July 2009 – Page 2 – Glorious Generalist

This weekend is the American Library Association conference, which luckily for my budget is being held in Chicago this year. I’ve gone once before, and I’m excited to go this year with some knowledge of what I’m getting into. Which is, basically, thousands and thousands of librarians doing their librarian thing– walking around in sensible shoes and having conversations about how they are organizing their time. It’s lots of fun. This time I plan to go to more sessions and meet more people than last time I went, but also spend some time socializing with my library school friends who will be in town.

I will be doing some microblogging, so check the sidebar if you want to see what I’m up to.

I went to New York City last weekend, and then came down with a cold. Airplanes and lots of walking can do that.

I’d never been to New York City before, but always have been a fan of the city. Finally going there was incredibly exciting in the way that going to a long admired place always is- seeing the places you’ve read about, living the local lifestyle, and finding out things you didn’t know or expect. I’ll put up some pictures once I manage to reboot my life from being sick and at the same time working a lot.

On a completely different subject, this post by Meredith Farkas describes my feelings exactly. This post is about the dangers of relying on free or outsourced web 2.0 applications for important library functions, and I would suggest that it applies equally to individuals. If you completely rely on other companies or people for your technology solutions, it’s more likely than not that you will run into trouble. The lowered learning curve of web 2.0 is great for starting out, but if it really does get to the point of being essential, it’s a good idea to educate yourself about ways that you can take control of the technology. Maybe it’s putting it on a local server rather than a remote server, backing up data, or coming up with a Plan B for what you’ll do without that service.