Blogging Sessions at the SLA Conference

I ended up attending a few sessions on the use of blogs at the SLA conference here in Toronto:

Blogging/RSSing the Librarian Way, by Marie Kaddell, Information Professional Consultant, LexisNexis and Catherine R. Lavallée-Welch, University of South Florida - Lakeland. Fellow Canadian blogger Richard Akerman took extensive notes during this session.

Establishing a Weblog on Your Organization's Intranet, by Sabrina Pacifici of LLRX.com and beSpacific.com and Dennis Hamilton, Information Services Manager, KZF Design. Fellow Canadian law blogger Connie Crosby covered this session.

I mention "fellow Canadians" for two reasons:

a) to promote Canadian bloggers in our field
b) because there are so few of us, especially in a field such as law blogging (blawging?)

After the Blogging/RSSing the Librarian Way session, I went up to the front to speak with Lavallée-Welch, who is Quebec-born (she attended EBSI, the graduate school of library science at the Université de Montréal - I went to GSLIS, the cross-town equivalent at McGill University).

We talked about various things, like how a Québécoise librarian like her ended up first in Kentucky, before landing in South Florida. But the conversation turned to why Americans just go out and "do it" (blog), whereas it can feel at times like Canadians have to wait for the results of a Royal Commission ,or two, or three, before getting involved in this "next big thing".

Of course, many Canadians are involved in blogging. But in specialized areas like law, the culture is more reticent and reserved.

Odd for a country that pioneered communications technologies and theory (Innis, McLuhan).