Let's Join In: Technology and Community

Wednesday 7 June 2006

On a cold Adelaide evening over 50 librarians had their imaginations fired up on the topic of technology and the community. The joint event held by ALIA Information Science and the Australian Law Librarian's Group (SA) was generously sponsored by Lexis Nexis who provided the drinks and nibbles in the Ira Raymond Room at the University of Adelaide. Anthony Robjohns from Lexis Nexis and Di Thomspon (ALLG) welcomed the attendees, and Fiona Mariner (ALIA InfoSci) introduced the six speakers who came from a diverse array of sectors including public, state, private, not-for-profit, and academic environments.

David Wallace (IT co-ordinator for Disability Information and Resource Centre) and Mike Seyfang (formerly with Microsoft) spoke on how blogs and podcasts can deepen community connection through the immediacy and richness of voice and the overlapping stories that get created. We were left encouraged to make use of the technologies for our own use. The podcast of the talk (created on the night using an MP3 and a coathanger!) along with a variety of useful links about creating your first blog or podcast can be found here.

Next up Sean Abel gave the attendees the benefit of his experience in introducing a small Wiki project to record and maintain documentation within the South Australian State Library. Sean addressed the issues of trust, fraud, and ownership in the Wiki 'space' and concluded that although the technology involved in creating a Wiki page was very simple the cultural buy-in needed to make it work appeared more of a challenge.

Margareta Nicholas from SirsiDynix gave us an overview of RSS, informing us that while RSS could be an acronym of the Royal Statistical Society it most commonly refers to Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. We learned that RSS is a way for users to have automatic updates of information fed to their website, and that there are also aggregators of information offering syndication of content eg news sites like Reuters or CNN. Syndic8 is a handy site to view the wide range of possible content available via RSS.

Sean Boden, from the Charles Sturt Library Service, gave an introduction to the world of online gaming and the online community. The various types of games were explained to the uninitiated, along with the major choices of hardware and software platforms both currently on offer and about to be released. The benefits and costs of a public library setting up online gaming were also covered.

The final speaker of the evening was John Banbury from Flinders University who introduced [1.9mb pdf] us to a different way of classifying information - social tagging. Through sites such as del.icio.us users can tag sites with keywords that make sense to them and that will help the user remember and 'refind' information on the Internet. John explained that the major benefit of tagging, apart from the ease of use, was that it latched onto our natural cognitive processes, and it could also be used to make connections by seeing who else might be tagging things in the same area as us.

Copies of all the presentations, including a podcast of David's and Mike's talk will be made available on the Information Science page on ALIA's website.

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