Tuesday, 24 April 2018

All the Acronyms: LILAC, ICEPOPS and IFTTT

The last few weeks have been busy for me conference wise. Perhaps the biggest event I have attended was LILAC 2018 and its satellite event ICEPOPS

For those who don't know, LILAC is one of the larger conferences in the library calendar with a special focus on information literacy. As usual there was a great selection of speakers and the keynotes can now be viewed online (I especially recommend watching David White's talk on Posthuman Literacies). The first ICEPOPS - International Copyright-Literacy Event with Playful Opportunities for Practitioners and Scholars - was held the day before LILAC and provided a chance for those interested in learning more about copyright education to get together and learn about different approaches. Both events were really useful and I ended up tweeting so much that Twitter thought I was a bot and briefly suspended my account!

I usually write a reflective blog post on events I attend but this time I decided to try something different - sharing my notes and tweet archive from the conference. Partly this is in the spirit of openness and ensuring that those who couldn't attend the event got a chance to see what was said and partly this helps me to justify to myself the huge amount of money I recently spent on a MacBook Air! In all seriousness I thought it would be good to share the full picture that I took away from the events. Usually when I blog I end up leaving a lot out as otherwise posts would be about eight pages long. This way you can see everything that I thought worth writing down (although it is of course my own personal interpretation of what was noteworthy). People seemed to enjoy reading these during the conference itself so I've collected them together here as a record. 









I also shared my collected tweets from both events. Setting up a personal archive of tweets is something I try to do from most events I attend as I use Twitter as a form of note taking and find this an easier way to go back through my own notes.








A few people have since asked me how I created these archives so I've included the instructions below. I find it a really useful way of keeping notes but I'd be interested to learn about the different methods other people use.

Setting up a tweet archive with IFTT
  1. Create an account on IFTTT
  2. Connect your Twitter and Google Drive accounts
  3. Go to My Applets - New Applet
  4. Under IF select Twitter
  5. Select New tweet by you with hashtag 
  6. Specify the hashtag of the event when prompted then select Create trigger
  7. Under Then that select Google Sheets
  8. Select Add row to spreadsheet. At this point you will be prompted to select an existing spreadsheet or set up a new one. You can also alter the way that the tweet is collected at this stage (IFTTT will guide you through it)
  9. Select Create action and you're ready to go. The applet will run automatically
IFTTT is quite an intuitive site which guides you through the process of automating things quickly and easily. Remember that these archives only work if they are set up in advance as they collect information as it happens rather than retrospectively. If anyone knows a way of creating an archive retrospectively then I'm open to hearing about it! 


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