Library Bazaar » Conferences

TEDxLibrariansTO speaker videos now online

Fiacre — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:30:13 +0000

The speaker videos from TEDxLibrariansTO are now available, starting with Melanie McBride and John Miedema. The final five videos will be posted over the next few days. Enjoy!

TEDxLibrariansTO’s first speaker announced

Fiacre — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:59:29 +0000

I’m currently co-organizing a TEDx event, called TEDxLibrariansTO, specifically for librarians and information professionals to take place in Toronto on June 25.

We have just announced our first speaker, John Miedema, and will be announcing more as the event draws near. Fell free to check out the event’s website and help us spread the word. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Augmented reality, one year later

Fiacre — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:27:27 +0000

Layar was launched in June 2009 and this interview with Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, one of the founders and current general manager, looks at the last year and their future goals. Of particular note is Lens-FitzGerald’s mention of Bruce Sterling’s keynote, “At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry“, from the Launch Event in August last year.

Video: Bruce Sterling’s Keynote – At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry from Maarten Lens-FitzGerald on Vimeo.

Can libraries learn from The Rocky Mountain News?

Fiacre — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:55:32 +0000

Here is a thought provoking presentation by John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of The Rocky Mountain News. Founded in 1859, The Rocky Mountain News was Colorado’s oldest newspaper. However, it published its final edition on February 27, 2009. It was the first major paper to close after the economic crash and Temple outlines the events that led to the paper’s closure, many of them related to the paper’s inability to deal with new technologies. He believes that the lessons he learned can be broadly applied, and I am sure librarians can draw insights from his presentation to help us understand our engagement with both emerging technologies and our users.

Temple’s ten lessons are as follows;

Know what business you’re in.
Know your customers.
Know your competition.
Know your goal.
Have a strategy and be committed to pursuing it.
Measure, measure, measure.
Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old.
Let the people running a new venture do what’s best for their business, regardless of the potential impact on the old.
To compete in a new medium, you have to understand it.
Invest in R&D.

Tuesday tech links: Conferences

Fiacre — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:05:11 +0000

I love attending conferences and try to squeeze in as many as possible. However, time, distance and expense have to be taken into consideration, so my options are often limited. The following are upcoming conferences I wish I could attend. If anyone out there is attending any of these, please contact me, as attending conferences vicariously is often just as entertaining.

1. ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. I’ve mentioned the real-time web many times on this blog, and this event should produce some exciting insights.

The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit will be made up of a smart and diverse group of people. Together we will discuss the key questions, in the process creating a final agenda on-site – and in real-time! The Real-Time Web is changing so fast that no predetermined agenda of talking heads on stage can do it justice.

2. The Internet as Playground and Factory. A fascinating subject that is rarely discussed in the rush to find the next up-and-coming social media app.

Today we are arguably in the midst of massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media. The purpose of this conference is to interrogate these dramatic shifts restructuring leisure, consumption, and production since the mid-century. In the 1950s television began to establish commonalities between suburbanites across the United States. Currently, communities that were previously sustained through national newspapers now started to bond over sitcoms. Increasingly people are leaving behind televisions sets in favor of communing with — and through– their computers. They blog, comment, procrastinate, refer, network, tease, tag, detag, remix, and upload and from all of this attention and all of their labor, corporations expropriate value. Guests in the virtual world Second Life even co-create the products and experiences, which they then consume. What is the nature of this interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality that it brings into being? What are we doing to ourselves?

3. Engaging Data Forum. As we enter the next phase of the web, it seems privacy will become an even more contentious issue.

The Engaging Data: First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information is the launching event of the Engaging Data Initiative, which will include a series of discussion panels and conferences at MIT. This initiative seeks to address the issues surrounding the application and management of personal electronic information by bringing together the main stakeholders from multiple disciplines, including social scientists, engineers, manufacturers, telecommunications service providers, Internet companies, credit companies and banks, privacy officers, lawyers, and watchdogs, and government officials.

Wildcard. Shift Electronic Arts Festival. I firmly believe that librarians, when looking at technology and trying to divine its future direction and what it will mean for our profession, should pay greater attention to the art world, where early adopters and innovators can be found.

From the dazzling shaman of dance music Ebony Bones to electro pioneers Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius aka Cluster, from Susan Collins’ live-video broadcast from a haunted house in Britain and real-time tech-necromancy courtesy of Hamburg robotics artists F18, to seriously fathoming the borders of reality with the video medium: with “Magic. Tech-Evocations and Assumptions of Paranormal Realities” as its theme, Shift guarantees an enchantingly varied programme.