Sitting here in the airport, waiting to go home after a morning spent with such last-minute things as figuring out how much to tip hotel maids, everything seems suspended out of time. I’m exhilarated and exhausted all at the same time. Happy to go home, sorry to leave. It’s been four wonderful days full of ideas, inspirations, fun, and the best company imaginable.

In the absence of an internet connection (when did this become such an life necessity?), I took the time to draft this post and transfer my pictures from my camera to my laptop. Tagging them as I went, I had to giggle when I remembered the librarian next to me in one of the session when, asked to write down a tag for a picture the presenter projected, wrote her tag in perfect LCSH (including double dashes). You’ve gotta love librarians. And I must admit, I have librarianish tagging tendencies, too. I use plurals to describe countable nouns and singulars to describe uncountable nouns, I don’t often tag pictures of me “me,” and I rarely attach more than a couple tags for any picture. But I draw the lines at double dashes and qualifiers.

And you’d have to be a librarian to get a kick out of the jokes that were flying a couple nights ago at the Irish pub in town. The CIL snowball effect had taken hold and we’d gathered well over 20 librarians by the time we left the hotel. One of them (our personal jester, as it turned out) looked up as we sat in the pub, noticed a bunch of books lined up and tilting into the spaces where some had been removed, and asked “Does anyone have the compulsion to go straighten those books?” We giggled. That was only the beginning. That was before our jester (Eric Sizemore) nearly killed Steven Cohen by suggesting that we twitter in DDC… “How are you feeling?” … “745.5944″ … and then we started twittering requests for DDC translations of concepts … and then some librarians started twittering us the answers. Yeah. We completely geeked out. You probably had to be there, but for those of us who were, it’ll live on in CIL lore for generations.

But now my plane is getting ready to board. I’m not a nervous flier, but I always get a little nervous about my seat neighbor. Two equal horrors may await me: it might be a nervous (or worse, an air-sick) flier, or it might be a talker. My duo combo of audio book on iPod AND magazine (which I pretend to read) should take care of the later, but there’s no help for the former. Luckily the former is very, very rare.

There are a couple more sessions I’ll blog about later. But for now, wish me happy travels.

technorati tags: cil2007

Ok, I’ve tried this a couple of times, now, and I think Blogger officially hates YouTube (maybe it’s some step-sibling rivalry or something). So here I go again… shorter… not as much excitement in my tone… and not as much detail. Blame Blogger.

This morning’s keynote was on the Library of Congress’ new project (scheduled to be available summer of 2008) to digitize culturally significant items from seven countries: the U.S., Brazil, Russia, Spain, France, Egypt, and the Netherlands. And yes, everything will be available in all seven languages. What a job.

The talk was interesting, but the demo video he showed at the end was very, very cool. Yes, I like shiny things… Very cool. Check it out:

technorati tags: cil2007

I’ve been having such a great time that it’s strange to think today is the last day of CIL. Some people are already heading out this morning. And everyone’s saying, “See you at Internet Librarian…” which makes me jealous that everyone else is GOING to Internet Librarian. Oh well.

Even though I’ve met new people every day, there are still a few of you out there that I just haven’t managed to cross paths with (at least, not knowingly). This is it, folks. Say Hi today or you’ll have to wait until next year. So if you see an olive green computer backpack wandering around on some girl’s back, there’s a good chance that back is mine. I haven’t seen any other olive green computer backpacks.

technorati tags: cil2007

With day two drawing for a close, my brain is full again. I need one of those pools of memories like in the Harry Potter books…

Today the most memorable quote of the day goes to Gao Tao. He was explaining Joomla and how they’d implemented it at his library. In the midst of telling us about decisions and meetings and other such fun stuff that you have to go through when implementing a major change in a library, he said, “The bad news is that you may get frustrated. The good news is that I just saved a bunch of money on car insurance.” Wow. The room erupted. And this was even after we’d grown to love him when he said to “please let me know if you’re having trouble hearing me, or if I start speaking in Chinese.”

Later I attended a presentation on Hennepin County Library’s inclusion of patron and librarian “comments” (reviews, annotations, etc.) in their catalog. Funny that I traveled all the way to DC to hear a guy who works just up the road… The most important thing I learned, though, was that rating and commenting should BOTH be present. I’d always kind of dismissed rating catalog records, but Hennepin has found that they end up with numbers (like “7/10″ or just “5″) written in their comments. So obviously people want this feature.

Oh, and there were ponies in Michelle and Meredith’s presentation, as promised. But the theme had evolved by presentation time, so it wasn’t just a pony…. it was a pony with a monocle. I’m not clear on how the monocle thing started (even though I was in the room when the scheme was hatched the night before), but Jason donated his photoshop skills to add the monocle. It was cool. Oh, and the presentation was good to. :)

After coffee, I sat on the stairs outside of Steven Cohen’s “What’s Hot with RSS” presentation. Why the stairs? Because the overflow room was full… After we’d colonized the stairs people started sitting (in neat rows, for some reason) down the hall. Amazing. I wished I’d had internet access during that one because people around me kept asking to see the stuff he was showing, or wondered about alternatives to the tools he showed. But I didn’t. But I did get somebody else started on Twitter, and explained blogging to somebody else. Fun stuff.

technorati tags: cil2007

There was a last minute substitution for this morning’s keynote. I don’t know what happened, so no juicy details from me, but whatever happened it resulted in a great talk by Andy Carvin (of PBS Learning.now fame) about how “Old Media” giants (such as NPR, CNN, and USA Today) are embracing the social web to extend their coverage and reporting power. And beta isn’t just for the web any more. NPR is releasing pilots early for comment and criticism here at Roughcuts.

In fact “participatory” and “transparency” were the real themes of the morning. “The people formerly known as the audience” (Carven quoting Jay Rosen) are becoming more and more instrumental in determining what gets reported and how it gets reported.

But I think he really hit the nail on the head when he said that as much as participatory environments really get things done, enrich “standard” content, and are generally recognized as a great idea, organizations are reluctant to “go social” because, and I quote, “People aren’t always comfortable sharing how they make sausages.”

But I think there’s more to it than that organizations (or individuals) think it’ll be embarrassing or icky or gross, or any of that. I think there’s at least as much of a perception that what happens behind the scenes isn’t interesting to people. At least, I know that’s true of my job. Almost every time my grandma asks what, exactly, I do at work (which is often, mostly because I’ve never been able to actually explain it well) I have trouble saying anything because I’m always sure that most of the day to day stuff I do and think about isn’t “interesting” (especially not to people who don’t live in library land).

Anyway, Carvin had a rich set of slides (PowerPoint file here) filled with an impressive number of examples. He didn’t get to all of them in his talk, but they’re definitely worth visiting. There are lots of links. Lots.

technorati tags: cil2007