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TED Talks are great. The Technology Education and Design conference occurs every year. This invite-only conference brings in world leaders in various areas, and gives them 18 minutes to present. 18 minutes is about perfect. It’s long enough that they can cover content with depth and content, but short enough that they don’t drag on and you can make time to watch them. Most speakers, as world leaders, tend to be very effective presenters as well. You can see talks on the TED website.

Kevin and I like them, and we both have learned a lot from them. However, as you know, it’s hard to find 18 minutes most of the time. So yesterday, during lunch in the space outside of our offices, we watched a TED talk with Craig, Erik, and Kaeley and then followed up with some casual conversation about how some of the ideas might apply to the library.

We watched Malcolm Gladwell (of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers) talk about spaghetti sauce. His talk focused on a study of people’s spaghetti sauce preference, and how instead of there being one best average sauce, there were people that clustered along different types. Further, many people didn’t say that their favorite was their favorite. One of his examples was that nearly everyone says they like a dark, rich cup of coffee, but really, less than 1/3 of people do. More people prefer a weak, milky cup of coffee:

Our conversations focused on what “clusters” our users might belong to, and that they might not necessarily shake out by the traditional student/faculty/staff/community member lines we typically draw. We talked about different data that we already collect that might be useful, and how information about clustering could inform our services.

If this sounds interesting to you, bring a bag lunch next Wednesday, and we’ll watch another!