Jessamyn West visits Melbourne

March 2007, Mebourne

Laura Foley

During the March long weekend in Melbourne, about 15 Victorian New Grads from a wide variety of library sectors met over lunch to chat with Jessamyn West. The informal gathering was held at Mr Tulk, the café attached to the State Library of Victoria.

While the food was lovely, the company was even better with a wide range of topics discussed from Web 2.0 to Wifi access. Organisational IT departments were a matter of frustration as many library workers found it hard to access some Web 2.0 tools due to IT restrictions.

Typical of New Grads, the latest technologies and ideas were bounced around the table. A few participants of the recent 'Unconference' recapped the event. Sherrill Harvey commented that she found the format to be very inspiring and the amount of collaboration and knowledge shared was amazing.

Jessamyn provided some handy tips on how to get published or present at a conference. Most people were interested in 'getting out there' but struggled to find a topic to examine, so Jessamyn recommended finding your niche. Focusing on an area that interests you or even becoming more aware of some small thing that your information service does differently is worth sharing.

We managed to visually record the happy conversations with some photos. More information can be found at Jessamyn's blog : http://www.librarian.net/

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