acrl 2007

i arrived late, late thursday night and gave my talk friday afternoon. i talked about blogging gones, about gleeson library's get graphic, and about usfblogtastic. i talked about blogging students, commenting librarians, and feedback loops - online and offline - that harness collective intelligence. i talked a lot about physical students spending time in physical libraries.

from derik's angle, things looked like this:


from my angle, things looked like this:



thank you jennifer lang for your summary!

i had to fly home the next day but before leaving i explored the morning poster session. awesome. they were the most interesting, creative, and practical projects i have seen at a conference. plus, librarians understand information visualization; the poster projects were exceptionally well-designed.

i especially liked:

library link: bettering life in, life out - laura sullivan, threasa wesley, and leslie hammann, steely library, northern kentucky university. a three-way partnership between steely library, nku's political science and criminal justice department, and the kenton county detention center, this project established a jail library to insure jail inmates' access to information resources, support life skills, and facilitate a smoother reintegration into society upon release from jail. (more info here.) inspiring.

the rohrbach library reference department art wall: showcasing student art - claire andrews and sylvia pham, rohrbach library, kutztown university of pennsylvania. the kutztown university of pennsylvania has excellent programs in art, art education, and communication design and the students enrolled in these departments make a lot of excellent art. so, thought some librarians, why not showcase their art in the library? the library gets great art. students get great exposure. brilliant. (check out the more you know, rohrbach library's blog.)

revelations from the reference blog - nick baker and christine ménard, williams college libraries. super smart: refblog uses PHP and MySQL to allow librarians to document their reference activities, share with and learn from their colleagues, and generate reports. plus, the guy who programmed it, nick baker, is also the librarian behind the brilliant youtube video march of the librarians! cool project - download it for free.

take the joystick: e-games for the library - sarah f. cohen, champlain college library. when champlain college library was selected to host the ALA traveling exhibition, "alexander hamilton: the man who made modern america," librarians approached the college's innovative electronic game & interactive development program to see if students could design an e-game around alexander hamilton. with minimal rules - and, thus, maximum creativity - students were asked to design games for a fictional client in a professional setting. by all accounts, they had a blast doing it. so, so cool.

couldn't make it? check out the conference blog. check out the diversity and depth of topics discussed. i remember the days when it would take weeks or months to find out what happened at this or that conference. these days, when done right, blogs give us nearly real-time coverage. for flickr, try the acrl2007 tag.