Back in September I had the pleasure of presenting at the Association of Rural and Small Libraries (ARSL) conference in Gatlinburg, TN. The session, Leading Edge Librarianship, was a 60 minute talk about some of the changes that are taking place in our patrons’ information landscape and what sorts of technologies we need to be aware of to stay relevant to our patrons’ information world.

A few months after the presentation, I was delighted to see Anne Layton Rice from the Monroe County Public Library in Key West, Florida (they’re on Facebook!), post something to the ARSL listserv about what she learned from that talk and how she had incorporated it into her work. The best part? It wasn’t the content of my talk, but the format that really hit home for her! I used a presentation tool called Prezi instead of PowerPoint (follow presentation the link above to see it in action), and for Anne, part of the message of my talk was the medium. Here’s what she posted to the ARSL list:

Last week, I used Prezi for a class on Flickr for very beginner web users. (“Beginner”, as in, they just set up their first email address last month.) I think Prezi is better than PowerPoint for most presentations, as PowerPoint is rather linear, while Prezi allows your presentation to “float” from bigger to smaller concepts and back and forth to show relationships. I found myself zooming in, out, back and around in Prezi during the Flickr class. This is more characteristic of how we present to a group, I think—esp. when we introduce new ideas.

The Flickr class was great fun.

Here’s Anne’s Flickr Prezi.

Here are a few other points Anne made about Prezi from a follow up email (to me, not the list):

• I’m bored to death by PowerPoints but needed visual cues for this class. Experimenting with Prezi made class preparation fun for me—I think it showed.
• Don’t you hate when a presenter responds to your question with “We’ll get to that slide in a minute.”? Prezi allows an immediate response within that teachable moment.

Anne also let me know that she’s working on a few other “leading edge” things, too! Her library is looking for a new ILS and they’re inquiring of each prospective vendor about their product’s support (or lack thereof!) for RSS; they’re working on getting a chat reference widget embedded onto the desktop of each of their public workstations; and, she writes, “I’m challenging my colleagues to give me one good reason why we should spend our paltry operating budget on MS Office upgrades when we can use GoogleDocs instead.”

Way to go, Anne! Way to drive progress!

Her Library’s Flickr collection has some great shots – check it out!

This is a great story, overall, but I think that what makes it so great for me is that in a time of little or no spare money for libraries, Anne was able to make it to a great conference that was relevant to her work, and then was able to make that trip valuable to her library by taking concrete action based on what she learned there. I have no doubt that the Monroe County Library service community will be better off thanks to Anne’s ambition!

What about your library? What sort of leading edge activities are you engaged in to offer your patrons more interesting and valuable services? Let us know in the comments!