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I spent ALA wearing two hats, my tech geek hat (which is a bit old and dusty) and my reference librarian hat (which is a much better fit these days!) Streaming the LITA Top Tech Trends and the LITA President’s Program gave me an opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and dust off that tech geek hat. It was nerve-racking to pull of the streaming, but it forced me to learn some new skills and it gave me a chance to work with a great committee and meet some interesting people on the Top Tech Trends panel! (And it gave me a great excuse to buy a cool, new MacBook Pro!) You can check out the less than perfect results of my streaming video at the links below:

While wearing my reference librarian hat, I attended an interesting session on screen sharing for reference questions. The two applications discussed were Google+ hangouts and Join.me. I really like the idea of screen sharing as a way of enhancing our virtual reference, the trick seems to be making it as easy as chat! There are issues to using Google+ hangouts in our computing environment, but I’m confident that we will get past those issues at some point and need to consider how to best incorporate screen sharing into our services.

So to recap, there is a reason they call it a comfort zone and I’m happy I don’t have to spend all my time outside of it!