CLA conference, part 1

TBO and I attended the California Libraries Association conference last weekend, so I thought I would take this opportunity to remind anyone watching that I am, still, a librarian, and to make some observations about the conference. As with most conferences, I suppose, CLA offered several "tracks" to guide participants to the workshops (an obvious misnomer--all I saw were "presentations"!) they would find most useful. In this case, all of the talks I saw were from 2 tracks--reference and technology. Since the job of a modern reference librarian involves the use of a wide range of technology, there should have been a lot of informational overlap between these two tracks, but instead I noticed some serious divisions, mainly in the attitudes of (at least some of) the presenters and the audiences.
One would assume that presenters in a "technology" track for a conference would necessarily be optimistic about the use of newer and better hardware and software, regardless of the audience, and that was indeed the case at CLA as well. In fact, at the "What's Hot in Technology" talk, the main emphasis of the discussion was that even if libraries don't (or can't) currently provide the newest technology to their patrons, this stuff is "out there" and people are using it, and our profession must address these new usages regardless of what we think about them. The all-too-real alternative is that we will become mired in outdated and archaic practices and prove useless to our patrons.
One of the problems this creates for us as a whole, however, is that this progressive outlook on technology is unsupported by the traditional "ideology" espoused by many librarians. I witnessed this traditionalism firsthand at the "Reference Tricks They Don't Teach You in Library School" talk from the reference track. Many of the "tricks" involved the use of Google's advanced features, almost all of which have been in existence for years, but even so, many members of the audience could be heard audibly gasping in wonder. (Seriously!)
I was even more taken aback, though, by the hostility shown toward the Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia that is almost completely open for editing) by the presenters. Instead of taking the opportunity to explain the technology and urging the audience to participate in this grand experiment in communal knowledge building, the presenter archly condemned Wikipedia by showing the audience how easy it is to deface it, without even taking the time to assess whether the information contained in it was accurate. The presenter's cynicism and dismissive point of view were instantly and powerfully transmitted to the audience--who were clearly horrified--making it extremely unlikely that any of them would view this particular emerging technology with anything but disdain. I was disgusted, and the fact that the presenters are professors at one of just two library schools in southern California made me realize how many librarians out there are being trained and/or reinforced in a belief of distrust for technology and the public.
The success or failure of Wikipedia (or any other collaborative technology or endeavor, including society as a whole, I'd argue) depends on whether there are more people in the world willing to do good rather than evil in this instance; this presenter clearly feels that's not the case. That he chose (and presumably continues to choose, in his position as professor) to air his pessimism from a position of authority is a disgraceful shame, because he probably just added about 100 people to the side that won't do anything to help.