most of the feedback I received was some form of this – “What a GREAT day! When’s the next one?”

So – we’ll have to start planning the next Podcamp Topeka, I guess!

Where Will David be this Spring and Summer?

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Speaking at the National Library of SpainI’ll be doing a bit of speaking, traveling, and conference attending this year – here’s where I’ll be through July:

  • February 25 – Webcast for SLA, Basics of Website Management, Part 2 (ok – no traveling on this one. Yay!)
  • March 12-17 – SXSWi (attending and geeking out)
  • March 28-April 2 – Computers in Libraries (one presentation, two preconference presentations)
  • April 22 – SEFLIN, North Miami, FL area – two presentations
  • April 24 – Lincoln City Libraries (Lincoln, NE) staff day
  • May 6 – Massachusetts Library Association
  • May 7 – Capital District Library Council, Albany, NY
  • June 19 – NEFLIN, Jacksonville, FL
  • July 9-15 – ALA in Chicago

And more to come, I’m sure. Make sure to say hi – always more fun when I know people!

Notes from SEDIC

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SEDIC Conference in the National Library of SpainThe last conference I spoke at in Spain was for SEDIC (Asociacion Espanola de Documentacion e Informacion) in Madrid. Here are the notes I took during the other sessions.

Introductions:

  • Milagros del Corral Beltran (the Director of the Spanish National Library): opened session, thanked the U. S. Embassy for participating, then mentioned something about how U. S. libraries are doing lots of 2.0 stuff.
  • Rosario Lopez de Prado (president of SEDIC): talked about web 2.0 being an easy to use set of tools. Mentioned that SEDIC was another great tool for libraries. Said the U. S. Embassy was a great example and leader.
  • Margaret H. Bond (Agregada Adjunta de Prensa de la Embajada de EE.UU. – she worked at the Embassy): she said some nice things about me, and some other stuff, too … about then, I stopped listening for a sec, because I noticed that every time the photographer (there was an “official” photographer at the session) took a flash photo, the translator headset I was using made a popping noise… and I found that rather interesting and distracting… 🙂

Next up – a session on Learning 2.0 in Spain!

Natalia Arroyo spoke first:

  • Natalia gave an overview of how their learning 2.0 program went. I think she said this version was primarily for para-professionals (which is pretty cool).
  • [then the interpreter told me she needed to rest her voice for when she interpreted me, so stopped interpreting for awhile – so I didn’t catch all of this session]
  • She discussed their goals: to create a learning community, spontaneous learning – student to student, continuous learning, hands-on
  • It went for 8 weeks. Look at these numbers: 8 instructors, 1190 participants!
  • More than just Spain – they had Latin American and Portugese participants, too.

Isabel Fernandez spoke next about the wiki they set up for the Learning 2.0 program:

  • she discussed how and why they used a wiki
  • the wiki focused on introducing 2.0 tools
  • gave a general overview of wikis
  • Mentioned Ohio Universities Biz Wiki as a good example (go, Chad!). Also the Seville Library wiki.
  • Mentioned the Library Success wiki, too (go Meredith!)
  • Also mentioned an academic library 2.0 wiki (not familiar with that one)
  • Had a couple great ideas for encouraging and growing participation on the wiki: thank users personally, welcome first-time users, and acknowledge the wiki writers’ work.

Then I spoke (I’ll share my presentation in the next post).

It was a great day, great content, and wonderful librarians.