I attended the 2012 MinneWebCon last April. While the sessions were great–especially a last-minute replacement UX crash course from The Nerdery, plunking the we need to do user testing sooooo baaaaaad seeds inside my brain, most enjoyable were keynote speaker John Moe’s PowerPoint slides:
YES. YES. I UNDERSTAND.
Quick shoutout! I recently started an internship with Public Radio International cataloging radio segments for the PRI / WNYC show, The Takeaway. I’ll also be presenting at the Library Technology Conference 2010 at Macalester College in St. Paul next week with my Augsburg colleagues, discussing contracting for LibGuides. Forget how to make the dang things work—how can cash-strapped libraries mired in hiring freezes get them done at all?
Thanks to the hounding encouragement of my colleagues at Augsburg (thanks, guys!), I’ll be attending the Minnesota Library Association 2009 Conference in St. Cloud, MN, October 14-16. I recently became a member of the MLA—it’ll be great to meet some people and check the pulse of Minnesota libraries, including public ones (oo oo, there’s a session on graphic novels—my heart says yes but my head says heck yes).
March 12-15 I attended My First Library Conference, ACRL 2009, in three-hours-south Seattle. Schoolmates and I skipped classes and ditched work to play Tetris with a car trunk and try not to laugh explaining to the border guard the purpose of our visit to those United States. They look at you funny when you claim you’re a book-sort, even if you’re not, without fail, it’s true.
The conference was part total blast, part perplexing disappointment. The roadtrip mystique, the being-in-a-different-city-doing-non-routine-things, the chance meetings of acquaintances both meatspace, virtual and crossing over, discovering new nerd stuff and neat applications for the known, seeing hilarious, thought-provoking and inspiring keynote speakers, dodging Cheshire-grinned vendors and devouring free food = good. Wanting to run screaming from poorly organized sessions of ugly confusing tedious PowerPoints guided by pulseless monotonous nonsensical presenters = bad.
There is a difference between being nervous and being egregiously unprepared. I empathized with the former, but the latter? I was befuddled. Why wouldn’t you… practice? Attempt to push valuable content? Tell us something we don’t already know? Is the pressure to publish and perform so great we forget to make it interesting, show enthusiasm and invest ourselves in true knowledge transmission? Conferring with others revealed similar sentiments. It seems ACRL has some serious issues with quality control and relevance, which makes me fear for my profession. It was, after all, my peers and superiors presenting. But many sessions seemed aimed at non-librarians while simultaneously preaching to the choir, with precious little emphasis and evidence of What’s New and Unexpected: results, insights, epiphanies, the possibly plainly interesting and the transformative and translatable for one’s own institution.
I felt pain. I have been told–mentored–to avoid library conferences altogether and hit education ones instead, or whatever your subject discipline or niche, like technology cons, even if you don’t quite fit. It’s better to not understand half of what they’re saying if they’re saying something fascinating than already know everything about everything. Exposure to peripheral topics can yield interesting connections, reveal opportunities and position you to find or develop and apply to library land that authentically new, next big thing.
That said, I did see a few great sessions and spent a lot of time in the overflow floor section of the Cyber Zed Shed, which offered quick presentations on web tech, social software and mobile device use in libraries. “Like carpet time for big kids,” which would have been a clever resnark for Twitter, had I not been ill-equipped for the party. Not wanting to lug my laptop around, I went without, largely foregoing the communal joy and wonder of twittering the conference via hashtag (#acrl2009), though I did get a few words in. And it was fun. A little ridiculous but also… worthy? With exception to alerting activists to the location of staging riot cops and directing medics to the wounded at the RNC ’08, it was one of the only times I’ve seen (and the first time I participated in) the concrete usefulness of Twitter.
I love these sorts of things for the sake of experimentation and casual communication (and for the spread of humor, egoism, etc.), but oh! my! heart! to see it actually do something interesting. It can be a seldom occurrence, a rarity that makes me dubious, and critical, and not willing to sink my time into new toys. But I was glad to observe and play what I did, though I became increasingly jealous of #sxsw as the weekend wore on… perhaps one of those “peripheral topic conferences” I can hit up next year? 🙂 I did learn that ACRL happens only every other year, which I did not know and am pleased to see. Given my experience, I can’t say an annual attendance would be worth it, though it was definitely a good time and the student rate is swell. I would not, however, pay the full, professional price ($400-500ish) without institutional funding.
Other highlights and tragedies: No Naomi Klein after racing to the registration booth five minutes before she was supposed to take the stage = devastating. I don’t have a job at which I can apply all the cool stuff I learned = bummer. I can talk about cool stuff in interviews = yay! As a new hire, I wouldn’t have the clout and unlikely the freedom to implement anything anyway = dar. The barnburner Experience Music Project social mixer dance-off = riotous. Author Sherman Alexie, damn! = charming, hysterical, extraordinary. And This American Life maestro Ira Glass magically appearing right next to me after his smashing closing keynote and signing my Minnesota Public Radio cloth bag with a fat green Sharpie = #omgomgomg. I squealed like a fangirl and clutched my grocery sack all the way home.
I am biting the term paper bullet and running away to Seattle for four days for the ACRL Conference. Woo hoo! Get in touch if you’d like to meet up!
