Library 2.0 Gang member and blogger, Michael Casey, is about to talk about New Technology Challenges & Successes, drawing upon experiences from within his new library in Gwinnett County. He’s joined by Chris Hall, IT coordinator at the library.

Our speakers, apparently,

“look at innovative uses of new technologies in the new building of their public library as well as new technologies being used in other libraries they have observed recently.”

Michael is hoping that the session will be something of an ‘UnConference’ (to borrow a term Dave Winer and others have used), with plenty of audience partcipation. We shall see!

As Dave wrote on Scripting News,

“the sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of the expertise of the people on stage.”

In no way a comment on Michael and Chris’ knowledge, too true! It’ll be interesting to see if we can harness a little of that collective expertise in this session…

Michael makes a number of quite sensible statements about budget, decision making processes, Return on Investment, etc. Unfortunately, he’s not getting a huge amount of interaction from the audience. Probably because we agree with him, but it’s always hard to be up in front and asking for input again and again, but not getting any. Maybe I should stop typing and say something controversial!

No need. People have started talking. Still pretty one way, though; questions from the floor to the stage. It’ll be interesting to see whether others try the same thing, and really push to get the audience involved rather than passive. Conference 2.0, if you will!

And, returning to the battery saga, I rang the two local Apple Stores in Arlington over lunch. No batteries. I wonder if I could find my new friend from this morning (whose name I foolishly didn’t catch), and ask her to call Steve Jobs for me, to get one couriered over from Cupertino? No, maybe not…

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