Random thoughts and lessons from SLA 2008

So I’m back from Seattle, after a great first conference and just wanted to try to collect some thoughts.

• Seattle was a great location. Lots of great restaurants near the convention center and hotels, easy to get to the monorail, public library, market, and other interesting locations. The weather turned out to be great, especially for some of those receptions that were held in the Space Needle, and upper floors of buildings.
• The buzz I heard about the conference was very positive. Some of the sessions were a little hit or miss, but I didn’t see any bad ones, saw some very good ones. One veteran conference goer I spoke to chalked it up to the friendliness of the convention center and conference staff. There were staff everywhere, even at off site events, very friendly, eager to help get you where you needed to go. This veteran conference goer speculated that less frustration and getting lost led to happier conference attendees. But I think there’s more than that. The opening session with Vint Cerf and Charlie Rose, and closing session with Seth Godin were great, which seemed to open and close things on positive notes.
• Met lots and lots of people. My problem is this: I’m good at remembering names of people, so that when I meet them at a conference I can say “I’ve emailed you about such and such.” I can also remember faces so that I can say “I don’t remember your name, but we met at…” But there’s a disconnect. I think in addition to writing down on business cards where I met someone I might have to start writing down what they look like. But that also may be a whole can of worms I don’t want to open.
• It was much more of a party atmosphere than I expected. I mean, I’m not sure that I expected stuffy boring receptions. But the networking events were genuinely much more fun than I expected. Librarians really are a fun bunch.
• Keep your schedule very flexible. I committed to a lot, at least partially, because I wanted to soak in a lot at my first conference. I think next year I’ll try not to commit to as much.
• Eat breakfast alone, dinner with colleagues, lunch is optional. This isn’t a hard and fast rule. I did have some breakfast meetings. And I remember reading somewhere that to really take advantage of the conference you should never eat alone. Maybe I would feel differently if I had been there just a few days. But 6 days of non-stop networking is a tad much. Alone time to gather your thoughts, prepare for the day, or have some quiet time is important too.
• It would be impossible for me not to mention Twitter. The SLA2008 twitter account was retweeting messages from about 250 people at the conference. The messages were great. You could really get a sense of what was going on in different sessions, meetings, receptions, and more. The conversation that was happening there was very interesting.

It was great to meet everyone, there are far too many to name individually. But I’m sure at some point you’ll hear from me. And I look forward to hearing from anyone who met me at the conference.