Redhaired Future Librarian

Conference: Bite Me! Vampires in Current Fiction

This is the first session I attended at the conference. It was led by Kansas City, KS librarian Kaite Mediatore Stover. She started with a brief overview of the horror genre, and then moved onto vampire books specifically. She covered the history of vampire legends and the history of vampires as characters in books. The word vampire first appeared in the English language in 1732, according to Ms. Stover.

She discussed current sub-genres of the vampire subgenre, including historicals, westerns, romances, mysteries, and young adult. Some of the titles I’m interested in reading include the Fat White Vampire series by Andrew Fox and the Mary Janice Davidson Undead romantic comedy series. An audience member said that the vampire story The Historian is popular among teens at her library.

For readers’ advisory, Ms. Stover suggests both volumes of Hooked on Horror.

I have to admit, I don’t think I have ever read a vampire book. I’m not sure why I completely skipped over that sub-genre, since I really enjoyed at least three vampire movies when I was a teen: The Lost Boys, Once Bitten, and Love at First Bite.

Conference: First Time Attendees’ Orientation

The first thing we did at the conference after checking in was to visit the first time attendees’ orientation.

The leaders of the different divisions and special interest groups got up and spoke to about 15 or 20 of us about what presentations they were sponsoring. They also encouraged us to join MLA. A fun thing they had us do was “new member bingo.” We were to find five different people to interview and write down their answers. One had to be a new member (identified by a blue star on their name tag), one had to be a first-time attendee (identified by a gold star), one had to be a special interest group member (identified by a ribbon), one had to be a division member (identified by a ribbon), and one had to be a vendor (identified by being in the exhibition hall with stuff to sell. Heh.) My classmates and I started trying to interview each other, but ended up reaching out and interviewing others. I talked to two people I didn’t know from the campus library, one graduate of the program, and a woman with the Missouri Association of School Librarians. The forms were then entered for a drawing, to win a Dell PDA. My roommate won!

This might seem frivolous, but it was important because people had a tendency to stick tight with the group they came with. Although my group stuck together pretty tightly (and found a classmate who moved away this summer!), it was great that we reached out and made contact with other people we might have been too introverted to approach otherwise.

One of my classmates told us that when she went to ALA, they had a new attendees’ orientation with tips on how to get the most from a conference. I would like to see that added to the new attendees’ orientation. Next year, the conference will be here in central Missouri, so I think we might have a chance to help.

I’ll post more about the conference as I have time. I’ll discuss the sessions I mentioned here, in order. (Unless someone posts a comment because they want to read about a specific session.)

Conference!

The conference was great! At the last minute, we were all able to get rooms at the hotel (oddly, thanks to getting kicked out of a different hotel.) The sessions I attended were:

• Wednesday
• New Attendees Orientation
• Bite Me! Vampires in Current Fiction
• Do You Have any Good Children’s Books?
• Performers Showcase & Dessert Reception at the KCPL
• Thursday
• YASIG Breakfast Featuring YA author Alex Finn
• Bringing YA Literature out of the Closet
• Networking Luncheon at Kabuki in the Crown Center Plaza
• My session
• SISLT alumni wine and cheese reception
• Friday
• Poster Session

I’ll try to post notes about each session as I have time to type them up. I’ll trackback them to this post to link everything together.

It was great and I think my presentation went well.

And They’re Off!

I’ll have to put the distance education post on hold. I’m off to the MLA conference in a few hours! I hope to get internet access so I can start posting useful stuff on my resume site as an extra resource.

You’ll know me at MLA. I’m the one with the bun, glasses, and comfortable shoes. And I might be carrying a book.

This Week in LibraryBlogLand

This week in LibraryBlogLand. (I was mentioned!) A lot of good stuff there, including the article about online degrees that I plan to comment on tonight if I finish my graphics in time.

Please Excuse the Temporary Ugliness

Sorry about the way it looked today. I was redesigning to put this more in line with my presentation, in case I decide to use this as a resource in my handout.

Presentation Link Dump

Here are links to articles about presentations. I started with a link from a comment on Library Stuff and followed where it led. These articles include valuable things to think about when presenting. (They all dislike Power Point. But that’s to be expected since I was following links on other sites of people who dislike Power Point. I need to find some sites about good things you can do with presentation software.)

I find this subject fascinating. I had no idea there was such controversy over Power Point. Even more interesting is that they don’t seem to be talking about the way I intend to use the software, which is as a fancy slide projector, to show my charts, graphs, and screenshots.

How to Make Presentations, etc. This is a forum thread on the website of Edward Tufte, who lectures about visual information. It’s fascinating, although a bit heavy-handed in its “anything but PowerPoint” message. A lot of contributions from visitors over the past few years.

An article from the Chronicle about how to deliver the scholarly lecture. Again, anti-PowerPoint. But full of other goodies. I’m not giving a scholarly lecture, but I suspect many of these points will apply. I’m assuming the people who show up will be there because they want to see and hear interesting information about how libraries use weblogs and how their libraries could use weblogs (my research turned up only a couple of weblogs in Missouri public libraries, though I assume there are more than that.) That’s what I want to give them.

I will add more links to the bottom of this entry and change the date to reflect the addition. Original post: 10-23-2005 12:30am.

PP Again, in Response

Stephen Cohen of Library Stuff posted a response to those who responded to his earlier post about Power Point. He does have a good point about trying blogs and wikis for presentations, and in some situations, I think I would be willing to try. It would be helpful if presentation software had web browsing capabilities built in, although a creative designer could make a “slide show” on a website and get the best of both worlds. But with a presentation like mine, which is essentially about library weblogs within a specific time span, a blog-based presentation actually adds an extra, unnecessary layer of technology. I have no reason in this particular presentation to have live websites. I am discussing design of certain weblogs, but not navigation, since as I mentioned before, a majority of the blogs are on blogspot and use standard blogspot navigation. All I really need at this stage is a reliable screenshot. (If I continue my research on these blogs and add more, there might be a time when I analyze the design and navigation more closely, and will need the ability to show that in a presentation. Also, if I do a presentation about setting up a blog, that would need internet access as well.)

As for the upcoming presentation, we don’t even know for sure whether we’ll have internet access in the presentation area. It would be a major bummer to get there and not be able to access the presentation at all. Then there are issues of display websites changing URLs, redesigning (Census Factfinder, I’m looking at you!) or simply being temporarily unavailable because of Internet gremlins. These are factors that need to be more stable before online presentation aids become widespread.

Some of the professors we support at the university use web sites quite a lot in their lectures. I think it’s a great idea for the right presentation, but I also think it introduces too much chaos at this point for people to rely on it when they don’t need it.

It’s important to bring up these issues, though. Just because people might disagree doesn’t mean that there aren’t important points to be made. We constantly have to reevaluate our methods and make sure they still work.

Is Power Point Evil?

Stephen Cohen of Library Stuff says that he gets a round of applause when he tells the audience he doesn’t use Power Point. I’m trying to figure this out: is Power Point a synonym for all presentation software, or is it Power Point itself?

I do plan to use Power Point for my presentation. I have pie charts, a map, and some screenshots. I’m a very visual person. If I went to a presentation that was just someone talking for 20 minutes, I don’t think I would absorb anything. I have to see the words and pictures. Now, I don’t plan to use any special effects… as a trained broadcaster, I know that they’re usually overused and pretty lame… but I do plan to have my presentation outline on Power Point. I’m practicing to make sure I don’t tell my presentation to the screen. I’m checking out the projector Tuesday night, so my husband will see my presentation before I finish packing. Then my roommate at the hotel will probably get to see it at least once.

When I’m done, I plan to record a script of the presentation incorporating the best of what I did in my practices and the live presentation, and I want to make a movie file of it. I suppose that’s the same thing as the new presentations for iPods I’ve seen floating around today. But mine is for any computer. It’s for anyone who’s interested in library weblogs beyond the cheering.

In essence, I suspect Power Point is being blamed for the lack of sophistication in its users. I think it’s as good a product as any, and like any good product, it can be abused.

[To clarify: I’ll be at the MLA conference next week. I’ll post some thoughts tomorrow evening about doing presentations with blogs.]

Comments on Blogger and Usability

Joy comments on Jakob Nielsen’s new alertbox on usability. I think Mr. Neilsen has some very, very good points. I was amused by Joy’s mention of Blogger’s lack of categories. This lack of categories is a point in my presentation on library web logs. Librarians love categories, so why are so many of the public library blogs on Blogger, which doesn’t have categories? Lack of categories is why I switched from Blogger to the defunct Greymatter, and then to Movable Type, and then to Word Press (I haven’t had time to switch this blog.) I switched from Blogger four years ago, but still use it for some work projects because it was chosen by others. It seems they’ve been resting on their laurels since then.

As for Mr. Neilsen’s usability points, tested against this blog:

1. I haven’t put up a bio yet. This site will eventually link to my official resume site and vice-versa. But I know I need to get that bio up soon, probably before my presentation.

2. I don’t have a photo up yet because I don’t like any of the photos of me so far. I don’t look like the me in my head. But I’ll get over that eventually.

3. My post titles could be better.

4. Wow, Firefox finally supports link titles! But I do like inline links, as long as I can see the address itself in the lower left hand of my browser. If I can’t see the URL, I don’t go there.

5. I don’t have any classics yet, unless my mild take on Cronin-gate counts. I suppose I should have linked that just then.

6. I