Caveat Lector

The ideal conference is one that sends me home recommitted to what I do. I needed that quite a lot this time around; quite a few frankly disheartening things have been happening around MPOW and my job, and I don’t think it’s any particular secret that despite a bright spot here and there, I’ve been losing hope.

No more. It’s a bad time for institutional repositories and no mistake, but I made some people hear me at ASIST, and I’ll make more people hear me over the year to come. I know what I’m about, and where it fits, and why it matters.

My shining conference moment occurred when I sat down front for Clifford Lynch’s keynote. Cliff Lynch occupies an odd place in my personal pantheon of heroes. I couldn’t be Peter Suber if I tried (and I have some meditations on the recent Poynder interview that I’m saving for when I have energy to write them down), and there are a few luminaries in the field I wouldn’t want to be.

Cliff is different. His chief gifts are perspicacity, the ability to distill everything he sees around him into a coherent account of trends and threats and hope; and remarkably effective communication both in speech and writing. Someday, if I eat my oatmeal and work very very hard, I might be able to rise to somewhere in that league. I do have my moments.

So anyway, there I was down front with bells on, because Cliff Lynch is my hero and all, when the great man himself sees my name tag and comes up to introduce himself! “There was an institutional repository panel—weren’t you on it?”

“Two,” I say cheerfully, “and I was on both of them.”

“Yes,” he answers, with this indescribable look, “I read a blog post about that.”

Uh-oh. I don’t have Internet access at the time (and yes, I’m sure ASIST has heard in spades about the ridiculousness of holding a conference about Web 2.0 technologies in a hotel where the wireless runs ten bucks a day), so all I can do is squirm and wonder what the heck somebody said about me.

Well, it turned out to be a straight-up recap, so I’m grateful!

Ken Varnum did a fine job liveblogging Cliff’s talk, so I don’t have much to add. Only that I’m fairly sure that even if institutional repositories fail (and I’m still not sanguine about them), the need for intelligent action on digital curation won’t go away—and based on the panel about educating digital curators that I went to, I’m well-placed to be part of that action.

So I’m pleased… and ready to go back to work.