ALA Annual Conference 2009
The location of this year’s ALA Annual Conference gave my fiancé and me a great excuse to tour Chicago before the event began. We explored the city, visited museums and saw the Harry Potter exhibit, tested the public transportation system, and ate some great food. Some more of our family members joined us on Wednesday to go to Alinea to celebrate a few birthdays, my fiancé’s fellowship, jobs well done, and our engagement. Alinea was an incredible experience; we all left the restaurant with goofy smiles on our faces.
The conference officially started on Thursday, July 9th, but there wasn’t a lot going on. After seeing my fiancé off in the morning, I got settled into my new hotel room, met up with a couple fellow librarians, and had a great meal.
I spent Friday at the Unconference. It was an amazing and intimidating experience to be immersed in a group of so many librarians I had been following on Twitter and the blogosphere. It took a feat of microbravery to participate. But I did it! The presenters were inspiring, and the discussion leaders and other participants were thought-provoking. (A more in depth blog post on my experience at the Unconference to come!)
Saturday, I attended OCLC’s To Be or Not To Be… DRM Free. I arrived a little late, so I missed the speakers names, and I was unsuccessful in locating further information about them online. This discussion had a lot of potential to be a lively debate. However, since it was at 8 o’clock in the morning, it was sparsely attended and everyone who was there seemed bleary-eyed, including me. The basic gist of the program was that “[high] quality content needs DRM” so that publishers can invest in authors. “We need publishers to help filter creators to have high quality content.” “Amateur journalism cannot replace quality content.” My personal thinking is that sometimes publishers publish low quality information, and the reality of content is that there is a spectrum of content. Not all published content is created equal.
Targeted Marketing: Hitting the Bull’s Eye woke me up. Los Angeles Public Library’s Director of Public Relations, Peter Persic, and San Francisco Public Library’s Chief of Communications and Adult Services, Marcia Schneider, spoke about their ad campaigns to change their communities’ perception of the library. It was really exciting to see images of their ads and to hear about their strategies. (A blog post is forthcoming on this program, too!)
Life After 2.0 with Meredith Farkas, Lori Bell, Michelle Springer, and Helene Blowers was really interesting, if a little disjointed. Meredith Farkas’ presentation about why 2.0 services fail in libraries really hit the nail on the head. Instead of just using “Web 2.0″ technology for their own sake, find a problem that needs solving, then find a tool that will help. And, if you’re going to use the tools, make the commitment to continually use them. Don’t abandon them! They’re embarrassing to the organization. She explained:
- Get to know your population’s needs
- Build things to meet a need
- Give staff time
- Plan to market 2.0 projects like any other service
- Make sure it’s in line with the library’s mission/goals
- Continually assess
In the evening, I stopped by the ALA/ProQuest Scholarship Bash. It was my first time attending the event, and I found it a little stiff. Maybe it was the time I arrived (around 8/8:30), but the crowd seemed to be closed off from new people joining conversation. I don’t think I would attend that again in the near future.
I sat in on the LITA Program Planning Committee meeting for the first time on Sunday, in preparation for my 2009-2011 appointment. Jason Griffey, the committee Chair, was awesome, and it was a whole lot less intimidating than I expected. The rest of the committee seems like a promising bunch of librarians, too.
LITA Top Tech Trends was also on Sunday. That was a very cool panel of people: Eric Lease Morgan, Joan Frye Williams, Clifford Lynch, John Blyberg, Geert van den Boogaard, Roy Tennant. Each of these speakers had a lot to say on the current top technology trends. Cloud computing came up, as did the ubiquitousness of mobile devices (mobile devices good for consuming, aren’t good for synthesizing, creating), libraries need to build apps. This was a group of very knowledgeable and engaging speakers. However, it made me wonder what LITA Top Tech Trends program would be like if we had developers of spatial operating environments, active commercial PC and Mac programmers, game developers, and others outside of libraries talk about what’s going on in their industries. Maybe it would have to be called Extreme Tech Trends, but it seems like it would benefit us all to hear about what’s going on outside the library world.
That evening, I dropped by the OCLC Blog Salon. Microbravery, what will you get me into next? It was so surreal to see even more “library celebrities” in such a small space. Unfortunately, timidity won out and I didn’t last for long. Baby steps.
Lastly, on Monday I attended the Content Management Systems in Libraries program. I blogged about it on the LITA Blog.
The programs at the conference got a lot of ideas spinning around in my head, and I’m still trying to sort through them.
July 19th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Hi, Melissa — Glad to hear it sounds like your experience at Annual was good overall. I wish I’d known you were at the Scholarship Bash, because we were there, too, and we would have loved to bring you in. I finally would have met you in person!
I’d also encourage you to give the Bash a second chance in the future, as this year was kind of an exception. There’s usually a band playing, people dancing (not me), and lots more frivolity. I think the fact that it was in the Art Institute made it more difficult to connect with other people since we spent most of our time walking around looking at art and interacting with each other. Just my two cents.
Anyway, hope to catch you offline at some point -
Jenny
July 19th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Thanks, Jenny! Wow, the Bash sounds totally different. I’ll have to give it another try.
I hope we meet soon, too! I’ll be sure to look for you at the next conference.
July 20th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Sounds like a good trip overall! I was hoping to attend the blog salon to meet up with other bloggers, but instead was running around trying to find my left-behind camera at the time. Maybe we’ll have a chance to meet up at a future conference.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
[...] off to the ALA/ProQuest Scholarship Bash at The Art Institute of Chicago. I have to agree with librarychan; it felt a bit stuffy in there. But we met up with Janie from Library Garden and saw some famous [...]
July 20th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Heather — Sure! That sounds awesome. Were you able to find your camera after all?
July 20th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Yes! Thankfully, one of the people at the meeting where I left it grabbed it for me, and got in touch with me that afternoon. Now that I’m AILA secretary, I’ll be at Midwinter and Annual for the next two years at least!