I’ll be updating this real-time, but posting it at the end of the day. For those of you desperate for realtime updates, you’ll have to go elsewhere. Of course, by the time you are reading this, it’ll be too late anyway…
Enough babbling – the conference is filling up and folks are getting their laptops and bags open and ready! The welcome speech starts at 10am, and that’s 2 minutes away, according to my laptop clock. There is a great spread of food and drink that everyone is taking advantage of – Bobbi is already starting her “how much coffee can I drink today” countdown and munching on fruit. I’m full of coffee from the 3 hour drive up here this morning and have already switched to diet coke w/lime. Yum.
Brenda Hough is welcoming us to the unconference and is setting up the expectations for the conference itself. Sounds like it will be cool!!! Stressing that attendees are key to success – and that attendees need to be generous. This is an excellent point. Polling the attendees for the types of librarians, location of attendees and is skipping personal introductions (100 registered – good idea). Spent some time introducing ourselves to 4 or 5 people around us. Met cool ladies doing Spanish outreach training, something we should be doing more of (Spanish Outreach, not the training).
Jason came up and introduced us to the facility and the wireless service available. They made laptops and projectors available and they have several rooms available for us. He also explained that each discussion will get an assigned (or volunteered) leader who will grab one of the projectors and take it to their room.
They then opened up the discussion to planning. Audience members shouted out what topics they wanted, the audience was polled for interest and the room was assigned. It went pretty smoothly, really.
The first session was about about staff training and there were a LOT of ideas for training in academic libraries. There were a couple of us discussing training public library staff, too, but lots of ideas for training academic librarians who are a bit more removed from their IT departments.
The second session was during
lunch where a group of 12 or so of us discussed Web 2.0 tools (twitter seemed to be a popular one…) over lunch at the Hibachi Hut in Manhattan (Aggieville). There was some great discussions, including a discussion about what is coming up next in the 2.0 world. The consensus of the group is that it hasn’t been built yet – it’s still to come. MySpace is still the king, percentages wise, of the social networking world and the next big thing isn’t yet here. What do you all think about that?
The afternoon session was admirably liveblogged by Erin at http://librarycampks.wetpaint.com/page/Library+Catalog+afternoon+session, so go take a look at it there.
Closing thougts – Wrapup and review from the wiki. They got consensus about the need for another conference next year – place to be determined, exact time (other than on a Saturday, apparently) in discussion as well.
