Thursday at Click06

Thursday was the only day that I got to attend the conference - after one very long, full-on day I don't know how other delegates have the stamina to do all three days, plus any tours or satellite events!

The day began with the meet the leaders session, where Alex Byrne (IFLA President) and Dagmar Schmidmaier (ALIA President) each spoke about their organisations, where they stand now and vision for the future, as well as how they came to be in those positions. Both reminded the audience that the real value of getting involved in the activites of your professional organisation is in the participation and knowing that you are making a difference - things like conference discounts and it looking good on your CV are a nice bonus.

After morning tea, I went to sessions on the results of an OPAC transaction log study in Germany, issues surrounding RFID and the Wave Riders HSC support programme being run by a co-op of Sydney libraries. As at first-timer to a really big conference with parallel sessions, I found that all the presentations were too short, particularly the RFID one, so I'll certainly be reading the papers when they are published online. I thought that Australian libraries could take note of the findings from the German study that OR and NOT were used much more when they were presented as radio button options on the catalogue, instead of as a drop-down menu where the other options aren't immediately visible.

After lunch, I was one of the new grads in the wake up session, the coaches gold medal ceremony. We were able to present certificates of recognition and medals to more than a dozen librarians who had been nominated by new grads as great mentors. After hours of preparation and lots of teleconferences it was great that it went so well.

Penny Carnaby was up next was a keynote session, where she took us on a whirlwind journey through NZ's new digital strategy and how recent library developments have made this possible. Talking to other delegates after the session, we agreed that Australia can learn a lot from our library colleagues across the Tasman with the aim of establishing a similar strategy in this country. I then went to a concurrent session on AskNow - I'm an AskNow operator so didn't really learn too much, but the stats and future of the service were definitely food for thought.

After afternoon tea (where I eventually found some food - necessary even after a very nice berry milkshake) I decided to just stay in the one room for the 3 concurrent papers. I heard papers on university library reference and info lit services, SMS reference and print vs electronic reference sources. The latter was definitely food for thought, particularly in light of Dagmar's earlier observation of how library education needs an overhaul to make it relevant to librarianship in the 21st century.

The dinner was great! I had no idea that a bunch (catalogue... whatever the collective nouns for librarians is) of librarians could party so hard! The food was delicious (especially the salmon appetisers... YUM), the lighting was fantastic and Darren Reid and the Soul City Groove had most of us out of our seats and dancing within a couple of numbers. The Social Committee did an awesome job - it was just a shame that we all had to work the following day or we'd have kept going to the wee small hours.

Kylie Smith (State Library of WA)