DIY Librarian

On Sunday, a I attended Blog U, a mini-conference attached to Web Search University. The faculty line-up was stellar (Blake Carver, LISNews; Steven M. Cohen, Library Stuff; Jane Dysart, Dysart & Jones; Amanda Etches-Johnson, blogwithoutalibrary.net; Sabrina Pacifici, beSpacific; Aaron Schmidt, walking paper; and Jill Stover, Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book). Their presentations were great, but the best part of the conference was how interactive it was. I really liked the format, with a few brief presentations and then time for questions interspersed throughout the day. It made me feel like my question didn’t have to apply directly to the presentation at hand, and it seemed to make the presenters more comfortable answering because they could defer to another presenter—or all provide an answer, which happened several times. I even asked some questions, something I’m often reluctant to do at sessions.

The presentations should be linked from the Blog U site soon, but you can also find most of them on the presenters’ blogs.

I particularly liked Schmidt’s not-PowerPoint slides. I’d read about Jessamyn’s HTML slides before, but this was the first chance I had to see them in action.

I felt like I, along with my colleague/friend Jen, was among the more advanced students, since we are already testing a WordPress blog behind the scenes at work, but I still learned quite a bit. In particular, I’m finding more ways to integrate the blog content into our website.

(With apologies to Ralph Wiggum.)