Library Conference

So for several days last week I was down state in Madison WI, at the WiLSWorld Conference (WiLS stands for the Wisconsin Library Service). It was a great conference with many excellent speakers and many interesting conversations with other librarians there. The keynote speaker on day one was Andrew Pace. He gave a talk titled "2 Point Oh My". It really reflected very well many of the items that we discussed last week in Pittsburgh--Library 2.0, open source software, different ways to serve patrons, and how the library fits into the information future.

Another interesting session was given by the State Librarian of Georgia, Dr. Lamar Veatch, on the PINES system and the development of the open source ILS Evergreen. PINES is a state-wide public library system which has put almost every public library in the state of Georgia under one library card and one catalog. In order to better serve this system, they then developed Evergreen to serve as the state ILS.

A final highlight came with Tom Peters' session "Brave New Online Worlds: Social Networks, Online Communities, and Multi-User Virtual Environments". His description of Library 2.0 was rather interesting: it is the believe the "community of users have something to add to the system [the library]". He also gave an in depth look at how libraries can and should fit into social computing, such as MySpace, Facebook and Second Life. Tom Peters volunteers several hours a day to give reference services in a library in Second Life.

It is always interesting to get to conferences and hear so many other view points on the field of librarianship. It was even more interesting to hear what seemed to almost be a carry over of many of our class discussions.