Wednesday morning

I found myself really slowing down yesterday although I attended several sessions and really enjoyed them. Seredipity seated me next to our blog leader yesterday. I came into the session after the second paper and sat down in the nearest available seat next to a lovely young woman typing away at a laptop. When I rudely peered at her nametag, I saw it was indeed the Kraftly Librarian herself.

The two papers that drew me to that session were about podcasts and wikis. We've been tossing around the idea of podcasts for about a year now but haven't done anything yet. No one at our place seems to think they would be very interesting, but the speaker introduced what they've done and that seems to have been successful. [ Strategies for Podcasting: Transforming Library Instruction to Meet the Needs of Technology-savvy Students, University of Tennessee Health Science Center] Maybe it will be worth another look.

The paper on wikis [ Integrating New Technologies in Library Operations to Improve Staff Knowledge and Customer Service, Levy Library, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY] gave support to the project we've begun toward creating a tool for our reference librarians and adjunct librarians spread out over seven campuses and a few extension sites. The speaker mentioned that they are transitioning to TWiki from some more basic wiki software. Our network administrator is not very enthusiastic about the whole idea and it's been a chore getting her to agree to loading wiki software on the server. I think TWiki would be too much to ask for although its content management aspects look really good.

The party last night was fun. It's always a kick seeing our colleagues get down and boogie or merengue or whatever. Librarians know how to have a good time.

I'm headed for home today and hope that those who can remain enjoy the rest of the meeting.