Day one at CIL 2005

A bit late on this post, but better late than never... Too much to see and do. I started out by checking David King's session on targeting library web sites to specific users. Academic libraries have been targeting academic departmental users for some time now with subject guides. David's talk pointed out some more general audiences - seniors, young adults. The crux of his session was meeting users with their own interests and using research into traffic logs, reference transactions and other sources to discern these interests. It might be worth taking stock of how we are meeting our student and faculty needs with our guides. David works for Kansas City Public and uses RSS feeds to push content to the subject pages - http://www.kclibrary.org/guides/. An interesting model to consider...

The other interesting news from the day was the Dead and Emerging Technologies session. Jodi alluded to it in her comments earlier. A quick rundown:

Dead = email, floppy disks, advanced search screens, anchored data storage
Emerging = rss and blogs, flash drives, IM, podcasting (audio and episodic mp3s through mobile devices like an ipod), simple search screens and mobile data storage

A good session overall and one that really made me think about how we can introduce library resources to the millennial generation. IM is calling out to reference. Check this link from University of North Carolina Libraries - http://www.lib.unc.edu/house/im_a_librarian.html. Stay tuned for more later tonight.