I’m attending this conference on a tattered shoe string. I’m originally from the Baltimore Washington area, so I’m crashing on the futon of some friends who live in DC. My library ponied up the funds for registration and I traveled down 95 on Bolt, a discount bus that comes with wi-fi. (It seemed appropriate to take the most technology-enabled mode of transport to the techy-leaning conference.)

As library budgets shrink in these tough economic times, less people are going to be able or inclined at attend conferences. If I didn’t have the opportunity to see friends between info-sponging, I’d probably just tune in to the twitter feed and hope folks made some interesting blog posts.

This is something that librarians from rural and small libraries have always faced. Often they don’t have the time or budget to travel to conferences. Yesterday, I attended the Tiny Libraries, Tiny Tech, Innovative Services session even though I work for rather large system because innovation at any level is worth investigating. Smaller branches of bigger systems can experience similar staffing, resource, and support issues.  And, I agree with justnathan who tweeted, “Next year someone give this talk: What Small Libraries can Teach Big Libraries (and Everyone Else).”

Jessamyn West (see West’s CIL-related hand-outs, files, and links at librarian.net) opened the session and related, “The people who work in rural libraries rarely leave.”

As I’m looking over my notes, my coffee-low brain is having trouble putting together coherent thoughts, so here are some bullet points from the talk and West’s PowerPoint:

• “If you complain with numbers, people will listen to you.”
• “There’s a lot of stuff you can be in charge of if you’re willing to do the work.”
• Rural librarians don’t always have time to “play” and explore things like a 23 Things program
• You can convince folks to get online by telling them the library will save money: “Let us save a stamp.”
• Patrons just want things to work. They don’t necessarily care about cutting-edge technologies.

The second half of the session highlighted My Kansas Library On the Web (KLOW), a program that allows Kansas libraries to request a website (a WordPress blog) that they can easily update and maintain. As West stated earlier, rural librarians often cannot attend conferences.  The two other presenters, Brenda Hough from MaintainIT and Heather Braum from Northeast Kansas Library System, showed video of Kansas librarians talking about the program.

I’m going to try to dig up the video links, but for now enjoy the following quote from a Kansas librarian that I wrote down: “I wouldn’t wait until everything is perfect to get something started.” Words to live by.