LIANZA 2008 Day 3 summing up

Today was slightly more leisurely - I still think I got my full money's worth, just that it's nice to come out and have enough brain left that you can remember what sessions you've been to without checking your notes.

First off, Lawrence Lessig's keynote was fantastic. For one thing, he's got a quick thumb on the powerpoint clicker, and his voice/slide synchronisation is so perfect that the images become an extension of his voice -- from a technical standpoint alone it was a joy to watch. His message was great too: he started off talking about the much broader context of corruption in government, justice and health, and then brought in copyright and libraries in a way that made us a part of that context: it was really moving and inspiring. With questions as well we ran over the scheduled time, and I'm sure we would gladly have listened to him for another hour as well. If you want to know more, you can read the live-blogging Kathryn, Kris and I did of the talk.

We then had the LIANZA fellowship awards and the AGM. I virtuously went to the AGM -- but must confess that when I saw that the first slide was "financial audit", I followed the unconference "two feet" rule and went back to the exhibition area. Sorry if I let the side down... but the vendors had jelly beans.

Speaking of vendors, the conference organisers had the brilliant idea this year of an "Exhibition Passport" - a card with a square for each exhibitor. If you all the squares stamped, you can enter a prize draw. It's a great way of getting people to visit stands they mightn't otherwise stop at, and it makes a great ice-breaker too -- one doesn't feel quite as greedy asking for a stamp as asking for a pen.

At lunch I went to the SLIS meeting because they were playing half of the video of Stephen Abram's speech from when he visited Wellington. The video didn't do justice to what was obviously a greatly appreciated talk but I was impressed by the way he adapted his speech to include a huge amount of local-relevant content.

My first session of the afternoon was a Second Life workshop led by Kathryn Greenhill. It was a great introduction and tremendous fun -- even if we never figured out why the scripts on my bookcase wouldn't work! At least I could see how it was working for others. At the end I snagged a moment to have a quick fly around the island.

I got back into the live-blogging with Lynette Makin's "Homework on Wheels", talking about the bookmobile initiatives in the Upper Murray region. It's a bit tangential to the work Meg Upjohn and I have done on Library on Location but wonderful to hear how varied the things were that they could do with this service.

The final session I was tossing up between three, but ended up at the Unconference one by Kathryn Greenhill and Constance Wiebrands, and I'm very glad I did. They gave a smooth and energetic presentation, demonstrated a Library Karaoke and a Libjam session with amazing flair, involved the audience, and just generally taught me a whole lot that I hadn't known before. It was particularly good hearing audience experiences of unconference-type things going on in NZ already.

My liveblogging of Abrams, Makin, and Greenhill and Wiebrands is here (you'll need to scroll down as this link contains two days' worth of stuff now).

Finished at 5pm and had a quiet evening before practising for the presentation Meg and I are giving on Wednesday.

Food report for the day: Morning tea appears to have been forgettable, but I'm sure it was perfectly pleasant. We had another delicious but awkward buffet-style lunch (ended up finding a wall where we could sit on the floor) concluded with macadamia-and-caramel tarts (a bit too sweet) and small chocolate cakes (not too rich). Afternoon tea consisted of absolutely divine fruit kebabs (grape, rockmelon, honeydew melon, and pineapple) which had me going back for seconds more than once. We had these another morning, but I was very glad to see them make an encore.