I spent a good chunk of my day following the PLA Virtual Conference action. Coming on the heels of Jen’s “blended conference” post, this seemed like it would be good time for a virtual recap.

I had planned to start the day off with my old (not in age, of course) reference professor Joe Janes’ session: “What Does it Take to be Good at Reference” but I had two (two!) flat tires on my bike this morning. Let me tell you, that makes for a long commute.

I finally made it to Nancy Pearl’s Q&A and then stayed through to the day-ending Virtual Happy Hour. Here are some of my brief thoughts on the event:

The Virtual Conference Format/Tools

All this stuff worked surprisingly well. The PLA folks, along with the Learning Times production team, did an outstanding job of keeping things on time and engaging. The conferencing platform—Adobe Connect—works similarly to Wimba, WebJunction’s conferencing tool, allowing participants to see slides, video, listen to audio, and chat with the hosts or other participants. Sure, we’d occasionally lose sound or a video feed, but considering the challenges of running live, streaming media for a national conference, these were tiny blips.

Nancy Pearl

The term “rock star” is way overdone in the library world but if anyone qualifies for the title, it’s Nancy. The session was billed as “conversation” and lived up the expectation. Nancy took questions during an open chat hour and covered them all, frankly and in rapid-fire succession.

• On the new Seattle library: “It is not my taste in a libraries. It’s a bit too industrial and cold for what I like in a library.”
• On why a librarian was chosen as an action figure: “The people who really perform miracles are librarians. Every single day.”
• On how she became a librarian. “”I knew when I was 10-years old that I wanted to be a librarian … I wanted to be a children’s librarian mainly because I had such wonderful children’s librarians at my library in detroit…”
• On Graphic Novels: the “whole graphic section is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.”
• On LibraryThing: “I am a happy user of LibraryThing.”

And on and on… Needless to say, the hour went very fast.

The “Why Do We Dewey” Session

This was a very interesting, info-packed presentation on how the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library embraced an experiment to merge the best of the bookstore shelving format, foundations of Dewey, and their staff expertise to develop a customer-centric shelving/display “neighborhood.” They piloted the project for their travel collection and shared their best practices and lessons learned from the project.

My favorite item from the talk could work anywhere—travel bags! What they do is pull together bags of travel guides, brochures, maps, and more for popular travel destinations such as Napa Valley. The bags are designed to give patrons all the information they need to have a successful trip, all in one bag. As a bonus, people who check out these bags also get a T-shirt: “I booked my Trip at Topeka and Shawnee County Library.” Patrons are asked to send in a picture of them wearing the shirt on the trip. What a great marketing hook!

Check out the presentation as well as the photos in their flickr collection (and while you are there, take a look at their website preview. It’s lookin’ good).

Virtual Happy Hour

I’m sure many of you are wondering what a Virtual Happy Hour is. I know I was.

It turns out there was little in the way of bargain-priced well-drinks or marinaded chicken wings, but there was plenty of conversation in the form of a lightly-moderated chat that allowed participants to share their thoughts about the day’s programming.

Though I felt slightly duped by the Happy Hour moniker, I agree it was a great way for the organizers to collect feedback on the day while encouraging participants to interact with each other in a fashion similar to how they would at a face-to-face conference happy hour (tomorrow, though, I’m going to find a way to have a cocktail).

That’s it for today. If you attended a session (or not), and have thoughts to share on the virtual conference experience, please post them here in the blog comments.