Sean Fitzpatrick's blog

With the reverberation of a couple dozen subfield delimiters echoing through the Twitterverse, @FakeAACR2 announced her presence. “Sorry. Dropped my fat self on the keyboard,” she apologized.

LITA’s Top Tech Trends was interesting to me this year because its participants, while all formidable representatives of the world of cutting edge library tech geeks, were all new to the panel:

There’s perhaps no better way for tech-minded librarians to kick off Midwinter than to hear the top stakeholders at the biggest library tech vendors (for-profit, not-for-profit, open-source, commercial) talk about their products and projects in the context of what direction they’re driving the industry.

I’m probably the last ALA conference/meeting-goer to realize this, but the Boopsie app is awesome. I haven’t even left for Boston yet, but this app is already changing how I’ll do the meeting. It’s a simple interface offering a meeting schedule, upcoming sessions, a listing of exhibitors (including yours truly, #1402), Boston restaurants, Boston hotels, and an #alamw10 twitter stream. It almost replaces the Meeting Guide—my #totebag just got a little bit lighter.

SLA announced today that its members have voted in record numbers to reject the association’s proposal to change its name to the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals (ASKPro), in a 3225 to 2071 vote. Fifty percent of eligible members voted.

Last week a new staff task force on use of social media at ALA assembled, taking the first step toward moving ALA forward in the social media realm. The task force will address why to use social media in the first place and also how to use it to improve member engagement, promote ALA products and services, manage our brand, and better serve members, especially at conference.

Last week, I wrote that the November 14 National Gaming Day event had some outstanding participation, “easily doubling the number of participants from last year, NGD mastermind Jenny Levine told American Libraries.”

Even though NGD didn’t have any firm numbers at the time of my first post, it was clear that the 2009 event was the biggest NGD to date. Today, NGD released official counts, taken from survey results:

Children, teens, and adults showed up in droves to play board games and video games at the biggest National Gaming Day yet November 14, with 1,365 registered libraries participating, easily doubling the number of participants from last year, NGD mastermind Jenny Levine told American Libraries.

One of the more lively discussions at LITA Forum was during a session whose topic had more to do with next year’s Forum topic than this year’s: Ken Fujiuchi from Buffalo State College in New York and Kathryn Frederick from Skidmore College  in New York gave the audience a lot to consider in their talk “Designing Library Services for the Cloud.”

When David Weinberger, author and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society talks, I listen up. So his opening the presentation by saying that “the Age of Information is pretty much over” was tough news to take first thing on a Saturday morning.