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I was fortunate enough to be a part of the closing plenary at the Medical Library Association Annual Meeting last week. David Rothman, Melissa Rethlefsen, Bart Ragon and I presented on Web 2.0 tools and participated in a panel discussion (with Mark Funk, awesome MLA past president) after the formal presentations. It was a great time! I’ve given talks to smaller groups of medical/health librarians in the past, but being around so many of them at once just confirmed what I always sort of knew: medical librarians rock!

If you’re a member of MLA, the whole session was webcast and should be archived over at MLANET. Also, David’s got all four presentations up in one handy post. A hearty thanks to the MLA for having me and to the stellar session planners for making it all come together so seamlessly (and enjoyably)!

So, once that was settled, my next consideration was: how can I make the list more self-sustaining? At the moment, people still have to email me their link to get their library blog on the list (so 1.0!) — how could I set it up so that people could add their links themselves and still not lose functionality (categorization and RSS being the two most important features in my book)? If you’re thinking “wiki”, you’re right! Say hello to the new Blogging Libraries Wiki. While there is still some tweaking to be done over the next few days (navigation, about page, help page, etc.), all the links have been transferred from the old blogrolling lists, so it’s fully up to date. And I’ve posted a note on the old page so if you’ve linked to that page, your link won’t be totally broken.

A few details about the wiki:

• it’s a MediaWiki wiki which was super easy to install, thanks to Dreamhost, my domain host. Dreamhost does one-click installs & upgrades of all sorts of goodies (WordPress too), so it was a painless process. The customization took a bit more figuring out, but thanks to the excellent documentation, that was relatively painless too.
• right now, the category pages are wide open for anyone to edit. I thought I’d start out that way and monitor the spam/vandalism level before considering login-only edits. Ideally, I’d like to stick with open editing so as to not discourage potential posters from adding their links (the fewer barriers to participation, the better!), but I’m realistic. We’ll see.

Update: …and there it is!

[Technorati tag: cil2006]

Kathleen discussed the “one-shot” information literacy session and the limitations of such sessions: we have too much information to present so we have to choose what to include and what to leave out. Interesting. I’ve never thought of it that way. For Kathleen, a successful one-shot session has clear objectives, has a specific, associated task, and includes a hands-on component. Her suggestions for what to include in a one-shot session include:

• lots of how
• some what
• minimal why
• the smallest number of steps to get results

As for what to leave out of the session:

• advanced features (Boolean, nesting, wildcards, truncation– put all this stuff in the handout)
• evaluation of resources and results
• personal information about you as well as your opinion(s)
• jargon (marc, LC, etc.)

Chad turned his attention to wikis, his talk was titled, “wikis in the classroom: powerful tools for library instruction”. He began by outlining his goals for instruction, which includes teaching tools to accomplish a project, teaching research/information literacy concepts, and begin a relationship and dialogue between librarian and student. It’s interesting that Chad’s goals are almost diametrically opposed to Kathleen’s, my guess that it has something to do with the fact that Chad deals with a specific clientele (business school students) that he probably gets to see/deal with more than once (if not in the classroom, then at least in the library?), making it important to build a relationship with those students.
Chad’s information literacy challenges include:

• most classes are 50 minutes long
• teach about 300-500 business students each quarter (15-20 classes)
• business school has 1700 students
• penetration of library instruction in classes is spotty
• front-loaded info lit may not be relevant later in the term or the academic career
• variety of projects means instruction must be scalable
• location of instruction can vary
• class requests may be spur of the moment

For chad, it came down to the traditional research/subject guide and the limitations of those guides: they are redundant (same resoureces listed in multiple guides), there is no interlinking, you have to edit the same content in multiple locations, searchability is low, and timely updates are difficult. So he turned to wikis! He set up The Biz Wiki in 2005 to replace the traditional subject guide using Mediawiki. He has also experimented with using the wiki to teach the resources and noted that he has found it to work better than class handouts.

Chad closed out his presentation discussing the obvious advantages of a wiki, which includes keyword searchability, flexibility, easily updated content, and the community-building aspect.  He did note that he hasn’t made use of the latter advantage yet as he is the only person who edits the wiki, but the potential to have librarians, faculty, and students build the content is amazing.

I heard this a lot during various sessions at the conference: wikis are great because they build community and a large contributing community will ensure that it’s self-correcting, etc. (the same advantages you hear about wikipedia). What surprises me, somewhat, is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of libraries doing this yet – i.e.: opening up their wikis  to their user communities (think: radical trust!). If you’re doing this at your library, I’d love to hear about it.
[Technorati tag: cil2006]

Right. Off to explore some more.