I always have a great time at Internet Librarian – meeting up with friends, giving talks, and attending sessions to learn something new or different.
That certainly happened this year! I have a longish list of things to explore in a bit more detail (websites, books, and ideas).
Here’s what I found interesting as I attended some of the talks:
Day 1 Keynote – Indi Young (at www.indiyoung.com):
She gave a talk about Deep Understanding. Not sure I can explain that well, though it was interesting. But I loved some of her major points, like her take on active listening (which helps to get to deep understanding):
- Act like a tour guide. You don’t ask about the thing the tour guide didn’t bring up. You ask questions about the stuff she does bring up.
- Break through the surface to get to the depth (reasoning, reactions, guiding principles, etc).
- Find out why. Toddlers are not embarrassed about what they don’t know.
- We don’t bring our thoughts to the session. We dive into the depths of the other person’s thoughts.
- Start with scope. What went through your mind as you <tried to accomplish your purpose>?
- Ground it. Use and event that happened. I.e., what about the last time, the first time, a memorable time…
- No list of questions needed. Just follow the last set of details.
- Avoid judgements and contempt. Her pain is real, even if you don’t agree.
- Rapport – DO support the participant emotionally.
- No notes, no analysis, no problem-solving.
- Attempt to banish assumptions.
I know – hard to do, right?
Gary Price – Super Searcher apps, Sites, & Tools.
Gary often gives a talk about new search tools and interesting apps. Here are some of the things he mentioned this time:
- – all the tools he talked about can be found on this web page.
- Zoho – they host one-off web pages for free. Example – the page mentioned above with all the tools listed.
- Webrecorder – create high-fidelity, interactive recordings of any web site you browse – sorta like a DVR recording of what you can browse. You can also take screenshots. Free tool.
- Audiosear.ch – full text search and recommendation API for podcasts and radio. You can even set up alerts on words and phrases that appear in a podcast. Cool.
- C-SPAN – their search tool.a lot of author interviews. Every word spoken is keyword-searchable. Uses CC for the search.
- Notablist – searches email campaigns!
- PhotoMath – solves math problems via the camera. And does it really well. It even “shows the work!” This would have been handy in algebra class…
- and quite a few other tools and apps. Check his list out!
Brendan Howley – Day 2 keynote speaker.
He talked about story telling. It was an interesting talk, especially since I’ve been thinking about video again in a big way.
- He mentioned this idea – ask the funniest local person to make a short video about the library. It’s bound to a a fun one!
- He also emphasized this – keep making and publishing content! He said “Good content now is better than perfect content on Friday.”
- He also had a valid point about mobile users on your website. You need to check your website analytics to see what your bounce rate is for mobile users. Your goal is a bounce rate of under 30%. Most libraries have a 70% bounce rate, which means that they are using the mobile app or website once and not coming back.
I got a lot more than this out of the conference – this is just what I captured. Hope to see YOU there next year!
Image by FoodLibrarian