In just the past few weeks, I’ve received two emails from companies whose services I’ve tried out who are now shutting their doors. Another one is changing its focus and will no longer be hosting the very thing I was using it for. Luckily these were tools/services that I’d tried out but wasn’t dependent on for providing services to my patrons. But what if I had been dependent? Would I have been able to move my content easily to another provider? Would I have had to find a way to host the content myself? Or would the content have simply gone up in smoke with no way to ever get it back?

While going with hosted solutions for one’s 2.0 services is cheap or free and is often the only option for a library with a tight budget, it’s not always the prudent way to go. Even if the service is free, the time library staff spend creating content on that service isn’t, and we don’t want all that effort (and content) going down the drain. We often put way too much trust in many of these services, having no backups for the content we’re putting on their servers. One great example of what can happen when you trust a company too much is Ma.gnolia, which was a very popular social bookmarking company that had a catastrophic server failure in January and lost everyone’s data. While they tried to restore the database, they failed, and now they’re going to start from scratch (though I can’t imagine who would trust them with their bookmarks now!). I don’t know if Ma.gnolia allowed people to back up their own bookmarks to their hard drive, but even if they did, I’d wager that a lot of people rarely, if ever, remembered to do it (she writes sheepishly, wondering when the last time was that she backed up her own del.icio.us bookmarks — done!).

My friend Stephen Francoeur created two of the best 2.0 tools for library staff that I’m aware of — an active and useful reference blog and reference wiki. For these tools which he created four years ago or so, he used Blogger and PBWiki. The blog and wiki are vital to their reference staff since they contain so much staff knowledge collected over many years. In his most recent blog post, Stephen describes how he decided that home is the safest place for all that data and how he had to move the blog from Blogger to a locally hosted version of Wordpress MU, and the wiki from PBWiki (now PBWorks) to a locally installed version of Confluence. He discussed how difficult the transition was, especially with the wiki since he had to literally copy and paste the content from the old wiki into the new. Had either of these companies gone bust before they could move that content to a local server, it might possibly have been gone forever. This just highlighted again to me how important it is that we gauge how vital the things we’ve created with these 2.0 tools are to our library (or to us personally if we use them outside of work) and take steps to protect that content or functionality accordingly. If the Google Custom Searches that I’ve created for several subject areas were to disappear, it wouldn’t be a grave tragedy. Were our subject guide wiki to disappear, we’d have lost content that is vital to our students and faculty and took us years to develop. That’s why our subject guide wiki lives on our own server.

We utilize the services of so many of these 2.0 companies because they provide services and space for free. However those services cost someone money, and if they aren’t making enough from pro accounts or ads, then they’re losing money on the bandwidth and server space it costs to run a successful site. Many of these companies lack any sort of a revenue model and while they may be funded by venture capitalists or big companies like Google and Yahoo! now, they may not be forever if they can’t find a way to make money for their benefactors. It scares me how dependent Iranians are on Twitter to get the word out about what the government is doing there when the company is losing money hand over fist. And many of the other big 2.0 companies we know and love are in the same boat.

There’s also the issue of their infrastructure. When I put things on our library’s server, I know that there are daily backups of the content. So if something goes kablooey, I can always roll it back to what it looked like the previous day. Not too bad. But do we know much about the server infrastructure of the companies we’re dependent on? Often we don’t know anything because that information isn’t provided to us. And this can even be a problem when you’re paying a company to run a service for you. Our Voyager ILS installation is hosted by Ex Libris, and a year or two ago they had too high a load on their servers and, as a result, we had a lot of problems with Voyager going down for a few months. It’s important, whether we’re paying or not, that when we’re trusting a mission critical service to a third party we know about their server infrastructure.

Another big issue is when a company decides to suddenly change how it operates, which may leave you high and dry or might at least force you to change the way you operate. A great case in point is PBWiki, now known as PBWorks. I really thought a great deal of PBWiki early on, so much so that I was on their Educational Advisory Board. Then they managed to alienate much of their original fanbase, me included. First they created a new version of their wiki software (PBWiki 2.0) which completely changed the way that authentication into the wiki worked. But you still had the choice of whether or not you wanted to create a 1.0 or 2.0 wiki. And in spite of a huge wave of negative feedback they received about PBWiki 2.0, they not only kept it the way it was, but forced people to switch their original PBWikis to 2.0. Now, they’re called PBWorks and I have no idea if the wikis (or workspaces) still look the same as the 2.0 wiki, because I wouldn’t touch a PBWiki at this point with a 10-foot pole. I don’t like companies that don’t listen to their users.

I don’t have a good solution for what libraries should do if they can’t afford to host their own content (or if the only technology providing that functionality is externally hosted), but I do think it’s critical that we should think critically about these companies with which we’re entrusting our content and whether our content is safe enough relative to its value. While your Twitter posts may not be super-valuable to you later on, your del.icio.us bookmarks or blog posts probably are. If your content is important to your library, consider whether or not you think that service that’s hosting your content is stable. Who hosts your content? A large, stable company that is making enough to at least cover its expenses, a start-up with venture funding and no revenue model, or some individual for whom this service is a hobby (though they hope to sell it to Google one day — and btw, it’s scary that “selling to Google” seems to have become a revenue model in itself)? Can you easily back up that content? Can you easily move it to another service? And do other services exist that provide the same or similar functionality? And equally important, what claims do these companies make on your content (always read their Terms of Service!). We need to consider all these things because I’d hate to see the hard work of librarians go up in smoke because it didn’t occur to them that these free 2.0 services might not be here forever.

Have any of you had disasters with hosted services? Have you moved your stuff from a hosted service to your own server and why? What do you consider before you put content on some third party’s servers? Do you feel like the your content is safe in all of the 2.0 services you use online?

My little guy is sick of beating up the animals hanging from his activity gym and seems to want some cuddle time now. Talk amongst yourselves.

Fortunately, the first two posts I’m pointing to acknowledge that Luddite is a pejorative term, though I don’t know that I would have bothered reading Love thy Luddite by Mick Jacobsen (who mentions that “it is probably better not call anybody a Luddite” only at the very end of his post ) had I not first read You should listen to the non-techies too by Angel Rivera. The use of the term Luddite throughout the former post really made it difficult for me to read, which is a shame, because the arguments are quite good.

Both Angel and Mick talk about opening a dialogue with non-techies instead of writing them off as being anti-tech. But Mick is coming at this from the standpoint of someone who loves tech and wants to share that love with others (the evangelist) and Angel is coming from the standpoint of someone who likes tech that is useful to him and is sick to death of people trying to push him to use technologies that just aren’t for him.

I feel strongly that we should not engage in dialogue with people who aren’t into the technologies we’re into just to convince them that we’re right, because, frankly, we might not be. I was happy to see Mick acknowledge just that fact:

You might be introducing the wrong technology at that particular time or you may need to reexamine the technology. The Luddite may very well have thought of something you haven’t and it may not be as useful as you hope (I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me).

Yes!!! I wish someone at my place of work had told me that an internal wiki was a terrible idea when I first proposed creating one 3 1/2 years ago. Early on at my time at Norwich, I saw a great need for an internal wiki to share knowledge among staff members. Was there a real need for better knowledge-sharing? Yes. But it didn’t really matter, because there were so many competing priorities for people’s time and this simply was not anyone else’s top priority. But I just saw the need and created a wiki that I didn’t do a great job introducing (an email with instructions on how to use the wiki — dumb Meredith) and wasted a lot of time on something that never took off. Would I have listened back then if one of my colleagues had told me it wouldn’t work? I don’t know. But I’ve gotten a lot less hard-headed since then, and understand that it’s not just the right technology for the need, but it’s people acknowledging the need, wanting to put effort into fulfilling that need (or having the time to put in that effort), being ready for the technology, and especially how the technology is introduced. The wiki didn’t fail because it was a wiki (or because my colleagues were anti-tech). It failed because fixing that problem was not a top priority. It still isn’t. A wiki worked great with my colleagues as a subject guide tool because reference and instruction are seen as top priorities by all staff.

Mick also talks about showing the person how you or others are actually using the technology to convince them of its utility:

Show how you are personally using this new technology, how others are using it, and how they specifically could. Hypothetical situations just don’t seem to work.

So true! I always pack my presentations with lots and lots of practical examples of how libraries are successfully using specific technologies, because it’s the concrete examples that sell it for most people. That’s how it works for me, even. I may not see the utility of something until I see clever uses for it beyond the “wow, this is fun!” I thought wikis were pretty cool, but it wasn’t until I could think of concrete uses for them in the profession that I really understood how amazing they were. And for a lot of people, it isn’t until they see what other libraries have done with wikis that they will understand that. “Wikis are so cool” isn’t an argument that’s going to work for most people.

I really like what Angel said about the pushiness of some people who just can’t understand why someone wouldn’t think their technology of choice isn’t the best thing since sliced bread (and are sometimes rude and dismissive towards those who disagree). There’s being a pragmatist about tech — and you can even really love the tech you use and still be pragmatic about it — and then there’s being religious about tech. We don’t need proselytizing. We don’t all have to use the same tools and just because we don’t like something you love doesn’t mean we need to be educated (ugh! I hate when someone makes the assumption that a person must not agree with them because they haven’t been educated about it properly — it really does stink of fundamentalism at that point, doesn’t it?). While there are certain technologies I can hardly live without, there are plenty that just don’t fit into my life. They may be “cool” and they may be really useful to you, but they’re just not for me. Twitter is one thing that I use extremely sporadically and I’ve found just doesn’t fit my day-to-day lifestyle. It’s great for conferences (and I’m sure I’ll use it at ALA Annual), but I don’t have the time to stick with it and I have a hard time multitasking between work and Twitter. It doesn’t mean I “don’t get it.” I just don’t need it.

And just because we use it, our friends use it, and we think it’s the best thing since sliced bread doesn’t mean that our patrons use it. This is why I am madly in love with the graphic from Char Booth and Chris Gruder’s ACRL presentation on the study they did of their users at Ohio University, which Char highlighted in her post, two-way touché. One of the things they did was ask users was what technologies they use and some technologies that many librarians use and are crazy about — Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, and Second Life in particular — they found were barely used by students at OU.

How many of us really know how many of our users are using these tools? It’s kind of important, right? If we’re spending time putting pictures of our library on Flickr so more our patrons can find them, it would be good to know if a lot of our users are actually on there. But in other cases, it may not matter so much, depending on how you are using the technology. I bet the number of our distance learners who use IM is a lot smaller than the number who use our MeeboMe Ask a Librarian service, because it doesn’t require them to really know anything about IM (just how to type words into a box). They don’t need to love IM or even know they’re using IM to benefit from it. Similarly, our subject guide wiki doesn’t look like a wiki at all to our patrons, so it doesn’t really matter if they use wikis or not as long as they can navigate a normal website. And if you’re using Flickr mainly as a storage repository and republish the pictures on your library website, it doesn’t matter if your patrons don’t use Flickr. But in some cases, it’s crazy that we spend valuable staff time trying to communicate with patrons using tools we don’t even know if they use.

And we need to keep assessing these things because as Char admits (with a nod to Brian Matthews’ post on Twitter) these things change all the time. While Twitter may not be hot right now with your population, it may be hot in a few months, so we really need to keep our finger on the pulse of our patrons. And there may be times when it make sense to step out in front of your patrons with new tech.

(As a side note: I came to the conclusion that Twitter had jumped the shark, not because it has been featured in every news outlet in the known universe over the past few weeks, but because my father started “following” me on Twitter 2 weeks ago. )

I think sometimes we all need to try and step outside of our personal feelings about these technologies, which isn’t easy when we think they’re the best thing since sliced bread. When we are talking to others about technology, we need to realize that what we find useful may not be useful to them (and that’s ok). When we are thinking about implementing new tech with our patrons, we need to understand how our patrons use tech and whether this is really a good fit for that population. Charging in with an “I know better” attitude rarely leads to positive outcomes. Effective 2-way communication and understanding other perspectives is critical.

LIS Publications Wiki

Welcome to the Library and Information Science (LIS) Publications wiki. This wiki gathers information about publications that LIS professionals might want to write for — whether they want to reach their colleagues or their communities. All editors, publishers, and LIS professionals are welcome to contribute to the publication profiles. To participate, just create a free account and log in.

Bravo to Laurie Putnam and her students at SJSU for putting this incredibly useful resource together!

Here are some of my favorite pages:

• Blog or Wiki — Which Tool to Use?
• Transparency and MediaWiki
• Looking in the Mirror
• We got trouble – a series of pieces on managing internal problems in libraries.
• Leader’s Digest

There’s a whole lot more there as well. I highly recommend that you take a look and browse some of the categories you’re most interested in. There’s food for thought in there for everyone, whether you’re just starting out in the profession or are a seasoned library director.

Since the site is a wiki, it’s something you can also contribute to! Walt provides tips on different ways to contribute to the wiki on this page.

I had a really wonderful time at Computers in Libraries, as always. While there are always certain talks where the delivery is disappointing or where you don’t learn anything, I went to a lot of talks that were fun or educational or both. And of course half of the learning goes on when you’re not even trying, during those networking times between sessions. I had a lot of fantastic conversations with people who have the similar professional interests. While we’re not always talking about libraries, we’re making valuable connections and friendships. Never underestimate the value of networking.

Here were some of the highlights for me:

• Going Local in the Library: Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Local 2.0 – What a great session to start my conference experience with! Charles Lyons gave us some great ideas for how libraries can help to collect and disseminate local information to patrons. He actually mentioned two “local wikis” created by libraries that I hadn’t heard of: LoudonPedia and WikiNorthia (I’m a huge fan of the SCRLD Wiki, which he also mentioned) I’ve been thinking about creating a Norwich University Wiki, where the library could gather information from all different groups on campus (students, faculty, staff) to create a truly helpful resource for new students. At the moment, I don’t have time to create, market or maintain this, but it’s definitely something I’d love to work on in the future. Lyons mentioned lots of other ways to get local, such as local search/custom search, blogs like Darien Community Matters, local online communities like Skokie Talk and MyHamilton.ca, and custom maps. I have firmly believed for a long time that the future of social software is local, and it’s nice to see libraries starting to move in that direction.
• The Global Librarian: Online Social Networks – definitely the funniest presentation at the conference. I didn’t learn much from Rikhei Harris, Josh Neff and Steve Lawson’s talk about the Library Society of the World, but I had a great time while not learning. I hope that some of the people who weren’t aware of some of the alternative professional networking opportunities online got something out of it. Any presentation involving a Rickroll, is a-ok with me. The second part of the session included three of the women involved in the excellent Infodoodads blog. I learned that collaborative blogging can make you pregnant (2 out of 3 of them are) and how to best manage and market a collaborative blog. Kate Gronemyer is definitely going on my awesome list. Anyone who shares Milano cookies and loves the Chowhound community is alright with me.
• Virtual Reference: Endless Possibilites – Two excellent and informative talks in one session on virtual reference. While I knew most of what he discussed, Dan Sich gave a really solid description of the efforts at his library to implement widgetized IM reference. It was nice to hear about the limitations of Hab.la, which I’d been interested in for our library, but am definitely not using until they allow you to put widgets on more than 5 web pages. Derik Badman’s discussion about how he created virtual reading rooms of the most recent journal tables of contents from specific disciplines was of great interest to me (here’s an example of what he did for library literature). I’ve been thinking of doing the same in some of the social science disciplines, taking feeds from the most popular journals and either mashing them up and turning them into one feed or putting them into something like Grazr to display them on a web page. It was good to hear from Derik that it was a really time-consuming project, so I’ll probably just start with one subject area and see how it goes. Derik used Yahoo! Pipes to accomplish his project, but I might use something more intuitive (for me) like Feed Digest.



Pecha Kucha Group

Originally uploaded by mcmikedermott

• 2.0 Pecha Kucha—Conversation Face-Off! – 6 presenters, 20 slides for 20 seconds each for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds per presenter. This was a real challenge for all of us, but it ended up being one of the most fun presentations I’ve ever been a part of. You can see good write-ups (a challenge in itself!) of the challenge at the Librarian in Black and Jenica Rogers-Urbanek. Greg Schwartz definitely had the most entertaining presentation (a library podcasting fable) and deserved the win. I’m just happy I remembered what I was going to say and got it out in 6 minutes 40! This is definitely something I’d like to try again and would like to see at other conferences. I’ve now given 3-hour, 2-hour, 1-hour, 30-minute, 15-minute, and 6 minute 40 second talks on wikis. What’s next?
• Collaborating with YouTubers to Enhance Library Instruction – I almost didn’t go to this one, and it ended up being one of the best. We’ve been thinking of doing some instructional videos at my library and this convinced me that involving students in it would be a very good idea. Check out Databases!, Chronicles of Libraria and more from Daabomb3018 (the college-aged son of the presenter from University of South Florida).
• Open Source Applications – another two-parter. I really liked Julian Clark’s presentation; the material wasn’t new to me, but it was an excellent introduction for people new to open source. Glen Horton gave a great talk on how librarians can give back to the open source community without necessarily knowing how to code. This includes teaching patrons about open source software, providing open source software on CD or thumb drives, writing documentation, and identifying bugs and reporting them.

I’ve been feeling a bit tired and run-down lately, so I wasn’t able to stay out as late as I usually do at these conferences, but it did result it my actually getting to the keynote presentations in the morning. I was very pleased that I made it to Liz Lawley’s keynote. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make library instruction more fun instead of making it feel like medicine students have to grudgingly take, and Liz really showed us how a “spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” (really!). More to the point, she showed us the elements of games that make them so satisfying and appealing to people and how those elements can be integrated into tasks people find boring/un-fun more satisfying. I am definitely going to look more into Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming (PMOG), Seriosity’s Attent, and Social Genius for ideas on how to turn basic tasks we do every day into a game. I do want to turn our library into a “happiness engine.”

I’m coming back to work tonight energized and excited about my new job and the possibility of implementing some of the things I heard about at CIL. Each of us is serving patrons in different ways (using different tools) and I love how conferences allow us to open up a little window into the work of these other libraries. Sometimes I look in and see that we’re doing the same thing. Sometimes I see tools and services that wouldn’t work in our library. But it’s those times I look in and see a fantastic new way of providing services that make me come back again and again to the Info Today conferences.

A while back, I wrote about the challenges I had in finding the right platform for our subject guides. Well, I’m pleased to say that I just linked to our subject guides from the front page of the library website, so they are live! I ended up using MediaWiki for the guides and tweaked the skin, Cologne Blue to meet our needs. It’s not the sexiest thing in the world and we don’t have every subject covered by a long shot, but we decided that we’d rather put it out where it can be useful than wait until we get to some “totally done” state (which will never really happen). It’s perpetual beta, baby! We still need to make some last minute tweaks before the students come back on Monday, but I think we’re in good shape to start and will be adding many more in the future.

My hope is that this doesn’t look like a wiki to the end user. I made sure that the editing options and other stuff like that were only visible to those who are logged in (and the only people with accounts right now are the librarians). So while you see a ton of editing options on the left-hand sidebar when you’re logged in, all you should see when you’re not logged in is a search box. I love that the guides are searchable and that we can assign categories to each page to allow students to browse as well. While we don’t have a ton of categories now, we may in the future. I also like that we have the option in the future of opening this up to further collaboration. I’d love to work with an interested faculty member on a collaboratively-developed course guide or subject guide at some point.

While there were many issues factoring into my decision, the main reason I chose a wiki is because everyone can create their own guides and edit them. I’ll be taking over the liaison duties for the Social Sciences in February and will also be in charge of doing LibQual for Fall 2008 (eeek!), so I’m going to be a lot busier than I was before. If we’d been in a position where I had to put up everyone’s guides and update them when they needed me to, it probably wouldn’t have gotten done. And it doesn’t just benefit me. My colleagues are really happy to have that control over their pages. When you have to ask someone else to do something for you, you’re going to be much less likely to make minor improvements on what you already have up there (I was like that too back when I didn’t have the ability to change our library pages in WebCT). My colleague, Josh, and I did a training yesterday on how to edit the wiki and I was happy to see how open to learning this everyone was. While I think they were a little freaked out at first, as soon as they actually started using the wiki, the anxiety level went way down. Prior to the training, Josh and I had been putting up everyone’s content, and we were a little worried that people wouldn’t feel comfortable taking it on themselves. Since the training, my Director has already put up one guide and is working on another. Woo hoo! Talk about leading by example!

Probably my favorite part of the subject guides is the focus on how-to’s. More general subject guides are great, but usually students are trying to accomplish something more specific. They’re not doing “architecture research” — they’re looking for information on a specific building or architect or design style. They’re not doing “English research” — they’re looking for literary criticisms, book reviews, etc. That’s why I think a task-based orientation works so much better than a subject-oriented one. The majority of the questions we get at the desk are from students trying to do the same few things and now we have guides that address those specific things that students are trying to accomplish.

We’ve been doing course guides since last year, but before, I always had to take people’s Word docs, turn them into HTML and put them on our site. It was time-consuming for me and annoying for the liaisons who created them because they couldn’t just make small changes on their own. Now, we’ll be doing all of these on the wiki, which I think will lead to more guides being created for classes.

I know this isn’t super high-tech or super innovative these days, but it’s a big deal for my library and I’m so excited to see it go live after so many months of evaluating, testing, planning, tweaking, and content development. We built a resource that’s (hopefully) useful for students where content is easily searchable and browseable. We streamlined the workflow for getting guides up and for maintaining them, which should lead to more up-to-date guides. We empowered staff to create and edit their own guides. We created something that could allow for future collaboration with faculty and (gasp!) even students. While it may not be sexy in terms of the technology it’s sexy in the sense that it’s replicable. This is a technology project that any library can replicate. You don’t even need to have a server since there are free hosted wiki options. As long as you have staff with a willingness to learn, you can make this happen.

When we got back from winter break, the ILL Librarian came to me with a request from a student. When a request from an online student is unusual or the books s/he is requesting is over $50, the request comes to me, as liaison, where I either allow or deny it. I usually allow anything over $50 that would be a good addition to the collection. Anyways, this request was for five books from before 1910. All of them were on the same extremely esoteric topic, which was likely never to be researched again by anyone at this institution (it was an odd one). In addition, they were out of print and some were impossible to find through used book dealers. The ILL Librarian was ready to suggest that the student utilize the ILL services of his local public library. I asked if she’d checked to see if the books were available online. She hadn’t. I then proceeded to find two of the five in Google Books and another two in the Internet Archive. So four out of five of the books he was requesting were freely available online for him to read and download.

I explained to the ILL Librarian that any time an online student is requesting a book from before 1923, she should check online to see if the book has been digitized. She was so grateful for the information, as was the student, who was shocked that so many of them were available online (though there’s tutorial for his program on Google Books that I created some time ago… sigh…).

Sometimes we assume that the knowledge we have is common. Often, we couldn’t be more wrong. That trick you discovered with a difficult-to-use database? That website you found that offers a treasure trove of statistical and demographic data? That free site for creating citations? It’s very possible that your colleagues don’t already know about this stuff. We all have so much useful knowledge to share with our colleagues, with our students, with our profession. Finding ways to share it and collect it can be challenging, but what we will all learn in the end makes it worth the effort.

Needless to say, I will be offering a session for my colleagues on Google Scholar and digital book archives this semester, and I’m sure my colleagues will give me lots of useful knowledge to add to my reference arsenal as well. What I love most about this profession is that we are constantly and simultaneously teachers and learners. It’s a good thing.

I think this is a common problem with open source projects and social software communities. Frequently the tools or communities so many of us depend on are run by one individual. And it’s usually fine until that person gets too busy to maintain it. I’ve had the same issue with the Library Success Wiki. While once in a blue moon, someone will pop in and fix some stuff on the wiki (people add to the wiki all the time, but I’m talking about the more maintenance-related tasks), I pretty much handle all of the maintenance. And that’s ok; it’s not particularly time-consuming to keep an eye on the Recent Changes feed each day and fix the errors of novice wiki editors. But I always wish I had more time to devote to it. I frequently get ideas for how to make the wiki better, but have no time really to make them happen. Anyone can pop into the wiki, create an account, and start implementing their own good ideas for making it better. I don’t have any more ownership over the wiki than you do; I just do the most basic wiki gardening. For all intents and purposes, this is an “open source community” which would benefit from the vision and effort of others. So if you’re perhaps not a coder but are looking for a social software project to contribute to, just pop over to the Library Success Wiki and think about what you might want to change/add. The beauty of a wiki is that your contribution can be as big or small as you want. You can add to an already-existing page, create a new page, or completely reorganize the wiki content.

Hopefully Feed2JS and the Library Success Wiki will continue to thrive and become far more than their creators had ever envisioned.

The same held true for the audiences at both of my talks. While the audience definitely skewed a lot older than most I’ve had at technology talks, they were a savvy bunch with some really smart questions and open minds. I wondered if it would be tedious giving the same talk twice, but each one had a different group with different questions that really helped shape the experience. In the second one, some people even shared their own experiences using wikis in the classroom, which made the experience that much richer. I enjoyed it so much, and I hope they felt the same way. Other than accidentally clicking on porn during the second iteration (what happened Information Literacy Wiki?!!?), and an audience member who came in 2/3 of the way through the presentation asking me to reiterate everything I said before (ummmm… no), it went really well. It was also great to see Alice Yucht, who is another one of those people you feel energized just being around. I know in Five Weeks to a Social Library, some of our most enthusiastic participants were school librarians. Are they all this fantastic? I definitely hope to get to speak at another school library conference in the future; it was a lot of fun.

My slides and all the links from my talk are available on my presentation wiki.

The only thing that was not great about this was the venue, the Sturbridge Host Hotel. This is the first time I’ve ever really complained about a venue, so, as you can imagine, it really was BAD. I’d heard from Jessamyn that it was a nightmare to get onto the wireless there, but I assumed that she’d meant “wireless for the participants.” Every place where I have specifically been asked if I needed to use the Internet for my presentation has provided a wired connection. Not so here, and unfortunately, this is one presentation that is 100% dependent on the Internet working, since I have to show a bunch of wikis, wiki software, etc. But, they gave me some card with a login and said that only the presenters would have wireless access, so it shouldn’t be a problem to connect. When I picked the wireless network, though, I got nothing. It wasn’t that my computer wasn’t connecting to the wireless; it was that there was nothing to connect to. I kept telling the A/V guy there (the assistant, not the guy who was contractually obligated to be there) that he needed to kick the router, but he insisted that it was because I have a Mac (funny, since I was able to connect to the wireless in my hotel room in the same hotel) and got on it without asking and started screwing around with my settings (REALLY uncool). I ended up having to use Adam’s cellular wireless card (thereby depriving him of Internet access for 5 hours), which worked beautifully, but if he hadn’t been there, I would have been in a real panic. The wireless was up for my second presentation (hey, guess my computer isn’t defective), but I stuck with the cellular card because at that point, I had no faith in the people running the show.

The other fun thing that happened is that an hour into my first 2-hour talk, the power went out. Not to the lights. Not to the outlets other people were plugged into. Nope. Just the power to the projector, the microphone, and my computer (though I had battery power) went dead. Ok. Great. I had a participant call the front desk to request that the A/V guy come. It took a full 25 minutes to get the power back on, and in that time, I went on with my presentation, trying my best to describe the wikis I was supposed to be showing them. I think I handled it well, but there were no apologies to me from the A/V folks nor any explanation as to why it happened.

I don’t blame the conference organizers at all. They were promised a lot of things and some of those things didn’t happen. When Melissa, the organizer, heard there was a problem, she marched in and started reminding the A/V people of what they were contractually obligated to provide. I know there are a lot of conferences that happen at this facility (MLA, NELA) but I think it’s an abysmal place to have a conference, given the fact that everyone I dealt with there was unfriendly and they don’t seem to have the infrastructure to deal with presentations that require technology (also the dividers between the rooms were paper-thin and it was distracting to hear my fellow presenters through the walls when I was trying to concentrate on my own talk). Perhaps it’s the only location in central Massachusetts that can handle a crowd like that, because I can’t imagine that anyone over the age of 10 (there’s an indoor pool) enjoys going to this place.

All in all though, a great experience at MSLA. The one thing you can say about tech problems is that they really test you and make you a better speaker for the next time they happen.

I’m not doing another out-of-town talk until February, a fact that makes me (and Adam) very happy. I love giving talks, but the travel takes a lot out of me. I’m trying to be more choosy about the talks I give, especially since I can’t be away from work too much. I’ve had some great conference experiences and some not-so-great ones. I’ve had some experiences where it’s like pulling teeth to get reimbursed and others where they’ve said “just send me an invoice and I’ll cut you a check.” I’ve stayed in fleabag motels and luxury resorts. I’ve learned to ask for 1 more night hotel accommodation than days I’m speaking because it’s rarely easy to get a flight to or from Vermont and then you end up spending your entire honorarium on a hotel room. You learn a lot from the good experiences and the bad, and I hope I’m better now at choosing speaking engagements than I was before. I’m really excited about focusing more on the class I’m teaching this January at San Jose State University and maybe starting another writing project in late Spring if Adam doesn’t threaten to divorce me. I will definitely miss speaking over these months, because I love meeting people, giving talks and sharing ideas face-to-face, but it’ll also be nice to be a homebody for a while.

If you’re going to be there, please do say hi. It’ll be a quick trip for me — I have to head home right after my talks are over on Sunday — but I hope to get a chance to meet some new people and share ideas.