This presentation was by Beth Jefferson of Bibliocommons, neither of which appear to have a website. This presentation was one of the reasons I went and was well worth it. Unfortunately she doesn’t seem to breath while speaking so I couldn’t keep up. Here are some notes:

  • Opening quote: "The Ark was built by amateurs, the Titantic by professionals"
  • Idea of radical trust. Librarians need to realize friends and peers are also trusted sources by many
  • Normalizing statistics - libraries are still popular (newspapers dead, libraries dead, paper is dead, etc)
  • Community is important - back to radical trust
  • libraries vs book stores - discovery - those who are familiar with alternatives prefer alternatives to the library
  • Leapfrog amazon. Amazon is the gorilla, don't follow.
  • browse vs queue - others let you browse and get online, libraries often let you get in line to someday get something
  • libraries provide nothing most of the time
  • fiction - discovery versus subject headings. lcsh isn't winning in fiction
  • social search/recommendations - amazon listmania - radical trust again
  • listmania - users curate collections
  • cataloging all possible uses is near impossible - example is music - beats per minute, workout category - example: jogtunes
  • social versus semantics - both have a place
  • poor relevancy is a MAJOR problem
  • libraries aren't the greatest at scholarly search either - example EBSCO brings up advertisements as results
  • is the catalog an interface to holdings or an actual navigation tool for users?
  • global versus local - global search that goes to local may be key
  • community collections - borrow from neighbor, library provides safe place
  • purchase and download links when available
  • communities of interest for those who want to share information
  • privacy - needs to be in user control - opt-in
  • licensing among user-base is an issue
  • include non-holdings for suggestions - allow people to suggest the purchase, weight suggestions with social abilities

The above is just a small overview and if your looking for a presenter for a conference I would definitely suggest Beth. Really got the brain juices flowing. The big ideas that came out for me were the community collections and the global versus local which I’ve been trying to think about more.