Things have been busy for my real-life alter-ego, Rachel Smalter Hall.  Last week I squeezed in a few hours to go to Topeka for the annual Kansas Library Association conference.  I absolutely loved Johnson County Library’s talk on “Free Range Librarians,” aka blowing up the reference desk!  Hilariously, they spent a lot of time discussing health and personal safety concerns for librarians who have to spend up to 90 minutes at a time not sitting at a desk.  I think it speaks volumes that this is even a legitimate conversation for our profession to be having.  Kudos to JoCo Libraries for going renegade!

In other news, author Charles Shields came and went last Thursday (the same day as KLA…), leaving a packed auditorium full of happy Lawrence Public Library patrons in his wake.  A few twitter friends even stopped by, including @larryvillelife!  Verdict? Our Read Across Lawrence Kickoff was pretty awesome.  The Lawrence Journal World even published a nice little article about it the next morning.

Last Friday, Angela Murillo and I had a fantastic time presenting our keynote at the University of Iowa B Sides Conference, “Unpacking the ‘Library’: Exploring Works in Progress Across the Fields of LIS.” And although I’m having trouble embedding the ol’ Prezi presentation in WordPress… I hope you’ll check it out here.  Here’s a screenshot to entice you:

And here are our presentation notes.  You can click on any of these headings to go straight to that portion of the keynote:

I. Overview
II. Introductions
III. An Innovating Profession

a. Classification
b. Catalogs
c. Open Source Tools
d. Open Access Journals
e. Institutional Repositories
f. Creative Commons

IV. Building B Sides
V. Building Tools in the Future
VI. And B Sides is Still Innovating…

Or, just continue to view notes from the entire presentation: Continue reading →