ALCTS conference 6/20

In D.C.:
I spent the morning with my 5 month old nephew watching him grin.
The 50th anniversary of ALCTS started in the afternoon and proved to be an excellent start to my week. The keynote speaker was Richard Lantham, author of "The Economics of Attention" 2006. An English professor, who has worked with media, copyright and now dabbles in economic theories. He was an interesting speaker and gave the group a lot of "food for thought" for our later sessions. Some important ideas he covered included the idea of the "wrapper" or "package" of information being as important as the content. So, the wrapper persuades the user. Think marketing and what Google does. Their "wrapper" is attracting the user. He also discussed the idea that we are in an attention economy and the value is in conversations.
Other ideas shared later included librarians being "facilitators of the cultural conversation" and while librarians are working hard to ensure the right skills at the right time; we will need to change our rules and customs like everyone else in this new informational "attention" age.
I met a lot of new folks, many of whom were heads of tech services at their library; so we had a lot in common.
Here are some of the interesting things I heard from my new friends:

• check out http://www.footnote.com/ (a website of original documents that allows people to add annotations)
• check out the Family History Library (http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Library/FHL/frameset_library.asp ) I met the head of cataloging, Emily.
• saw good poster sessions on merging cataloging and acquisitions (Univ of Tenn), the use of 2.0 technologies in tech services -- some cool ideas here, and some projects including international cooperation with collection development.
• Kentucky has moved Collection Development as a separate group that is a "Collections and Scholar Services" group combining cd plus scholarly communication issues
  All in all, a great start!