Conversants Keynote Title and Abstract

Here are the title and abstract for the keynote:

They Named the Building After Us: The Library as Conversation

The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. Through service, innovation, and leadership librarians facilitate conversations in schools, communities, colleges, government, businesses, and beyond. It is this act of facilitation of knowledge in partnership with communities that makes a library – not collections, blogs, catalogs, or ivy on walls. This is the central premise of participatory librarianship. This keynote will explore the new role of librarians as a passionate and powerful force focused on the social good. It will present a unifying approach to librarianship that seeks to make sense of Library 2.0 and information commons alike.