NELA, Day 2 (Part 1)

I began day 2 of NELA with Zumba at 7am, which was surprising even to me. This is the first time I've gotten up early for what they call Limber Librarians, but I've been wanting to try Zumba for a while and it was absolutely worth it. (Plus I woke up at 5:30am and couldn't get back to sleep.)

Rudyard Kipling in Vermont
Jackson Gillman, Kipling re-enactor and storyteller who works Naulakha - the house where Kipling spent four years in Dummerston, VT - spoke about Kipling's life and stories and performed a few of the stories. He was quite good, though I'm not a Kipling fan.

Net Neutrality and Intellectual Freedom
I went to this session because I know that net neutrality is a really important issue and I don't feel like I understand it. I still don't, but I know more than I did. The speaker was Lauren-Glenn Davitian from CCTV who gave a thorough overview of the history of the issue and laid out a 5-point plan:
1. Understand the issue
2. Protect yourself (updating your Facebook settings is a good start)
3. Spread the news
4. Pay attention to the FCC and FTC
5. Develop a local/regional security plan

There was some great discussion about the collection and use of our data. Many things to think about! It was kind of a downer as the situation feels a bit hopeless, but education is empowerment, right?

Over There: Wisdom from Social Media Mavens Across Disciplines

Shay Totten from VT newspaper Seven Days and Seth Mobley from VCAM (VT Community Access Media) shared advice about using social media.

From Seth:
- redundancy is a plus and consistency is a must - use the same or similar bios and avatars across various social media
- pay attention to how people in your community use social media and incorporate this
- there are thousands of social media experts out there - feel free to ignore them!

From Shay:
- keep some of your inner Luddite happy
- have people behind everything you are doing online - don't just have your twitter feed set up as an automatic feed from your blog, for example
- young people aren't on Facebook
- use TweetDeck to focus, schedule tweets, and keep yourself organized
- use categories you already have (for libraries: reference, young adult, children, etc)
- ask yourself what matters to people in your community who are using these tools
- follow relevant local hashtags

Part 2 to come
I attended one more program on the second day, but I have a lot of thoughts about it and rather than make this post even longer, I will address it separately.