Man, I have been busy these past few weeks. Last Sunday, I left the South Bay, hopped onto the 101 South and made my way down to Monterey with some awesomebrarians to attend Internet Librarian 2011.
This is easily my favorite conference, just because I learn so much from all of the sessions. It’s also my favorite conference because this was the second year I presented in it, and the first that I wasn’t in the Internet@Schools track. My friend and I had two presentations: Social Media Storytelling: Lessons from the Ad world – in which we discussed various ad campaigns and the lessons libraries can learn from these campaigns in how to market their library, Serendipitous Social Searching – in which we discussed the concept of serendipity in a digital realm and how it compares to physical serendipity.
In addition to these two presentations, I also have my Geography of Information presentation at Library2.011 this coming Wednesday (which I am working on right now and am pretty damn excited about….).
I’d like to write a more detailed review of IL2011, but I didn’t get to attend as many sessions as I wanted to – the keynotes were certainly inspirational and aspirational. I’m really sad that I missed out on the gamification keynote because I would have loved to hear a librarians perspective on it, but it’s been something I’ve been reading about for a while so I’m not too disappointed.
Aside from conferences, I’ve had to deal with my laptop hard drive dying – I’ve lost all of my work, but at least my laptop is back up and running. I’m considering this a sign that I needed to clean out a whole bunch of crap from my life.
By the end of the week, I’d like to post my notes from my two presentations for those who were interested in what we had to say. I was really surprised at the number of people who came up to us and thanked us for bringing attention to the importance of storytelling as a marketing tool. yay for tapping into a need that no one had really considered!