Image by the author.

While personal information is often thought of as only the documents, emails, and other pieces of information that people receive or retain for some potential, immediate, or future need, William Jones, in his Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management (Morgan Kaufmann, 2008), expands the field to include information about “me” or owned by “me.” As our online identities, information about us online, expand, how can we manage that information to put our best face (identity) forward?

My online life has proliferated greatly over the past years. What once was an email account that I accessed through a text-based interface and was primarily a way to communicate with a few friends I knew “in real life” has become multiple blogs, websites, social networks, comments, micro-blogs, status updates, photos, drawings, links, presentations, and more. Each one is a new profile and another place people might find my content (or at least something about me).

Perhaps I’m lucky in that I have an unusual name. I can Google myself and go through 100 results without finding a hit that isn’t me (also an indication of how active my online life is, I guess). Take a look at the first page of results on my name in quotes. On examination the results reveal a few points of interest. Seven out of ten feature my name in the page’s title. Six of the ten have my name in the URL. The top result is my home page, which has my name in neither title nor url, but is in the header of the page and the metadata and probably a lot of links go there referencing my name. The remaining result is my profile on my library’s LibGuides, which simply features my name 10 times in a very small amount of text.

When you are trying to find out about someone online, a lot is based on names in titles and urls and links from one site to another. That is no problem if you have a rare name (at least, rare online) and your name ends up in titles of pages or urls. But many services don’t put names in page titles; maybe they just put your username, which is often not your name or even close to your name. Maybe your name only appears once on a page, but it’s a single important occurrence (table of contents of a book, praise in a newspaper article or blog post). How will people find you (if you want to be found)? How will people find what you want them to find (the good stuff)?

Even more problematic is the case of someone with a name that is shared by others who also have some kind of online life. Confusion can easily occur to the casual searcher. I have a friend who has not only someone with the same name as her but who is also in the same profession. This lack of difference in basic identifiers (same name, same occupation) can increase the chances of confusion and a mingling of multiple identities. In the case of my ITLWTLP colleague Emily Ford, a Google search on her name does bring up her author page at this site (result nine). But it also brings up Emily Ford the author of a book from the “Erotic Print Society”, Emily Ford the marketing manager, Emily Ford who posts about restaurants in the San Francisco area, Emily Ford the rowing coach at Oregon State, as well as Emily’s in Alaska, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. Some of these might be the same Emily–does author Emily live in San Franscisco or coach rowing, did Emily from North Carolina move to Massachusetts–, but they might also all be different.

In a world full of Emily’s, how does our Emily associate herself with her content and not someone else’s? If she is looking for a job and someone Googles her name, the Googler should easily realize that these are not all the same Emily, but he or she may make wrong assumptions about certain content. He may think ITLWTLP Emily also writes erotic fiction–our Emily may not want people thinking that. He may miss positive content that Emily would want others to see. There are no easy answers to these problems, but a number of sites and tools have been made to help aggregate online identity and make connections between the sites you want people to see.

ClaimID, created by two doctoral students at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science, was designed as an online identity manager. You create an account to manage your ClaimID page (you can take a look at mine) which serves as a kind of home page. For the many people without a homepage, who use Facebook or Twitter or Blogger as their primary online home, the ClaimID page offers a single page to aggregate your personal information. This page is used as a repository for your links: links about you, links by you, as well as links that people might think are about you (so you can say “not mine!”). By putting your name in the URL, the title, and the metadata, ClaimID hopes to make your page rise in search results. By linking back to your ClaimID page from your various online profiles, you can help raise that profile (most search results use inbound links to increase relevancy). With ClaimID you can stake a claim to your online identity, tweaking it as you see fit by adding or not adding content.

ClaimID makes use of a few emerging (already emerged?) tools for making social/identity connections online. Of relevance to gathering personal information about yourself is “rel=me”. This is a subset of the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) microformat. A microformat, as succinctly described by Microformats.org, is “designed for humans first and machines second, …a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” Basically, it is a way to embed data that is both human and machine readable. XFN is used to embed social relationships into links. If I have a link on my blog to another blog, I can use XFN to note that the owner of that other blog is a “friend” or a “colleague” or even that I have “met” them. These relationships are marked using the “rel” (short for relationship) attribute of link tags in HTML. If a normal link to my friend’s blog looks like this:

<a href="http://someblog.com">A Blog I Read</a>

A link to my friend’s blog, where I am using XFN, may look like this:

<a rel="friend" href="http://someblog.com">Blog I Read</a>

This would allow XFN aware applications to know that I consider the owner of the “Blog I Read” to be a friend.

For online identity, the value of “me” can be used for the “rel” link attribute to represent a link to another page about/by the same person. The use of “rel=me” is already in place at a number of web applications and sites. Take a look at the html of any Flickr profile page where the user has filled in the “homepage” field, and you will find a “rel=me” link. Similarly, the “Web” field of a Twitter user’s profile is also linked with “rel=me”. These links make an assertion of identity between two sites. Ideally, a user would be able to create reciprocal “rel=me” links to loosely verify the relationship. In other words, if my Twitter page has a “rel=me” link to my home page, my home page would also have a “rel=me” link to my Twitter page. This reciprocal linking shows that I have control over both sites, thus verifying their connection as “me.” Verifying who “me” is, is another problem all together. If someone else made a Twitter account and linked as “rel=me” to my home page, there would be an ambiguous relationship, because I, in control of the home page, would not link back to someone else’s Twitter account with “rel=me.” These links are not about establishing who someone is, rather they are about relationships: saying that this account and that account are the same entity.

These links are what would be considered “semantic links”. The idea of semantic links is that the link itself helps explain the relationship between the two ends of the link (in this case, people relationships, but it could also be other types of relationships). Of particular importance is the ability of machines (other computers) to “read” these links and understand the relationship.

Google’s Social Graph API is one application designed to read these semantic links using the “rel” attribute and XFN. The Social Graph is not yet widely used, but it points to the potential for these types of tools. For the time being, it’s interesting to use the Social Graph to see how one’s own accounts and sites are connected. One can peruse a few example applications of the Social Graph including the Site Connectivity demo.¹

You can type one or many websites into the Site Connectivity box and it will track down “rel=me” links, both one way and reciprocal. See the results for my homepage here. The results show how my various sites/accounts connect to each other through “rel=me” links. The first section, “Info on Your Connected Sites” shows sites connected by “rel=me”" links. The sites in the left column are those linked from my homepage. The right column indicates the strength of the connection. Sites at the top of the table with green numbers are reciprocally linked with “rel=me”. I’ll admit it’s not all completely clear to me. The “Possible Connections” sections show sites that link to one or more of my other sites. I’m not sure why my home page appears down here. I do know that a few of my ITLWTLP colleague’s Twitter accounts appear in this section because they have this site in the “Web” field of their accounts. Because I am also pointing at the same page, the Social Graph thinks we might be the same entity.

You’ll note that I’ve actually got a number of reciprocally connected sites and profiles. This is primarily because my home page links out to a number of my profiles with a “rel=me” link. When those sites (Twitter, Flickr, etc.) are also using “rel=me” a reciprocal relationship is created.

Even if you don’t have your own home page (or a ClaimID page) linking out to all these services, you can create a networked identity by linking your profiles to each other. Tools able to identify and follow these semantic links can follow chains of links to create an aggregate. If you put someone’s Twitter URL into the Site Connectivity demo at Google, you can often immediately find that user’s profile in various blog platforms, Flickr, Friendfeed, Technorati, and other sites. Try it for yourself. If we put Aaron Schmidt’s Walking Paper website URL into the search we end up with a list of potential connections to FriendFeed, Flickr, Yelp, Technorati, and LastFM².

Do these connections, publicly discoverable as they are, offer a threat to privacy? I would say, “no.” The type of information tracked by the Social Graph API, all of these links, are based on information published by the people in the links. I choose what I put into my Twitter account web field. I choose what goes into my Flickr profile and all my other accounts. If I don’t want these pieces of information to be discovered, I shouldn’t make them public or at least not link them together.

By choosing which connections you create and how you label them, you can create multiple online identities. If I had wanted to, in the past, keep my librarian self separate from my comics blogging/drawing self, I could have made a concerted effort to not link those profiles, to use separate home pages, separate usernames, separate commenting identities. It might not have been a perfect separation, but it would have helped a lot in separating the two identities. In my case, those both becoming ever more public identities, it does not behoove me to do this. I want the connections to be made.

One should be aware that any information that gets out there publicly could be put to use by sites and users outside the original context. This gets done already; think about the white pages that spread across the internet and the sites that aggregate them. In the past I’ve found sites that list my last four or five phone numbers and addresses all at once. This is being done with our social networking information. Going through the Google results on my own name (above), I found results at the site Delver. There were two pages for “Derik Badman.” One seems to be drawing on my Flickr information (and links to my now deleted MySpace account), showing my profile, connections, and thumbnails from that site. The second seems to be drawing a limited amount of information from Facebook, including a small subset of my friends (perhaps those that had public profiles?). Why are these two profiles separate? As far as I can tell, this is because my public Facebook page had no links to any of my other accounts, thus keeping the site from making the connection between the two.

So what does all this matter to librarians, that is, beyond a personal interest in their own online identities? Information literacy, educating our patrons, is more than just about finding, using, and evaluating information made by others; it is also about our own information and our own personal information space. And personal information is more than just the stuff we keep on our computers. Personal information is also the information about us that others might find, use, and evaluate. If we are aware of these issues, we can advise patrons to manage their online identities. Tools that automatically create these connections will only increase over time. People should be aware of their online identities as they look for jobs (don’t you Google candidates?), while those with a public personality, or who want to have a public personality need to be even more careful of the identity they put forward. For self-promotional reasons, being able to manage and connect all one’s various profiles, content, and networks can aid in creating exposure for creative endeavors. Younger users can benefit greatly from being aware of these issues before their online identities proliferate, allowing a great control of these identities from the start. Some of us are stuck with what’s out there, and all we can do is manage the results.

Thanks to: Emily Ford for comments and the use of her name, Ellie Collier and Hilary Davis for comments, and Lianne Hartman for editing, comments, and the title. (Edit: And thanks to Lianne for noticing my typo in the title, which you can still see in the url.)

1. The use of other “rel” values can be used by this system to works towards a “distributed social network.” This article by Ben Ward is a good introduction to the topic.
2. I should note that none of this is private information. It’s all based on publicly viewable links.

Please don’t fill your slides with words. Find some relevant and pretty pictures to support what you’re saying. You can use the pictures to remind yourself what you’re going to say next… Your presentation should be *very* incomplete without your narration.

This is something I have been working on since I started giving presentations professionally. I sat through a lot of bad presentations in the past few years, and, while some of them were bad just because the content was poor or uninteresting, many of them were just poorly formatted. In the comments on Aaron’s post, Kevin Driedger added:

…my thoughts on slides – they should illustrate the talk, like a nice illustrated book… (Comment #10)

This lead me to a subject my thoughts often settle on: comics. In this case the equation:

Presentation = slides + speech [1]

Comics = image + text

Earlier this year I started using hand drawn images in my slides (see this pdf for an example), instead of bulleted lists or photographs, but I hadn’t yet given much thought to the factor that is common to both presentations and comics: image-text interaction. A number of definitions of comics emphasize this factor, going all the way back to Rodolphe Topffer, the father of the comics form, who, in 1837 describing one of his histoires en estampes, wrote:

This book is of a mixed nature. It is composed of a series of line drawings. Each of these drawings is accompanied by one or two lines of text. The drawings, without this text, would only have an obscure significance; the text, without the drawings, would signify nothing. [2]

This interdependence between image and text is at the core of the form of comics, and the same concept can be easily applied to presentations. Not all presentations necessarily require slides (or words for that matter), as a lecture without slides or a silent slideshow also form a presentation. In that interim place between all slides and all speech, I preliminarily posit some types of slide-speech interaction [3]:

1. Slides and speech are redundant:

This is the classic boring presentation. A slide shows a list of bulleted items while the speaker reads them off or even worse reads whole sentences and paragraphs off the slides. This redundancy of two information channels is disengaging. Most attendees will read the list for themselves more quickly than the speaker can say them. The redundancy of text and image does not provide any space for friction, thought, or curiosity. In many cases, where the speaker is not significantly elaborating on the slides’ text, the speaker becomes peripheral and even unnecessary.

Old comics are great for this sort of tedious redundancy:

from Sheena, Queen of the Jungle 11 (Spring 1951): 9.

2. Slides and speech are independent:

This is veering into performance, but I can imagine a presentation where the speech and the slides tell separate narratives. This is not to say that the two narratives are completely unrelated; often the point is to draw on the conflict or similarities between the two. A library conference is probably not the place to be experimenting with such things though, unless you have something really well done and interesting planned. Even comics examples of this tactic are extremely rare, the most popular example being a short story by Chris Ware called “I Guess” [4].

Panels from Chris Ware's "I Guess"

3. Speech carries presentation:

At some point people stopped just talking and started using slides and other media. I can’t think of many examples of straight-up speeches that I’ve seen at conferences, other than some keynotes (by non-librarians) at ACRL. More common is a cursory use of slides that tend to be brief, visually dull, and do little to add anything to the speech. I used to make a lot of slides that would fall into this category, for instance:

One of my boring slides from 2006.

These slides were accompanied by lots of talking. The slides act as little more than placeholders, a visual signifier to back-up the speech and add a small portion of emphasis. This type of presentation is not necessarily bad, but it does require a speaker who is dynamic and engaging. Depending on the presentation’s content, this format may leave something to be desired in its ability to convey information in a complete manner. If I am speaking about a web application, having a number of screenshots in the slides can aid greatly in comprehension for the audience.

This type of speech and slide combination is rather popular, getting praise for Guy Kawasaki (who uses 10 slides with short words or phrases on them) or the “Takahashi Method” (using very large words). Another example of this is Lawrence Lessig’s well-regarded style. He uses a lot of slides with a small amount of text or simple images, but he displays them at a rapid rhythm. I find the visuals in the few presentations of his I’ve looked at online to be mostly superfluous, seeming to serve primarily as a visual attention grabber (give the audience something to look at) than as an additional channel of new information. Though, I shouldn’t ignore the utility of slides as attention grabber; it is a valid use.

4. Slides carry presentation:

This type of presentation is rarely seen at conferences. It belongs more to the classic vacation slideshow (“And this is the little cafe in Paris we went to on our first morning”) or, in current times, watching a slideshow from a Flickr photo set than to what someone would expect from a professional presentation. This may be the appropriate style for certain types of presentations, but one would need a good sense of design and visual narrative to pull off something like this successfully. Information that is process or space oriented might be the best candidates for visually driven slides that require little added speech.

Reader participation bonus section: Find me a good example of this in a presentation.

5. Slides and speech share duties in conveying a point:

I believe this is the ideal mode for most speech + slides presentations. When visually appealing slides complement the speech, the presenter can engage multiple senses of the audience members. The conjunction of the multiple channels of words and image (sound and image) can create a synthesized effect that is greater than each individual’s. This “wow,” sit-up-and-take-notice factor is one of the joys of comics. Even in the most basic of comics, something like a New Yorker single panel, the humor and the pleasure of reading comes from the picture and the text creating something that does not exist in either one independently. A similar sense of pleasure and creation can come from the well planned slide/speech conjunction, often through contrast, metaphor, or unexpected juxtaposition.

The following comic, for instance, would not have the same effect if the text or image were viewed separately:

Peter Arno from The New Yorker 12 Apr 1930

For brevity’s sake, I must here ignore numerous other complications that arise from considering the interaction between speech, text on a slide, and image on a slide. I will also leave out much discussion of how the rhythm with which the slides are changed can effect the presentation. The simplest of slides can be effective if they are quickly moved through, while more detailed slides could retain interest for long periods of time as speech is used to elaborate on the visuals (the classic example I can think of is an art history lecture where a single work is shown and discussed at length, though even this can be improved with detail views.). As I noted above, Lawrence Lessig’s slides are often not very interesting in themselves (a word or two), but he moves through them quickly enough that the viewer’s interest can be maintained.

Many people seem to think slides need lots of text so the audience can have something to take home and re-visit or so people who didn’t make the presentation can take advantage of the presenter’s information. Slides with little or no text would be mostly opaque on subsequent viewings. I would offer a few responses to this concern. A presentation is made for the audience, the people who show up to listen. A presentation done well should not be easily boiled down to a mass of text (else, why not just write an article or a blog post). It should take advantage of its particular form/media. The best method for re-visiting the presentation or archiving for those unable to attend is a recording. Cheap options are available to make multimedia presentations available online.

When I presented in Second Life a few months ago (which I talked a bit about in my previous post to this publication), I followed up by creating a recording of my voice over the slides. In this case I re-created the presentation, recording a new version of my speech–rather than recording the original live–and then syncing it over the slides. In this way, an interested party could watch my presentation in a form closer to the actual event than a simple deck of slides.

If you want to have a take away for the audience, printing out your slides is a cop-out. There are better options. I’ve previously handed out (posted) my speaking notes as a complement to slides, allowing for viewers to at least get the main points I spoke about to accompany the slides. A simple sheet (half-sheet if you want to conserve paper) of main points and, if appropriate, urls or citations can act as a reminder and reference for attendees when they get back from the event.

Creating a presentation that utilizes an interesting combination of speech and slide does take more time and effort than a bulleted list. Besides the conceptual effort, the actual creation of the slides can become time consuming. You can create your own images (drawing, photography, etc.), but even for those without such skills, plenty of options are available to take advantage of other’s artistic work. Free photos are available through various Creative Commons sites (like Flickr’s) and there are numerous options for clip art–good clip art (check out the many options from Dover books) not that clip art that comes with MS Office [5].

The presentation of information should be important to our profession. After all, the fourth of the ACRL Information Literacy Standards includes:

3. The information literate student communicates the product or performance effectively to others.
Outcomes Include:
A. Chooses a communication medium and format that best supports the purposes of the product or performance and the intended audience
B. Uses a range of information technology applications in creating the product or performance
C. Incorporates principles of design and communication
D. Communicates clearly and with a style that supports the purposes of the intended audience

I’m not sure how directly practical all of the above is, but I hope it at least gets people thinking about the topic. Presentations can be interesting for many different reasons, and one of them is the form. I realize some of the forms above might be too “arty” for most presentations, but I don’t think it is outside the realm of reason to add more art to our conferences. Art can convey information as well (if not better) than dry technical work. Creativity should never be overlooked in our work.

Next time you are making a presentation, set aside extra time to work on your slides, not just to make them but to think about them and how they will interact with what you will say. If we challenge ourselves and our audiences, we will not only have more interesting presentations, but we will all get our brains working a little more.

Further Reading:

There are tons of books and websites about slides and presentations and the dreaded Powerpoint. There are also hundreds of books on design. You can also learn a lot from just looking at art and design and examples of great presentations. You might start with: Presentation Zen.

Thanks to Aaron Schmidt, Kim Leeder, and Ellie Collier for comments on the content and Lianne Hartman for editing.

Image Credits:

“Sheena” image is in the public domain. Drawing by Robert Webb. “I Guess” image copyright Chris Ware. Arno comic copyright The New Yorker.

Notes:

[1] I’ll admit that we could consider a speaker’s movements and body language a third factor, but that’s a whole other topic, one that is rarely put to use in librarian presentations I’ve seen. This is a channel of information that is particularly missing in the webinar format.

[2] Quoted from: Kunzle, David. History of the Comic Strip vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. 46.

[3] Borrowing a bit from Scott McCloud’s Understand Comics where he describes and names a number of image-text interactions.

[4] From Raw 2.3 (1991).

[5] I’m told there is a good collection in Word from iStock Photos. It’s not on my Mac, so I haven’t seen it.

Library Camp East photo courtesy of Darien Public Library.

Earlier this month, I presented at a one-day conference. Everything happened ordinarily. My submission of an abstract was accepted and I was scheduled in a session with two other presenters. Preparing for the presentation, I worked up my outline, gathered images, and put my slides together. The night before, I practiced my session by making a recording on my Mac. On the day of the conference, I was delayed and showed up late, so I missed the first presenters, arriving in time for the last part of the beginning session. Following that, I participated in a round table discussion. I grabbed a drink and a quick snack during the break and chatted with one of the other presenters as I set up my slides.

My presentation went well. It was not without some technical difficulties that forced me to cut my talk a little short, but I’m satisfied with how it went. The organizers tell me it was well received. I joined the audience to listen to the two presenters who followed me in the session. Later there was more chatting and another session. I had to leave early, so I missed some of the last presenters.

All in all it was a interesting day and a novel experience. You see, I was presenting at Met@Morph, the first annual Web Comics Comic-Con and Conference and it was held in Second Life–my first conference presentation in a virtual world.

Derik presenting in Second Life. Screenshot by Sean Kleefield.

I tend to stay on top of the latest tech trends, but I’d been avoiding Second Life. I’m not interested in having another life, I’m happy with my first life, and I got my fill of avatars in all the years I played role-playing games (the ones with paper and dice). My impressions of Second Life have been so colored by the use of it as an alternate world/life that I neglected its use as a social communication tool. This experience convinced me of the potential for virtual worlds as virtual conference sites.

With the economy tanking and travel prices increasing (I don’t want to think about how much it’s costing to get me across the country to ACRL in March), large national conferences become ever more problematic for a larger number of librarians. There has always been a (perhaps large) group of librarians who have neither the personal nor institutional funding to attend conferences, a group which has been mostly shut out of ALA (see Emily’s post).

Why do people go to conferences anyway? Anecdotally, the majority of librarian attendees go for: a) continuing education/keeping up, b) socializing/networking, c) presenting and sharing information and experiences, and d) committee work and other activities involved in making the content of the traditional conference that offer an opportunity to pad the resume. I’ll leave off: e) free stuff, though a perk, I doubt that is a main draw (I did enjoy my free trip to a game at Dodgers Stadium while at Annual this year (Thanks, EEBO)).

All of the aforementioned reasons can be replicated (with different levels of success) in other contexts. I’ll focus on two models, the virtual conference and the unconference, specifically considering reasons a, b, and c above.

Most virtual continuing education opportunities have, more recently, stuck to the webinar model. A presenter uses audio over slides to offer his or her information to a group of users watching from their computers. Typically, the presenter’s talk is supplemented by a chat channel where users can comment and ask questions. Attendees log in, the presenter speaks, questions are taken, and attendees log out. While this model can be effective for conveying information, it is not any more effective than just posting the presentation prerecorded and is severely lacking in any social aspect. Other attendees are names on a list and perhaps an occasional chat comment. Webinars are also visually dull (especially if the presenter is not skilled in slide design) and offer little interaction for the audience. One is easily pulled out of the moment, distracted, bored. I’ve never managed to sit still and attentive through a whole webinar. At the least, a live conference offers people to talk to before and after the presentation and people to look at during the event itself.

Participating in the Second Life conference was very different than any previous experience I’ve had with virtual presentations. A presentation in a virtual world allows for the same slides and audio presentation with chat commentary (equally prone to many of the failures of webinars), but it also opens up other opportunities. First of all, it’s more visually engaging and socially immersive. With more visual interest and movement–and unlike every webinar I’ve attended–I remained engaged by the presentations in Second Life. The virtual world also gave me a greater sense of the presence of other attendees. They were more than names on a list. They took up space. This alone improved the experience, but the medium provided an extra bonus of social interaction. I could chat (publicly or privately) with other attendees before and after the main presentation. Sure, it wasn’t like hanging out at the hotel bar with a bunch of colleagues, but it was better than nothing.

Some might object to virtual conference participation based on the technical and training requirements. Attendees need fairly modern computers, there’s no way around that. But considering how much it can cost to go to “real life” conferences, the cost is not prohibitive (I could buy a compatible computer for the price of a plane ticket across the country, and I could re-use it many times). This won’t open up opportunities for those lacking technology or money for technology.

Virtual world use also requires training. I’m not an active video game player. I had an Atari and a Commodore 64 when I was a kid (that dates me somehow), but never got further along than that. Since then my game playing has been sporadic and social. I had to learn Second Life for my presentation–my first experience with a virtual world and I was going to be standing in front of an audience trying to talk and advance slides. However, I found it surprisingly easy to make an avatar, dress him up, and get used to moving/looking around the environment. Admittedly, I’m good at picking up these things, clicking around and inferring what different options will do, but I did this primarily on my own (I did get training for doing the actual presentation and slides). With a little bit of training (and that would have to be part of any virtual world conference), most computer literate users could pick up enough to attend a presentation (if not necessarily have a great looking avatar).

Virtual world presentations open up a space for synchronous interaction at a distance. A great potential here would be micro-groups dedicated to librarianship, bringing together scattered librarians with common niche interests. For instance, I’d be interested in a small conference with librarians working at integrating their libraries into a Blackboard environment or a small conference about comics in libraries.

While virtual world conferences can offer geographically disperate librarians a greater sense of social interaction, the increasingly popular unconferences make use of social systems to create local in-person conferences.

Library Camps are a good example of unconferences which have become ever more numerous over the past couple of years. In the fall of 2006 I attended Library Camp East, hosted by the fine people at the Darien Public Library in Darien, CT. The event was a one-day, informal gathering of a few dozen people. We met in the morning, brainstormed ideas for discussion, and created a multi-track schedule for the day. The discussions were informal and without any pre-planning, covering topics such as mash-ups, web design, and communication between techies and non-techies.

The unconference offers an agility not found in a formal conference. Attendees make the decisions of what the discussion topics will be, allowing for not only a greater sense of participation (how very 2.0) but also a greater chance of currency. The smaller nature of these conferences means they can be put on for less money, offering a cheaper (or free) alternative for budget-strapped libraries/ians. Localized, one-day conferences would obviate much of the expense of travel and lodging associated with conferences. These types of events also enable attendees to network on a local level, building social relations amongst librarians which could lead to further collaboration and sharing.

My primary personal disappointment with the unconference I attended was a result of the conference’s form. The topics decided upon by the group, on the day of the conference, ended up being mostly not of interest to me, and the time spent deciding upon topics ate up too much of the day. My unconference improvement suggestion is to start the conference online prior to the event. If attendees start planning the schedule collectively online, not only would time be saved at the event itself, but attendees might spend more time in consideration of topics and organizing the conference schedule. Knowing some part of the schedule might also attract more attendees because it would eliminate fear of the unknown and potentially attract those who specialize in the pre-selected topics–attendees who could help facilitate discussions and provide a richer experience for everyone involved.

Both these alternative types of conference can fulfill the continuing education function of conferences without much argument. The socializing and networking function is less sure in a virtual world but is undeniable at an unconference. People are increasingly accustomed to making friends online. Communities grow around message boards, listservs, Twitter, Facebook, and other social tools. The idea of a virtual world conference starting some kind of deeper social connection between participants is not that unusual. Sure, we may feel we know someone better after spending a few hours with them at the hotel bar, but a virtual connection can become just as ‘real’. After all, when the conference is over, we go back home and connect with our new conference friends on our virtual social networks, don’t we? The major part of this blog was planned virtually after a few brief connections at ALA Annual this summer.

So, this post is a call to action, or maybe just a call to continued action. Let’s find ways to increase our continuing education and networking outside of the large annual conferences. Unconferences have been popular, and I’m going to start making plans for an unconference in my area (Philadelphia area librarians, let me know if you’re interested in either helping with planning, have a location, or just want to attend). So far, virtual world conferences have seemed to focus on virtual worlds themselves (like the recently announced “ALA SLymposium on virtual worlds and libraries in Second Life”), but the potential is there for an increase in more varied events.