Post-Internet Librarian

Sitting in the airport waiting to go back home is probably the best place to write a reflective blog post about the Internet Librarian conference.  I'm certainly not distracted by anything... Unless boredom can be a distraction.

The ILC was not as great as I'd hoped it would be.  Which is not to say I got nothing out of it.  I did.  I got plenty of validation.  I found out that my library does a pretty good job of managing our online presence.  We make sure we brand everything with our logo.  We try to keep the same color palette on our various sites. And we've done our best to use consistent naming for our accounts, although, our reference name, eref, is too generic.  Oh well. It's been around long enough now that our patrons know it.

I also found out that I have a better idea about how to strategize a strategic plan that I thought I did.  That was a comfort, to be sure.  I had recently been in a meeting about our technology plan and was poo-poo'd by the group concerning a suggestion I made.  Found out my suggestion was accepted practice.  (told you so). I also found out a whole lot more about developing a strategic plan.  This was a very good thing since I plan on doing one in the very near future.  Internet Librarian really helped me prepare for that task.

And I learned about failure at IL.  Not that there's a lot to learn about it -- we have all failed at one time or another.  Anyone remember thin clients?? 

I attended a couple of programs that dealt with library fails.  I was surprised at some of them.  Reference in 2nd Life?  Has anyone had true success with that? Granted i heard only a brief synopsis of this library's SL adventure, but it sounded to me like part of the fail was that they didn't want to answer the kinds of questions they got.  People wanted to know how to put on clothes. That's a legit SL question. It's also a public library-type question.  I mean, we'd answer it -- and count it in our stats for the day.  I guess the academic library that was presenting this particular fail didn't realize the SL is a community, not a campus?   It took me awhile to figure out how to dress that avatar when I first joined SL.  Too bad we weren't doing SL reference then.  I could have been the Naked Librarian!

I don't think I'll be bucking to go back to Internet Librarian anytime in the near future.  I'm glad I got to go this time and I'm sure I'll find a reason to go again, but I think I'll stick to ALA for the time being.