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!
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