Standard Social Sharing and Aggregation on the Go: Access 2010 presentation

Earlier this week, I had the honour of speaking at the Access 2010 conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The title of my talk was rather unwieldy, but what it boiled down to was:

• An environmental scan of how libraries are currently offering users of their services the ability to share their thoughts and to connect with one another around library activities
• A brief overview of some relevant emerging standards for socially-enabled applications (Activity Streams, XHTML Friends Network (XFN), and the HTML5 browser geolocation API)
• Some of my thoughts about how library software could adopt these standards to knit together experiences across library system boundaries, and outside of library systems altogether
• Some findings from an initial implementation of one of these standards (Activity Streams) in the Evergreen library system

Here are the slides (OpenDocument, PDF) and the accompanying recording (OGG Vorbis, MP3). Thanks to Bill Denton for the use of his recorder for the audio!

One quick reflection is that, in the interest of using a familiar example, I think I focused too much on sharing and aggregating objects (such as reviews) between libraries and didn't make a good argument for the value of enabling connections between people based on their activities.