2007

Lots of ideas at the LITA Emerging Technologies IG

When: Monday Jan. 22, 2007 The scene: Around 60-70 people attended this IG on the final day of the ’07 Midwinter conference. It was standing room only, which of course meant that several sat on the floor. The discussion was wide-ranging, with Joe Ford, of Joseph Ford & Associates, presiding as incoming chair. The primary role of the Emerging Technologies IG at Midwinter is to program the summer session as close to the bleeding edge as possible, and to that end, nearly everyone attending had suggestions on what they would like to see this coming June in Washington D.C. With very little coaxing, the group took off on a free-wheeling discussion, talking about what emerging technologies most interest or concern them. Several themes quickly emerged: the implications of widely available broadband, large amounts of personal storage capacity, the effects of widely social information consumption, as well as the legal and…

2006

Scenes from the ALA opening session

Very impressive baritone telling people the session is about to start. We need have this guy recorded and announcing that “the library is now closing” all across the country. The session led off with a surprisingly moving video of ALA and New Orleans, outlining the recovery efforts of the past year. They showed some amazing footage of the devastation, and the fixes being attempted. Mayor Ray Nagin, talking about the importance that libraries have played here, Nagin says that “libraries have been the centerpoint of the diaspora.” Mitch Landrieu regaled the audience with the world’s longest joke. Madeleine Albright gave a powerful speach. Some highlights: “Libraries are the laboratories of freedom.” Talking about freedom, she said “what we preach abroad, we also need to practise at home.” The axis of evil is actually “poverty, ignorance, and disease.”

2006

Kicking liaison work up a notch …

Okay, I admit it. The main reason I coughed up $200 for this seminar was so I could figure out what to do with my subject guides. Happily, the experience was more than worth it, as I came away from ACRL’s “Taking Your Library Liaison Program to the Next Level” a little brighter and a little better equipped to bump things up a notch. The speakers, Craig Gibson and Jamie Coniglio of George Mason University, kept things moving with lots of case studies. At one point our individual tables had to craft a liaison program from scratch with just a year to do it, which turned out to be a complicated process. There was a lot of talk of freeing up librarians to do their liaison work. One sticking point, of course, is the amount of time liaison librarians typically spend on the reference desk. It’s tough to pry us…