3 talks and 2 conferences in 1 week
I’ve been on the road for the last week giving 3 talks and attending 2 conferences: Internet Librarian and the NISO Forum – Understanding the Data Around Us: Gathering and Analyzing Usage Data. The talk that went the best was the preconference workshop on AJAX I co-taught at Internet Librarian. The students were extremely bright, attentive and asked good questions. For me a 3 hour preconference split between2 presenters is just the right amount of work and fun. I really enjoyed showing different demonstrations of AJAX in action on the web-at-large but also in the library world.
In contrast, my presentation at NISO was one step away from a train wreck. This wasn’t because I was not well prepared, or enthusiastic about the topic, or the technology issues before the presentation that resulted in my having to reconstruct my presentation from scratch at the last minute. Instead I blame it on the 14 hour travel day proceeding the conference and a long Internet Librarian conference.
I’ve attended two conferences back to back before (ALA Midwinter and Open Repositories) but I’ve never given presentations at two back to back conference . Based on this experience, my overall feeling is VERY BAD. I don’t know how people like Roy Tennant, who I saw very brief at IL and was on a long speaking road trip, do it. Frankly, I feel like I’d lose my mind if I did more than two successive trips to give talks.
Even though I wasn’t happy with how my talk came off, many of the Forum attendees came up afterwards and had positive comments and asked LOTS of questions. Still when I give a talk I want to bring a certain level of enthusiasm, and I didn’t meet my personal expectations giving the NISO talk. This has gotten me thinking long and hard about my numbers of commitments and how to meet them all well. The bottom line seems to be that in the long run, to be happy with the quality of my products, I’m going to have to be more selective about what I do.
For the folks who attended one of my talks and are looking for my presentation materials the relevant links are below
From What to Why: Electronic Resource Usage Data in collection development and user behavior – NISO Forum
Screencasting & E-Learning on a Shoestring – Internet Librarian
Hi Karen. I caught this posting via Technorati and it piqued my interest. As a member of both the jQuery & Ext JS teams, any unique postings relating to Ajax & JS catches my attention.
Are there unique challenges in terms of Ajax for libraries or are you just offering a high-level overview of the technology for prospective developers in this space?
Rey…
Rey,
We offer a high level overview, show (no code) how AJAX is used by other web applications, show (with code) a couple simple AJAX examples in libraries, then provide a bunch of examples of AJAX being used by libraries. All of this is for librarians or developers working in libraries on library web pages/sites.
As far as challenges specific to libraries using AJAX… I’m not sure. We mentioned the JQuery library as part of our because most libraries need very efficient ways to develop given their small staffs.
Feel free to look at our presentation slides (http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=agm4brmfpr7z_22gn955p) and a followup post (http://www.librarywebchic.net/wordpress/2007/10/27/ajax-presentation-information-and-links/) to see some examples of how libraries are currently using AJAX.
Karen