The Web2.You Conference at McGill University

Over the past few days, I’ve been exploring Canadian blogs and learning about more conferences, past and future. Today, I’m going to review and comment on  the Web2.You Conference held at McGill University in February 2009. Even though I could not attend, there is a good archive of video and blog posts that have been valuable to explore. For blog posts, I would point you to John Dupuis’ recap (Science Librarian at York University), Graham Lavender’s blog (a student at McGill and one of the organizers of the conference), presentation files from Stephen Abram and I’m sure there is more out there. Thanks are very much in order to Graham Lavendar for curating the conference’s wiki – you can find presentation slides and videos from several of the presenters in one convenient location.

I was particularly interested to watch videos of Michael Stephen’s on the Hyperlinked Library. The presentation is 10 parts on YouTube (here is Part One). I’ve read his blog – Tame The Web – with interest for over a year but I’ve never seen him present. I was very much impressed with this presentation. There was a great deal of good ideas and examples there (including examples of signage gone wrong). One point I took away in particular was the notion of thinking more deeply about privacy and participation. These are complex questions but I think Professor Stephens is right to point out that sometimes concerns about privacy shut down debate and exploration. Near the end of the presentation, new trends in employment were discussed: job titles like “user experience librarian” or “emerging technology librarian” (both of those interest me!) came up. Also, he suggested homework for those attending : create a Wikipedia entry for the McGill library/information school (there is a basic one now) and recommended reading Seth Godin’s book Tribes (which I did a few weeks ago).

Related posts:

1. CLA 2009: Pre-Conference
2. Fall Conference Season: Access & Internet Librarian
3. Housing Memory Conference at the University of Toronto: Day 1
4. Upcoming Conferences: CLA and SLA