I had a great weekend in Melbourne. After a tech run through at the State Library on Friday, I met up with my friend Leanne who works there, for chai and muffin at Mr Tulk, the coffee shop at SLV. I spent half of Saturday curled up in bed with Harry Potter, trying to get over a cold.

Sunday and Monday I spent in the comfortable, intellectually stimulating, friendly company of Michelle McLean and Helene Blowers. Michelle was the perfect host – showing me around her hometown and introducing me to her kids and puppy who are all very sweet, cuddly and well behaved. I also caught up with a number of great Victorian librarians. A huge chunk of conversation all weekend was about how we can encourage library staff to increase their skills with emerging technologies in a way that is relevant to 1) their current jobs and 2) the future they will need to tackle.

The presentation went well. I liked Helene’s style of wandering the audience wearing lapel mike. I liked the way Lynette showed a montage of the blog posts written by Yarra Plenty participants during her presentation. I enjoyed Michelle’s enthusiastic detailing of the innovative libraries she visited – and her ability to prevent them all blurring into one. I liked the outline of the considerations of the State Library of Victoria as they redesign their website – and their attempt to get just one spot for the user to go to access many different systems. All presentations will be available on the State Library web site. I had a tour of the building during a couple of other presentations – wow and wow! I need a couple of days to browse next time.

I tried some liveblogging and hope to post Michelle’s talk in the next couple of weeks. But now, I’m back on the plane for another, even shorter, visit to Melbourne.

You can see other photos from my weekend State Libray of Victoria visit July 2007