Suzanne's Anaheim events

One of the fun things about ALA is going to some of the events in additions to programs and workshops. So I thought I'd use a blog posting to talk a bit about some of the fun stuff.

WebJunction Member Reception - Lauren's and my flight from Salt Lake City to Anaheim was cancelled so we spent 7 1/2 hours in the Salt Lake City airport and missed the reception. Am I bitter? I'm just upset that I missed out on the feather boas. There are photos of the event on Flickr.

One of the interesting events at ALA this year was a Big Game - California Dreaming. You signed up, joined a team and then answered trivia questions posted around the conference center and/or at the Marriott or Hilton and/or picked up items like in a scavenger hunt and earned points for your team. I knew none of the California trivia questions but I can scavenge so I got the only 75 points scored by the Special Librarians team. Here's a photo of the winners. The Library Society of the World.The photo is by ALA on Flickr. The Big Game concept is kind of interesting and might be an activity to consider for a future MLA conference, perhaps as a Sheila Cates fundraiser. There's more information about it on the ALA conference wiki.

I did make it to Disneyland for the Spectrum Scholarship Bash.
I didn't take any photos. This one is by Squid from Flickr. The Disneyland adventure was a bit disappointing. I was expecting some kind of special treatment like the bash a few years earlier at Universal Studios in Orlando. Instead it was us librarians and several hundred thousand other Disneyland enthusiasts. So, I only saw one person I knew the whole night. I did go on a few rides - Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc. I refused to wait in line for 45 minutes for some of the other rides. And I did manage to find some better food than I had anticipated - gumbo. And there is certainly no shortage of shopping opportunities. We got to "enjoy" the Disneyland fireworks every night while we were there. I thought this would get really old really fast if I lived nearby.

Book Cart Drill Team Championship - I finally made it to one. Of course, I got there late and it was standing room only.Costumes, music, choreography. This I believe was the winning team. They did a zombie dance number to "Thriller."



Another photo is from ALA on Flickr. And they have lots more book cart drill team photos as well.

And, last but certainly not least was the AILA American Indian Youth Literature Awards reception.

This photo was taken by Karen Gonzales of the winners:

Picture Book:
Crossing Bok Chitto: A Choctaw Tale of Friendship & Freedom
by Tim Tingle.

Middle School Award Winner:
Counting Coup: Becoming A Crow Chief on the Reservation and Beyond
by Montana’s own Joseph Medicine Crow.

Young Adult Award Winner:
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie.

There was food, story telling, music and dancing. I got to hang out with Mary Anne Hansen and Karen Gonzales. And, as Karen pointed out, with 3 calendar girls, how could it not be fun? Carlene Engstrom was a member of the awards committee. Nice job, Carlene! And I got another book signed and took this photo for Karen of her with Sherman Alexie.

Finally, on the last day, one of the last events was an interview with Kite Runner author, Khaled Hosseini. He talked a bit about his life and the writing of and reactions to The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. One of the bits I particularly enjoyed was the difficulty some readers had in accepting the book as fiction. He recounted one woman asking what has happened to the boy (I can't remember his name). He replied, you know the book is fiction? She said yes, and asked again. So, he gave in and said he's fine.

I very much enjoyed attending my first ALA conference. From my point of view, it was incredibly well organized. Over 20,000 people and things seem to run without a hitch.

I attended several interesting sessions and meetings. An interview session with Joshua Ferraro, of LibLime and Koha fame, included questions about consortia and open source ILS, long term support and very interestingly, the recent collaboration between Relais and LibLime. Watch for an open source Interlibrary Loan tool in the future.

Another intriguing session was "Size Does Make a Difference: Library Networks, Cooperatives and Consortia in the 21st Century". A panel discussed ongoing efforts through surveys to identify issues with existing statewide cooperative efforts.

OCLC is encouraging more communication between states in the Pacific Northwest that have group service contracts (such as Montana). ALA was a second opportunity for this new group to meet and I attended that meeting the second day I was at ALA. We're learning a great deal just from being able to get together and toss around ideas about what we all need from OCLC to make group services successful. Montana continues to be hailed as a model.

I was happy to present the Montana Memory Project during an OCLC session on CONTENTdm, Connexion Digital Import and WorldCat.org. There were plenty of questions about the MMP and where we're headed as a collaborative.

These are just a few highlights in three full days in Anaheim. ALA is truly amazing and I valued the experience whole heartedly.

Lauren at ALA

This was my first opportunity to attend the ALA Conference and I have never been to such a large convention before – there were 22,000 librarians! It was a great experience and I hope I’ll be able to do it again sometime.

The focus of my trip was professional development and networking with training/CE colleagues, so I built my agenda around ALA-CLENE (Continuing Library Education Network Exchange) events and anything else that smacked of training or CE. Also, as chairperson of the MLA Intellectual Freedom Committee I wanted to attend some IFC events. It was good to have a basic purpose because the array of available session topics is amazing and I wouldn’t have had any idea where to start…

My three days at conference included several visits to the Exhibit Hall as well as the following sessions:

Saturday:

• AASL President’s Program – Intellectual Freedom: a Core Value – (American Association of School Librarians) – excellent panel discussion
• ACRL Learning Virtually: Online Professional Development for Library Workers with Tight Budgets (Association of College and Research Libraries) – panel discussion and examination of online learning systems
• ACRL Learning Virtually Poster Session – an opportunity to meet and discuss online learning projects with designer/developers
• ALSC Stories for a Saturday Evening (Association for Library Service to Children) – I’ve never heard professional storytellers before and this was really fantastic. I got to hear two of the performers – a very funny lady telling stories about family life and her Puerto Rican grandmother and an older black gentleman (and library school professor) sharing African fables and stories.

Sunday:

• ACRL-ANSS The Lady, the Tramp & the Lion King: Mixed Messages about Gender, Race and Ethnicity in Disney’s Magic Kingdom (Anthropology and Sociology Section of ACRL) – I slipped into this session to kill some time before my next scheduled event and this was very interesting! In a nutshell: Disney has come a long way in representing ethnic and racial diversity but when it comes to gender and class they’re still back in the ‘50s where they started.
• ALA-LIRT Energize Your Instruction: Keep the Magic Alive for You and Your Audience (ALA Library Instruction Round Table) – lively presentation from a witty and charismatic speaker. Not what I expected, but very good. If I had this guy’s talents I would always have the enthusiastic attention of an audience – but I’m not the same Myers-Briggs type!
• ALA-CLENE Training Showcase – An opportunity to meet training/continuing education colleagues and learn about training/CE projects going on in library systems around the nation.
• ALA-IFC IFC/FTRF Issues Briefing (Intellectual Freedom Committee/ Freedom to Read Foundation) – Review of challenges to library materials that have taken place around the nation during the past year.

Monday:

• OCLC WebJunction MAC Brainstorm – discussion of Member’s Advisory Council and upcoming changes to the WJ website
• ALA Public Programs Let’s Talk About It: Love and Forgiveness – This year’s ”Let’s Talk About It” program has a very nicely developed theme. This panel discussion included the scholar who created the program, a representative of the foundation who is co-sponsoring, a librarian who has successfully run the “Let’s Talk...” program, and the director of ALA Public Programs. 30 libraries nationwide will be selected for the grant, but even without the grant you can use the resources to run a program at your library.
• CLENERT Training and Staff Development Discussion – Roundtable discussion with library trainers and CE coordinators from many systems in many states.
• ALSC Poetry Blast – Wow! Authors of children’s picture books that are written in verse reading from their books.
  
  I hope I can bring the benefits of my ALA conference experience to Montana libraries. Let me know if there is anything you would like to hear more about. And I recommend that if you ever get an opportunity to attend this conference - grab it!

Suzanne's Anaheim programs

These are the sessions I attended with brief descriptions. I'll add links to presentations as they become available.

Saturday

• Sustainable Libraries: Shades of Green. After listening to a couple of the presentations, (Ohio Township and Santa Monica) I got the picture. There was a lot of repetition. Conserving water, using natural light...
• Building and Supporting Koha, an Open-Source ILS - this was an interview of Joshua Ferraro, CEO of LibLime by John Houser of PALINET. It included some demos of the Koha system along with information on support provided by LibLime. There were a number of true believers there.
  Summary from LITA blog
  
• Social Software Showcase - I couldn't get into this one so I spent the afternoon in the exhibit hall. Luckily, a lot of the information is available from a Social Software wiki.
  

Sunday

• OCLC Update Breakfast - got there a little late but did get the updates and talked a bit about Worldcat
• Library 2.0 and Children's Services -
  
• Top Technology Trends - partly because I was coming down with a cold and partly because I'm getting old and less and less able to multi-task, but I found this presentation incredibly distracting and hard to follow. They had two remote presenters via webcam, a local panel and opened up a Meebo chat room so attendees and panelists could chat during the presentation. So, you could read the chat on one topic on a big screen while the panelists might have been talking about something entirely different.
  Library Journal's summary
  Audio available from LITA blog
  Sarah Houghton-Jan's presentation from LITA blog
  Eric Lease Morgan's Top Tech Trends from LITA blog
  

Monday

• WebJunction Advisory Committee planning meeting
• This is Your Brain on DOPA: Grassroots Organizing and Social Networking
  Summary and links to presentations from YALSA blog
  
• Top Library Building Trends