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Yesterday, a group of us attended the virtual conference Handheld Librarian.It was presented as a combination of PowerPoint presentations with live voice-overs.Attendees had to log into the conference site to watch and listen; attendees could submit questions and comments to the presenters and moderators in real time via IM.The topic of the conference was delivering library services via mobile or handheld devices.

The conference was so well attended that we were unable to log into the opening keynote session for about 30 minutes until they opened a second log-in site.Four hundred seventy-seven individuals or groups attended the morning sessions. Needless to say, the attendees were a self-selecting crowd of tech-loving librarians, many of whom Twittered the conference.Throughout the morning, #hhlib trended in Twitter which means it was among the top 10 topics mentioned.Every few moments, I’d get a refresh reminder telling me I had 75 new tweets on #hhlib.It added an interesting dimension to the conference to watch and hear the presenter while reading attendees reactions on Twitter at the same time.Many tweets lauded speakers comments, others posed questions to the audience, while a few complained about audio quality or disagreed with speaker comments.

Surprisingly, people have continued to Twitter about the conference `today.Presenters’ have been posting their slides on their blogs or web pages and the audio recordings are not available at www.handheldlibrarian.org.