I had to skip out of the second half of the session to present in a project management workshop (“Project Management in Practice”) with Helene Blowers and Macrina Williams, moderated by the awesome Mary Auckland. Let me just tell you, Helene Blowers is the best ever person to present in that dreaded post-lunch timeslot — she energizes the room like none other! It ended up being a really fun session with a lot of good conversation around the challenges we all face working on projects in our libraries. Not surprisingly, we all shared a lot of the same challenges, regardless of what type of library we work in. The angle for my part of the session was the “one-person project management team” and my slides are here.

The last official thing I did at IL was a little session called Drupal 101. When you click that link you’ll see a bunch of intro slides on Drupal (fulfilling the “101″ part of the session title), but I pretty much skipped over those and spent my 15 minutes imparting some lessons I learned from working with the software over the last 8 months. I was pleasantly surprised that over half the attendees raised their hands when I asked if they had already installed/played with Drupal, so I thought I’d capitalize on that, skip the basics, and talk about the things I wish I’d known 8 months ago. Since that session, I’ve remembered a few more things I should have mentioned, so I’m working on brain-dump post on that. Anticipate!

I was thrilled to wake up this morning to the new release of meebo, complete with chat rooms (just in time for my session – shame I ran out of time & had to skip over it)! There are all sorts of use cases for libraries here, from small group chats with subject specialists or liaison librarians, to chat sessions with a librarian and an IT specialist to help with the tech stuff (we’ve done this in Trillian, using the plain, old “invite” feature). Definitely worth a look if you’re planning an IM reference service!

• how to create an IM account
• intro to IM presentation
• IM tips
• IM canned messages

It all started for me some months ago with Will Richardson’s blog and the attractive notion of the participatory web in the classroom; then Library Crunch launched, a blog devoted to “bringing you a Library 2.0 Perspective”; and if that wasn’t enough, Internet Librarian happened, and I positively soaked up all the coverage I could find, and, not surprisingly, much of that coverage was devoted to Web 2.0/Library 2.0 applications (must find a way to get to IL next year). And then last Friday, this article on the Library 2.0 movement quoting all the right library tech luminaries.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been preparing for a few local-ish talks, the first of which is a half-day workshop on Wednesday for the Health Science Information Consortium of Toronto called Web “2.0 @ your Library”. Most of it is the standard how-to-implement-blogs-and-rss-@-your-library stuff, with a hands-on component, but this time I decided to frame the workshop within the context of Web 2.0, and so far, it’s turning out to be my favourite presentation yet. I’ve planned on devoting the first and last 10 minutes of the workshop to talking about Web 2.0 applications for libraries and why these applications matter and, thus far, this framework is making everything in-between a bit more meaningful and providing some much-needed cohesiveness. I’ll let you know how it goes & post the slides when I’m done.

Later: This is a demo post for a talk I did last week for an SLA group. The talk is here, for anyone who is interested.