Karen Munro, Learning Librarian

I’m home from ALA Annual in Washington, DC, where the weather was fine and where I wore out two pairs of sandals and two feet.

I spent most of my time in meetings, as I’m incoming to a couple of new positions in LES, IS, and ACRL. One is a *very* new position–that is, I’m co-chairing a brand-new “Greening the Conference” subcommittee for the ACRL 2009 Conference Planning Committee. My co-chair is Charles Forrest at Emory University, who works in library planning and architecture (among other things.) Emory is a leader in green design, with several LEED-certified buildings (and a mandate that all new buildings will be at least LEED Silver certified), so I think we’ll do great things. I’m very excited about doing something to tie libraries to sustainability. Two good ideas, no waiting!

I’m also pleased to see that my colleague Jesse Silva, federal government documents librarian par excellence, has been getting recognition for some of his work, and for a project we’re working on together. We’re joining forces to build a better online tutorial, a more “Web 2.0″ version of the by-now-traditional screencasting tutorial. Our basic idea is to merge Captivate screencasting with live searching in a database (Lexis-Nexis Congressional, in this case) in a single screen using a wiki, with RSS feeds to top it off. Sound crazy? We’ll see. Starr Hoffman mentions the project here, along with some of the other cool ideas Jesse is working on. We’re working on the tutorial now and will have it ready for fall, for the UC Berkeley librarians’ conference on Web 2.0 I’m helping to organize.

I have a mountain of email to climb, so the posts I have in mind about Technology: The Middle Way and How to Bundle Online Apps (?) will have to wait. I also need to go see what went on at some of the programs I missed while I was trudging around D.C., map in hand, internal compass spinning madly. It’s a very good thing I’m not a GIS consultant. Wayfinding in the real world is definitely not my forte.