Day 3, and the last day of AALL 2012. I just spent an hour working my way up and down the cavernous exhibitors hall, casting an eye over every stall and picking up a cute black bull stress toy for my nephew, and a tiny Lego man which one publisher had creatively come up with to entice people to his stall, all the parts separated so you could bespoke your own figure. I discovered a couple of databases I had never heard of before and could be really useful back home. My lack of a business card fazed no one, all they had to do was scan the barcode on my name tag hanging around my neck, I felt a little like a package at the supermarket, which made me smile.
The session, What You Don't Know Can Hurt You - An Overview of Social Media Legal Issues and a Deep Dive into Social Media in the Workplace seemed very apt to me as I take my tentative first steps into the land of Blog. I always attend sessions on social media when ever I get the chance to keep up to date and find out something new - and there is always something new. The two presenters, Marcia Burris and Barbara Yuill made the point that we are living in a period of change as significant as the industrial revolution in terms of how we live our lives. When you consider the impact of the Internet and email as it dawned twenty years ago, it pales in significance to social networking and the complimentary enabler of mobile technology.
Social Media Law is developing slowly in relation to the rapid growth that's happening but it's a good point made that we are not the customer of online sites, we are their product. If we keep this front of mind we go a long way towards self vetting our own digital foot print. It's not just the profiles and photos we load up that are eroding traditional notions of a private sphere, it's the cookies that collect data about our online choices, we are in effect, easily read. Privacy laws will change in time. Social media spreads very quickly and it is hard to undo tweets and postings said in a sudden strop, deleted information can be retrieved and is discoverable.
The last session I attended was on valuing library resources and services and it was an excellent way to end the three days. The title of the paper, What Makes a Librarian Worth a Million Bucks? was enough to entice me along. The session tied back neatly to the Keynote presentation by Richard Susskind on day one about our future roles. Walking past the hugely impressive Boston Public Library, and visiting the Harvard Law School Library yesterday, the answer to that question about our value it seems to me is this, we know stuff, we know how to get it, we know where it is, and we know what our lawyers want. Conferences like this keep us looking ahead not at whats coming towards us, but to where it's going.
Sounds really interesting Amanda, would love to hear more about that last paper. Also, how big is the conference (how many attendees, exhibitors, papers etc.)? I always have this mental image of US conferences being enormous and intimidating - but how have you found it, in comparison to some of our local ones?
ReplyDeleteHi, (thank goodness I take notes) the last paper was modeled around a value assurance cycle which involved a continuous looping of Audit-Align-Appraise-Act. You Audit your resources; Align to the mission of your organisation; Appraise the best course of action and then take it, Action. Sometimes the action may be as simple as influencing a decision maker, or it may involve entire collection rebalancing. I thought this was helpful for the audit, list and define everything you do, add short definitions to the list that are understood by the business. They (LaJean Humphries and Denise Pagh) went into some quite complicated multiplication, not my strong point, to assist with the audit.
DeleteAs for the numbers attending the conference I think it was around about 850, the exhibitors were numerous and so many names I hadn't heard before. On average each segment offered 8-10 sessions, it really was hard to choose which ones to go to. Completely different experience to the Australian conferences, very glad to have had the opportunity to experience it.