So here I am, early and setup with my eee for the 2nd day of the ALIA Biennial conference in lovely, warm Alice Springs. The first day, Wednesday was a tiring but exhilirating day.

The conference really began Tuesday night, with the welcome cocktail party and official opening of the exhibition. And of course to start the serious networking.

Wednesday started with the newcomer breakfast. Although I have been to many library conferences, this was my first ALIA conference. It was also an opportunity to catch up with colleagues, both current and past and to begin some serious networking.

The opening plenary was given by Professor Martin Nakata from UTS, speaking on guidelines and practices in Australian Indigenous digital collections. He spoke on the preliminary research project being conducted in partnership with SLQ, SLNSW and NTL.

The morning concurrent sessions were on the topics of Policy, Public, Access an Health. I was fortunate to present in the Public session with Glenn Harper from Frankston Library on what our public libraries are doing with Web 2.0 tools. In the same session, Greg Honeyman from SLV spoke on their new internal staff communication tool – the Fridge and Dr Vivienne Waller from Swinburne spoke about how what web stats can tell us about our virtual users, using her research on the SLV website as the example.

The afternoon plenary was by Anita Heiss, Australian author who spoke passionately about Indigenous literacy and gave great sources for and ideas on how to support indigenous literature.

The early afternoon concurrent sessions covered the topics of technical, public, special and health, with the later afternoon sessions covering archiving, public, special and health. We learned about indigenous knowledge centres, the Livestock Library and Pandora with web archiving.

The evenings Happy Hour led to the Australian Premiere of The Hollywood Librarian. There has been a lot of hype about the movie coming out of its launch in the US so I wasnt sure what to expect, but I was impressed. It was a great documentary about libraries and librarians, through Hollywood film and in modern day reality of the USA. The film-maker Ann Seidl was present for the showing and mentioned that further viewings will be held in Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. I highly recommend you attend if you can – its welll worth it. If you cant, Ann is hoping the DVD release will be available by Christmas and that is one DVD I will be getting as a gift for myself.

As you can see, its was quite a day. The papers are available from http://www.alia2008.com/ and if you want one attendees view of some of the sessions, I have blogged the sessions I attended on my blog http://connectinglibrarian.com.

More will come over the next two days of the conference, so stay tuned!