A Reference Renaissance - In Hot and Steamy Denver

I was the only SPL staff person at the Reference Renaissance Conference in Denver on August 4-5. But I was far from the only Washingtonian. There were librarians from Timberland, Spokane and Sno-isle systems as well as a bunch of people from the State Library. There was also a distinctly international flavor to this conference with presenters and attendees from Singapore, South Africa, India, and Canada.

My general impression was of a very well thoughout and organized conference. The sessions were 90 minutes with the usual panel of 3 presenters. There were 6 tracks and frankly I had to make some hard choices. (We were also provided breakfast, 2 snacks and lunch each day so I can't complain about a lack of networking time!)

The attendees I spoke with were about evenly divided between academic and public libraries with a smattering of special libraries for good measure. The presenters were slightly weighted towards academia but that isn't really very surprising.

I'll blog about a couple of specific session that were particularly intriquing but here are a few observations of other sessions.

There was an entire tracking on managing reference service. It included training, staffing and interestingly 2 sessions on automating collecting reference desk statistics. There seems to be a real move into using various software programs to click rather than tick.

An absolutely fascinating - although very theoretical presentation was Mary Cavaugh's "Reference Librarians' Personal Theories of Practice" Using methodology from Education and Social Science she discussed the differences and conflicts between the individual librarian's views about "what reference looks like" and the institutional expectations for reference service.

There were several presentations on various 24/7 alignments and on the variations of im, chat and e-mail reference. We are pretty on the curve in this area.

I'll post on specific sessions I really clicked with later.
Heather McW