Good morning from MLA!

Good morning, all, from Mankato, MN! The last day and a few hours have been a fine frenzy. My librarians from the Twin Cities metro and I drove down to Mankato early yesterday morning for the Start of the Minnesota Library Association Conference. Each of us attended some great programs yesterday afternoon - including one on the use of Web 2.0 for library marketing. I found her uses of some of the technologies innovative; including the use of Flicker to embed links to the catalog record of the books that she was displaying (in the photograph). I only wish that she'd talked a bit more about the drawbacks. 1) How do you convince management and the IT partners within your own institution that this method of promotion your resources is ethically sound (in the case of MySpace) and secure? 2) How do you manage time to update these tools on a regular (i.e., daily) basis? After all, patrons will stop looking at pages that are dormant or irrelevant. 3) How do you help patrons move past the learning curve? Some folks I know can barely utilize a keyboard, let alone access and manipulate Flckr.

My presentation went alright this morning. I think I kept to my time limit reasonable well (had about 5 minutes to spare). Most of the participants laughed at my jokes and took some good notes; several came up and send that it went well and took my business card. I'm glad that I'm done... and I am really excited to move on to preparing another one.

Later tater.