I'm at ALA in Anaheim right now going to programs, cruising the booths, and catching up with colleagues. I attended an OCLC Symposium yesterday on the topic of using mash-ups in your library. The talk was great, but I thought the best bits of information came from David Lee King. He is the Digital Branch and Services Manager at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. He talked about useful ways to implement meebo widgets, RSS feeds, google map mashups, and the publication of user content such as teen poetry on their site. He also talked about how your library can use Google "ego" alerts to keep track of what people are saying about your library online. It's a great way to respond to users whether they post good, bad, or incorrect information about your library. It's well worth a listen if/when OCLC posts the video on their site.....

I'm wrapping up my stay in Claremont, California, the "city of trees and phd's." I flew down here for the ContentDM users group meeting which was really a pretty great event with lots of great presentations, awesome accommodations, and a lot of really nice people. I'm mostly impressed by the wealth of knowledge in this community of users, and I hope to take back what I have learned and apply it to our shared collections using ContentDM. It's also really exciting to see all these institutions digitizing collections, and putting them out there for the public.