Seflin Conference

Today I attended a conference in Davie, Florida, for the SEFLIN libraries. I have to say it wasn't as impressive as PLA, but that was to be expected. I was, alas, but I did catch most of the speech by one Meredith Farkas, whose blog I've stumbled across before. I have to say if there's anyone in the Library World who I'd like to emulate, it would be her. She encapsulates most of my ideas very well, and articulates and argues them much better than I ever could.
After her speech I went to my first workshop, which was about the decline and fall of the OPAC. This presenter argued that OPAC is more or less doomed since it was never meant to be a tool for the public, but rather a tool for our own use. We've done our best, I suppose, to retrofit it for the public, but it never seems to have caught on. He went on to differentiate the differences between a finding tool, (OPAC,) and a discovery tool, (Google, which is apparently what the patrons really want.) In fact, he predicts that in 10 years or so, the public won't use the OPAC at all and it will revert to being a staff-only tool, with the public going to 3rd party websites like WorldCat to find our materials. Interesting idea.
At lunch the people I was supposed to ride with got to sit with Meredith. This made me very bitter about being late. Instead, I was exiled to a table where I didn't know anyone. They were all apparently from a career school. The lunchtime presentation was by an important woman, but I would argue that the only people interested in her presentation were statisticians. The woman basically organized a large phone interview for people and how they find their information. Her research claims to find that people are using libraries more, exactly the opposite of what we'd thought for a long time. From what I learned in my research methodologies class, (I can't believe I'm actually using something I learned from that class,) I would argue that this whole study is flawed and biased, since the only people who are going to respond are those that care about libraries anyway. But, that's my two cents. I'm sure someone would have brought up that point before, and hopefully it was taken care of, and this is me just speaking out of ignorance.
But still, I'm not putting much faith in that study.
The afternoon conference was about government research, and I have to say it wasn't particularly interesting. I think many people attended it in hopes of gaining tips on how to help patrons who come to the library to fill out government forms due to the E-Government initiatives. But, the only help the woman offered was basically "do what you can." It was interesting to see a few of the website she pointed out, though.
After that the conference was over. I hung around until 4 to mingle, but that was it, folks.
I arrived at 9:30 and left at 4, totalling 7.5 hours.