LibTech 2017

Today (Thursday March 16) I attended LibTech (Library Technology Conference) 2017, which was held at Macalester College. While it was a Wednesday and Thursday conference, I just wanted to attended Thursday’s session as I was interested in seeing the Keynote speaker Patrick Meier. Meier’s area of expertise is in Humanitarian Technology and Innovation, such as working with drones, and I wanted to get his fantastic book autographed (he also has a blog where he discusses his work: https://iRevolutions.org/). I also attended the talks on: “Mapping a Tornado Tragedy: A Crowdsoucing Case Study” by Melody Dworak, “Emerging Technologies: A Task? A Specialty in Librarianship? For Now, the Answer Appears to be, “Yes.”” by Mary O’Dea, and “Enriching Student Learning with Data Visualization” by the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University Libraries. The data viz presentation on the software (Tableau), was probably the most interesting talk after the one by Meier. Lunch was a taco bar, which is always fun, and it was great to run into and talk to a lot of librarians I know, but have not seen in a long time.