Day two of the Computers in Libraries 2010 and Internet@Schools conference was packed with information and ideas I’ll be bringing back to school to implement. Gary Price of The Reference Shelf showed us many new Internet resources. Cheryl Lederle-Ensign and Erika White of the Library of Congress introduced us to their newly updated website and the myriad new resources for teachers. Paul Barron, director of library and archives for the George C, Marshall Foundation, talked about Google’s ranking system and how important it is for students to understand why the top three results may not be the best results. He said “bad decision making is usually the result of an inability to locate information.” For this reason, it’s imperative that school libraries teach students to locate the best information available so that they will be able to make informed decisions now and throughout their lives.

Krista Godrey, liaison librarian at McMaster University demonstrated how open-source applications like Libx and Zotero can assist students in searching, collecting, citing, and sharing their research source materials. Rebecca Jones (Dysart and Jones) and Deb Wallace (Harvard Business School) were exceptionally persuasive when they discussed how we can use critical thinking skills to make the decisions that will help us to progress inside our organizations.

The evening program was a lighthearted look at “hot” and “not” technologies. Sorry, ipad users, but that one’s a “not.” Html5 and anything that helps people to work better collaboratively came out with high marks in the “hot” category. The highlight of my day, however, was hearing the archivist of the United States and "Collector-in-Chief" share that the book he's presently reading is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.