IL2008: full of win

Internet Librarian was indeed full of win. My Academic Library 2.0 mates and I did our pre-conference again, this time for a cozy group of very engaged participants. I know it’s bad conference economics when the number of participants just doubles the number of speakers, but seriously, it makes for a very interesting day of conversation. Thank you to my brilliant co-presenters Jason Griffey, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Steve Lawson, and Iris Jastram for being generally awesome and a complete joy to work with!

I had to skip out of the second half of the session to present in a project management workshop (“Project Management in Practice”) with Helene Blowers and Macrina Williams, moderated by the awesome Mary Auckland. Let me just tell you, Helene Blowers is the best ever person to present in that dreaded post-lunch timeslot — she energizes the room like none other! It ended up being a really fun session with a lot of good conversation around the challenges we all face working on projects in our libraries. Not surprisingly, we all shared a lot of the same challenges, regardless of what type of library we work in. The angle for my part of the session was the “one-person project management team” and my slides are here.

The last official thing I did at IL was a little session called Drupal 101. When you click that link you’ll see a bunch of intro slides on Drupal (fulfilling the “101″ part of the session title), but I pretty much skipped over those and spent my 15 minutes imparting some lessons I learned from working with the software over the last 8 months. I was pleasantly surprised that over half the attendees raised their hands when I asked if they had already installed/played with Drupal, so I thought I’d capitalize on that, skip the basics, and talk about the things I wish I’d known 8 months ago. Since that session, I’ve remembered a few more things I should have mentioned, so I’m working on brain-dump post on that. Anticipate!