I’ve noticed a curious trend here at Internet Librarian. Those sessions led by LSW members are consistently of high quality. They were informative, humorous, to the point, and organized. Those sessions led by non-LSW members are a very mixed bag. A couple were brilliant (I’m thinking of danah boyd, especially). A few were definitely not.

One explanation could be that we’ve managed to amass a group of cool librarians that are also good presenters. And while I think this is definitely true, I don’t think it’s the whole story. For one thing, if this were the whole story, I’d expect to see improvement in those of us who’ve spoken a lot, and I’d expect to see newer presenters from the group playing a bit of catch-up. I’m not really seeing that, though. It seems like the entire group, veteran and newbie speakers alike, churned out really high-quality work.

My theory is that the fact that we keep up with each other online, and the fact that we all know and respect each other, enticed everyone to step up and make sure that what they presented would be top notch. Put simply, everyone was proving to everyone else that they were cool enough to belong in the group. Even those who had never spoken at a national conference before had a reputation to maintain in front of a crowd of seriously talented, smart, and funny peers.

There’s a down-side to this network effect, too. We generally knew a lot of the facts presented already, since we’d already presented them to our peers online. Still, I heard several things expressed in person in ways that I hadn’t heard online. And the sheer mass of presentations and discussions juxtaposed against each other highlighted some trends that I would probably have missed otherwise.

The conference is over now, and we’re all scattering back to our respective homes. The conversation about librarianship will continue, though, as we keep up with each other online. I wonder what this means for the quality of next year’s conference. Only good things, I imagine.

Next up: actual information from sessions. I promise. I’m working on it.

I now understand the cult of Internet Librarian. People have been telling me for years that I needed to come, and for years I’ve very prudently stayed away to tend my collection of panicky Fall Term students. But this year I was asked if I wanted to help lead a pre-conference workshop here with pretty much the best group of people ever, and so here I am, and it is wonderful.

I wake up every morning (far too early, I might add, due to the craziness that is the Pacific Time Zone) to the sound of the sea lions singing to each other. There’s good sea food. There’s good company. And there have been several really interesting sessions so far. I might even get around to blogging about a couple of them soon. For example, there was a great session on an ethnographic study that a team at George Washington University did to see how students used Facebook and how librarians might appropriately fit into that world. It’s always great when somebody backs up hunches about the way things work with actual research.

But more on that next time I have a good wireless signal.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been helping to plan a conference. It’s been a very interesting experience. Exciting, confusing, thrilling… all at the same time. But it’s shaping up even more nicely than I had dared to let myself hope. We have two days of sessions planned. The second day will be all hands-on workshops. The first will be sessions made up of one primary speaker to set the stage for a few people to show how the topic at hand played out in their work lives, all of which will be followed by discussion.

One of the most interesting parts of the experience for me has been sitting in the planning meeting and listening to everyone’s vision of the ideal conference and then making as much of it as possible happen amidst the practicalities of real life. What can we realistically pull off this year? What should we put on the list for next year and the year after? And now, with registration open, I still can’t really believe my ears when I hear that people are signing up. This is really going to happen! And you know what? I think it’s going to be really fun.

John Reidl (who’s talk last year is still one of the most interesting keynotes I’ve ever heard) will open the show, and Rachel Smith and Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium will speak in the middle of the first day. There’ll be sessions on things like cyber scholarship, open source, taking our public services online, and managing digital collections. And there’ll be workshops on everything from usability testing and multimedia content creation to Facebook and digital archiving.

If you’re interested, registration is easy and the price is low. I highly recommend it, though I do say so myself.

I’m still processing my thoughts after CIL, and I’m sure this won’t be my last post on the issue, but I thought I’d just give a quick thumbs up and thumbs down list.

Thumbs down (first so I can get it over with):

• Arlington doesn’t seem to have a blue sky. I’ve only seen clouds. Does the sun ever shine there?
• Vendors who clearly haven’t heard what we’ve been saying for years. C’mon people. We aren’t trying to be mean when we question your relevance ranking algorithm or your obsolete file structure. We’re just frustrated. And nothing’s changing in any fundamental way.

Kinda in between:

• Wireless that doesn’t work. In all fairness, ITI clearly tried very very hard. There was a whole lot more connectivity than there has been at previous conferences. Unfortunately, all of our bandwidth needs have also increased and so we crashed it… regularly and with frequency.
• And for all the guff people gave for new ideas that didn’t work (you know the ones), I think it’s great that ITI is really working to make sure this conference structure and logistics move forward with the times. It’s regrettable that many of these experiments flopped in a big way, but a track on open source and a track on new user interfaces were two great steps forward.

Thumbs up (to leave you with the good stuff):

• The people the people the people
• More accommodations for the laptop laden (a blogger’s row in the front of every room, complete with power strips. Yay for power strips!)
• Watching the stenographer at work. I had no idea they did that!
• Pecha Kucha!!!!

And even though nobody else will care, here are the top in-jokes from this year (feel free to comment with those I’ve left out):

• One-eyed pink bunnies.
• “Libelous and slanderous”
• “I’m late for choir practice”
• “Hookers and blow”
• “I hate technology”
• Lobby 2.0

[Edited to get the right things into the right categories. Thanks, Greg, for the heads-up. Advice to all: never blog when this sleep-deprived, no matter how much you think it'll be fun and easy.]

technorati tags: cil2008