Well, I haven’t been on blogging this conference as much as last year’s, the main reason being that there is no time during the day and at night the Wi-Fi is bogged down horribly. My main complaint from last year seems to have been addressed, (yeay user surveys!) that the descriptions for some programs were not accurate and many of the seminars were geared toward academic libraries. Several of the seminars were divided up, like CMS for Public Libraries, and CMS for Academic Libraries. That was nice so I knew which one to avoid. However, the pickings were slim as far as decent seminars to attend. They did the whole Open Source track again, and nothing seems to have changed there and I didn’t want to just repeat for the fun of it. Another track was entirely social networking and mobile apps for libraries (like making an app for iPhone kinda stuff), which doesn’t really apply to our library. I did one seminar about using blogs as webpages, and that was useful. I didn’t know that you could download Blogger and Word Press software for free and host it on your own website host (therefore giving you more control over the site and also giving you your desired URL).

I have definitely extracted many useful things from this conference and the big book of collected slide presentations will be a useful object to have at hand, and I plan to go through and explore sources listed therein. Overall, it’s been a good conference and at least I didn’t have to worry about conflicting seminars, since there wasn’t too much that bowled me over as far as selection. Maybe this isn’t one of those conferences to attend two years running. Oh well…next year I’d like to go to the Innovative Users Group anyway, since that’ll be back on the East Coast.

But stay tuned for some great pictures I took of the Cherry Blossom Festival yesterday and some other sights along the way. I was going to photoblog this whole thing, but you know, you can only look at so many strangers up at a podium and the back of other strangers’ heads before you get bored. I’m saving you all the trouble! You can thank me by sending me chocolate chip cookies!

Shannon