I just finished reading Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, and yes, there’s no way to make that sound like I’m not making a joke. But I was thinking about reading conference reports for events that I haven’t attended.

It’s too tempting to take quick conference blog posts (or worse, Twitter posts) at face value, and assume that

• what was reported is actually what was said;
• the person who said it belives it; and
• the person who reported it appoves of the sentiment.

None of that is necessarily true. So it’s tempting to decide simply not to comment at all. I know that Walt Crawford tries to do that.

But thinking about the ideas in Bayard’s book, I realize that I need not be so circumspect. In the context of of a discussion of Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist, Bayard sums up Wilde’ point this way:

Criticism is the record of a soul, and that soul is its deep object, not the transitory literary works that serve as supports for that quest. (176)

As with criticism, so too, I would argue, with the blog post, or the presentation.

So let’s talk about the “Dead Technology” session at Computers in Libraries earlier this week. I’m not entirely sure who presented. I don’t really know what they said. But the mere existence of such a panel prompted people to create their own lists of dead tech and have their own arguments online, and it also prompted people to second-guess the technologies that were reported by eyewitnesses. You can sample the #deadtech hashtag on Twitter, or read a fairly interesting FriendFeed thread kicked off by Meredith asking “Help! Need clever/funny examples of dead tech for Marshall Breeding. Anyone?”

But just as you don’t need to have seen this panel to say something about it, the technology doesn’t have to be “dead” for you to bring it up at this panel, and neither does the “deadness” of the technology ensure that it is interesting or appropriate to talk about.

Velcro as seen through a scanning electron microscope.

In that FriendFeed thread, people really picked up on Meg vs. Meg’s suggestion of “velcro.” It seemed to drive people nuts that they use velcro every day, but that someone would have the temerity to suggest that it is a dead technology. I’d say that Meg was exactly right. Velcro’s ubiquity proves that it is dead. When every kid has a yard of velcro on his shoes, backpack, and jacket, is that still a “technology?” Is it something that you have to maintain? Is it a feature that sells a product? Are we waiting to buy this velcro product because we hear that there will be better velcro released next month? It’s no longer technology; it is lint.

Of course, if you wanted to take something that was undeniably dead and talk about it, you’d have to go a different direction. How about microcard? I doubt there are many librarians who would argue that microcard still has much life left in it. So it’s boring to talk about unless you can show why we should care that it is dead. You could talk about how in 1944, Fremont Rider devoted an entire book, The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library: A Problem and Its Solution, to a passionate case for microcards. You could talk about where that solution took us and how it informs what we think today. Lastly, you could talk about how a current-day technology that looks very much alive is actually rotting from the inside, and likely to take us the way of the microcard. I wonder if that’s what the speaker was getting at who said the iPad was dead tech.

Anyone can pick a technology out of the hat and say that it is “dead.” What is interesting is what happens after that–can they make you care why it is dead? Can they make you mourn that dead technology, or swear to avenge it? That’s what the dead tech panel is about.

Addendum

If the whole idea of “dead technology” is interesting to you, let me recommend two books, one of which I have read and one of which I haven’t (I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which is which.)

Carolyn Marvin’s 1988 book, When Old Technologies Were New is a fascinating look at how people reacted to an assimilated new technologies in the late 1800s. It examines issues of class, art, work, and public discourse in the age when the electric light, telephone, phonograph and even the idea of an “electrician” were new and untamed.

A great companion to Marvin’s book is Klaus Musmann’s Technological Innovations in Libraries, 1860-1960: An Anecdotal History. He covers some of the same ground as Marvin, in looking at technologies like the electric light and the telephone, but in this case how they specifically were seen to relate to libraries and library work. His book documents a world where librarians are not technological innovators, but are restlessly reactive, forever adopting and adapting technologies.

Then I pretty much threw a copy at Neil Gaiman, but he didn’t get it. (Here’s the story on FriendFeed, Josh’s message to Neil and Neil’s reply (!) on Twitter, and Dorothea’s message and Neil’s reply (!!))

I was successful in getting the zine and an LSW badge ribbon (thank you Candaian non-ALA-attending posse for getting those done!) to the Shanachie Tour Dutch guys, and they were nice enough to do an interview with me about the LSW. You can view it below (mom, my part starts at about 6:50). I think it turned out well–I sound surprisingly prepared, given I had no idea we were going to do this ahead of time.

ALA Annual Conference 2009 Chicago from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

One hundred copies of Codslap! The Library Society of the World Zine are now printed and ready for folding and stapling! They could have done that for me at the copy place, but I was too cheap to pay for it. Plus it doesn’t seem like a zine if you don’t get to screw up the stapling and folding by yourself.

It had not occurred to me just how heavy nine hundred sheets of paper would be. I’m going to have to drasticaly re-think my baggage strategy for this trip.

It has been years since I have been to ALA Annual, and am coming to grips with how big and spread out it all is, and that I won’t be able to just head down to the lobby of the conference hotel to find people to go to dinner with like I can at ITI conferences. I took a stab at a schedule and posted it to FriendFeed. I expect to make many changes on the fly, but unless the Fates intervene, I will be at the LSW meetup on Saturday night at Giordano’s on Jackson.

I thought I’d share with you the introduction that I wrote:

Thanks for picking up this, the first issue of the Library Society of the World’s zine, Codslap! If you aren’t familiar with the LSW, it’s an ad-hoc group of librarians who like to meet online (and in person when we can) to swap ideas, ask questions, and enjoy each other’s company. We believe that you don’t need a large formal organization for professional development. Josh Neff, who is the founder & sheriff of the LSW wrote a fanciful story for this zine about the founding of the LSW, but see the back cover for URLs and more if you are interested in taking part on this planet.

Shortly after I announced that I’d be compiling this zine that you hold in your hands, the following exchange took place on the December 10, 2008 episode of the (late, lamented) podcast, Uncontrolled Vocabulary:

David Rothman: You know what’s funny, Greg? As much as I love Steve Lawson, I will not and cannot support this endeavor.

UV host, Greg Schwartz: Tell me why.

David Rothman: Because it is wrong to be doing a dead tree endeavor….It’s an incredibly inefficient way of getting information out. It’s environmentally irresponsible. I mean, it might be charmingly archaic if there’s some, you know, real artisanship to the way the paper is made or used, but there’s certainly none of that, it’s going to be done on a photocopier. It’s just terribly unprofessional. Honestly, I think information professionals should be pushing everything towards the digital. I think we should be trying to abolish print journals.

First of all, I love David, too. Seriously. So I didn’t take this as a personal thing. David’s also a smart cookie, so if he thinks that putting together a paper zine isn’t just quirky, but something approaching downright immoral, then it seems like something worth looking into.

I think David is thinking of this zine as “information.” When it comes to information, I agree with David. I’m not so much into paper journals anymore. I never understand it at work when someone hands me a document they created on the computer then printed out. I don’t want a stack of paper that can’t be searched or altered. When it comes to information, I’d rather have bits than atoms, in the old Nicholas Negroponte formulation.

But I don’t think of a zine as information any more than I think of a love letter as information. If someone writes you a love letter on a scrap of notebook paper, you don’t complain that it’s not on handmade paper. You don’t ask them to scan it, OCR it, and email it to you in RTF. You don’t say “it’s not very professional of you to call me Boo-Boo.” You read it and cherish it and keep it in your sock drawer so you can pull it out years later and remember that time when you were in love.

Zines have a lot more in common with love letters than they do with journals. This zine has contributions from about a dozen people who just wanted to share something funny or thoughtful or useful with other library types. Some of them are my best friends, and some of them are people I didn’t know before they sent something in for the zine. A few are zine veterans, but I think for most of them, this is their first experience with writing for a zine. I thank them all for making this little experiment in love a success & hope I did their contributions justice.

Please look for me and introduce yourself. As long as the supply holds out, I’ll be handing out Shovers and Makers buttons, though I might try to extract a promise from you that you’ll do a Shovers and Makers post if you haven’t done one already.

I did, however peek in on a Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) meeting bright and early one morning while I was still in my pajamas and making pancakes for my kids. LITA’s popular “Top Tech Trends” panel met at 8AM on Sunday (hallelujah?) and LITA had the foresight to use technology to make the meeting more accessible to those of us who couldn’t be in Denver to participate.

In addition to the now-familiar stream of Twitter updates from meeting attendees, LITA took things a few steps further, first by using something called Cover It Live to add moment-by-moment liveblogging updates to a post on the LITA Blog, then by streaming live video of the session on Jason Griffey‘s Ustream.TV account (a recording of the session is available there now).

This seems exactly like one of the things LITA should be doing right now: showing ALA that it can cheaply and easily reach out to members and non-members by providing some live conference coverage. My experience of watching a little of the streaming video and reading a chunk of the liveblog can’t really compare to the experience that actual attendees had. Video quality and selective liveblogging aside, I was a bit distracted making sure my kids didn’t pour maple syrup on each other. But I heard enough to be intrigued and to have a little side conversation online with some other people who were similarly keeping an ear and an eye on the proceedings.

Opening up a meeting this way can only help LITA and ALA. It’s not a substitute for being at the conference, it’s more like an advertisement for the conference and the association in general. The more people who get a chance to put their eye to the keyhole, the more people who will eventually decide they need to step through the door and be in that room for that meeting the next time around.

Mostly, I’m posting now just to get you to go back to that comment thread and catch up, but here are a few thoughts anyway, partly provoked by my conversation with Iris Jastram (whom I hope will either comment here herself or post something to Pegasus Librarian).

The idea of the “unconference” or “library camp” is only a few years old, and people have different associations when they hear the term. For some people, the defining characteristic of the library unconference is that it is free to attendees. For others, it’s that the event is local and informal, or that it lacks any pre-scheduled sessions or keynotes, or that the schedule is created by the attendees on the day of the event.

That’s not to imply that people are so rigid that they can’t imagine an unconference that doesn’t meet their defining characteristic. But I do think that for those people who think “no registration fee” when they hear “library camp” or “unconference” will immediately think twice about an event with even a relatively modest fee. Those who expect a fully-unstructured schedule will wonder about an event with a keynote speaker or pecha kucha sessions. And so on.

For my part, I think one of the great things about the unconference format is that it can be whatever the attendees decide it is, and that many different kinds of events can fluorish. As long as people are interested in doing unconferences, there will be a spectrum from borderline anarchy to fairly buttoned-down events with a bit of flexibility in the schedule.

The only really surprising thing to me was in one of Roy Tennant’s comments where he mentions that LITA is expecting to lose money on their LITACamp, despite the fact that registration starts at $150 for members. I find that rather shocking if it is true, and if I were a LITA member, I’d be asking to see some spreadsheets.

It looks good: two days of conferencing (May 7 and 8) on the OCLC campus in Dublin, Ohio. They have lined up John Blyberg and Joan Frye Williams to provide keynotes for what appears to be otherwise a typical, participant-structured unconference.

It seems like there is a lot of potential for this to be a great event. But one slightly odd thing caught my eye: the registration fees.

The libray camps and unconferences that I have heard about up to now have been free or low-cost to attend. LITACamp is priced more like a typical ALA event: registration is $150 for LITA members, $210 for ALA Members, and $290 for non-members.

I’m going to try and keep my normal tendency to editorialize in check here. I certainly think there is more than one way to rock an unconference, and I’m not averse to people charging fees for them. I have sympathy for what Meredith Farkas says about Value in the online world. I have wondered before if “free” can work against a person wanting to travel to an unconference: that $150-$290 seems like something of a “guarantee” that LITACamp will be “serious” and worth traveling to, though in reality, it’s hard to see how the content of the LITACamp will be affected by the cost. And while it’s nice that they offer breakfast and lunch, it looks like most of the money will go straight to LITA.

For now I’ll just say that these registration fees seem unusual for an unconference, and I’m very curious to see how people react.

Maker Faire 2008 by Flickr user r3v || cls. This photo has a by-sa Creative Commons license.

The program (link to PDF) shows a mix of big-deal events–e.g., ArcAttack’s Musical Tesla Coil, the Ring of Fire, King of Fling Catapult Contest and so on–and smaller, hands-on booths and exhibits–such as DIY electronics, Swap-O-Rama-Rama, and Green How-To Activities. As I read over the program I started to think less about how much I wished I could go and more about “why can’t we have a library ‘conference’ that’s more like this?”

Imagine showing up for a Library Faire (we probably couldn’t actually call it that given the whole O’Reilly “Web 2.0” trademark thing a few years back, but bear with me) and instead of sitting in sessions or chatting up vendors while scouting out the best schwag, you’d sit down in a booth or workshop with other librarians and create something that you could bring home. You wouldn’t just hear how a group of librarians did something at their library, you’d have those people teaching you how to do it, and you would leave with the project already underway for your library. The emphasis would be on people teaching each other in small groups and on people leaving not just with notes and handouts, but with something that they’d begun to make, whether it was a new web page, a new approach to teaching, or the start of a new PR campaign. I’m picturing something like a poster sessions come to life–not “look at what we did,” but “let me show you how to do this right now.”

It might be harder to find equivalents for the big-deal parts; what do libraries have that plays to a crowd besides book truck drill teams? A big tent for the “gaming in libraries” folks to go nuts in would also be a natural. But maybe the big stuff wouldn’t be that important. Maybe the idea of a day of hands-on activities would be enough.

While still at Internet Librarian, I floated a sketchier version of this idea on FriendFeed and the response was heartening. Some of the comments make me think that we aren’t all on the same page, but that’s not a bad thing at this point, when we are just kicking around a new-ish idea. Of course, I’d love to hear more ideas in the comments on this post.

APE 2008, photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. This photo has a by-nc-nd Creative Commons license.

The theme this week might be “cool events that Steve can’t attend.” I saw Scott Beale / Laughing Squid’s photos from the Alternative Press Expo 2008 in San Francisco today, and thought how much I would like to have attended. Then I thought how much I would have liked to attend with a nice library budget for buying stuff.

Anybody out there who can provide a librarians’ perspective on APE2008?