Fellow Library Society of the World denizens know that I spent much of last week fussing over a presentation to the Colorado Academic Library Summit. I enlisted their/your help a few times, and am grateful for the help. I hope that I was the first person to thank the LSW in a conference handout!

The talk, Web 2.0 and the Digital Library -or- Learning from Flickr (follow that link for slides, abstract, and further reading) seemed to go well. I had a very large room–it must have been able to seat about 200 people–with a respectable turnout of 30 to 40 people. The room wasn’t optimal, and having to use the mic was a bit of a chore, but it worked out OK. I need to remember to bring a little clock for the podium, as I finished way early. That’s not a big problem, as it left time for some very good questions and comments from the audience, but I hate not knowing how I’m doing on time.

Joan Lippincott‘s keynote on Millennials was interesting and avoided making too many sweeping generalizations about generations. I particularly appreciated that she quoted Lorcan Dempsey’s The user interface that isn’t, a blog post that was on my own list of further reading for my talk: “[Libraries] do not participate fully in the network experience of their users.” Lippincott asked how many of us even think of users as having “network experiences.” Which was one of the things I was trying to get at in my talk which immediately followed hers. Nice when that kind of thing happens.

For the other sessions, I saw Jack Maness from the University of Colorado present on “librarian 2.0.” You may have read Maness’ article Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries, as it was heavily blogged when it came out last year. He gave a very engaging talk, with a vision of the socially-present web-based library that I hope was resonant for others in the audience as it was for me.

I also attended a talk by Chris Brown of the University of Denver on using Google Scholar and Google Book Search. He had some interesting techniques and haxies for using Google Scholar with RefWorks and licensed databases. He also showed how he’s putting links to Google Book Search documents in library catalog records, which seems like a great idea. Let’s hope Google keeps those URLs stable. It was fun to listen to Chris talk about getting lists of titles, comparing lists, and generally geeking out.

I had to take off before the final session of the day got underway, but it was overall a very good experience as a speaker and as a conference-goer.