Report from the Handheld Librarian Conference

I spent most of yesterday at the Handheld Librarian Online Conference. Not having been to a virtual conference before, I signed on with some trepidation, and while I did get some things out of it, I wasn’t entirely pleased. Aside from my problems with the substance of the conference—in general, it skimmed the surface rather than providing any depth—at any normal conference, they would at least provide bathroom breaks. Still, it certainly beat getting dressed and driving to a hotel.

Technical problems kept me out of the first half of the opening keynote address, “Current Mobile Trends in Libraries,” by Gerry McKiernan (fortunately, the conference admins set up some alternate servers fairly quickly, but it was obvious they were not prepared to handle the 470-some conference logins all at once). The keynote was a grab-bag survey of everything mobile in libraries—mostly stuff we have covered here in the Library Science Twine, but I came away with a few new links and helpful tips (Did you know that LibGuides have mobile formatting? The link is at the bottom of the page, and apart from problems with really long URLs, it does a good job. Test it on the Episcopal and Anglican Studies LibGuide I just published).

The other keynote was by Tom Peters, “Mobility and Singularity: People, Communication, Information, Information Objects, and Information Services in Motion.” It would be hard to sum up, but in a nutshell: In the future, everyone will be well-wired but physically immobile—unless the robots get us first. How the robots got into it, I’m not really sure. And as some pointed out on Twitter, it was hard to see why we would need mobile devices if we weren’t going to be mobile. It was one of those things that sound interesting and intriguing as it is going on, but by the time you get to the end you say, Say What? It was most notable for a quote from Shakespeare, describing bodily movement as “lugging the guts.”

The rest of the conference broke into individual sessions (everything was recorded, but I haven’t had a chance to check out the ones I missed; maybe some of you who attended them can add your report in the comments). I went to a pair of presentations on libraries loaning Kindles, and eBooks in general; check out the eBook Reading Devices comparison at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville for a taste. I also heard a couple of presentations on SMS text messaging for reference, which included everything from passing a phone around the reference staff to using integrated products like AltaRama, Text a Librarian, and libraryh3lp. The end-of-day talk on SMS by Joe Murphy got a lot of talk on Twitter, to the effect that “Students have shifted to texting, so libraries must either adopt reference SMS or die”; it was the highlight of the day for a lot of people, it seems (I haven’t heard it yet).

(<rant>I hate text messaging. It’s overpriced, and they charge you twice for it (read David Pogue). I refuse to pay for a package of stuff I’ll never use. Worst of all, you have to pay for all those illiterate wrong-number messages from people who don’t understand that STOP WRONG NUMBER means that you are not Alex and you are not going to say Wassup Dude! I swear, it costs me a buck every time some idiot miskeys Alex’s number into their phonebook. I only keep SMS active because it’s occasionally useful for Amazon Notifications and the like; my wife has deactivated it entirely </rant>).

(<ignore rant>Yes, if you have kids, ignore the above. According to the presenters, teenagers average 2800 messages a month. Many Tweeters claimed their kids did more. My wife knows someone whose daughter did 11,000 last month; he calculated that she was sending a message every three and half waking minutes. And yes, he’s signed up for a texting package, merely because he wants to be in a relationship with his child</ignore rant>).

Actually, what I found most interesting about the conference was the Twitter presence (found by searching for hashtag #hhlib—as some pointed out, Twitter hashtags introduce a form of controlled vocabulary into the usually tag-based Web 2.0 universe). I did go to the Twitter talk (which was like the rest—some interesting points, but mostly elementary). But I found myself regularly distracted throughout the day by the ongoing Twitter conversation. This was my first experience following a Twitter hashtag; I normally follow a handful of interesting writers, and never actually tweet myself. I hadn't realized so many library-types were Twittering, nor that if you get them all posting at once, they make the top-ten trend list on Twitter, nor that once you hit the trends, the spammers and porn-purveyors join the conversation. Apart from the latter, the conference Twitter was fascinating. Not only did I get to see reactions to what I was hearing and reports from the sessions I was not attending, I also learned that everyone else, like me, was tired, hungry, and bug-eyed from the screen by the end of the day. Twitter created a community in what was otherwise a disembodied virtual experience. Nice to be with you, one and all, even if none of us had to lug our guts out of the office chair!