Once again I had a great time at the Com­put­ers in Libraries con­fer­ence, even though I didn’t get to stay for the whole thing. I did a pre­con­fer­ence with Aaron Schmidt on gam­ing that was our best one yet, and I got some great feed­back about the “Hi Tech, Hi Touch” pre­sen­ta­tion I was asked to give. I want to give a spe­cial thank you to every­one who joined in the fun and made gam­ing night such a huge suc­cess that we’ve already been asked to do it again at Inter­net Librar­ian.

Slides from my talks are up on my pre­sen­ta­tions wiki. Feel free to con­tact me if you have ques­tions about them. As always, the best thing about these con­fer­ences is the peo­ple. Spend­ing time with old friends is always spe­cial, and I love get­ting to meet online friends in per­son. A big thank you to every­one who was so sup­port­ive and encour­ag­ing — I really appre­ci­ated all of your comments.

Today’s National Library Week video is all about a game, in this case Go Fish. (More NLW videos here.)

I missed these last year but still laughed when I saw them today. The DePauw Libraries did a take­off of the Mac-PC ads on the sub­ject of search results, as well as a promo called “Branch­ing Out” dressed up as a Com­mon Craft video!

What: Gam­ing (& Gad­gets!) Night
Where: CIL 2008, Jef­fer­son Room
When: Sun­day, April 6th, 5:30–8:00 pm
How much: FREE
Who: You and other peo­ple inter­ested in gaming

Aaron Schmidt and I have given a few gam­ing work­shops at past Com­put­ers in Libraries and Inter­net Librar­ian con­fer­ences. After the ses­sions we’ve opened up the room to any­one inter­ested in play­ing some games and/or learn­ing about gam­ing. It’s proven to be a pop­u­lar and really fun time, so this year Infor­ma­tion Today has turned the post-workshop game­play into a fea­tured event. With refresh­ments even!

We’ve assem­bled an impres­sive array of games!

Sys­tems: Nin­tendo Wii, Playsta­tion 2, and Xbox 360. We’ll also have two Nin­tendo DS handhelds.

Games: Wii Sports, DDR, Hotel Dusk, Gui­tar Hero III, Pro­fes­sor Lay­ton and the Curi­ous Vil­lage, Wario Smooth Moves, what­ever you bring, and Rock Band.

Since we’ll have three sys­tems going at once, we’re open­ing up the option of an hon­est to good­ness tour­na­ment with prizes. You prob­a­bly want to know which game, huh? Well, it’s up to you. Sign up in the com­ments on Aaron’s post or at a page we’ve cre­ated on the CIL08 wiki titled CIL08 Gam­ing Night to play Rock Band, Gui­tar Hero, or DDR. We’ll play whichever game gets the most signups!

In addi­tion, Chris Har­ris is bring­ing some mod­ern board games for some casual play (I may bring a cou­ple, too). Bring your own games, bring your lat­est shiny, new gad­gets, and we’ll see you Sun­day night!

And we do. Check out the About page of the Tech­ni­cally Ran­dom blog.

“We are the Ran­dom Tech­nol­ogy Un-Committee and we are more what we aren’t than what we are.

We aren’t a com­mit­tee;
We aren’t a task force;
We aren’t an advi­sory group;
And, we cer­tainly aren’t organized.

We do not have a charge;
We do not have a mis­sion;
We do not have a task list or a time­line;
We do not have a chair.

But we also are.

We are tin­ker­ers;
We are won­der­ers;
We are pathfind­ers;
We are dreamers.

Our sole pur­pose for exist­ing is to share our thoughts and tin­ker­ings and brain­storm­ing in the hopes of find­ing new solu­tions, inspir­ing more brain­storm­ing and reduc­ing the num­ber of wheels being invented.

And, we do.

We have occa­sional un-meetings where we sit and share our thoughts and tin­ker­ings. We have no agenda and we do not tol­er­ate blind neg­a­tiv­ity.
We blog and tag and book­mark what­ever we think is inter­est­ing and worth shar­ing.
We may do more, who knows.

Finally, the we who is we is you too. Right now we have a small crew of authors for this blog, but we wel­come your par­tic­i­pa­tion by either com­ment­ing on blog entries, join­ing our crew of blog authors or par­tic­i­pat­ing in our to-be-announced future un-meetings. (Thanks, Kathryn!)