Academic Library 2.0 Breakout Sessions

While the breakout sessions for the conference had morsels of useful information, by and large they did not meet my expectations. The descriptions of the sessions were slightly misleading and there was less context/big-picture and more "how-to" than I wanted.

Breakout session 1: Collaborative Technology: The Read Write Web
http://collabtechforlibraries.pbwiki.com/

This session focused on Social Bookmarking and del.icio.us. The speakers illustrated how to use del.icio.us as a way to organize links and useful web sites.

The Just-In-time Reference application currently under development at UCB was then discussed. "Just-in-time reference is a way to aggregate reference resources for library users and write them to a PBWiki web page for later use." Essentially, this application allows you to save your resources as you are helping a patron and write it to a wiki for later use. Here is the application: http://librrc-rh.berkeley.edu/jitref/

Breakout Session 2: Self Service Reference

This session featured Michael Buckland and others from UCB's School of Information. They were speaking about their design of a system that will empower users to find information on their own.

I'm not sure I can eloquently summarize their work, but essentially they want to be able to build context into information. So if you have an online biography, their system would allow users to link out to a variety of resources from the biography. An example is Wikipedia: within a record you have the option to link out to other sources. This is limited by the fact that you can only link to other Wikipedia entries. The idea is that the UCB design will link to a wealth of online information and resources in a useful and contextual way for researchers.

The speakers highlighted the "Importance of inverting the relationship" – start with who, what, and where and then link to resources:
1. context finder: search from text to reference works
2. context builder: making/retaining notes/linking to reference works
3. context provider: enriching reference works by providing reference links