Join our exciting expert — an academic, researcher and blogger — as she shares research and insights around social network sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook; youth culture; how observing and blogging can create a career; online culture; trends that Internet Librarians should be watching in the future, and more. You won't want to miss this stimulating event.

Blogs, wikis, social tagging, and other Web 2.0-inspired constructs, now commonplace, have become their own silos within the libraries’ overall web presence. It’s time for Web 2.0 to grow up and move into the strategic infrastructure that supports the library mission. No longer should blogs and wikis exist as stand-alone tangents and social computing be an afterthought to the overall computing environment. Breeding proposes a transformation of the way libraries approach their web presence that systematically blends Web 2.0 concepts into the fabric of its supporting technologies. Hear his tips for building on what we’ve learned from Web 2.0 to create an enterprise environment that more effectively supports the strategic mission of libraries.

From selection to implementation to federated search integration to evaluation, learn from one library’s experience navigating the “next-gen” waters. Find out what we knew, what we learned, what we wished we had known, and get insights into all that is Next Gen OPAC.

This session shares secrets for enhancing online user experience via a dynamic environment for collaboration, sharing, interaction, and accessing content and services. Chase discusses how to engage library staff and users in blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other social software to build online communities and platforms for interacting with online users. Chang discusses best practices for managing internal information and documents by using a wiki to build an intranet and deal with the library’s internal documents. The last presentation provides another case study of using a wiki to build a library staff intranet with multiple editors and the necessary training for intranet content providers.

From library catalogs to mind maps to visual search engines join us as we tour some of the best, most interesting, most useful, or just plain coolest  visualization tools out there.  One of the most important trends to emerge from the Web 2.0 phenomenon is the advent of  visualization tools that can illuminate, reveal, and shine a bright light on otherwise complex, dense, or dare we say boring data and text. Explore how these tools offer unique ways to visualize information patterns, facilitate information discovery and navigation, and reveal hidden concepts. Find the sweet spots for these new visualization tools for libraries, including how library users responded when the library
catalog went "visual" with AquaBrowser.

Libraries are becoming increasingly present in the social media sphere on sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, to mention a few. Once you’re there, however, how do you know if you’re having an impact? How do you measure success? This session takes a look at developing a social media plan, defining relevant goals and objectives, and looks at a number of useful free online tools to help track and measure your social media efforts.

The session focuses on the latest in micro-blogging: Twitter. The point of Twitter is to answer the question “What are you doing now?” in 140 characters or less via the web, client software, IM, or SMS. The first presentation shares the ups and downs of Twitter along with reporting on the results of several librarian- and library-based Twitter experiments. The second presentation by Next Gen librarians reviews the use of social networking tools to stay on top of hot technologies and new developments including how to weave Twitter streams, RSS feeds, online bookmarks, and information shared over social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn into a professional development tool that will help you keep up with ease.

Hear from an InfoTubey (a YouTube library marketing award) winner how to make a movie. Robinson covers everything from coming up with the original idea, scripting, storyboarding, casting, finding locations that work, lighting and editing. The focus is on how to make movies on a budget and demystify the entire process so that you feel you can make movies too. In fact, participate as our speaker and the audience make a 60-second movie in the session and see how easy it really is.

NOTE: The presenters request that attendees of this session bring 13 business cards and their cell phones!

Social software is rapidly changing the way we provide information to our consumers, work together in an organizational structure, and communicate. Going beyond SEs, this session highlights cutting-edge tools and techniques for libraries, hot new trends, resources, and advice. Jam-packed with Cohen’s A–Z listing of the hot social software and RSS tools on the market today, there will also be time for the audience to highlight favorite social software tools.

The Gartner Research Group predicts that by 2011, 80% of internet users will participate in a virtual world. Should libraries be pioneering these virtual worlds—and just what is the role of libraries in virtual worlds? This overview of virtual worlds and what libraries are doing in them comes from serious practitioners who highlight librarians and projects featured in their book and share many tips and insights.

Despite steady integration into a common European Union, each European nation retains certain individual elements of infrastructure. Libraries, for example, tend to follow different policies and systems in different countries. This talk examines one aspect of library activity across Europe: the implementation and use of digital games. By studying some rich and varied examples of game use, several important questions are addressed: Why do some library digital games services flourish in some European countries but not in others? Is access to games affected by library funding, technological progress, legal restrictions, or national attitudes toward digital games? Are there models of game use in European libraries that could be replicated in American libraries? Discussion of these issues highlights both the barriers and opportunities for the technology and suggests ways for implementing digital games in libraries in the future.

In the first presentation, hear from experienced team leaders about the challenges and excitement working with adolescents in the creation of a “library” game. Learn the strategies and implementation plans for creating the “Dark Ink” game with students from the Netherlands, and gain insights about how to do something creative like this in your environment. Buckland, a recent grad, and Godfrey discuss the challenges of chat with avatars and reference services in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

In the virtual world Second Life, libraries have become integral parts of many online communities yet still have a number of unique challenges. Some arise from the nature of the virtual environment, others from the fact that all our patrons are highly sophisticated computer users. This session describes the role of libraries in the Second Life, focusing on the Alexandrian Free Library System which is a consortium of community-based libraries operating in Second Life, including the communities of Caledon and Steelhead. Caledon is a large community where the library system resembles a real-life public library system with several neighborhood branches. Steelhead is a small town that recently decided to open its own public library. Using "images from the field" to show the libraries' presence, our speakers look at how the libraries were created; how their online collections are selected and organized; and how their reference service, online exhibits, book groups, poetry readings, storytelling, and other activities have become an integral part of these online social networking communities.

This session presents practical methods for gathering data from users in a variety of ways for user-centric design, including techniques for implementing what your users need and want, and how to overcome the obstacles that may pop up. Learn how to make your library evolve, bit by bit, into the library your users have always dreamed of! Full of insights, concrete examples, and tips to use in your library.

This session looks at the learnings from one university while engaging all staff in creating an updated 5-year strategic plan that recognized that improved uses of technology were key elements in developing both better user-centric services and staff computing skills. By using Web 2.0 applications such as wikis and blogs, the staff was introduced to the power and ease of social networking tools, incorporated new technologies into staff workflows, and allowed everyone to participate in the strategic planning process. Once exposed to collaborative networking technologies, staff further adopted these tools for improved documentation of numerous changing operations, procedures, and policies. Gain tips and ideas from their experience.

Pecha Kucha is Japanese for the sound of conversation and represents a fast-paced series of presentations. Each of our panelists has 6 minutes and 40 seconds along with 20 images to express their opinion about planning and management strategies and techniques in libraries. Each takes a view—planning frameworks, project management, marketing, customer relations, and more. See if they can do it and then join in the conversation about 2.0 technology tools and tricks.

Space, and the management of it, is a challenge that besets every library; however, the more you know about what you have, the better you can manage it. A geographic information system (GIS) is a configuration of computer hardware, software, and personnel specifically designed for the acquisition, maintenance, and use of geographically referenced data. This session gives an overview of GIS and discusses its relevance to libraries. It looks at how one library partnered with its technology department to create a GISbased spatial information manager for the library to serve a wide range of applications including facilitating the analysis and optimization of existing space within the library, serving as a real-time high-quality map generator, providing access to the square footage of any room in the library, assisting reference librarians in their efforts to direct students to resources in the library, facilitating disaster planning, and more. Cox shows actual highquality maps generated by the system and discusses its integration with Google Earth.

Hear how social network tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Plaxo, and Naymz are being used for business/professional use, while others like MySpace are NOT useful in this context. Looks at unique characteristics and provides tips for getting the most out of these tools.

This talk looks at the characteristics of the “organization 2.0” and how libraries are recreating their structures and processes to thrive in a new environment.

This cybertour looks at some of the interesting roles and jobs that information professionals have these days. Join us and be inspired!

User-focused tools help information professionals to connect and integrate our activities and resources into our clients’ and communities’ workflows and lives. Those that are fun and easy really grab those customers and communities! Lawley looks at new opportunities and challenges resulting from social and mobile technologies and practices, discusses recent research and trends, and provides thought-provoking insights for us as we plan for the future.