fuzzy CIL feelings

wow, it's already 11pm at the end of my first full day of the conference! I haven't posted anything about today's stuff yet. My head's swimming. What's been fun has been all of the socializing (or should I say networking) that I've been doing. I've met so many great people. I've met people from various parts of the South, from Missouri (a State Library employee out there, in fact), from across the country, from Canada, Australia, you name it.

I also saw some folks I knew from CT. Polly Aida Farrington, who teaches technology classes (for librarians) and consults in CT and NY, came to last night's Dine Around - at the excellent Urban Thai (yummy salmon mango salad - ahh!) (see the flickr photo she posted of the group) and hosted a ning.com Library20 social network dinner at the Chesapeake Grill in the Hyatt tonight (yummy but much more expensive salmon dinner). I met Kate Sheehan, of Danbury (who is one of several of us authors of the Ct Libraries' Technology column) Public Library & saw Tilly from Westport. (And I saw Jon Blyberg and discovered that he's starting at Darien Library shortly - yay, he's coming to CT! I hope that it's a great move for him - we're glad to have another great librarian join us...)

And of course, the icing on the cake - no, not the Cabernet Sauvignon freely offered at the reception tonight (though that was good, too), but my cousin - who's a librarian at the National Library of Medicine was there & spotted me. I get to have lunch & spend some time with her tomorrow afternoon (yes, my family is library-oriented - she and her husband both are librarians, my sis is a librarian, I'm a librarian)!

Above and beyond the excellent presentations, it's the social part of the conference that does so much for me. In fact, now that I think about it, this is why Web2.0 is so successful - we learn more from one another than we do from reading, heck, even from attending presentations. We learn so much more because there's a feedback loop when you're talking with someone - anything that you're not quite sure you're understanding you ask for clarification on. You can't do that with a printed text. Also, when you're speaking with others, e.g., in a one-on-one way, you can get a more honest answer about something. For example, I was talking with a woman from Delaware about print/time management programs and I learned a lot of information that I'd never hear from the vendors.

cil2007