Sharing the Rehearsal of my Talk at the CILIP 2 Council Meeting

As I described a couple of days ago in a blog post on CILIP2.0 – Open Session on CILIP’s use of Web 2.0 myself and Phil Bradley will be giving brief talks about how we feel CILIP should respond to the opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0 at a CILIP Council meeting next Wednesday (29^th April 2009).

I have produced the first draft of my slides and I’ll be chatting to Phil how this may fit in with the approach he will be taking. I have also created a ‘slidecast’ of the talk, by recording a rehearsal of the talk and synching the audio with a copy of the slide on Slideshare. This will help Phil to gain a better understanding of what I’ll be saying. But I also feel that their can be benefits to be gained by sharing this pre-release verion with a wider audience.  In suitably-configured browsers the slidecast will be embedded below:

I’m well aware of risks in doing this: I feel slightly self-conscious about listening to the sound of my own voice and towards the end of the talk I found myself forgetting what I was intending to say and start stuttering and repeating myself.  If I felt that as a professional all of my outputs mist be of high quality although I might write a script I would leave the reading of it to a trained actor. But this would undermine the key point in my presentation that information professionals (in particular) should be willing to make use of innovative approaches to one’s work, be prepared to make mistakes and learn from them and be prepared to be open with one’s user community in the early stages of development and not just when a service has been finalised.

Making this particular slidecast available can also provide some specific benefits:

• Users can comment on my talk.
• Users can suggest other relevant resources, either by commenting on this blog post on or Slideshare page or by bookmarking resources on del.icio.us using the same tag.
• Anyone who would like to attend the meeting but can’t make it will get a feel for my contribution.
• If I fail to attend the meeting (I’m ill or First Great Western fails to get my to London on time, for example) my slidecast can be used as a replacement.

But before you start listening to the slidecast (which lasts for about 20 minutes) I should say that the talk contains nothing that I haven’t written about in my blog previously. Indeed the talk is very similar to a talks on Time To Stop Doing and Start Thinking: A Framework For Exploiting Web 2.0 Services and A Risks and Opportunities Framework For Library 2.0 which I gave in the Indianapolis last week.

To summarise the key points.

The talk begins by reviewing examples of Library 2.0 approaches, add the University of Wolverhampton and the National Library of Wales.  A description of various barriers which have been identified at various UKOLN workshop for the cultural heritage sector is given. It is acknowledged that there are  legitimate concerns which need to be addressed such as sustainability, interoperability, staff development, cultural barriers, etc. The talk describes a variety of deployment strategies and outlines a risks and opportunities framework for the deployment of Library 2.0 services. The talk suggests how a ‘Critical Friends’ approach (which I will expand on next week) can be used in conjunction with this framework and help to identify possible problem areas. The need to balances such risks with the possible benefits to be gained and the risks of doing nothing – as well as the risks of doing something similar in-house which fails to meet user’s expectations.

The talk concludes by looking at what a professional organisation such as CILIP should be doing for a young librarian (using Jo Alcock as an example) and suggests that thinking about what might be provided in a ‘CILIP 2.0 Manifesto’ could be helpful in furthering the debate.

Your comments are welcomed!

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