I had a middling time at Intenet Librarian this year. It wasn’t the fault of the organizers or speakers, things just didn’t really gel for me.

My presentation was part of the Academic Library 2.0 preconference, along with the happy people pictured here (that’s Amanda Etches-Johnson, Iris Jastram , Me, Jason Griffey, and Jenica Rogers-Urbanek L-to-R). I was certainly impressed with my fellow presenters, and I think my section, Academic Library 2.0 Interface -or- Learning from Flickr, went well enough. We had a small group who seemed to find the preconference worthwhile. If you want to know more, you can look at the preconference site or read Jenica’s wonderfully detailed blog posts, part of her IL2008 coverage.

But for various reasons, the conference never came together for me. The biggest problem was that I wasn’t there long enough. I had planned to miss a day anyway, flying out late Tuesday afternoon, but then United Airlines decided to rebook me by pulling flights out of a hat (including a layover of negative one hour on the return) and even after a few fixes I was still stuck leaving on Tuesday morning. That, plus the fact that I started feeling queasy on Monday made everything a bit hazy for me.

I have caught up a little by reading the blog coverage. I suggest the aformentioned posts by Jenica on her blog, Attempting Elegance, or Sarah Houghton-Jan’s posts on Librarian in Black if you want detailed play-by-plays that go well beyond just a semi-intelligible transcription.

But two of the post-IL posts that I have found most interesting aren’t session reports, but ideas about presenting. Iris Jastram, in a post titled A Side Effect of Social Networks that I Hadn’t Anticipated, identifies a kind of positive peer-pressure at work when it comes to creating quality presentations. It is interesting to watch those experienced presenters, or even the folks who are new to presenting who I have known from online contacts for a long time. I watch them less to learn about what they are presenting (though they usually have something new to teach or show me) and more to see how they present it.

The other post I’m thinking of is Aaron Schmidt’s HOWTO give a good presentation where he runs down a list of tips like “So don’t ‘give a presentation.’ Just talk to your audience. Have a main point or two and tell the story surrounding those points.” and “The podium is not your friend.” I can get behind Aaron’s ideas as one way to give a good presentation. As Jessamyn West points out in the interesting comment thread on Aaron’s post, there are many different kinds of presentations, and I’d add that there are many different kinds of presenters with different strengths. Anyone who is interested in seeing a variety of effective presentations should take a look at the TED talks from that other conference in Monterey. Check out the difference between the way Hans Rosling uses data visualization and Ken Robinson tells stories and Blaise Aguera y Arcas does a tech demo.

In fact, you could say the only thing those talks have in common is that they present you with a new way of seeing. In other words, it’s the actual content that is compelling, and the style highlights the content. It goes back to that Walt Crawford title: First Have Something to Say. Given my schedule, I only saw a few session at Internet Librarian, but by far the most useful and interesting to me was a fairly traditional presentation by Eliabeth Edwards of George Washington University. There were several of Aaron’s tips that she didn’t follow, but it didn’t matter because she had participated in actual research on an interesting topic: students’ perceptions of librarians on Facebook (looks like Edwards and some colleagues did a very similar presentation at Reference Renaissance, and it was blogged at Emerging Librarian).

I’m all for better presentation technique, but for it to really work for the audience, you need to be presenting some interesting research (and I’m using a pretty generous definition of “research”–a “how we done it good” that has a retrospective or evaluation of the results is good enough for me) or giving them a new way of thinking about your topic. I’ve attended (and given) too many talks that are just a run-down of online tools or the like, and I think the time for those is pretty much over.