Conference Musings Day 2

What a difference a day makes – I brought my power cord with me so I had juice in my laptop and was able to tweet with a frequency that would ordinarily have concerned me – I try not to normally overwhelm my followers – but there was so much information to share and so many mindblowingly insightful tweets to retweet that I am temporarily justified. #asist09

I went to many sessions today and I think I found my favorite (so far) …  Mike Crandell and Karen E. Fisher’s presentation “Free Access to Computers and the Internet at the Public Library”.  From the iSchool (is your school) at UW, they did a fabulous presentation about the research they’ve done (also in book form) and I hope that they develop a model to share with other libraries on how to identify the impacts of PACs (Public Access Computers) in their communities as I feel this would be a good tool to help us evangelize in these tough economic times.  The early finding that they shared with us (on a difficult to read slide – fix please <grin>) were that the top domains of PAC use are social inclusion, education, employment, health & e-government which feels right to me as I observe the patrons in my rural library.  I wish there was more research for public librarians (in general) at this conference …

There was no lunch today …  for a conference of nerds they sure aren’t feeding us.  I had crepes with some fellow attendees including the other student conference blogger (http://crywhite.blogspot.com/) at a wonderful crepe spot on Robson street (turn right).

By the end of the last session today – I was failing at understanding all the new information.  I think I can only absorb so much info in a single day so I left the conference for the day with much fonder memories and a history of tweets I will have to one day turn into a long form blog post, complete with high quality links…

And I also realized that no matter what I do, I always get turned around at skytrain stations and spend many minutes panicking when the parking lot looks completely different and unfamiliar until I realize I need to find the entrance and backtrack from that because the exit always exists you somewhere completely different.  It’s not me, its bad user design.

Cheers,
Ro McKernan