Caveat Lector

I am, with five truly outstanding librarians, planning a five-week workshop for next February entitled “Five Weeks to a Social Library.” It’s all about the IM and the RSS and the blogs and the Flickr and the hey hey check out the social software!

For me, it’s also about putting together real services, useful services, on the cheap. We the planning committee are doing our level best not to spend money. All of us are donating labor, obviously, and a few of us are donating server space, bandwidth, and services. We’re relying heavily on open-source software and (currently-)free services.

Naturally, this means a salutary lesson in technology fallbacks. We’ve tried two Skype conference calls so far, and both times audio-quality problems sent us to IM chatrooms instead. That, to me, is a message worth sending—try things out, be flexible, have fallbacks, don’t panic. We get our work done just fine in the chatroom.

I’ll be shocked if we get through the entire five weeks with nothing breaking. That’s not a reflection on us; it’s a reflection on technology. My hope is that we set a good example for solving tech problems while keeping the focus on learning.

The benefit of all this tightwaddery is that we can offer this workshop to librarians who don’t have our travel and training budgets (or indeed any travel and training budget). For the first time, I’m smiling when I think about my service-to-the-profession obligation. Sharing what I know with people who want to know it irrespective of means is what service ought to be about.

Without further ado, our CFP:

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Call For Presenters: Five Weeks to a Social Library

CFP: Five Weeks to a Social Library
Location: Online
Dates: February 12 - March 17, 2007
CFP Deadline: September 22, 2006

We are pleased to present Five Weeks to a Social Library , the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries. The course was developed to provide a free, comprehensive, and social online learning opportunity for librarians who do not otherwise have access to conferences or continuing education and who would benefit greatly from learning about social software. The course will take place in Drupal and on a MediaWiki installation, and will also involve a variety of other popular social software tools. The course will make use of synchronous components, with one or two weekly Webcasts and many IM chat sessions being made available to students each week. The course will culminate in each student developing a proposal for implementing a specific social software tool in their library.

The course will take place between February 12 and March 17 and will be limited to forty participants. However, course content will be freely viewable to interested parties and all live Webcasts will be archived for later viewing.

We are currently welcoming proposals for live presentations and course content on the following topics:

• Blogs
• RSS
• Wikis
• Social Networking Software and SecondLife
• Flickr
• Social Bookmarking Software
• Selling Social Software @ Your Library (no live Webcasts on this topic)

We want the presentations to be as practical and useful to as wide a library-related audience as possible. Preference will be given to presentations that 1) are very “nuts-and-bolts” or 2) describe a successful use of the technology that could be replicated in different types of libraries.

We are looking for presentations in the following formats:

• Webcast – a one-hour live online Webcast that will be archived.
• Screencast/Vodcast – no more than 30 minutes (please note: most commercial screencasting software offer a 30-day free trial).
• Podcast – we welcome proposals for podcast presentations, podcast interviews with innovators in the field or podcast discussions between innovators in the field.
• Text presentations – we will accept a very limited number of text presentations, but we greatly prefer presentations that incorporate audio and video.

In addition to developing a presentation, presenters must also make themselves available via AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) for questions from students for one-hour during the week their presentation is shown.

All presentations will be made available under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Format of Proposal: 250 – 500 words, written. Proposals are a way for the review team to assess your contribution quickly. Please do not submit full presentations.

Proposals should include the following:

• Full name of presenter
• E-mail address of presenter
• Web-site and/or blog URL of presenter
• IM screenname(s)
• Institutional affiliation
• Brief biographical information (under 150 words)
• Include same personal information as above for any additional presenters after the lead presenter (if applicable)
• Presentation title
• Format(s) you are willing to present in (if you are flexible about the format you are willing to present in, please note that)
• Presentation Abstract (250 – 500 words)

Proposals must be submitted by September 22, 2006 via e-mail to sociallibrary@gmail.com . Any questions about the CFP process can be addressed to the Planning Committee at sociallibrary@gmail.com.

Proposal Review: Proposals will be reviewed by the planning committee.

Planning Committee:

• Michelle Boule
• Karen Coombs
• Amanda Etches-Johnson
• Meredith Farkas
• Ellyssa Kroski
• Dorothea Salo

Key Dates:

• Deadline for Proposals: Friday, September 22, 2006.
• Notification of Acceptance: October 1, 2006.