Semblance of a Whole

Live Blogging a Blogging Seminar

I'm currently in Los Angeles, attending the annual conference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association, otherwise known in the local parlance as "the RBMS Pre-Conference" (the "pre" refers to the fact that it precedes the American Library Association Annual Conference, which takes place in Anaheim starting Friday). My recent, public expression of laptop envy has yielded some benefits: My husband took pity on me in my state of digital deprivation and decided that since he had recently gotten another laptop through his new job, he would pass on to me his older machine. It's beat up, and the battery won't hold a charge for more than 30 seconds, but it's small and it works. So, for the first time in my life, I was able to bring a laptop computer to a conference. Thanks to the ubiquity of free WiFi, I can now be one of those people quietly clicking in away in a corner of the room simultaneously taking notes on the session, skimming email, and instantly accessing any web site mentioned by the speakers.

At this very moment I'm attending a seminar on blogging in archives and special collections, so I couldn't resist the opportunity to "live blog." Actually, I was too chicken at first, but one of the panelists noticed me tapping away in the back and eagerly asked if I was blogging. So I decided why not?

The seminar started with an overview of blogging and a near-real-time demonstration of setting up a blog (using the example of the seminar blog), showing how easy and fast it can be. Next we heard from three panelists who are using blogs in their repositories, Stephanie Horowitz at the Charles Babbage Institute, John Overholt from the Hyde Collection at Harvard, and Nancy Kuhl at Yale’s Beinecke Library.

More later. . .