I talked (for what seems like the millionth time, though it’s not) about Librarians Build Communities at the Pacific Northwest Library Association conference, yesterday.
This is what I gave as the description of the talk:
Librarians have a set of very useful skills, which could benefit our local communities enormously. Librarians Build Communities is a program designed to match librarian volunteers with organizations in their communities, both to build partnerships between libraries and other organizations and to advocate on behalf of libraries and librarianship, by showcasing librarians’ skill sets. It is still in its early stages, with pilot projects in a few cities and states, but we have put together a toolkit for running this program in other areas and hope it will grow quickly.
It was Friday afternoon, and I think people were tired. I also feel like maybe my talk was too abstract, without enough concrete details? I mean, I have no finished projects to point to, right now (other than the creation of the website and primer, itself, but that’s sort of a meta-project, from the attendees’ perspective), so that probably made people feel like they had less to grasp onto. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t one of those talks where I felt like my audience was inspired, excited about what I was saying, or even really that with me. I should add, everyone was very nice; they just seemed a little puzzled, or un-enthused, or something.
Nonetheless, the room agreed that we should host LBC during PNLA next year. So I feel like I accomplished something!
If you’d like to see my slides (and you can judge for yourself whether it was too abstract), I’ve put them up in PDF form here and also on Slideshare.