The Liminal Librarian

Big book!!!
Originally uploaded by librarianmer.

Blogging has fallen by the wayside these past couple of weeks as I was getting ready for, attending, and digging out from under this year’s CIL conference. The highlight of the conference for me, though, was getting to see Meredith Farkas, Michael Casey, and Laura Savastinuk sign their new books — and see people’s excitement at getting their hands on them.

I started this consulting editor gig with ITI just about 1.5 years ago, so Library 2.0 and Social Software in Libraries are the first two books I’ve been privileged to follow from conception through fruition. (And, what a way to start out — in addition to being great writers, they’re all lovely people!)

Sure, I’m a little biased, but it’s exciting to see their ideas in book form, and I do hope they get a whole new audience excited about and thinking about these issues.

I have all sorts of conference-blogging type notes and had grand notions of posting them here, but I think others have beat me to the punch — and been much more thorough — on every session. What I appreciated most about this show, though, was the relevance and hands-on nature of most of the sessions. Seeing Darlene Fichter talk about mashups, I came away feeling that, hey, I could probably make some of this work myself. Seeing Jessamyn West talk about Firefox, I learned about some new extensions and add-ons that will help me at home. Just talking with people, from potential authors to random folks in the exhibit hall, I felt the energy of a group of people dedicating to using technology to make libraries better.