What happened at the Library 2.0 forum?
Well, I don’t know… err I didn’t have £250.
However, I have been having a look at DaveyP’s (photo)graphs;
In Part 5, the importance of opac online catalogue features to academic and public sectors is interesting. Public libraries are usually very hot on reader development – all those book displays and promotions (I have to get on with constructing a six foot black swan that will sit outside Hereford Cathedral and read book extracts to passers by!). So it is perhaps no surprise that pubic libraries want the also borrowed, user comments, user learning, user ratings and user tagging features, after all, libraries are trying to appeal to the community… ooh look, social networks…
Conversely, how would a user of an academic library rate a book on the social impact of small mammals on populations of wilderbeast? It’s only going to be interesting to a very select bunch… very select…
In Part 6 I am struck by the amount of people who feel that their opacs online catalogues are not easy to use for their public. I am sure this is true. I tried to use an opac in Birmingham central library once – couldn’t make head or tail of it.
And having not been to the forum – I still don’t know what Phil Bradley looks like 
.
April 20th, 2007 at 18:38
That’s actually what he looked like. To protect his identity, he did the entire presentation from behind a thick sheet of frosted glass
To be honest, I hadn’t spotted that the camera had decided to focus on the shoulder of the woman sat in front of me (which is cropped out of the image), but you know how much I love serendipity!
At the risk of never being invited back to the NEC again, I did think the forum price was a little too high — I’m sure they could have easily charged half that and gotten 3 times as many delegates.
If it’s of interest, I’ve just uploaded a pile of graphs showing the spread of responses to individual questions:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davepattern/tags/respondentspread/