Walt at Random

Speaking (twice) at OLA

A note for my (dozens? scores? more than one?) of Canadian readers:

I’ll be at the OLA SuperConference in Toronto this year. Attending pretty much the whole thing (arriving Wednesday afternoon, leaving Saturday early afternoon). Speaking twice:

• Friday, 3:45-5:20 p.m. Session 1320, Shiny Toys or Useful Tools? (About liblogs and library blogs, with a few sidenotes about wikis. Some stuff from the books, some new checkpoints. Some of this may appear in the next-but-one issue of Cites & Insights.) Yes, I know there are, what, 28 other sessions at the same time–and, who knows, maybe I’d rather listen to John Dupuis (who’s on opposite me). [Dupuis’ session has been moved.] But anyway…
• Saturday, 9:05-10:20 a.m., OLITA Spotlight Session, Top Tech Trends. One of three panelists. I’ve never met the other two panelists, but will assume they’re better trendspotters than I am. I’ll be working on possibilities (and maybe attending Midwinter’s LITA Top Tech Trends session to take notes…)

And attending some unknown number of sessions and social events, formal and otherwise. Right now, I have seven sessions and four social events marked as possibilities… It’s my first time at OLA, and I’m very much looking forward to it. And hope the weather and airports work out.

But I’ve also done something a little out of the ordinary, at least for me: Mounted a temporary page here, containing my current tentative schedules for both OLA SuperConference and the 2009 ALA Midwinter Meeting, which I’ll be leaving unusually early (because of OLA, but also because Frontier cancelled their mid-afternoon Denver-San Jose flight, and I wasn’t about to get back home at midnight…)

For OLA and ALA Midwinter both…

The curious among you will see that the ALA schedule is pretty skeletal, other than Saturday. It’s busier than my usual ALA “must do” schedule, to be sure, because I agreed to chair the LITA Publications Committee (and have since realized that I really have done more than my share of this LITA governance stuff, and am feeling to old for it…)

I’m sure some mandatory items will be added to that schedule, which I’ll attempt to keep up to date until shortly before the conference(s). (I’ll delete it post-OLA.)

Meanwhile, if you’d like to get together, feel free to send me email or leave a comment. No guarantees, I’m not a nightowl and not on an unlimited budget, but I’m certainly open to possibilities. (For all I know, a flood of invitations to vendor receptions may be on its way–but since that’s never happened in the past 33 years of attending ALA and Midwinter, I’m not holding my breath.)

If you missed the link above, here it is again–or just look over in the righthand margin, where it says “Midwinter 2009 and OLA 2009 schedules”

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 4:39 pm and is filed under ALA, C&I Books, Speaking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.