Happy Wednesday! It’s a good Wednesday here because my afternoon meeting was canceled, it’s beautifully sunny outside, and we get to talk a little bit about presentations and exciting news. So let’s get to it.

First, if you haven’t read through the presentation on Presentation Tips from The King’s Speech, you really should. Go ahead, click the link. I’ll wait here.

Now, wasn’t that worth reading? And it’s totally true, prepare, practice, get feedback, and find your own voice and you will be fine (although having a built in cheering section at your presentations is also helpful). I think it is incredibly important to keep your own voice when presenting. For example, even though I basically live in academia, I can’t get into the “super-serious professor” mode when presenting. It’s just not who I am and that’s okay. So to me, all presentations are just conversations, more or less, and that helps me with presenting. That and lots and lots of practice. So what helps you prepare for presentations? Any tips are always appreciated as I’m always trying to improve.

And you know the great thing about becoming an awesome presenter? There are so few of them, even though everyone can improve by taking the time to practice and prepare. So if you become a good presenter, people will not only appreciate it, but tell their colleagues and you will get more people coming to your talks. Really. At the last couple of conferences I attended I went to a few sessions not because I was super-interested in the topics, but because I knew the speakers were great. Content matters, but you are only effective at delivering content if you can connect with your audience and that’s where being a good speaker comes in.

Speaking of presentations (and exciting news), for any of you, dear readers, who are coming to the Society of California Archivist’s Annual General Meeting/Conference in San Jose in April, you should leave room in your schedule for a panel presentation that I’ll be chairing. It should be lots of fun (and hopefully useful) and also feature Collin Thorman, probably better known as The Litbrarian, Sherri Berger of the California Digital Library, and Jesse Nachem from the University of California’s Office of the President. We’ll be discussing graduate school, internships, breaking into the profession, among other stuff. At the very least, do stop by and say hello.

Now on to the public service announcement, you’ve probably heard of the horrible flooding affecting Queensland, but you may not have read this great article about Brisbane librarians and how their disaster planning allowed them to save a lot of materials and restore services quickly. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done, but it is good to see a report on how awesome librarians are, especially in times of crisis. Also, if you want to donate to help the flood victims, the government has a donation form for flood relief. And if you are wondering, the library school at Queensland University of Technology was affected as there was flooding on the QUT campus, but everyone (so far as I’ve heard) is okay.

Now, to finish up the day, let’s all take a break and watch “So You Want to be an Academic Librarian” (thanks to @johnxlibris for posting the link!):

Have a great rest of your day and I’ll be back on Friday with some tech and library fun. Allons-y!