Blake Sums Up CIL 2005
March 20th, 2005Blake Carver has a writeup on CIL:
“Andrea Mercado. Learn that name now, because in the coming years she’ll no doubt be a “Mover & Shaker” or she’ll be the head of something or in charge of some place important. Her work, energy and personality make it inevitable. She’s a mover and shaker in a conviently small and portable format.”
I second that. Andrea and I have been working together for a while now and I am enthused by her ideas about our profession. She was also the most prolific blogger at CIL, IMO.
“I don’t think my LISNews presentation went well. I didn’t cover what I wanted to cover, I was nervous for a while, and I’m not sure I really said anything useful. I’ll just let others judge for me.”
Consider me judging for him. His presentation was incredible, inviting, and funny. Who else can keep attendees awake and attentive at 4:15 on the second day of the conference? Blake is modest. He continues:
“As Bloggers (Core or not, I was not) I think we need to talk about what we do and look at how we do things more and talk about ourselves less. What was being done from the conference was a great beginning, an amazing 1.0 of conference blogging.. Let’s look at how we did things and look for the next step. Stephen Abram said something about the Sirsi sales crew working the booth being in “today” and being VP of Innovation, his job was to be in 10 years from now, and I hope a blogger will take the lead on being the VP of Innovation for the LIS Core Bloggers. Let’s begin by asking some big questions. How do we work together, how do we improve what we write, can we do some real reporting and is what we do fit for print, or would anyone want to read what we do in print. As Andrea would say, we need to be more meta, less focused on “me”, and more focused on “us” and what we can really do for each other and our profession. How do we move beyond what we do now and into something else?”
I’m going to disagree with Blake here. Why should we talk about ourselves less? This is exactly what sets us apart from other professions. We don’t talk about ourselves enough. Sure, bloggers can go on an ego trip every once in a while, but that is few and far between the great things that we accomplish that nobody knows about. If we come up with a great idea, implement it, and nobody uses it…who cares! Marketing is key.
Also, why discuss print? Blake assumes that print is better than electronic here (Or am I missing something?). A very unBlake thing to say and I’d be interested in a clarification. When Andrea and I met every morning, I’d hold out a copy of our complimentary newspaper and say, “Interested in reading a print-based-fascist-out-of-date newspaper?” She’d say no, and we turn on our computers.
Last, I agree that we should be more focused on “us” and what we can do for our profession. I think that we can do this along with good marketing skills. This was one of the reasons why Kevin and I put together the Communities and Collaboration track: So that we can use the tools discussed to work together within/as groups. I hope that Internet Librarian will be more collaborative. In fact, we’ve got some great ideas brewing to make sure that it is. Stay tuned…