Presentation

I’m submitting a proposal to deliver a presentation on this topic at the 2008 Online Northwest conference.  My focus there would be on del.icio.us and Bloglines as two cool tools to use together, and some of the strategies and practical apps outlined here so that the whole library can get value out of the process.  I’ll probably keep the blog and widgets ideas on board to help answer questions or to add a little to the presentation to spice it up.  Maybe I can also do some show and tell – here on this blog, I have the latest del.icio.us links from my del.icio.us account as a widget in the sidebar, for example – would that be a cool addition to a library home page?  A kind of “What’s new online?” Maybe you could create a widget of a certain tag in your del.icio.us list, so that every time you come across a site or article that would have a high patron interest (rather than some obscure web app that you want to come back and look at later, or an article about library policy and ethics or something, right?) you can tag it and it will just pop up on the website.  Depending on how you want to play, if you had a blog that patrons can look at, you could tag each new post in del.icio.us and have it show up in the list as well.  Random, disorganized and miscellaneous links might seem like the antithesis of library organization, but a lot of people don’t know what they want when they come to the library, they just want to browse.  Having random links might create a reason for people to return to the site regularly, to see what strange and interesting new things your librarians have found…