I’m back from CALI and even now, a few days later I still have trouble wrapping my head around what I’ve learned. Sarah and Meg enjoyed the conference. A lot of the other cool kids were there also. If I didn’t link to you it doesn’t mean I don’t care though. I just wanted to write down some of my impressions. 1. CALI is a friendly and accessible conference I met some online friends, met some old friends, and met some new ones. Really there were too many to name. Anyone who thinks that the crowd at CALI would be unwelcoming is wrong. Even when there were some disagreements in a few sessions, between participants, discussions were respectful and professional the way they should be. In addition, you don’t have to be a hard core coder/techie to get something from the conference. There were sessions at all skill levels, and that met the interests of anyone involved in legal instruction. If you think you might feel intimidated, don’t. This is an accessible conference. 2. Your online friends are not who you think they are This is probably poor phrasing. I am not accusing anyone of being misleading by their online presence. Rather I think the depth of knowledge you gain from meeting someone face to face or in “meat space” as Sarah says, gives new dimensions to the person you’d only previously met online. What you may think someone is like from reading their blog posts, tweets, or watching their facebook page may never fully prepare you for the complex person you meet live. Of course it does get a little more complicated. There may be times when people have not accurately represented themselves one way or another. Thankfully I didn’t run into that. 3. Presenting can be nerve wracking, rewarding, fun, and a learning experience I can be a tough critic on myself. For the presentation Tom Boone and I gave I got very nervous. More nervous than usual. I’m not sure if it was the new title on my card, presenting in front of my online friends for the first time, or something else, but something felt a little off. But I got through it and received some great feedback. But I also look at everything as a learning experience. I look forward to seeing the video, analyzing myself and how I prepared and see if how I can improve in the future. But looking back at it was also fun. Tom and I were able to incorporate the twitter stream for the conference into the presentation by putting up a screen showing the tweets behind us. This proved distracting as I saw people react to the tweets. What I should have done is interact with the twitter feed. But the potential is there to create an amazing presentation experience. This is particularly true because CALI was live streaming the event. Interacting with twitters watching live from afar would have been very cool. I would like to explore how these tools can be incorporated into future presentations. Speaking of twitter… 4. Twitter is an amazing communication tool I still hear people put Twitter down occasionally, but it really is a powerful tool. The amount, quality, and depth of the tweeting at this conference was unbelievable. It added a whole new layer to the whole conference. The ability to send and receive information, wholly relevant to a session, with other session attendees added real value to each session. This is why I think Twitter could help make presentations even more powerful. 5. People involved in legal information are doing some amazing things Whether it’s the Cornell LII, Justia, or the ScheduAALL, people involved in legal information and instruction are doing some amazing things. We live in a time of incredible opportunity. This is a chance for us to try something new. Whether it’s spurning wexis for some of the free legal information options out there, or taking a chance on a new way of doing something, we should take what we’ve learned and see how we can put it to good use. I look forward to trying to do that.

Recent questions about using new technologies for professional development have me wanting to create a presentation or article that will examine the effect of these technologies. As part of this project I have put together a survey that I hope might answer some questions about tools law librarians are using for professional development. I hope my law librarian colleagues will help answer some of these questions by taking this survey. It should take less than 10 minutes to complete. Any additional comments are welcome and can be kept confidential by request. The survey appears below.

So the day in the life of a librarian meme seems a great way to start blogging from my new position at Yale. I got put onto this by The Technological Tortoise (thanks Sarah). A reminder to new readers of this blog, I just started a new job as the Librarian for Emerging Technologies at the Yale Law School Library. And below follows a run down of my day today. I don’t know whether or not it will be typical (I’m working on my second week), but I think it’s a good indicator of things I’ll be doing here, and a nod to some of the amazing people I have an opportunity to work with. 8:30am: arrive, check email, check RSS Reader My RSS Reader (Google Reader) may be the most crucial tool in my arsenal. I often get asked how I stay on top of the latest technologies and happenings in the library world. It’s all due to the Reader. I subscribe to 257 feeds, including ego feeds, search result feeds, and blogs (library, web, design, and technology related blogs). I can scan through the RSS feeds in about 15 inutes to 30 minutes depending on how many interesting things are in the reader. I will also star items to read later, and bookmark things using Diigo. I use the aideRSS Firefox extension to help filter my feeds and sort through them more quickly. 9:45am: attend the Advanced Legal Research class Being in this academic environment is very new to me and even though some of it is review (review is always good),  I’ve already learned quite a bit about the students, librarians, academia, Yale. Today’s class was led by Yale Law Librarian S. Blair Kauffman. He brought a lot of enthusiasm and energy to the class, and gave a great introduction to some basic research topics. I also applaud the students for taking additional research classes. Some of the attorneys I worked with would have been well served with a good legal research class, and I have a feeling these students will have a bit of a leg up wherever they go from here. 11:10am: attend Researching American legal history class This is an area of research where I may be a little weak and is important to learn about. It’s led by John Nann and Morris Cohen. I already learned a lot and it’s just the first class. There was also a librarian/historian from the university’s main library, and a 3L interested in the treatment of certain subjects throughout American legal history attending. This provided good insight into how interesting and challenging some of the reference here will be. 2:00pm meet with Fred Shapiro Fred is the Associate Librarian or Collections and Access. Part of my orientation has included learning about the responsibilities of other librarians and how things work in the library. We discussed the process for ordering and canceling materials, how materials are selected, and how the various librarians work together towards collection development in the library. 3:00pm: set up web server Worked on a virtual windows server trying to set up a web server to host some web projects I will be working on. I have been trying to set up XAMPP , I’ve used it before with some success. It makes it easier to set up Apache, MySQL, PHP, and PERL. I’ve been having some real problems with it though. I’ve installed and uninstalled it trying to get it to work. Today, I decided to try installing the individual items without using the XAMPP package. Apache, MySQL, and PHP were installed successfully. But when I tried installing PHPMyAdmin I ran into some major errors. 5:00pm: Success! I figured out how to install and enable various PHP extensions to make PHPMyAdmin work. Normally I would want to continue working on this, I like to stay on a roll. But it’s already about time to leave. If I leave now, I can go home with a smile on my face. Whereas if I encounter more errors I might go home miserable and frustrated. So that’s my day, the long and short of it. Like I said, while not typical I think there’s a good indication of what this job will be. I look forward to documenting my work here in the future.