Brainfire
I love the way I feel after a conference, like I have all of this brainfire motivating me and synapses pinging all over the place. This is a sharp contrast to how I feel at the end of the quarter, which is a lot more accurately described as brainfried. The challenge is to keep all of this fire going through the summer and into fall quarter. Hopefully having another conference in August will keep things rolling along.
I think it’s amazing that just a few weeks ago I was as skeptical of Twitter as many folks out there and now I think I’m a solid convert. Without Twitter I’d have spent much of ALA alone and hungry. I know there has to be some application for community college libraries– I just haven’t figured out what it is yet. I’ve heard my boss might have caught some serious brainfire at ALA as well, so I am looking forward to connecting with her and seeing what our collective imaginations can come up with.
As with every national conference I attend I am always struck by the numbers of librarians out there stagnating away in libraries with administrators who are afraid to do something different than they’ve always done. I feel like I need to keep pinching myself because I certainly don’t suffer under any stale conditions. How awesome to have a boss who wants you to dream big and figure out ways to apply those dreams in practical, user-centered ways. I swear I’m not sucking up, just reflecting. 
If, like me, you are blessed with an environment in which you can dream big, I recommend a column in the current RUSQ, written by Michale Stephens. Taming technolust: Ten steps for planning in a 2.0 world offers concrete steps to take on your way to embracing the twopointopian mishegas while ensuring that you don’t go overboard with “flashy, sexy technology” that does nothing to further your end goals.