A TASTE OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES with Megan Fox
By Tom Clark

The 2005-2006 Boston Chapter Programming Calendar kicked off on Thursday, August 25 at Pierce Atwood Law firm in Portland, ME with Simmons Professor and technology guru Megan Fox (http://web.simmons.edu/~fox/), the Web & Electronic Resources Librarian for the Simmons College Libraries presenting "A Taste of New Technologies." Twenty five attendees were hosted by the Pierce Atwood Librarian Kami Bedard and her admin Megan York in a beautiful Portland setting.

Megan launched the late-afternoon session with her Top 10 list of new and exciting technologies that have taken the information world by storm. But like the wonderful sunny day that greeted the attendees in Portland - Megan clears away the clouds of confusion and empowered all the attendees in how best to embrace these exciting new technologies.

Starting with the handheld and mobile market, Megan introduced many exciting tools (or toys, as they seem to be called) that go far beyond the common PDA or cell phone. Megan raced into the exciting world of Blogs, RSS, Podcasts, Wikis and Instant Messaging, and continued the exciting journey with the enhanced online offerings beyond traditional search engines which include toolbars, deskbars, desktop search, bookmarklets, widgets, social bookmarking tools and many other del.icio.us offerings. Finishing up with a flourish in the folksonomy world, Megan showed how community practitioners are categorizing and tagging wide-ranging sets of information.

Throughout the two-hour long presentation, Megan was careful to explain how each tool, toy or offering could be used and enhanced by the library world. Catalog information, reference material and subscription resources can be delivered to portable devices. In addition to many informative library-related blogs, blogs and wikis can be used for internal delivery of information, live FAQs, favorites, virtual suggestion boxes, marketing and more. Personalized RSS feeds can be used for due-date reminders. Instant Messaging potentially offers the quickest route to delivering answers and the social bookmarking and folksonomy/tagging world is enhanced by the organizational controls already mastered in the library world.

After the content-rich afternoon, many of the attendees gathered for a post-session dinner at "Maverick's" in downtown Portland. This is the second consecutive year the Boston Chapter Northern Outreach program has traveled to Portland and judging by the turnout and happy smiles of the attendees, an August SLA program in Portland will become an annual event.

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