Meeting the tribe
Librarians are my tribe. They think the way I do, work on the things I work on and care about, crack jokes I find funny, build an atmosphere I can get along in. It is a good thing to spend three days among them.
I mean, no conference can be bad in which I meet Emily Lynema, who did the actual rubber-meets-road work that made the NCSU catalog possible. (Conference organizers? I would pay large amounts of green for a conference session about how she did that. Obscene amounts. I might even travel.)
And as long as I’m engaging in shameless name-dropping, I met Roy Tennant and Michael Sauers and Meredith Farkas and Andrew Pace and Rea Davakos and Greg Schwartz and Rob Casson and Rachel Singer Gordon and lots of people. And it was fun!
Unfortunately, however, Computers in Libraries isn’t my conference. I don’t regret going, because it’ll be a while until I sort out which conferences are mine. This one, however, is clearly not. To a large extent, this conference is for people who need to be told to try new things, people who have to have their hands closed around a rock and moved up and down before they will actually beat on something with it. Beating things with rocks comes naturally to me. It’s just what I do.
It’s mostly for public-service folks, too. Which is great, and I don’t mean that as a put-down; it’s just that my patrons, my needs, my duties, and my strategies are different.
So I had a great time, and I’m not in the least sorry I went—but I probably won’t be back.