The Travelin' Librarian

Some final thoughts and reflections on my recent attendance at the Computers and Libraries 2006 conference in Washington, DC.

• I was happy to meet Kimberly Babcock Mashek of Wartburg College (IA), Erin Kinney of the Wyoming State Library, and Paul Miller of Talking with Talis during the conference yet have been remiss in mentioning them earlier. Many apologies. (I’m bad with names so, if you should feel that you earned a mention, many more appologies as I probably have forgotten your name. It’s nothing personal, honest.)
• Michael Casey: we were both there but somehow never linked up. Maybe next time.
• During the conference Neal-Schuman sold four copies of my latest Web design book. That may not sound like a lot but it was every copy they brought with them and more than most titles sell at a conference.
• The March issue of Computers in Libraries was the one being given away from free at the conference. The cool part is that that’s the issue with my article in it.
• The overlap with PLA basically sucked but I understand the difficulties involved in planning such an event. However, I’ve been thinking about this and I thinking that maybe it was a good thing. Here’s why. Granted, many of the people I wanted to talk to and hang out with went to PLA on Thursday but several people made the comment to me that it was “nice to see new blood presenting at the conference.” One of the things that allowed all this new blood was the fact that the old blood wasn’t there. Those folks not being there also forced me to hand out with different people and hopefully make some new long-term friends and contacts.

Well, unless anything else comes to mind in the next week you can safely assume that this is it for my blogging of CIL2006. Thanks for reading.

About Michael

Michael Sauers is currently the Technology Innovation Librarian for the Nebraska Library Commission in Lincoln, Nebraska and has been training librarians in technology for more than 15 years. He has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller. He earned his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael’s tenth book, Blogging & RSS: A Librarian’s Guide, Second Edition was published October 2010 with three more books to be published in 2012. He has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs Web sites for authors and historical societies, takes many, many photos, and reads more than 100 books a year.

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