Just a few words about my experience at ArbCamp yesterday (A2's un-unconference), I had a great time! Thanks to those who organized, it was really well put together. I talked to quite a few students there, I know there were several that came from all over Michigan, and being a student myself, I was felt so welcomed at the event and I do appreciate that.
I didn't take a whole lot of notes at ArbCamp, I think I was noted out after ASIS&T, but I did have a lot of wonderful conversations with people the entire day.
I enjoyed Mitten's enthusiastic talk on Grids in Web Design. I wasn't aware of Blueprint Grid CSS but I am now! I'm a big fan of generators (or anything that will do things for me for that matter) so I found a link to one while I was listening to the discussion. Also mentioned was the nifty Firefox extension It's All Text! There were other great tools being bounced around here, but I actually missed the rest, I think my internet cut out toward the end of the session.
Before lunch we went to Ed's Lunch 2.0 which mostly just turned into a chat session with an SI student at Michigan. Garin from SI explained the Community Information Corps, a weekly lunch featuring speakers in the Information field. It's too bad I normally work on Fridays, the speakers sound fascinating and I wouldn't mind attending some time. From here on until after lunch I met and talked with several interesting people.
After lunch I started in the Photography & Social Networks session but then ended up in the Library Camp session after a few minutes. Sometimes it's just so hard to decide. My friend Sarah stayed in the photography session though. During the library session we talked about some interesting ideas of small libraries or personal libraries. Peer-to-peer circulation came up. As it was being described I almost envisioned it as a library social network, within your library network you're able to share library books with one another or see what your friend has, bypassing the hold/checkout process at your local library. The advantage to the library would be that your patrons bypass the circulation process and deal directly with one another, saving circulation costs and freeing up shelf space (if the library allows items to stay out until they are needed by somebody else). In a Library 2.0 dream world this sounds like a fabulous idea, but l know that libraries would never buy in to this. It's hard enough getting things like RSS in catalogs and social features in our systems scare most librarians. It's too bad.
LibraryThing also came up a lot. I find LibraryThing interesting but I'm not a user myself. One point I mentioned at the discussion was that since I borrow most of my books from libraries and don't actually own them myself, that has always been a perceived barrier for me to start to use LibraryThing. I did start a LibraryThing account to catalog our sheet music a long time ago though; I wouldn't mind trying to start that process back up again. I wanted to catalog our sheet music and then also our classical music CDs so finding corresponding pieces would be easy to cross reference between the two collections. Since we don't play much anymore this hasn't been high on my priority list. Anyway, one reason why I would start using LibraryThing would be to contribute to the collective tagging data on materials. Some libraries are starting to import LibraryThing tags into their catalogs and I think this is potentially more beneficial than trying to integrate tags on their systems themselves.
After then was Derek's discussion on Social Media 101. Some of the topics included a rundown of the popular social networking tools, a brief discussion on privacy, as well as a list of potential uses for the tools. I'm sure I'm missing a lot. I use a lot of the tools already, but one thing I did think during this is that I will probably want to figure out what I'm not using anymore and clean all that up. Network portability came up and this is something I'm interested in. Probably not so much portability but just some way to know what it is I'm signed up for and a more efficient way to aggregate my online presences. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the number of choices in various networking tools and also the fact that I'm not even sure what open accounts I have out there anymore.
Sarah and I spent a good while talking to Andy, a neogeographer, which is a title I find fascinating. I also enjoyed talking to Andy at ABC later that evening.
All in all it was a good day; I met a lot of great people, had a lot of interesting discussions, and took my husband out with me for some beer and more great discussions at ABC later. Although I think today is the first full day I've spent at home in over a week so I'm actually enjoying this time too.
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