Last Friday I got to attend a conference sponsored by the Indiana Library Federation (ILF)’s Reference Division. Actually, I got to do a presentation at the conference. The name of the conference was: “How to use Hot Technologies and not get Burned.” I was honored to be a presenter along with Jessamyn West and Michael Stephens! If you’ve never visit their websites, they are MUST-READS for any librarian who develops, uses, dabbles in, or even touches technology!

Jessamyn’s website/blog: Librarian.Net
Michael’s website/blog: Tame the Web

Topics covered at the conference included: blogs, wikis, IM, Jybe, Skype, Flickr, RSS, podcasting, and how/when to use them. Some of it was as basic as introducing people to the technologies, and other parts were more philosophical, asking the “why” questions and discussing benefits of using the technologies.

Final word: We’ve now got a generation of people who were “born with the chip,” who use all these technologies and who expect to see them used by libraries. If we don’t stay on the ball, they’ll drop us like a broken-down Commodore 64 and find someone who’ll give them an iPod Nano!