OLA Super Conference 2008: My Session

As I mentioned the other day, I presented yesterday at the OLA Super Conference this year on My Job in 10 Years: The Future of Academic Libraries. Between the bad weather all day Friday and the 9:05 Saturday timeslot (not to mention being up against theTop Tech Trends panel (Curse you, David Fiander!)), it was as cozy as I expected it to be. Turning it all into lemonade, however, I would like to thank those that did show up for seizing the presentation away from me and turning the session into a wonderful conversation about the future of academic libraries. It was very gratifying that a number of the attendees remarked that it was the best session that they'd attended during the whole conference.

As promised, I will be posting the PDF version of the slides on my webspace (probably tomorrow). I'm also embedding the slides here using the Google Docs presentation module. I have to say that I was quite pleased using Google Docs and would recommend it to anyone preparing a presentation using a variety of computers (ie. office, ref desk, two different home machines, laptop on the road). The fact that you can now export to PDF makes it a lot easier to create a portable presentation rather than the zipped html they allowed before. The printing is also a lot better. The only thing that's missing is a notes field.

Here they are:



During the presentation itself, I barely got beyond the "Some Thoughts" slides as each of them turned into a jumping off point for discussion. Who knows, maybe I'll get a chance to reprise the whole thing again somewhere.

(BTW, if any of the attendees are reading this, consider yourself invited to comment!)

Update 2008.02.04: And before I forget, I'd like to thank Melissa Helwig for stepping in at the last minute and convening my session. Thanks, Melissa! Also, pdf version of slides here.

PDF version of original My Job in 10 Years blog posts here.