Echo Chamber Presentation: Director's Cut (Slides Edition)

Laura and I did a version of our Echo Chamber presentation at an event in Newcastle a couple of weeks back. We had a shorter time than usual to do it in, so we took the opportunity to make a slide-deck rather than using the Prezi; it isn't as long, and as far as I'm concerned the more potential this presentation has for dissemination, the better. If we make it available in more ways, that's good - particularly in as embedable a medium as a Slideshare presentation; feel free to take this and put it wherever you like (it's on an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence). Laura has also uploaded this to her Slideshare account, and it's featured on Slideshare's Homepage! Woot.

Marketing Libraries Outside the Echo Chamber

View more presentations from Ned Potter.

We had a great time in Newcastle - thanks to Biddy Casseldon and her team for putting us on! Unlike at the other events we've presented at, the vast majority of the audience weren't familiar with who we were or what we were going to talk about, via Twitter or blogs, beforehand. We were escaping from our own echo chamber to a certain extent, and starting with a clean slate, having to win over a fresh audience as to the importance of what we were talking about. It was really gratifying to see people nodding emphatically - you really got the sense that people were having exactly the same "oh we really DO do that stuff, and it really DOES matter, and we really CAN try and fix it!" type revelations we had when we first started discussing the echolib thing 12 months ago. We were preaching to the unconverted, and I think we converted a lot of them. :)

-thewikiman

Escaping the Echo Chamber (but not, sadly, the traffic) with SLA Europe

Last night Geraldine Clement-Stoneham and the rest of her SLA Europe team hosted an event, at the City Business Library in London, all about escaping the echo chamber. It's about a year since Laura and I started talking about echolib and trying to raise awareness of the issue, so to go from a speculative tweet to a fully fledged event aimed at addressing the problem, in 12 months or so, is fantastic. Cheers so much to Geraldine for putting this on! We roped Voices for the Library in to present also - the idea was that we'd explain the echo chamber phenomenon, and then they'd show what can be done when you escape it. However...

VftL had to go on first, because I was late. No just a bit late, but arriving an hour and 20 minutes after the event had started, late. I'd set off from my house in York at 8am, with baby and wife. The idea was to get to Brighton by around 2pm, get the train up to London, have a meeting about something really exciting, then head to the City Business Library for 5:30pm. Due to a series of road-based disasters (stationary traffic for 7 miles on the M1, and the A1 closed you say? Good news!) I was still driving ELEVEN HOURS LATER, having abandoned going to Brighton entirely, trying to get to a car park near the library. My wife described this whole thing as the most stressful day of her life (keep in mind she gave birth less than 4 months ago...) and I have to say, I was absolutely frantic for most of the day. We were acutely aware that it didn't REALLY matter in the grand scheme of things (by which I mean, we could have been in the accidents that caused the delays, so it's all relative) but it did seem, as we inched forward 200 yards every hour and a half, desperate for the loo most of the time, the whole car smelling of burned clutch, fighting with other London drivers during rush-hour as we took the final 6 miles of our journey in a mere 3 hours, like the end of the world was nigh. Emily, the baby, was just incredible - by far the best behaved of all of us. She was so patient, so smiley, and hardly cried at all. When we got to London, I ran off to try and take part in the event, while Emily and my wife were met by my in-laws, who'd incredibly kindly come up from Brighton to help ease the stress, and they all got the train back down to Brighton. This is a library blog so I don't want to spend too much time harping on about family - but Robert, Susan, Alice, and especially Emily - thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. :)

Thank you also to Bethan and JoBo for changing the order and going on first, and for Laura for taking over and doing a lot of the presentation solo. By all accounts, Laura was ace at the bits she doesn't normally do, despite having no script or notes to work from, and no time to prepare! I got there in time to do two of the parts I normally do, which I enjoyed, but I really really wished I'd been there from the start. I'd so been looking forward to this event, it was so important to me to do it well, and there were so many people going I wanted to meet. So once again, to everyone who attended, thank you so much for your patience!

Although I was slightly distracted by not knowing what had been said already, and felt I couldn't get into a proper ranty stride regarding Seth Godin etc, I think it still went well and lots of people said positive things. The networking afterwards was my favourite networking experience ever. The previous day in Newcastle at the New Professionals Information Day I'd felt uncharacteristically unconfident and uncomfortable for some reason, so this was a really nice antidote to that. I met so many people for the first time (either having interacted with them previously on Twitter or not having any previous knowledge of them) and they were all absolutely lovely. I had a great time. But, I also had the travel-cot etc in my car, so sadly I have to make the drive back to Brighton earlier than I'd wanted to. However, the pain of this was mitigated by giving Neil Infield a lift home! He navigated superbly (it was great to see some parts of London a second time :) ) and we had a great chat, about libraries of course, in the car...

Anyway, here is the Prezi from last night - it's a re-configured, updated and improved version of the previous one. As with all embeded content it will change on here as we change it on Prezi, so have a look now, before we start mucking about with it to change it for the Libraries@Cambridge event in January.

Escaping the echo-chamber on Prezi

Final thing - thanks so much to everyone who came. A friend of mine who has lived in London, likens trying to get Londoners to come back into the middle of London for something in the evening, to asking Frodo Baggins to go through all he goes through in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and then when he finally makes it back to the safety of the Shire, asking him if he fancies a pint at Mount Doom.

So, cheers for coming along folks!

-thewikiman

The Echo Chamber, Live!

Of all the things I've been involved with, it's the Echo Chamber thing that I get most excited about - it's a real problem, but one that we can all help solve, and one that people really do seem to be engaging with, on both sides of the Atlantic, since we first started tweeting and writing about it. Woodsiegirl and I will be doing various evolving versions of our Echo Chamber presentation in the coming months. It would be absolutely fantastic to see as many of you as possible at City Business Library in London, November 24th, at an SLA Europe event organised around the #echolib theme. It's an evening kick-off so people can come after work, and we've managed to rope in some of the Voices for the Library people (JoBo and Bethan) to talk about their actual echo chamber escapes, so it's going to be fantastic. Full details are on the SLA Europe blog. The ideas and feedback from the audience will be written in to the Echo Chamber Prezi, which serves as a living archive on the subject, updated and added to every time we present.

I've put together a slide deck to act as a brief introduction to the Echo Chamber problem. If you'd like a brief outline of what it is and why it matters, have a look below. The final slide also gives details of the other Echo Chamber Live events we have coming up. (As ever, I'm more or less incapable of putting anything together that looks good small, so full-screen is best.)

A very brief introduction to the Echo Chamber problem

View more presentations from Ned Potter.

For a more comprehensive round-up of the Echo Chamber phenomenon, see the Echolib Netvibes page.

- thewikiman

80 New Professionals Walk Into a Bar...

Actually, they weren't ALL New Professionals, maybe 10% of them had never worked in libraries at all; plus it wasn't a bar, it was CILIP HQ, although later, a lot of them did go to a bar.... Friday saw the first of the New Professionals Information Days for this year (to read about how they came about, check out this earlier post) and I had a great time; everyone else seemed to do so, too. Kathy Ennis of CILIP's Membership Support Unit put together a little organising committee to plan the day, which I loved being part of. We tried to plan a unique day and one that improved on the previous years' Graduate Days and I think it worked - I liked the structure, I thought the content was useful, and most of all I liked the combination of speakers. We tried to ensure that New Professionals ran the workshops, but the keynotes were from inspirational leaders in the profession. The result was a day that, hopefully, wasn't like any other library event this year - and I'm certain you won't find another programme that good without paying considerably more for entry than nothing at all, which is what Friday's event cost the delegates...

I really enjoyed Lex Rigby (link below) and Katie Fraser's presentations (I couldn't see any more because in a late change I ended up doing a session myself, which I wasn't looking forward to but went fine I think) and I loved the keynote presentations from Phil Bradley and Maxine Miller, which I thought dove-tailed nicely. It was exhilerating stuff! Highlights for me included:

• Phil saying "all bets are off"
• Phil saying "this is the most exciting time EVER to be a librarian"
• Phil saying "don't assume people know more than you - at least don't take it on trust. If someone says 'I'ved worked in this industry for 20 years' they may just have worked the same year 20 times..." (I didn't take notes at the time so aplogies Phil if those aren't exactly right)
• Maxine giving a talk without notes which was, she later told us, completely different from what she had planned! I don't want to make too much of her ethnicity as the awesomeness of her talk had nothing to do with that, but it was so nice to see a non-white face presenting at a library conference! Also to be in charge of the Tate's library is a pretty cool job, too...
• Attempting to use Muffins as a bribe to get the audience talking, and finding the one audience member who was so allergic to chocolate she couldn't even have the spiced apple one because it had been in the same bag.. (thanks for speaking up anyway though!)
• Using my iPhone for my notes rather than a piece of paper - I only did that because of #epicprinterfail but it actually worked quite well
• Meeting new CILIP CEO Annie Mauger who popped in at lunch time - impressive considering it was her first full day in the job!
• Lots of people saying how useful they were finding the day

After the event there was a LISNPN meet-up in the pub around the corner from CILIP. There were many reasons that I loved this - getting to meet people properly and get to know them was one, seeing information professionals coming in out of the rain, not really knowing anyone but turning up and throwing themselves into the fray, was another. Plus, marvelling with Chris Rhodes that the network we'd created had progressed from online to face-to-face events so quickly, and not only that but events that were nothing to do with us! That's absolutely awesome - if all LISNPN members can take it upon themselves to organise regional meet-ups, using the network to advertise them, then that's just fantastic. The network is so much stronger if it is self-organising. Thanks so much to Bethan and Laura who've organised spontaneous events so far! Final highlight was meeting a very nice bloke in the pub who said he'd been wondering about librarianship for a while, applied for a few things but not got anything he wanted, and today was make or break for him in terms of pursuing it as a career. And we made him! (Rather than broke him - I don't mean we forced him...) He really enjoyed the day, it opened his eyes, and made him really want to do it for a living.

So 80 New Professionals went into a conference - I think the veterans among them were inspired anew, the brand new ones found out there was more support and engagement than they'd imagined, and the people who were not librarians at all at the start of the day either ended up committed to the profession, or scared off it entirely - and I'm fine with that; better to find out now what it's all about than get a job and realise it's much more intense than they realised later...

If you're in the North of England, book on the Newcastle one now! November 23rd, Newcastle City Library. Even if you have to take a few hours off work it's worth it; it really will be a great day...

Other stuff relating to NPID2010:

• evil_jen's blog post
• Lex Rigby's blog post
• Neon Librarian's post
• Annie's blog post
• Girl in the Moon's blog post
• Libraries, the Universe and Everything blog post
• Tina Reynold's blog post
• The slides from Phil's presentation
• The slides from Nicolás's presentation
• A tweet archive of all the #NPID2010 Twitter activity
• Twitter archive analysis
• Some pictures from CILIPInfo

- thewikiman

NPID2010: New Professionals Information Days

For the last few months I've been working with Chris Rhodes, Maria Cotera and Kathy Ennis to create a new CILIP event. Actually it's a refit of an old one - the CILIP Graduate Day that I presented at last year. We've re-thought it from scratch, introduced some new ideas, got in some fantastic speakers, and rebranded it as New Professionals Information Days - the reason that is 'Days' plural is that we're doing the programme twice, once in London and once in Newcastle, to try and make CILIP more inclusive and a little less London-centric.

Some of the ideas we've incorporated came from the many people (most of them New Professionals Support Officers) who took part in the initial brain-storming session at CILIP HQ. Our little working group then took these ideas on and honed them into what I think will be a truly excellent pair of events.

The London event takes place at CILIP on October 1st, and the Newcastle event takes place at the City Library on November the 23rd. You can find full information, including times, speakers, topics, how to book and so on, via CILIP's website. For now, here's a few points I'd like to highlight:

• The events are free (and you get refreshments too!). I'd be really surprised if you get to another event this year, with such a good line-up of interesting speakers and topics, without having to hand over a big chunk of change
• They are aimed at people who've joined the profession in the last few years, and also those who haven't joined it yet at all
• The days are structured in such a way that many people will be able to attend without having to take a full day off work - so for example, the London event runs from half-nine in the morning till four in the afternoon, but the last session is a repeat of the first session (with the keynote speakers sandwiched in between). So you only actually need to come from 9:30 till 1pm to see everything - OR, if you prefer, from 12 till 4pm. Good eh? I think this is a mint idea (got a feeling it came from Bethan Ruddock in the original brain storming session) and more conferences should make themselves flexible in this way
• The theme is great - pursue your passion through librarianship. This is something I've written about before - how the information profession allows you to pursue your existing passions and bring them into your job; I'm thrilled we've managed to build the entire conference around this idea. We need to publicise this aspect of librarianship more, it's ace.
• The speakers are fantastic! First we put together a list of the subjects we'd like to hear about as New Professionals, and divided them into different strands. Then we put together a wish-list of who we'd ideally like to hear speak on the subjects we'd come up with. And basically they all said yes! One person couldn't make it so I'm having to fill in with a talk about technology (and the Prezi I'm going to use for that will be lovely :) ) but otherwise we've got a stellar line up - including Phil Bradley, whose keynote will be entitled "Around the world twice on a library degree"! How cool does that sound? I've never got to see Phil talk in the flesh before, and we're honoured to have him.
• Newcastle City Library is beautiful... It's a fantastic modern building - if you live Up North, try and come along just to see how a brand new library operates, looks, and feels. You can always nip in from 15:45 - 16:45 and just hear Phil and Maxine Miller's keynotes!
• If you can't attend, you can follow on twitter using the hashtag #NPID2010, and either way you can get to know the speakers a little bit better: @PhilBradley, @katie_fraser, @LexRigby, me(!), and, coming over all the way from Spain, @nrobinsongarcia. We'll also be doing something with Wallwisher that will allow in-the-flesh attendees and virtual-attendees to interact together. WOOF!

So a free event, organised flexibly to fit your schedule, great networking opportunities, in ace surroundings, with online elements, and brilliant speakers. How can you resist? London is nearly full already by the way, so book soon if you want to go.

Really excitingly for me, the London event is being followed by a LISNPN meet-up that evening, in a pub of Woodsiegirl's choosing. The idea is to come together, set the world to rights, and plan a fool proof future for the profession... There's one in Manchester soon too (tomorrow at the time of writing), and both have been organised spontaneously by the members of the network. This excites me more than anything we've done with LISNPN so far - if it provides a platform for Information Professionals actually coming together and shaping their future collectively, then it's worth its weight in gold.

-thewikiman