Day 2 of the conference was awesome.

I started at a vendor breakfast, my first such event at a a conference. ALS held a lovely pancake breakfast with guest speaker Margie Seale from Random House. She gave us an interesting insight into the publishing world and into the issues they are facing at present. I was particularly impressed by the 3 books they gave each attendee – including a hardcover copy of Don Watsons American Journeys. When I get a chance, Ill blog what I learnt at the breakfast. (I thought it rude to drag out the eee during breakfast)

The opening plenary was from Claudia Lux – President of IFLA, who spoke on the role of IFLA, and on her presidents project of Advocacy. She gave an insight into this topic that I had not had before and which was very helpful and very interesting. This was followed by the awarding of the 2008 ALIA awa irds, which has already been posted on Libraries Interact.

After morning team, a 2^nd plenary session included Gillian Hallam from QUT discussing the preliminary results of the 2^nd stage of the Nexus survey, which looked at institutional views on workforce planning. Richard Sayers from CAVAL talked about a collaborative staff development benchmarking project with partner organisation EMALINK in the UK.

The late morning plenary was from Inga Lunden from the Stockholm Library, who shared her dream for what libraries are and should be about and the plans for the new Stockholm Library. Its a grand vision, an inspirational one, which hopefully will be given the go ahead in the next few months.

The early afternoon concurrent sessions covered the topics of workforce planning, youth, arts and public. I attended a paper on third party funding for public library programs which was helpful in its presentation of real life Australian examples, as well as good advice on how to go about it. The 2^nd paper was on the NSLA Strategic Plan, which is a huge undertaking by our State, Territory and National Libraries of Australia and New Zealand. It will be very interesting to see the outcome of the 10 projects which comprise the plan.

The late afternoon concurrent sessions were on the topics of workforce planning, public an arts and I attended the paper on Connecting with the community, which presented results from Victorias Libraries Building Communities project. Lots of good ideas and practical advice were offered and happily taken in.

Last night was the awesome conference dinner at Ooraminna Homestead, so a road train of buses were utilised to take us the site, about 40 kms out of Alice Springs. I will be doing a separate blog post at Connecting Librarian on this too. Just to say, great location – out under the stars - with a guide for star gazing, beautiful good quality, delicious food, great and entertaining hosts and live music, awesome company. It was a fun night, one to defintely remember and I congratulate the organising commiitee for giving us such a great night.

So its the last day of the conference. Another big day with great plenary speakers and presentations on offer. All the papers will be available from http://www.alia2008.com/ or check out my individual blog posts at http://connectinglibrarian.com.