Why I won’t be at Internet Librarian this year
Tue 19 Sep 2006, 10:38 pm
Last year’s Internet Librarian conference was a great combination of a kick-in-the-pants good time and a valuable professional development experience (see my posts tagged il2005 for details), so I had assumed that I would head for Monterey again this fall.
But a few months back, just as I was starting to feel bad about not even submitting a proposal for IL2006, and wondering if I should save my traveling for a conference where I would actually present something, I got a call from Eric Jansson of NITLE, the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (the acronym is pronounced “nightly”).
NITLE’s slogan on their home page is “advancing liberal education in the digital age,” and I know them mostly as the people who put on workshops for liberal arts colleges to discuss and develop sound programs for using technology in teaching and research. They also host and provide technical and logistical support for multi-campus collaborative projects like IDEAS, the Image Database to Enhance Asian Studies.
Eric knows me because I am one of the people responsible for IDEAS. It would seem that Eric also reads this blog (hi, Eric!), as he asked if I would like to present a talk on possible future directions for digital image collections, with an emphasis on flickr and social software.
The catch is that the NITLE conference, Managing Digital Image Collections, is on October 23 and 24, the same days as Internet Librarian. And it is at Milsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, so I can’t just pop over from IL to do my bit at the image conference.
After some moments of doubt–including an IM with Meredith Farkas where she said (and I’m paraphrasing here) “don’t be an idiot; go to Internet Librarian!”–I decided to skip attending Internet Librarian in favor of presenting at Managing Digital Image Collections. I’m disappointed that I can’t do both, but I’m excited to have the chance to talk to librarians, faculty, and instructional technologists for a few days about digital image collections.
I’m also excited about doing the presentation itself. I usually avoid PowerPoint like the plague, but I’m thinking that it is probably the right tool for this job. I figure if I’m talking about images, I’m going to need to have a lot of nice big, bright, full-screen images in my talk, and PowerPoint’s scaling seems the only reliable way to do that. So I’m looking forward to the challenge of making a highly visual PowerPoint presentation that I can be proud of (I have been catching up with Presentation Zen for inspiration). Wish me luck, and I’ll share here when it’s done.
Just this week, I learned that I will be missing something else: Lorcan Dempsey will be speaking at the Library Renaissance Conference at Colorado State University on Tuesday October 24, the same day that I’ll be telling people in Jackson about how current digital image collections do a poor job of insinuating themselves into users’ intrastructure.
As for Internet Librarian 2006, tag your photos on flickr, and maybe I’ll use them as an example in my talk. I expect lots of cheesy wild photos of this year’s giant calculators.
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- File under: Conferences,Navel gazing
- Comments? 6
Aw, that means I won’t get to meet you at IL. Which is a shame. But, you gotta do what you gotta do.
Comment by joshua m. neff — September 20, 2006 @ 3:53 pm
While I don’t exactly remember using the word “idiot”, it sure does sound like me. ;) I was just selfishly wanting you to come so I could finally meet you!
There’s nothing wrong with Power Point, per se. People can do a crappy job or a great job with any kind of slides.
If you’re a Civil War buff and have a car, Vicksburg is a pretty cool place to visit. Jackson isn’t much to get excited about (I was trapped there once while escaping a hurricane) but visiting the battlefield was cool.
Good luck with the talk! We’ll try not to have any fun without you. ;)
Comment by Meredith — September 20, 2006 @ 7:07 pm
Thanks, I was hoping to meet both of you as well, along with several other bloggers I have noticed on the roster. Not to mention catching up with the people I met last year, and collecting on that beer that Steven Cohen is just dying to buy me. C’est la vie.
Thanks for the travel recommendation, Meredith, but I think I will be too busy trying not to panic over my presentations to do any sightseeing.
And speaking of hurricanes, my mom just mentioned that this visit will still be during hurricane season. Great.
Comment by Steve Lawson — September 20, 2006 @ 9:55 pm
I won’t be at Internet Librarian, either. I’m also not going to be at the NITLE conference. Phooey. There are so many people I’m not going to meet, and so much fun I’m not going to have.
I have a love-hate relationship with PowerPoint. I love what it can do when it’s used well, and I hate 99% of the presentations I see that use it. There’s nothing worse than reading along with the speaker as he or she moves from one bullet point to the next, elaborating occasionally on a particularly interesting sub-bullet. But big, beautiful pictures — that’s an entirely different matter. There’s no way that even a well-structured and brilliantly delivered speech could replicate those.
Comment by Iris — September 20, 2006 @ 10:26 pm
I’m sorry that we can’t hang out like we did last year in the scarily vacant bloggers’ room, but I wish you luck at this confrence (which sounds pretty cool).
Comment by Sarah Houghton (LiB) — September 21, 2006 @ 3:07 pm
I, like Iris, will also not be having fun at a variety of places this year. The only bad thing about living in the middle of nowhere is that it costs a small fortune to get anywhere, and I pretty much blew my wad (and the library’s) on ALA.
PowerPoint as slideshow for big, beautiful pictures sounds good. My biggest ppt pet peeve (gosh, that was alliterative) is when the font changes halfway through the slide for no apparent reason. But pictures are nice.
Comment by Laura — September 22, 2006 @ 1:47 pm