*blows the dust off the computer*

Er, yes, haha. Um. Well, all right. It's been a while, hasn't it? Wonder if I can remember how this whole thing works still.

I've not been blogging for roughly 2 months. I've been ill. I've been away, living it up in Christmasland with the family. I've been slaving away over Management Studies (still). And the main reason is that I've had nothing to say. But excuses aside, thought I'd write a little about yesterday, which was the annual libraries@cambridge conference.

The theme was "Working Together". There were a number of speakers, and a few really stuck out for me. The first was a guy from Microsoft Research, who talked a bit about what they were currently working on. It sounded like the semantic web for academia, in a workable format, so I'll try and keep aware of that.

The next was Ned Potter, aka "The Wikiman", who talked about "Escaping the Echo Chamber". Brilliant stuff - because we blow our own trumpet well enough within librarial (I still intend that to become a word) circles, but fail at getting the message out to others. He pointed out some failures and some successes, and offered some simple guidelines for library advocacy. He also played us the fantastic "Study like a scholar, scholar" New Spice video, from the hugely successful viral marketing campaign. Best. Libraryvid. Ever.

One thing he mentioned as being a success surprised me, though. I'm sure every librarian heard about Frank Skinner's vitriolic words about libraries in the Times some months ago - it seemed to spread through the community like wildfire. However, I hadn't realised that some time later he visited a library and recanted his words - a real shame, but entirely typical of mass media, which seems to glory in bad news and catastrophic events, but can't be bothered to celebrate success in the same way at all. Bah, humbug and all that.

Another good bit was the discussion of copyright and special collections (as it turns out, I don't think that was the session I had originally booked in for, but couldn't remember and thought it sounded interesting, and didn't involve moving rooms). I've taken away some useful cribsheets about determining copyright and shared them with my offline colleagues.

Finally the afternoon session was a bit of an exercise in self-congratulation (but why not? There were a number of things about which we could be proud). I was very pleased to hear that TeachMeet would be happening again (but still can't think of anything I'd be able to talk about!), and it was good to be reminded about the 23 Things. I was interested in hearing about the 23 Things for Researchers taking place in Huddersfield, and if that goes ahead in Cambridge I'll probably sign up to that if it will help me in my degree.

OpenCambridge sounded great, and I might consider talking to the librarian about setting up a display and opening up our library. The museum is already involved, so it would probably depend on whether or not I felt like working a weekend at the library as to whether it would go ahead. Fresher's Fair sounded great too, although I was appalled that it costs so much to be involved when you're not a student society. (I have a number of other gripes about the fair too - CUSU taking up too much space (seriously, why bother?), sports societies being shoved away together even though a sport like archery has a more lateral appeal &c.)

A good day, overall, despite the triteness of the title ;) The highlight was recognising two of my answers to a questionnaire being used in Andy Priestner's talk on 23 Things! It's like being cited or something =)