Dine Arounds - Making a Big Conference Less Impersonal

Today I would like to blog about my favorite part of the CIL2008, the Dine Around! I am not certain if I mentioned before but the conference had, I believe, over 2200 attendees. Most of the sessions I attended were in packed meeting rooms with upwards of 400 people. Great presentations but not exactly a medium ideal for discussion.

Someone thought of a way to alleviate this - the Dine Around. Basically, each night someone had set up a list of places to eat in the area along with a suggested topic for discussion. The eateries were outstanding and included a sampling of the fantastic ethnic cuisine available in the vicinity. The only downside that I could see to the system was that it appears that no one clued the locations that we were coming and it seemed they were a bit surprised to see 10-20 librarians arrive wanting to move tables together.

Lissa and I also were able to have an informal dine around one day at lunch with Terri O'Rourke from the Harvard Law Library. I found it refreshing that librarians at large university libraries face some of the same challenges that those of us who teach at small academic do.

Monday night we had dinner at the Kabob Palace where the announced discussion was to be wikis. Unfortunately the address for the Kabob Palace was incorrect on the sign up sheet, it sits around the corner on a side street from the other restaurants. This led to a small crowd but a great meal and a wonderful, wide ranging conversation that began with wikis and went far afield from there. Attending were Lissa and myself, ____ Smith from the Lewiston, Idaho Public Library, ________ and _______ from Temple University Library, and ______ from the Ohio University Library. (I apologize that I am so bad with names - hopefully someone will e-mail me and straighten me out or I will find more of my notes).

______ Smith is working on a wonderful wiki project to put up information on the historic structures in Lewiston. Having worked for several years in the cultural resource management field as an historian doing historic structures surveys this was, as they say, right up my alley. I think his idea to make this an open wiki and to engage the energy and research skills of the local genealogical community will make this project a great success. I hope to hear more on this in the future.

I was especially happy to speak to the folks from Temple. I am hoping to persuade the administration here to begin using the LibGuides software. Temple has been using the software and I was able to ask these nice ladies a million eager questions about it. They were uniformly positive and their web pages look great!

Our final dinner companion, ______ from Ohio University, worked with the person who I replaced when I was hired in my present job.

Tuesday night we went to Urban Thai to discuss Second Life and libraries. I have never been on Second Life and was quite curious. The food was fantastic and we had a large group. The folks in our local area included Tara Spies? and ______ from the Texas State University Library and Dan Sich (see his CIL 2008 blog) from the University of Western Ontario Library. I learned quite a bit about Second Life from everyone and I hope to log on this summer.

I hope to be able to attend CiL again in the future and the first hing I intend to look up is the Dine Arounds!

The Best Western Pentagon Experience

Due to my own procrastination and the usual delays inherent in any bureaucracy I signed up for CiL too late to book a room at the Hyatt Regency where the conference was held. Instead I ended up at the Best Western Pentagon a couple of miles away. In the hotel's favor it was clean and the folks who worked there were very friendly. It was also only a short shuttle or cab ride to the convention site. Unfortunately, that was about where the good parts about the hotel ended.

1. Wireless. The hotel promised free high speed internet via data ports and wireless access. As far as I was able to tell the wireless only worked in the lobby and my room did not have a data port. Normally this would only be a mild inconvenience but given the content of the conference it was a major hassle not to be able to try out all of the new sites the presenters mentioned.
2. No refrigerator. Since when do hotel rooms not include a mini-fridge? Coupled with the anemic ice maker that produced only a small bucket of ice a day this made it difficult to keep soda cold and impossible to save any leftovers.
3. The cable connection to the TV did not have the end connector. Basically, the coaxial cable was cut off with a knife and the metal wire simply stuck into the TV connection. This required replacement at least once a night as the cable worked itself out of the TV.
4. My final problem was one that is true of many hotels - the Continental breakfast. My question is on what continent is this breakfast? Donuts and bagels and a piece of fruit or cereal might be ok for kids or really skinny people but on MY continent breakfast should include bacon, sausage, gravy, fried potatoes, eggs, and the like. They do say it is the most important meal of the day.

Would I stay at the BWP again? Yes, if it were the only hotel open for the conference but you can be certain that I will book a room earlier in the future.

Riding the Rails - Amtrak to DC and Back

The trip to CiL was an adventure from start to finish. Lissa and I took an Amtrak train to DC. Neither of us had ever rode the train before. The Cardinal route travels from Chicago to New York via West Virginia every other day and is scheduled to take around nine hours each way.

The decision to take the train rather than fly was an easy one. Our round trip tickets from Charleston to DC were only $96 each versus the $5-600 it would have taken to fly each of us there. While my fees were being covered by the university, Lissa's were out of pocket. Moreover, I do not like to fly. The few trips that I have taken with the Army National Guard and with the WVDOH have satisfied any urge I have to travel by air. Lastly, I feel that air travel, except in the most urgent of instances, is a huge drain on the environment.

The ride to DC was nice and we arrived at Union Station only about one hour late. The scenery on the route is outstanding and near Thurmond, West Virginia you pass an area that contains dozens of fairly intact coke ovens.

The return trip was also quite comfortable though I was frustrated that the electrical outlet for our seats did not work causing us to be unable to view the movies we had brought along to watch on the laptop. The disappointing part about the return trip was that a tree had fell onto a bridge in a remote area of West Virginia and we were stuck for over four hours waiting on a CSX crew to arrive to remove the tree and certify the bridge safe for travel. Unlike the trip to DC, the Amtrak crew was quite uncommunicative while we waited leaving the passengers unaware of when we would get moving again. Our 8:10 pm arrival in Charleston turned into a 2:10 am one. Unfortunately, most of this section of the trip was out of cell phone range leaving our friend Jeff who picked us up waiting most of the evening for us. He was amply rewarded with a trip to Sitar the next day though!

Despite the delays, I highly recommend traveling via Amtrak. It was wonderful to be able to relax, read, listen to music, and move around when I wanted on the trip. It was good to not feel the guilt (and economic impact) of flying to DC and not having to drive once we were there was an extreme blessing. We are already looking at further trips by rail.

Back from Computers in Libraries 2008

I am back from Computers in Libraries 2008 and I must say we (my wife and I) had a wonderful time. The conference was fantastic and much bigger than I had imagined. The only disappointment was that I had intended to blog about my sessions each evening after we returned to the hotel but the hotel wireless failed me. Therefore I intend to post some info on my experiences over the next week or so. My postings will cover some general aspects of the conference as well as the sessions I attended. Future posts should be as follows:

• Riding the Rails - Amtrak to DC and Back
• The Best Western Pentagon Experience
• Dine Arounds - Making a Big Conference Less Impersonal
• The Exhibitor's Hall
  
• Web 2.0 Services for Smaller, Underfunded Libraries
• Fast & Easy Site Tune-Ups
• Library Web Presence: Engaging the Audience
• Widgets, Tools, & Doodads for Library Webmasters
• What Do Users Really Do in Their Native Habitat?
• Mashups for the Nontechies
• Libraries A-Twitter & Using del.icio.us
• Facebook Apps & Libraries Friendly Future
• Harnessing New Data Visualization Tools
• 2.0 Pecha Kucha - Conversation Face-Off!
• Speed Searching: Tips & Tricks for Speeding Up the Search Process
• One Click Ahead: Best of Research Shelf
• Elearning: IL Instruction & Out-of-the-Box Software
• What's Hot in RSS & Social Software
• Talking 2.0 to the Faculty
• Post Conference: Integrating RSS into Your Website

J.K. Rowling Goes Too Far

Thanks to LISNews for this story on Rowling's continuing fight to stop an independent Harry Potter Lexicon. In the story she is quoted as saying, "Muggles everywhere should be happy that I have been so restrained. Some thought I should protect every word I wrote in the seven Harry Potter volumes." By this she was referring to the fact that her "lawyers have copyrighted and trademarked the words "Harry" and "Potter" and will protect those brands." While I am pretty certain that there is NO way that one can copyright a word it is possible to trademark words though to do so for words that are in everyday usage is typically meaningless.

I enjoyed the books, my wife and daughters loved the books, we all love the movies. Together we have generated a not insubstantial amount of money for JKR. Given that in 2005 Forbes listed her net worth as $1 billion she is not hurting for the money.

Further, what JKR is missing here is that the creation of a Harry Potter lexicon is a necessary step for her works to begin to enter the literary canon. Let's hope that she soon sees the light.