Today started off with Stephen Abrams giving a wonderful, as usual, speech about libraries and innovation and the future. I sat next to Cliff, who took notes as Stephen spoke, so I’ll let him give you the details on the talk. After that, I went to lay out for a bit on the beach, since it was beautifully sunny out and I got a bit more sun – as well as a nice lunch at the beach bar & grill.
After cleaning up, I went down to my conference room to get set up for my presentation. I was a bit early (since I’m still on US time, not Jamaican time) and Michael Sauers came by early as well to keep me company, since he figured people wouldn’t really start showing up until 10 minutes or so after 2 (the session was scheduled for 2pm). He was right, and we got started promptly at 2:15.
The room was seriously HOT (and not in a Michael Stephens way), so I pretty much sailed through my slides very, very quickly. I managed to do my 90 minute presentation in just under an hour, just so I could get out of there! The room was pretty much packed – almost all the chairs were taken, so there were probably 50 or so folks in this pretty small room. That didn’t help! After questions, including a great question on copyright issues with Amazon book jackets used in catalogs that I totally handed off to Mr. Sauers (and he loves me for it, I’m sure…), the session broke up. At that point, Erik & Jaap – who are in Jamaica filming for the LBI Shanachie Tour, asked me if they could interview me about library uses of mashups. Those of you who were at Internet Librarian last year might remember them. At this point I remembered that I hadn’t put on any makeup after cleaning up when I came back from the beach. Hopefully the slight sunburn I have will keep me from looking like a dead fish on camera… I’ve been following the exploits of these two talented filmmakers for a while, via the biblioblog circuit, and was thrilled to be included in their project!
Now, it’s stormy (and I have discovered a true love for sitting on my covered balcony, smoking and drinking my cranberry juice and watching a truly warm thunderstorm go by) and I’m glad I took the time this morning to get some sun. I’ll probably not be able to do much laying out until Wed, since I want to see the panel on copyright issues tomorrow morning and I’m back into the presentation room tomorrow afternoon (and I may be heading into Montego Bay proper with Michael and his wife before my song-and-dance). After my presentation is Cliff’s session on Info Overload – I definitely want to attend that one – and then the Jamaican cultural celebration is that night.
I’m here on my own – the library isn’t sending me – but I’m managing to get in as much library-related conference stuff as I do when they do pay my way. There is something wrong with that picture. I should be spending more time on the beach! Oh well, I wouldn’t be teaching others about this crazy Web 2.0 stuff if I didn’t love it myself, so I guess I’ll come back slightly less charbroiled and slightly more informed than I’d planned!
Categories
