Some thoughts on the Colorado Association of Libraries conference.

  • I think that Emilie’s and my presentation, Keeping Current, went quite well. We were in a large, theatre-style room, and it was pretty much filled (I think that means around 150 people). Michael Sauers blogged it and took some photos. We got a few nice comments on the CAL2006 wiki, and I think that most attendees found it worth their time. After the session, we had a few requests to reprise the talk elsewhere in Colorado in the coming months, so that should be fun.

  • It’s good to remember when doing a session like this–one that seeks to introduce people to technology that they may know very little about–that many people who want to attend it will lack a lot of context. So it’s important to come up with a quick, easily-understandable way to make sure everyone is on the same page. I think we did a pretty good job of this, but it’s an area I could continue to work on in the future.

  • If you are on a conference planning committee, and someone suggests that you can put the smaller sessions in cubicles in a big room, shoot that idea down as quickly as you can. It wasn’t a total disaster, but it was noisy. (Our presentation was in a separate room, so it didn’t affect our particular session.)

  • I had the chance to spend a little bit of time with Michael Sauers, which was enjoyable. The little bit I did for his presentation was a “staged reading” of my blog post, A biblioblogger visits the local branch library, which means that I had the pleasure of shrieking out “Ajax del.icio.us OPML Creative Commons radical trust mashup widget!” in a crowded room.

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