I went to two presentations at ALA Midwinter that talked about situating libraries and librarians into their user’s online spaces. Both presentations made me reflect on outreach; of stepping outside the library walls to build relationships, of discovering the needs of the people using your library service, and of putting the library in front of people where they are getting their information needs met by other providers.

At the OCLC Symposium held on Saturday, David Weinberger (of Everything is Miscellaneous and Cluetrain Manifesto) and Nova Spivack (of twine.com and grandson of Peter Drucker) talked about the semantic web, and what it means for libraries. Both Spivack and Weinberger emphasized the power of the collective, and the importance of understanding the social graph. When asked by an audience member what it meant for information professionals, Weinberger said “you need to be in a smart network”, meaning, make sure you are on Facebook and twitter, or whatever relevant online community space there is. But make sure the people in your network are saying smart things, and pointing you to good information. You can check out the tweets of other attendees to get a sense of the lively conversation the talk engendered.

On Sunday, David Lee King, Cindi Trainor, and WebJunction’s own Rachel Van Noord gave a talk about putting the library into the online spaces where your users are and how to cultivate that online community space. David’s library in Topeka, Kansas is on Facebook and twitter with friends and  use YouTube to share online book reviews and guides to using the library. But what he emphasized was that these tools are not just mechanisms to push out information, but are instead platforms for engaging their community members into a conversation with the library.

In the same talk, Cindi talked about how her library uses LibX, an internet broswer plug-in which literally situates library resources into online resources such as Wikipedia, Google Scholar results, and amazon and barnes & noble search results. Rachel ended the presentation by talking about the 5 principles of cultivating online community, re-emphasizing David’s point that conversation and leadership are keys to engaging people in the online space.