I love attending and talking at Internet Librarian – I always learn new stuff and meet new people (new to me, anyway!). Good times.

Here are some highlights from a couple of talks from day 1.

Keynote presentation – we heard from a digital artist named Eric Chan. He shared his story with us – what he does and how he makes connections that allow him to do digital art in fun ways (like designing art on a coat, doing a mural, working on a branding project, etc.).

He said a few things that really resonated with me.

One of the themes of his talk was to not be afraid to make connections. that’s how he gets to do a lot of the cool and interesting things he does – he meets people, talks to them, shares what he does, and asks to collaborate with them.

I think that sometimes as librarians, we feel we don’t have permission to ask, or tend to hold back and not make those useful face to face connections. Eric is successful because he doesn’t hold back. Let’s be a bit braver, make those connections, and see what happens.

Eric also mentioned that digital amplifies things. Specifically, digital amplifies scalability, connections, creativity, and collaboration. Something all libraries should consider when working on new digital-based projects.

I also attended Roy Tennant‘s talk about Linked Data. Still trying to wrap my head around this concept, and Roy’s talk helped a lot. He explained why we need Linked Data (so our catalog records can be linked out to the wider world and have context outside of an ILS). He also said “if you don’t have links, you don’t have linked data.” Simple enough, and I never thought about it exactly that way.

He also said that card catalog records were made for description, not discovery. That made a lot of sense to me, and helps explain a lot about what’s needed going forward.

Basically, Linked Data is just getting started. Roy said most of us just need to wait for the vendors to figure it out, and that it’s a major transition that will take years to navigate. Should be interesting!

SO there you go – Day 1 of Internet Librarian 2017. Fun times!