if:book: emerging libraries at rice: day one

Nothing like waking up on your "day at home" (ie, day to study at home), glancing at the Google sidebar and seeing, "if:book: emerging libraries at rice: day one," and realizing that there's a fabulous conference going on 2 hours and 45 minutes by car from my house, that I would *love* to be attending, and I DID NOT EVEN KNOW ABOUT IT, and even if I had known, it would have conflicted with my classes and I would have been torn about attending. So, several problems here, along with some great joy at reading Ben Vershbow's summary of yesterday's proceedings. I can, he says, attend the conference virtually in SL, but of course I have lots of things I'm supposed to be doing over the next day and a half that will keep Gee Susanti in her avatar closet, I'm afraid. She's like the doll in Toy Story that gets pushed under the bed and "lost." Well, I'll try to check it out this afternoon.

But for right now, how did I not know about this conference? It is tailor-made for my research interests. I'll go visit the Rice U Website and get on their mailing list for next year, find out how to get the proceedings, etc. And next, what to do about the conflict between really important conferences and other events, and classes. Maybe once I'm in the Ph.D. program this won't be such an issue. I think the class thing is alot less structured there, but I'm not sure. Also, it may be that I've taken just about all the structured classes I'll need to. Well, I know that's not true because I have to take research methods, at least, and I've got to schedule some time with Mary Lynn (my adviser) to talk about summer and fall registration and what to take. I think that I'll need to take some more digitization classes to further develop my digital library specialty. Ok, enough whining.

The conference is going to be Webcast, but apparently not live, because there's nothing on the Website about how to access the Webcast. The page says info will be forthcoming. The lineup of speakers is breathtaking, the subjects, extremely intriguing. Ugh. C'est la vie. Get over it...