Monday, August 3, 2009

What I learned at the Handheld Librarian Conference

Here is the stuff I learned from the Handheld Librarian Conference.

The conference organizers set up http://www.flexyourinfo.com/track/hhlib2009/ for tracking images, delicious tags and tweets concerning the conference. During the course of the day, Guy and I learned about an even better real time twitter tracker -- http://tweetgrid.com/search?q=%23hhlib.

I Got to meet a lot of other really, really, really cool librarian tweeters, including two of the presenters. Val Forrestal's presentation is here. She posts many good articles (concerning twitter) at delicious, and she also wrote a followup to the conference.

I really liked the afternoon keynote by Tom Peters on "Mobility and Singularity: People, Communication, Information, Information Objects, and Information Services in Motion". I would "lug my guts" to meet Tom in person. In short, because of mobile communication technologies, people don't need to meet face to face to get work done, and people will travel less in the future for business purposes.

Joe Murphy did his session on "Sending out an SMS", but since I was not able to attend that hour, I could still get a sense of the session by following the tweets and comments. He also posted his slides at SlideShare.

From the twitter conversation, I also heard that the session on "Mobile Medical Information: View from the Medical Library" was very good. I will go back and listen (and/or look at the slides) to it sometime in the future.

It was a good, but long and productive day.