Internet Librarian Conference Highlights

Greetings L2 Crew from Monterey.

I am writing from the Internet Librarian Conference where about 1500 people are in attendance. So far, I have heard about many cool things other libraries are doing and some ideas for us to think about. First of all, I have to say we are right in the top mix with what other public libraries are doing and that is thanks to all of you!

In Online Marketing: Outreach and PR most of the suggestions are things we are already doing. Yea! Some sites we need to check to make sure we are listed are: Wikimapia, Blogdigger and in Google under “link:www.bplonline.org”.

To find out what our patrons are saying in social review sites and to respond to any remarks, we need to check such sites as yelp, citysearch, judy’s book, insiderdpages, and local2me.

Another way to reach out is to identify yourself as a librarian from BPL and answer questions posted on internet boards. In fact on Tuesdays, librarians are “slamming” the boards to show that librarians have the answers and it is all free. Some of the boards mentioned: Ask Meta Filter and Answer Board Librarians. We could also list staff members by name who are experts in various free expert finding tools such as allexperts.com, ziki, and illumio.

We need to make sure our wifi service is listed in: wififreespot, wifihotspot, wifi411, wiwinder, jiwire, wi-fi zone. Once we have all our locations hooked up for wifi, we will need to go back and edit these sites.

We need to push our info OUT via email and RSS The best way to get the word out about signing up for email is to acquire email addresses through sign-up sheets at all the events we participate in such as neighborhood meetings, festivals, etc. People are more likely to sign-up that they want to get a newsletter or want to receive our blogs via email by adding their email address to a paper list.

We can list our contact information in online directories such as Askcity, Yahoo! Local, and google maps.

Other things mentioned to push our info out: instant messaging, text messaging, youtube, google video, blip.tv, blinkx, singingfish.

With podzinger it is possible to transcribe audio content. Debbie is looking into a local person doing our transcriptions but if that doesn’t work out, we need to look at this and see if it is a good option to use.

We could look at twitter to see if we see any use for it for us. It could be one way to answer reference type questions.

That was just one session. Whew! I will post more later.