When the wiki was first created, I put up a page for people who are blogging the conference so that people would know where they could find conference reports. Well, Luke, from the lbr blog took it one huge step further. Here’s an excerpt from the email he sent me:
If a number of people are interested, I’m thinking about adding a more complete schedule of programs/events to the wiki so that folks could “sign up” in advance to cover an event. Then once a blog entry on that event is ready, the blogger could add a link directly from the schedule to their “report” — and in this way, the wiki itself could become a
hub to tie together all the “coverage” from various blogs.In fact, if promoted right, we might even be able to get non-bloggers involved, because they could simply add their report as another page in the wiki (or we could help them do so).
Luke, when I meet you, I may just have to kiss you! What a fantastic idea! It’s great that we have PLA covering public library events, LITA covering technology related events, and various bloggers covering whatever it is they go to, but there is no one-stop-shop for conference reports. People have to visit dozens of websites and blogs if they want to learn about what happened at the conference and there is no way to know who is blogging about a specific event. So Luke added the Conference Reports section to the ALA Wiki. In it, he includes a list of possibly every event at the conference (but feel free to add more if you know of others) with a link to a report page. If you blog about a specific event, session, or lecture, all you have to do is go into the report entry for that event and add a link to your blog entry. For those of you who are interested in getting your feet wet in conference reporting/blogging/wiki-ing, this is probably the easiest way to do it and requires no real committment or limitations. Just go into the entry for the event you went to and write about it. You don’t need your own blog, just write it into the wiki itself. This way, we can provide a ton of fabulous content — and links to fabulous content — for those who either couldn’t attend the conference or couldn’t attend a specific session they’re interested in. We’ll be sure to link to all of the posts at the LITA Blog, PLA Blog, or any other group blogs we find — though anyone can link to any posts they find on specific events.
The beauty of this is that you don’t really need to sign up in advance unless you want to. If you go to a session that you find inspiring or horrible, you can decide right then and there that you want to write it up in the wiki. I know last year there were so many amazing events at the conference that occured at exactly the same time, so this is a great opportunity to get a report on the events you inevitably have to miss (unless someone has figured out how to clone librarians). 🙂
This has to be one of the coolest ideas I’ve heard about this year. Please consider participating in this unique reporting opportunity. We’re librarians — we’re all about getting information out there!
