Great session today at the webinar. The archive of the session is now up in all of its Wimba glory. Feel free to go and check it out.

I really liked the discussion that came out of it, especially the response to questions about assessment of Web 2.0 tech in Academic Libraries. We’ve been thinking about doing an MS Library 2.0 Summit themed on Assessment for the Fall. Interested? What do you want to have numbers for? What is tricky to assess for you? Or do you already have a great 2.0 assessment program going? Maybe you could be one of our speakers! The normal structure of the conference is to have a keynote and then nine or so “Steal this Idea” speakers. These are just regular folks who’ve found something that works for them that they want to share. It’s been a huge success in the past, and we are trying to make it even more value-added and targeted this time around.

Tomorrow June 30, 2009, I am conducting a webinar with Baylor E-Learning Librarian Ellen Hampton Filgo on how we have worked to bring 2.0 into our academic libraries–pitfalls and pratfalls included. Webjunction is hosting it, and we just finished our rehearsal. It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun. Here’s the description:

When the goal is to be “where they are, when they need us,” what does that require at a university library in 2009? As students, staff and faculty move their lives online, university libraries must choose whether to move with them or get left behind. But where is the value in a university library when Google is the new ready reference desk and the libraries’ resources are increasingly digitized? How does a library remain relevant in a socially networked academic world? From their perspective as, respectively, virtual reference and e-learning librarians, Amanda Clay Powers (Mississippi State Univ. Libraries) and Ellen Hampton Filgo (Baylor Univ. Libraries) will discuss how libraries can readjust and move their most important resources online—their people. By using social networks and other web-based technologies, libraries can become a value-added member of their community— both online and in person. By using these new tools, librarians can once again hover by their reference stacks with an offer to help that’s just a click away.

Sound appealing? It’s free! Just register!

You can also find out more about it on the Facebook event page posted by Webjunction.

We will be taking questions, etc. and if you do come, let me know what you think. They event will be archived too, so you can go back and look at it if you miss it. You can even get a group together to review it and use their Wimba chat feature with each other…pretty cool.

I had a great conversation with my colleague David Nolen this week about reading and writing being the same thing, essentially. Or how could they be. He’d been wrestling with the idea since he heard it from the Nobel-prize winning French writer J.M.G. Le Clezio who spoke at MSU recently.

Somehow this led to “does Twitter make you stupid” which David posed theoretically, and I, of course, rejected outright.

Twitter makes me smarter and super full of information and super-duper totally connected to everyone and everything all the time (gulp). –me

But, fighting knee-jerk reactions is my specialty, thanks to my father, and drilling down to the essential bits of the “changed-brains” theory that seems to be floating around, there does seem to be this new way of gathering information out there. Whether or not it’s changing brains, we continued to debate.

Thinking about Twitter, I imagine mainlining data. The myths (how could something so new already have myths?) that Twitter is about lunch or contemplating belly buttons is so beyond my experience it’s hard to know where to begin. I am acting as my professional/personal self online. I gather, evaluate and disseminate information (much like olde librarians of yester year). I put myself in my community to be of service to the community. I am still trying to be where my “patrons” are, when they need me. I have internalized my profession and I am actualizing it in this new world.

That being said, I have decided not to check Twitter until I have already accomplished things AT work. NOT to begin reading tweets from my bed via my iPhone as soon as I wake up, as has been my wont. It turns out that if I start mainlining too early, I get into that cloud of data and it’s hard to get back out to think about larger projects. I need that morning time to start thinking about projects at work. To get motivated. So is this an addiction? Or is it just hard to switch between two types of thinking? I don’t know. More to come.

A month ago my best friend and roommate Kris started a blog and got onto Twitter. He is a procrastinating playwright, among other things (poet, cabaret artist, award-winning actor and director, teacher…), who is currently running away from a very fine play he has started called 10 Mile. He is a storyteller and general pontificator in the grandest Deep South tradition. Discovering a medium where it is permissable to not-edit and not-judge and not-worry about writing has been a watershed experience for him. He is committed to his blog with an energy and enthusiasm I have rarely seen, set free of the torment and conflict that accompanies other kinds of writing. And now he is linking to this blog on his site. Currently the link is titled “best librarian in the entire world (wide web),” and he is posting excerpts from my blog.

One of the things I struggle with is creating with and managing online identity, and subsequently privacy. I consider my online life to be largely a professional life, but as I said at CiL2009 on the Managing Identity on Social Networks panel, I believe it is not possible to truly separate the professional and personal. Generally my approach has been to use privacy settings and judicious boundaries to control my identity online. Perhaps it goes without saying that Kris has a vastly different idea of judicious.

So once again, I’m back at the drawing board. As his editor, I would never want to stifle his creativity. There isn’t really anything wrong at all with his blog or his right to mention me or our life in it. It’s just not what I expected. At the same time that Kris has come into his own online, my family has gained momentum on Facebook. I now have 18 people on my mother’s side alone on Facebook. That’s right. Eighteen people. It was one thing when my brother or sister-in-law made the occasional comment on my Facebook page. It’s an entirely different thing to have my mother, cousins, aunts and uncles omnipresent.

So I’m calling it a developmental challenge…and I’m testing out my theory that creating and managing identity online is a series of developmental challenges that are necessary for growth. I’m just not exactly certain what that involves.

One of the things I’ve learned is that there is a challenge to the real-life relationship that goes along with these online developments. I’ve had conversations with my mother about what I want people to see about me on my Facebook page. I helped calm her anxiety about the difference between her news feed and her Wall when unexpected things appeared. I even deleted a Wall comment from my aunt that I thought revealed too much information about my grandmother. Now we are all on a private family Facebook Group, where we can share pictures and stories without the world watching.

And Kris. The respect we have for each other in person extends to the online world. And why wouldn’t it? Protecting and nurturing his creativity is a mission I have taken on with joy and great relish. And he is inordinately proud of my work and would never ever want to embarrass me. So every day, just like with the rest of his work, he reads his blogs aloud to me when I get home. He looks for my reaction as his editor and his friend. But if he’s used my name or a story about me, he’s looking for something more. Really we are all working together to find our balance.

I’ve been on Twitter now for two years. I got on Twitter for the reason I do most things in the social networking world–to see if we could use it for the library. My focus on Twitter has been local, and I still see that as the main impetus for my involvement. In the beginning, I could find very few people in my town (Starkville) on Twitter, much less students/faculty/staff at Mississippi State University. I was fairly certain Twitter was useless. But I read too many blogs, and all the bloggity bloggers kept saying it was cool. Most notably David Lee King, one of my favorite librarian bloggers. So I dug in. I used Twitter’s search engine to set up an RSS feed to find every time someone mentioned “Starkville” or “Mississippi.” It became very clear that the “Starkville” search was much more focused than the “Mississippi” search (yay “librarian”). So every time someone mentions Starkville, I get a hit on my RSS feed. When I was getting started, I would go and find that person and whoever it was they’d been talking to, to see if I could mine that conversation for local twitter gold. I gathered MSU and area tweeps one at a time, finding Twitter communities in the MSU’s Art Department, the Improv Comedy Group, Starkville’s House of El Podcast , local meteorology types, and then miscellaneous related people around campus. I followed them, and sometimes they followed me back. Mostly I “listened” in what may have been construed to be a creepy manner, but I am prepared to defend it as the essence of Twitter (I thought life-blood, but essence seems mildly less horrifying…both evoke The Pricess Bride I think). And it has paid off. For example, this weekend I found out that our library website had gone down via the tweets of one of our in-the-middle-of-exams undergrads. And I wasn’t even the first one of the library staff to spot it. It had already been fixed–via Twitter–by the time I got involved.

So I still have the RSS feed, and I still review every mention of Starkville on Twitter. Sometimes I find a new person to follow. Or find out that you can get crawfish for $2.65/lb in Louisville, Mississippi.