IFLA Talk

I gave a talk, well in fact two talks, back to back, to about 150 librarians at the IFLA conference (IFLA: The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) in Quebec City in early August. My first talk was KM2.0 KM goes Social and the second was a rerun of a talk I gave at actKM Conference in Canberra last year where I look at how I use social tools. You can find the slides in SlideShare.


My talks were the lead in to three shorter talks from Mary Lee Kennedy, Executive Director, Knowledge and Library Services (KLS), Harvard Business School; Moira Fraser, Parliamentary Librarian & Group Manager, Information & Knowledge, New Zealand Parliament and Patrick Danowski, Project Manager, Statsbibliotek su Berlin. All ably chaired by Jane Dysart.

We then broke out into a panel Q&A and discussion. There was a huge amount of interest in KM and social tools from the librarians in the room. I think everyone was pretty much trying to figure out how they could apply social tools in their own organizations. And of course the perennial question came up : "how do you measure the benefits of social tools?"

There were some answers from the panel but my answer was that there are basically two approaches: 1. Was the traditional - figure out your business outcomes and measure against those and 2. if you don't understand social tools and what they can do for you then there is no way you can measure the benefits. So experiment and pilot first. (There is a short article or blog posty brewing in my head on this!)

More on the IFLA conference: if you can read Dutch then a short article from Karolien Selhorst and a blog post from Jane Dysart on the Social KM and tools session. And some photos. Also IFLA has a very active KM Section.