A week from today, I’ll be taking part in a new project Tom Peters (of OPAL fame) has put together called Casual Conversations. From what he’s told me, it sounds like it will be a Charlie Rose-style interview (in a web conference format) where we chat about our work, stuff that we’re seeing in the profession (or tech world) that excites us, etc. It think it will be really interesting, because it’s the casual conversations I have with people I admire in the profession that I find most illuminating.
Here’s the info:
Friday, December 7, 2007 beginning at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time, 1:00 Central, noon Mountain, 11:00 a.m. Pacific, and 7:00 p.m. GMT/UTC/Zulu:
A Casual Conversation with Meredith Farkas
Meredith Farkas is the Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University in Vermont. She also blogs at Information Wants to Be Free. Her book, Social Software in Libraries, was published by Information Today earlier in 2007. She also writes a column for American Libraries, was one of the organizers of the online course, Five Weeks to a Social Library, as is known by some as the Library Queen of Wikis.
This online conversation can be accessed in various ways through the following URL:
http://www.conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs1641902f62b4
The Casual Conversations series is designed to be up-close and personal from a respectable online distance. While there are many conferences (in-person, online, and in-world) where librarians can hear leaders in the field make formal presentations about interesting projects, there are few opportunities to hear these same leaders discuss informally what they currently are working on, their future plans and goals, the challenges and opportunities facing librarianship, their personal pet peeves, etc.
This afternoon, at 2pm ET/1pm CT, Tom will be interviewing Aaron Schmidt, someone I think a great deal of, both as a person and as a librarian/techie. If you’re interested, and you should be, his conversation can be accessed from the same URL above.
Here are the rest of the upcoming conversations:
Friday, Jan. 18, 2008: Curtis Rogers
Friday, Feb. 8, 2008: Lori Bell
Friday, Feb. 15, 2008: Michelle Boule
Friday, March 28, 2008: Marshall Breeding
Friday, April 11, 2008: Jenny Levine
Friday, May 16, 2008: Stephen Abram
Friday, June 6, 2008: Michael Stephens
Looks like a great project and I look forward to listening to many of these. Thanks Tom!
Will this be archived? I’d love to listen but I’ll be on the desk next Friday and they might frown upon me being totally zoned out with headphones.
Yes, this will be archived and should be available on the OPAL website http://www.opal-online.org/ soon after the 7th.
Hi Meredith, thanks for the casual conversation.
I like the idea and it is nice to hear someone talk for longer than 5 minutes.
And since you’re looking into the open source ILS here is my favorit song one more time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSHBzd9ftDE
..and Tom, maybe you can crank up the mic a little bit for next conversations?