BC Library Assoc 2009

Just spent three exhausting days at our annual provincial library conference: BCLA 2009.

We brought Marie Radford out from Rutgers University for two sessions about VR, reference quality, and her recent research about patrons perceptions of reference. That was excellent.

They also had Michael Stephens  as the Plenary speaker. I certainly hope his Hyperlinked Library presentation made an impression on those who need to be impressed. That's not a backhanded-complement. What I mean is that for some segment of the audience, much of what Michael says is what we already understand and seeing his presentation is energizing and affirming, if nothing else. But for an unfortunately large and powerful segment of the population, it's what they need to understand. I just hope that they'll eventually get it. 

As for me and my long, drawn-out attempt to Respond to the VPL Vision 2015 document, BCLA just emphasized that whatever detailed prescriptive suggestions I write about will likely no longer be the latestd greatest buy the time I've finished writing but, by the same token, we need to push risk-averse, digital-averse libraries harder to meet their new patrons needs with new services so I'd better hiring up and get this over with (and move on to the next thing).