In like a lion, out like a polar bear

Isn't that the saying for the month of March? Seems like it should be, up here. It's been snowing on and off all day. But yesterday all the high school kids were out in shorts, running for the track team. "Spring" is a relative term, I guess.

I've been away in lovely North Carolina. We visited friends and basically enjoyed ourselves for a full week. And before that, had my mother-in-law up for a visit. Lesson learned: give yourself a day or two between having guests visit you and leaving to go be a guest yourself. All those little things like laundry and packing and eating up all the perishable food can be a real pain when you're trying to entertain. (Even though my mother-in-law is about as easy-going as anyone I've ever met...she was a good sport about all of it.)

We visited the Davidson, NC library. Very cute. Little. Beautifully windowed, light and airy. Nestled in the middle of the town green, right across from a hipster coffee shop and a soda fountain that is vintage 1950's Americana, it's now a branch of the Charlotte and Mecklenburg County system. Very cool. Everyone in Davidson was watching the NCAA Tournament, it seems. That or waiting for the Easter bunny.

On an unrelated note--I saw that there's a company doing a road show for their downloadable audiobooks. It sounds like they're basically tricking out a big truck and driving around to cities, to help make sure people know how to use the online resources the libraries have purchased for their communities. This is a great idea! The library gets some free publicity about how up-to-date they are, users gain a better understanding of the new technology, and staff can basically enjoy the circus (or so it sounds...). Someone in one of those cities, you'll have to let us know how it goes! (OR someone get the scoop at PLA.)

Speaking of PLA...did anyone see John Wood? Was he as awesome as I would expect?

Jenny Levine and Web 2.0

Okay okay, I am guilty of name-dropping. But Jenny's work on Web 2.0 stuff (gaming in particular) is fantastic and I wanted to make sure everyone had heard about the event going on in Virginia next month.

It's called Changing the Way Libraries Do Business: Meeting the Challenges of the Web 2.0 World, and of course the title alone was enough to pique my interest (oh she that loves change for change's sake!). But on top of that, Jenny is the keynote. And there's a raft of additional interesting people slated to speak, too:

*Kate Sheehan from Darien Public Library
*Jamie Coniglio from George Mason University
*Jennifer Howell from Western Maryland Public Libraries
*Karen Calhoun from OCLC

So it's going to be a good session. I wish they were videocasting it. I can't go, because we've already booked our tickets to go see friends for a long Easter weekend. But take the Maundy Thursday (I know it can be really dead on academic campuses right before Easter) and give your brain an infusion of fresh new and fun ideas.