Professional Development

Saturday was day 2 of the ASIS&T pre-conferences for me. Friday morning contained an interesting overview of DSpace and Saturday was a workshop on Classification Research. Presentations in the morning discussed tagging, building of communities through user-based categorization, and systems that support knowledge creation/SenseMaking.

The discussions that grew out of the presentations focused on the relationship of tagging systems to classification/categorization structures and there were some interesting examples presented including LibraryThing and PennTags. . .

Internet being somewhat hard to come by at this conference, I took a few notes off line over the last few days & have summarized them for posting.

The ASIS&T confernce kicked off sunday afternoon with a full slate of sessions. I attended a session that presented work on informaiton/service management systems. In this session Michael Buckland commented on the commonly used definitions of ‘reference work’ and made the point that in many publications (including ALA) reference work is defined more in the context of what the librarian does rather than what a user does. His research is looking at methods for providing contextual information/links in online reference resoruces.

The evening session was a presentaiton on the used of facebook and second life in collaborative environements and looked specifically at the implications for leadership & professional communities. There were some very intersting comments made, including a study of active LIS organizations in these environments and some of the useful activities that can be conducted in these online communities. As could be expected Facebook was seen as a low-barrier, high-return tool for basic community building while second life was seen as a higher investment but also higher functionality tool that could enable online communities to replicate the sorts of teask and reltaionships that can exist in teh physcial work.

Tuesday morning was an interesting set of talks on wiki and blog use in different environemnts including collaborative bokwriting, classroom, etc. It was interesting to hear many of the experiences that we have ssn in our use of the wikis reflected in the reserach presentations.

The opening keynote session focused on the impact of disruptive technologies in the information world. Some of the more interesting examples demosntrated how the addtion of a pit of *pop* results in a significant differentiation of a product in the marketplace. In general, the presentation focused on the power of disruptive technologies on a field and looked at examples where this had happened before (coffee, flying, diapers) and how the market responded (differentiation of products with a focus on service/experience, new collaboration/competition relationships, innovation).

In the afternoon I saw a poster by Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba that presented the results of an user-based evaluation of FRBR catalogs.  Their results indicated that users found FRBR catalogs easier to use for work/expression discovery but did had a difficult time figuring out how they would get access to a specific item from their library (catalogs tested were from OCLC -FictioFinder, Worldcat. . .).