I’ve had this half draft sitting unpublished in here far too long! Now I’m at MLA08 and need to post on that…so it’s time to set this free…
This year CIL08 was in Arlington, VA. It is usually there though it has been in LA I guess. I’ve wanted to go for the past couple of years but the prohibitive cost kept me away. I was so happy to find out more about the discount from Rudy. With Solinet’s 50% off, I finally took the plunge. And I’ll say now that discount or not, I’ll be headed back to CIL if I have anything to say about it!
I really enjoyed the format of CIL. Everyday was jam packed with presentations… I’ve been to other conferences and decided I really enjoy a solid day of presentations and learning opportunities with free time for networking.
I think the biggest thing I took away from CIL was the power of networking and being involved. I recently heard “it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you.” Wow. That’s so true! I’ve read and heard from others who seem to expect something to come to them…um, no, that’s not how it works. So that’s what inspired me to get moving with my blog and to start joining my colleagues in discussions, banter, and generally getting to know each other.
The other thing I can “thank” CIL08 for is that I finally feel like I know how to get more connected. Maybe I shouldn’t admit this but it’s easier than I imagined. I’ve begun getting to know people on Twitter*, through blogs, and in conferences. Guess I was just sitting in the corner, caring about things all by myself. Silly me!
So you may be thinking…so is that all you got out of CIL? Well, no. I got pages and pages of notes! That’s my one real complaint about CIL. Several of the presentations I attended really should just be renamed to “50 things/tools/URLs about X in 45 minutes.” Or something like that. Instead of taking the time to actually show more of the tools or to offer a more thoughtful introduction (who is it good for, where you see it being useful, a good/bad thing about it), several presenters just ran through list of resources. Not so helpful for me. Now I have nearly a full notebook of one liners. I have a lot of investigating to do before I know what I really got out of CIL! Just to give you an idea of what I attended, here are a few of the presentations that I really enjoyed: Mobile Searching, Sarah Cohen’s Talking 2.0 to Faculty, Sarah Houghton-Jan’s Online Outreach Libraries: Successful Digital Marketing, Jody Fagan’s Mashups for the Nontechies (Yahoo Pipes), the Pecha Kucha (featuring Amanda Etches-Johnson, Greg Schwartz, Meredith Farkas, David Free, Aaron Schmidt, and Greg Notess), and finally Charles Lyons’ Going Local in the Library: Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Local 2.0. Summertime will be my time to play and see which tools work for me, my library, and my patrons.
*More thoughts on Twitter: I recently posted to Greg’s request for opinions and thoughts on Twitter where I discuss CIL.
