Welcome [back to posting] Week

Well, I started this blog to keep track of some of what I do as an e-learning librarian…and then I got very busy being an e-learning librarian and didn’t keep it up. In part I’ve been holding off because our library is in the final stages of setting up blog software for the librarians, and I’ll probably want to use that software for my blog. It didn’t seem to make much sense to put a lot of content here, if that other blog was about to take off. But now we’re into Welcome Week, and I figure what the heck, I might as well dive back in. So I’ll try to pick up some momentum with this here blog again.

I’ve got a few different plates spinning this fall, but one I’m currently thinking about is a Library 2.0 conference for next fall.  I’m on the committee that’s organizing this for our library, and it’s a great opportunity to dig around in the social software world, play with some tools, and try to prophecy how these will be used in academic libraries.  A couple of interesting 2.0-ish opportunities have cropped up in the library world lately.  For instance:

The Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County’s 23 Things to Learn About Library 2.0

Meredith Farkas’s Five Weeks to a Social Library

Both these projects are free professional development for librarians interested in learning more about blogs, wikis, social software, tagging, digg, flickr, and so on.  I’m putting them both on my calendar, and very excited to see how they play out.  (We may steal some ideas, or even some speakers, for our conference, too.)