NYLA Conference 2010

Image via WikipediaHi ho out there. Is it snowing? Eh, in any event, I just got back from the annual New York Library Association conference in Saratoga Springs and wanted to say a few things about this years' outing.

First , I'll get the shameless self promotion out of the way. I took part in the SMART division of NYLA session called Flash Talks. They put out for a call for people to do presentations on fun and exciting ways their library is using technology. Catch is that the presentation has to be in the 20x20 PechaKucha style which is 20 PowerPoint slides all set to 20 seconds each as to keep the presentations moving. I decided to give it a try and settled on the idea of doing a presentation on audience response devices (iClickers).

After the first presentation, which was a combo presentation award that someone won, which was on hardcore cataloging, creating a script to batch load multiple records for weeding and some other stuff that went way over my head, and hearing that a presentation after me was going to be on cloud computing, I started to get nervous that talking about iClickers was going to be a little low-tech for this crowd, of which I knew no one. Well, the presentation went well with some well timed jokes thrown in to lighten the mood, and from then on I was known as 'the clicker guy'. The crowd ended up being a mix of tech people and some instruction people interested in tech and they were able to relate to some of the points I raised with using the clickers to keep students into the lesson especially in one-shot sessions that we do here. I even got some people asking me for more information about the clickers after the session. And on top, someone raised the idea of me doing a full session on iClickers at next years' conference. (And thanks to those that helped me out with this)

A big thought that I came away from the conference with was that there were more than a few sessions that I went to where I thought either, any of us could have run that session I was just in and some of the sessions were just on how that library tackled a particular issue instead of, what I was expecting, a review of multiple ways that issue could be addressed. For instance, I went to a session on library programming on a budget. What the presenter did was really focus on how they ran a program there on a budget and not on multiple ways or programs that could be done on a budget. Maybe that was just my preconceived expectations getting in the way.

A big draw for me for this years' conference was that Michael Stevens, who I follow on Twitter (and more about that in a bit) was doing a double-session entitled The Hyperlinked Library. I'll link to the slides from his presentation but I will point out that it's a large file, something like 400 slides, but well worth going through. Instead of pigeonholing a 400+ slide presentation into a few sentences, I'll let you check it out and see what you take from it. I highly recommend you do so even if it takes a while. It was my favorite session of the conference. Visit Tame the Web for the presentation.

Throughout the conference I was Tweeting using the #NYLA10 hashtag so those not at the conference could follow, and I gained a few followers from that, including Michael Stevens who put up a screenshot of the NYLA follow screen during his session. Ah, the power of the Tweet.

Some other random thoughts:

• there was a session on embedded librarians and how one small college decided to change their library orientation sessions to online videos using Camtasia and I thought, wow, that sounds familiar.
• EBSCO has a new service called EBSCO Discovery Service or EBSCO Integrated Search which is similar to products like Summon.
• For emerging tech trends check out Gartner's top 10 tech trends for 2011
• Firesheep is a Firefox add-on that steals cookies over wi-fi
• Search Flickr for awesome and horrible library signage
• Cloud computing is the next big thing (or it might be the big thing already.

That's all for now. If I remember more or find more notes, I'll update.

LL