I'll write more later, but I am absolutely delighted with the way things went in my talk - we had an audience of 20-25 people who were deeply interested in this topic, laughed at my jokes and gave me 15 minuts of great questions and suggestions. Altogether, one of the best presentations I've ever given. You can see the PowerPoint at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/saltlake.ppt. I told the group that I'd consider this a success if somebody went back to their library and created their own VERSO. Perhaps this will happen.
Afterwards, I joined Ronda for a workshop on Elluminate - a program that facilitates web conferencing. I had used this more than a year ago for an ACRL webcast that reprised a very successful presentation at ALA in 2006. I found it a bit bewildering at the time, so this program helped me to gain a bit more of a comfort level. Afterwards, we went to the conference buffet luncheon, which was actually pretty good.
The first afternoon session was presented by Jane Hutton from West Chester University of Pennsylvania: "Academic Libraries as Digital Gateways." She is concerned with the fact that millions of books are available online but the libraries are falling behind in providing access to this. In extreme cases, the library's opac has a record for a microfiche book title when the same book can be found online. She did some excellent research by picking 10 titles of classic books that were known to be freely available online. This access was rarely reported in university online catalogs. Sites such as the University of Pennsylvania listing and OAIster did much better, but no one site showed everything. She also mentioned an encounter between a Serials Solutions executive and a Google Books manager where the Google manager was asked about publishing a list of everything they were providing so Serials Solutions could generate marc records. They were told in no uncertain terms that Google will not provide such a report. Hey Google - here's an idea. Make your own marc records and market them to libraries - "Google book collection about the Italian Renaissance," etc. Maybe you already have enough money.
After that, we went to a session about the creation of quick tutorials for distance education students by librarians at SUNY Plattsburg. This turned out to be a popular topic, judging by the fact that I nearly had to sit on the floor. They found that these tutorials are a great investment in time because they can be reused in many ways after their initial creation. Curiously, these are visuals only - they are just starting to experiment with narrated tutorials.
We visited the poster room for the final session of the day. Highlights included a presentation by Todd Quinn from Northern State University in South Dakota who is using Web 2.0 tools in the teaching of information literacy at the library. Also, librarians from Appalachian State University have created a virtual library that resembles Second Life except for the fact that they are delivering actual useful library information. They divide the library into "Information Gardens," navigated by the use of avatars. 
Ronda and I walked 5 blocks west to the Gateway center - a sort of open air mall that looks like it was designed by Dr. Seuss. Five blocks doesn't sound like much, but a block in Salt Lake is the size of entire villages elsewhere. The day's finale was a birds-of-a-feather gathering of 11 librarians at the Market Grill which was, thankfully, only one block away. Their specialty was seafood, but I went for prime rib instead, following that best stuffed mushrooms I've had in ages.
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