my two posts from PLA yesterday

Today I went into the wilds of Filene’s Basement with my sister to get my boyfriend a suit, so no PLA for me, even though I heard that Jenny and Michael’s talk was excellent (and agree with Sarah and Suzi, what a nice bunch of people). My two posts from yesterday are linked here:

  • The Joy of Censorship by Joe Raiola – I enjoyed this talk a lot though I wwas worried I’d have trouble transcribing parts of it to the PLA blog because of all the swearing, but the PLAblog admins were pretty nice about it all, including the image!
  • Productive Aging – Are Public libraries Productive Partners? – it was really great to hear Mary Catherine Bateson issue a call to arms to take advantage of the boomers retiring and having lots of free time while they are still healthy and involved to get them to help their communities and help their country.

I tried pretty hard to go to sessions which wouldn’t be on the standard techie paths, and also tried to do write-ups quickly and efficiently. I liked getting to use the press room and I liked feeling that I was sharing some of my skills and abilities (quickly tossing up a well-linked and well written blog post for an event that someone else couldn’t go to) with other librarians. Sarah did a little PLA blogging, but also did write-ups of a few more sessions on her own website. I posted my final post on the PLABlog, even though I swore I was going to do a write-up on how terrible the bathrooms were

Elsewhere in the library conference world this weekend, Meredith lets us know that she didn’t suck in her talk in Computers in Libraries. Look at that talk about wikis, it does not suck.

see you at PLA?

I’m at PLA for the next few days so updates will be over at the PLAblog, and you can follow along with the photostream at Flickr by looking at the pla2006 tag. You can’t sort by author so I suggest you read the whole thing if you’re interested in what a public library conference looks like. This is my first real post there. Early observations:

  • Free wireless everywhere for everyone, and even a special wireless lounge with couches and outlets. Huh, that looked easy.
  • The Hynes Convention Center is a really good place for a conference.
  • The PLAblog is not just a neat project from the perspective of people who can’t go to the conference, it actually is a great network of folks who are sort of known to be the techie-types who are visible to help with all sorts of things.
  • As always, I’m delighted to be staying with a person (my sister) and not in some wretched hotel. I have yet to stay in a hotel in the US that is at all better than my own room at home, or even most of the guestrooms I stay in. This may be one of those rural vs. urban things, but it sure is true.
  • It’s really nice to get to just write-up things for the blog and not a) be in charge and b) be on my way to a governance meeting. Steven and Andrea are doing an amazing job.
  • Brian Smith (also blogging for PLA) is as funny in person as he is on his site, just don’t call him the “laughing librarian”