Handheld Librarian Online Conference

On July 27th and 28th I attended the Handheld Librarian Online Conference. Contrary to popular belief, this conference did not encourage hand-holding at all but rather it focused on handheld (aka mobile) technologies and how we can be using them to our libraries' advantages.

The first interesting workshop I attended was called, Reading Tectonics with Katie Dunneback and she presented a well-rounded overview of the impact ebooks have had on publishing as well as on libraries. Here are some juicy tidbits:

• Who reads ebooks = reverse bell curve. This means you either don't read them at all or you read them all the time. There is little middle ground right now.
• There's been a tremendous rise in self-published titles. Does this put a new spin on being able to judge a book by its publisher?
  
• Learning how to work with ebooks is a two-pronged staff: one one prong we have the technology side and on the other prong we have the customer service side. My two cents: essentially all staff need to be trainers themselves in order to provide good customer service when working with these technologies. They need to be able to tailor their help with each customer because each one is going to be coming to them with different levels of experience and comfort. Having one "this is how we do it" spiel for ebooks is not going to be good enough.

Another session I attended that was noteworth was, Getting the most out of your 140 characters; essentially this was all about working efficiently and effectively with Twitter. I have to say, it rekindled my Twitter interest. I had taken a hiatus there for a while but after attending this session I had some new things to try out. Here are some more juicy tidbits:

• Become a student of Twitter. If you want to see how it works and how it works well and who uses it well you gotta study, study, study.
  
• Follow more people than you think you should. I'm not sure I'm sold on the value of this yet but then again, maybe I'm following the wrong people.
• Follow locally. For example, I did a search on Hagerstown and have started following a few more people and businesses who are from the area. I've since added folks and businesses from Allegany county and Garrett county too!
• Follow celebrities. I'm not sure I'm sold on the value of this either because there are few celebs I'm even interested in but, the presenter says you can learn from them on how to craft good tweets. Yes, there is an art to effective tweeting!
  
• Participate in hashtag trends like A Day in the Life of a Librarian #libday7

If you're on twitter feel free to follow me and I'll return the favor. You can find me under jzamostny.