Final Thoughts

Attending my first ALA Conference was a great experience. Before the conference, I was a bit overwhelmed, but once I got there I found that it was just like any other conference I had attended, but on a much larger scale. I was fortunate to be able to attend with three of my colleagues who are veteran conference goers--Margaret Craft, Bonnie Strohl, and Narda Tafuri. I woud definitely attend again.

While in Washington, DC, I was able to spend some time visiting with my daughter and son-in-law, Lynn and Donald, and I was able to do a little sight-seeing. Lynn and I toured the National Building Museum where there is currently a wonderful David Macaulay exhibit. This building is where all of the U.S. Presidents have held their Inaugural Balls since 1885. Here is a photo of me with the White House in the background.

Garrison Keillor was the speaker at the closing session. He talked about libraries and librarians for about 45 minutes and was delivered with his usual dry sense of humor. (cf. his article on libraries in Salon which touches on some of what he said to us.) This session was taped for broadcast on C-Span and the auditorium was packed. I was fortunate to be able to attend the Awards Ceremony and the Inaugural Banquet later that evening in support of Charles Kratz, the Dean of the Library at the University of Scranton, who is joining the ALA Executive Board. I saw Barbara Cole from Commonwealth Libraries and Debbie Malone, Library Director at DeSales University and Co-Chair of PaLA's Legislative Information Committee.

This morning I attended "Once Upon a Furl in a Podcast Long Ago: Using New Technologies to Support Library Instruction." This was a panel of four librarians: Joan Lippincott gave an overview of emerging technologies and library instruction; Kathy Burnett is teaching future librarians at Florida State Unviersity how to use technology tools in the classroom; Kathryn Shaughnessy is using the tools with Social Justice students who are in Third World countries; and Heather Tompkins shared lots of tips about using the social web tools.

Poster Session - This afternoon was devoted to my poster session, "You Asked, We Responded: Redesigning an Academic Library's Web Site Based on User Input." Several people who are thinking about redesigning their Web sites asked quite a few questions. When I get back to the library, I'll add a picture.

Although I never did manage to hook up with Barbara Burd, I did see several more librarians from Pennsylvania, including Christie Roysdon and Evelyn Minick. There are two Internet cafes here at the conference and there is a kiosk at the hotel that also has some computers with Internet access which have made my ability to blog while I'm here possible.

I went to an interesting program this morning, "Harnessing the Hive: Social Networks and Libraries," sponsored by MARS. There were 3 speakers. Matthew Bejune talked about his Wiki research. He said that libraries are using Wikis mainly for collaborating with other libraries or with library staff, but few are using Wikis to collaborate with their users. This is where he focused his research. He created LibraryWikis as a companion to his upcoming article in the September 2007 issue of Information Technology and Libraries. Matt was followed by Meredith Farks, aka Queen of Wikis, who maintains Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki and who is the Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University in Norwich, VT, spoke about "Knowledge Management." She demonstrated several ways that libraries are using Wikis. Her presentation can be found at http://meredithfarkas.wetpaint.com/. The final speaker was Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, an online service to help people catalog their books. He describe LibraryThing as social cataloging. Libraries are starting to incorporate LibraryThing into their online catalogs. Currently only one library, the Danbury Library in CT is using this, but Tim said that within the next month more will be added. For more info about how your library can incorporate social cataloging, go to http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries/. On the negative side, I overheard some people chatting as I was waiting in line in the rest room the they were unhappy with Tim's criticism of Library of Congress Subject Headings.

I went to two interesting programs this afternoon. The first, sponsored by ACRL, was on gaming. James Paul Gee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, explained the many ways that video games incorporate good learning principles. Some of these principles include the following: 1) they lower the consequences of failure; 2) they encourage players to think about systems and relationships, not just isolated events, facts, and skills; 2) learning is embodied and affective (emotional). He encouraged librarians to not just read a story to children, but to play a video game with them. George Needham, Vice-President Member Services at OCLC, then spoke about what librarians can learn from gamers. He suggested that we should rethink how we deliver services. IM and text messaging are ways that we can hit people where they are, when they really need it.

The second program was sponsored by LITA. It was a panel discussion with the librarians from the "Google Five" libraries and Adam Smith, Product Developer from Google. They gave an update on the status of this project. There were some problems like unbarcoded books, brittle paper, and binding; but, the librarians all seemed to feel that these were minor and that the benefits far outweighed the problems. Dale Flecker, from Harvard University, suggested that because of the project text mining would become a new research field.

I was able to spend about an hour visiting the exhibits this morning. While I was there I met some other PA librarians, Lynn Moses from Commonwealth Libraries, Merrill Stein from Villanova, and Joe Fennewald from Penn State Hazleton. I didn't find the booth with the Wheel of Acronyms yet, but I'll keep looking!

ACRL 101 - This was a great program! Very well organized. Pam Snelson, ACRL President gave a welcome and invited us to get to know a little bit about our neighbors. Then she gave an overview of how ACRL is organized (more acronyms!) Mary Jane Petrowski, ACRL Associate Director, told us how we can get involved in the Association and she broke this down by how much (or how little) time we could spend being engaged. We also heard from Jo Ann Carr who told us where we could find a home in ACRL, and if one doesn't exist, then they would build one for us! Louise Sherby, ACRL Representative to the 2007&2008 ALA Conference Program Coordinating Team explained how that committee organized the programs. She also gave us some tips on finding things in the Program Guide. And Julia Gelfand, Past Chair, ACRL Science & Technology Section gave us some tips on navigating the Exhibit Hall. The 'official' program being over, we were free to speak with representatives from many of the Sections. ACRL is creating a New Member Wiki and the surveyed us for things that we thought might be helpful to include. On our way out we participated in a Jelly Bean Assessment. We voted on whether or not we found the program "useful" by depositing jelly beans in jars. When I left, the "useful" jar was filling up fast and the "not useful" jar was empty.

I just noticed that my last posting is time stamped 5:41 AM. Yikes! It was more like 8:45 AM. The computer terminal from which I'm posting this message says that it's 3:51 AM so please disregard the time stamps on these postings from the Conference.

ALA has a lot of acronyms. There are 2 pages in the Program Book devoted to defining them. At yesterday's Conference 101 program, they told us that there is a game in the Exhibit Hall called Spin the Wheel of Acronymns. I might want to check that out because I learned what quite a few of these acronyms mean at the first program that I attended this morning, RUSA AND ASCLA 101. My next stop is ACRL 101. I do know that acronym stands for Association of College & Research Libraries.

Conference 101

I got to this program 10 minutes before it was scheduled to start and there wasn't a free seat available. The room was set up with 15 tables, 10 chairs at a table. At least 50 more people eventually were seated around the room. Some dragged in chairs from another room. The President of the New Members Roundtable gave a little commercial about joining the Roundtable. Then a guy named Michael (I didn't quite catch his last name) went through the program book telling us page numbers for all of the important things that we should know about--maps, schedules, freebies. He said that, being the librarian that he is, he organized all of the cards that he got in the mail from exhibitors by booth number. Silly me, I wasn't even going to bring mine! Diner was great. We ate at a tapas restaurant. It's a good thing that we had reservations because it was very crowded.

Well, I'm here at ALA. Margaret Craft and I came together. We checked in to the hotel, but we can't get into our rooms until 4:00pm. We walked the 2 blocks to the Convention Center. It's 3 blocks long! After we picked up our badges, we wandered around a bit and found the Internet Cafe. I'm going to Conference 101 at 4:00pm which is a program for first time attendees. This evening we are being taken to dinner with one of the library's vendors.

I will be attending the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Since this is my first conference, I thought that some of you might be interested in my experience. I'm not there yet and I'm already feeling a bit overwhelmed by how large it is. There are so many programs, meetings, and events that ALA has created an online Conference Planner to help you schedule your days.

Our recent workshop, "Logging the Academic Life" at Lehigh University, was a great success. We had about 60 attendees turn out on a hot, summer's day to hear Scott Carlson of the Chronicle of Higher Education and Richard Sweeney from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, our two keynote speakers, give two highly entertaining and stimulating presentations.

Folks also attended one of the three breakout sessions, one by Suzanne Kellerman, Penn State, and Chris Raab, F & M, on their experiences digitizing student newspapers, a second by Richard Griscom, Univ of Penn, and John Osborne, Dickinson College, on what their institutions are doing towards digitizing the best student scholarship, and the third by Julia Maserjian, Lehigh University, who showed us some of the nifty projects faculty, students, and library staff are collaborating on.

Look for a more complete write up of the workshop in an upcoming issue of the PaLA Bulletin.

Photo of Chris Raab and Sue Kellerman by Bonnie Oldham