On Friday I survived an early morning wake-up, 2 flights through three timezones, and a day that ended at 1am in my home timezone. That makes it nearly 22 hours of being awake! I slept like a rock last night, despite fireworks going off at the nearby Disneyland park. I’m tired tonight, but more than happy to be at ALA, learning new things and meeting old friends.

Today I attended a CONTENTdm session that was both an overview of OCLC’s CONTENTdm software and their Digital Archive services and an in-depth demonstration of how to use their Acquisitions Station software to catalog compound objects. Cataloging compound objects like yearbooks, books, and postcards made me rethink my priorities when I return to work after the conference. They can be very complex and require specialized knowledge of PDFs, full-resolution images, and filenaming conventions. I’m definitely going to delegate more everyday stuff so I can spend time on CONTENTdm and other projects.

The OCLC Symposium was thought-provoking. Although the theme was mash-ups, the keynote speaker, Michael Schrage, didn’t spend much time talking about mash-ups in the sense that we’re used to hearing about them. He talked about innovation and said it’s the conversion of novelty into value, although the definition of novelty depends on the perceptions of individuals. He said libraries should find out what our customers think is the most innovative thing we do. Four actions libraries should take are:
1. Learn from our lead users- find out who they are.
2. Think about who we want to collaborate with to create value for both parties.
3. Market our best internal arguments & disagreements.
4. Establish “Liberatories” that attract talent and inspire hypotheses.

He finished with a quote that I really liked: “Success comes from not taking the path of least resistance, but the path of maximum advantage.”

A panel discussion followed with David Lee King, Mary Beth Sancomb-Moran, and Susan Gibbons discussing their mashups and answering questions from the audience. David discussed mashups like RSS feeds linked to resources in their catalog, a Meebo IM widget for reference and dead links in the catalog, bookmobile stops on a Google map, patron comments that can be added anywhere on their website, and how they used outside software like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter for user-contributed content. Mary Beth showed a map mash-up of the Minnesota Sesquicenntial banner’s travels through 11 counties and 35 public libraries. She also used a map mashup to show legislators and constituents which libraries they represented. Susan discussed how they asked students and faculty to give input as to what they liked, disliked, or thought was missing from the library’s web page. Students wanted things the library never thought of, like dining room schedules, IM, Facebook, and course-specific information. The libarary worked with the registrar to create a mash-up of subject guides with course names, meeting times, professor names and a dynamic link to a librarian, whose title was different depending on the course associated with the subject guide.