IL04: “technology and collaboration”

I ended up having to sneak out a few minutes early from this presentation as it ended at 11.15 and I’m giving my Data Visualization talk at 11.30. As expected from anything in which Stephen Abrams (VP of Innovation for SRSI and the current president of the Canadian Libraries Association) speaks this presentation was a hoot. (Sorry, that’s the best word I can come up with for describing that hilarious Canadian.) The presentation was basically an overview of collaboration technologies that can and are being used in libraries today. His simple truth: “What matters is not what you have but how you use it.” Another interesting point: People who tend to be more liberal or open minded want information that challenges their perceptions, more conservative people want information that confirms their perceptions. The new collaborative technologies that are out there include, on the user side: Web conferencing, presence management, real-time translation, real-time speech-to-text, collaboration sites and wikis. On the information provider side there’s Web services, RSS feeds, learning objects, digitization, and faceted metadata. Another one of his best points: “Collaboration is an environment, not and end in itself.”

The single best thing I learned from Stephen at this conference was “I may have made up the word, but since I’ve added it to the spell-checker, that makes it official.”