It's a wrap!

We had our wrap up meeting for the MULTA project today. This was a two month collaborative project where library staff used a tikiwiki environment to find out ablout blogs, wikis, social tagging, forums, RSS feeds, Library 2.0 and some of the associated memes. I wrote a wiki page defining each one and set weekly tasks involving one technology per week. I also ran a "hands on" workshop once a week.

The reminder I sent out to staff about today's meeting. Thanks to Librarian in Black for the pointer to says-it.com.

We decided how we wanted to continue to use the site, and to continue MULTAting new technologies (what about podcasting and screencasting and virtual worlds and....). We are forming a group to implement some of the recommendations we created as part of a group wiki editing exercise.

We finished up with an amazing spontaneous conversation . It just showed that people had really "got" the implications of the new tools. The topics ranged from:

• the budget for our online journals and whether people could access them well
• google scholar
• what our younger users are up to
• how these tools are a bit like the internet when we were first exposed to them - we know that they will change what we do, but can't exactly see how,
• Second Life and Universities with campuses there
• how we can find out how our users are using our site
• how the number of information sources has grown so large that we can't afford the luxury of providing subject heading access like we used to
• how far we should go to meet students where they are instead of where we think they should be. (is this new for academic libraries? - I don't think so)
  
• where intellectual rigour fits into students' searching strategies.
  

Being able to talk about these things in a knowledgable way without seeming totally confused, scared or bewildered was the aim of the project, so I was just sitting there thinking "yes, yes, yes..yaaaay!". We raised many more questions than we answered, but I think that also might have been the whole point of the project.