So after going on and on about the New Librarian’s Symposium on this blog I suppose I should give you a rundown of how it actually went.I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many glasses in one room! har har. Interesting range of people, about 1/6th under 25 (about 190 went) the rest were mid 30s right through to 50s. Most were from public and academic libraries. I met lots of nice people, including the entire Perth delegation.

Day 1 was a career planning day, complete with Myers-Briggs. I’ve done that like 4 times so that was kind of boring, but the others who hadn’t done it before seemed to enjoy it. There was a cocktail party in the evening with several library leaders, I was kind of disappointed since all but one were Queenslanders, and since I’m in Sydney, it wasn’t quite as interesting. However I did get to talk to this year’s ALIA president, Joyce Kirk for all of 30 seconds and that was good.

Day 2 was more of an issues in librarianship day, with a panel discussion in the morning about the library of the future that piqued my curiosity. There was some murmering about the quality of library schools in Australia that was interesting, but unfortunately there was no time to follow up on it. Dinner was kind of embarassing, there was this really really bad covers band playing and to everyone’s embarassment, many people got up to dance. Yech.

But on the whole it was great to finally see what the rest of the new generation of librarians in Australia are like. I was hoping to find some activist librarians, but maybe they stayed home.