Brief report on SLAINTE Web 2.0 event

I was fortunate enough to be asked to speak at the SLAINTE event Enterprise, engagement and new communications; Web 2.0 in the library which took place yesterday at the National Library of Scotland. This is a brief overview of what took place.

Graeme Forbes, Resource Acquisition and Description Manager, NLS started off the day with an outline of the day, a Web 2 definition, references to Andrew Keen, and making the point that participation was a key element.

Liz McGettigan, Head of Edinburgh City Libraries then talked to the subject "Harnessing collective intelligence". Points included the difficulties of trying to define libraries in the new Web2 world, what Edinburgh is doing in the area. Liz also feels that they've just dipped their toes in the water, but I think she's doing herself an injustice, since they're innovating, blending resources and to be honest, I use them as a good example of what can be done with Web 2.0 resources. She made the important point that it's a mindset change. Communication is key and they can now do things that they've not been able to in the past. She also referred to greater engagement with students, questions relating to making libraries more relevant, and harnessing intelligence to create better resources in the longer term.

I then did an hour session tooking at resources and applications, mapping them onto library based activities. You can see the slideset over at Slideshare though since most of my presentations are image based they may not make a huge amount of sense!

Jason Miles-Campbell, Service Manager, JISC Legal gave an excellent session on "Staying legal: the law surrounding Web 2.0" He made a lot of telling points, the first being that people are using to taking decisions about things like powertools in the building, but it was much more difficult when it came to Web 2 risk management, because we lack knowledge of where these tools are taking us. He talked about the dangers in offering, using and requiring the use of specific tools, intellectual property law, copyright, accessibility and liability issues, data protection, risk and how to mitigate it.

In the afternoon Gillian Hanlon,Information Officer, SLIC talked about Removing barriers: developing national guidelines for library use of Web. She referred to SLICs use of resources such as a blog, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and so on, why Web 2.0 tools should be used, the barriers, creating guidelines and next steps.

Last up was Dave Errington, CEO, TALIS who talked widely on and around the subject of Library 2.0. He talked about disruptive technologies, the age of some of the resources we use (email is now a 30 year old technology for example), the fact that we're on a journey, people have to start thinking differently, the technology adoption curve, and that Library 2.0 is an attitude.

We ended with a long Q&A session, which since I was involved with it I wasn't able to keep notes, but thankfully A Pretty Simple blog covered that, and the rest of the day as well.

It was a very enjoyable day and I really enjoyed meeting several people that I'd previously only known via Twitter, and I also made some good new acquaintances as well. If you want to follow the day via Twitter hashtag you can find tweets at #web2libraryevent

[Edited to add: Slides from several presentations are available here]

Comments

[James Coltham]

It was good to meet you yesterday Phil - thanks for the many useful links and resources given in the course of your comprehensive presentation! Hopefully people will find my own coverage of the event, which you link to above, of interest too. Apologies that the hashtag I came up with (#web2libraryevent) wasn't that inspired - I had to think fast!