The first full day of the conference was amazing! It’s fully how you get on the phone to call home late at night and when asked how your day went, you start with “fine” and then 30 minutes later you haven’t stopped talking about all the things that happened to you during the day. Here are some of the highlights:
Jennifer Koerber and I ran out Issues & Challenges track for the third (and probably last for us) time and had a wonderful set of speakers including Jill Hurst-Wall, director of the iSchool at Syracuse University, to Rudy Leon from University of Nevada, Reno. (Ask her about their Burning Man collection if you get a chance.) But I must say, the standout of the track was the Innovative Library Tech: Practices & Services session presented by Carol A. Watson, Maureen Cahill, Wendy Moore, from the University of Georgia Law Library. I just can’t stop telling people how great their session was.
The point of our track was to include the audience in discussion as much as possible. These ladies took this idea and raised the bar. Not only did they take the microphones out into the audience (allowing Jennifer and I to sit and participate in the session,) they also had the individual groups at tables answer some directed questions as groups and report back to everyone in the room. Lastly, three times during the session, the invited five audience members into the “fishbowl.” During these times, those audience members were brought up to sit at the table on the stage and answer questions from the presenters. Oh, and did I mention that they did all of this in an hour?
We’ve already reported to Jane that not only should these three ladies be invited to do it again at Internet Librarian this fall, they should also be invited to take over the track from us. So, if you missed them @ CIL, please look for them at IL.
During the day I also think I agreed to write another book. Nothing’s final yet and it could end up not happening so watch this space for more details.
The other significant event of the day was my attending of the Syracuse iSchool reception at the Hillyer Art Space. There I got to meet several more iSchool students and the Dean. Short version, some of these students are currently looking for employment. Hire them! everyone I spoke with was scary smart and a complete joy to speak with even in a very crowded and loud space. That was definitely the best two-hour of my conference thus far.
I ended the day with a few hours at the hotel fire pits (sans fire) where I was again able to reconnect with several old friends. Sorry, most of those topics are considered off the record 😉
I finally crawled back to my room about 11:30 and put myself into a drug-induced (Motrin PM) sleep and refused to set my alarm. That resulted in a solid eight hours of uninterrupted sleep and I even made it just in time for the day-two keynote. I am feeling much better this morning and am looking forward to being just an attendee today.
