Category Archives: conference

ALA Annual Conference 2009

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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.

United States Citizenship Services

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My first exposure to immigrant services in public libraries was when I read a case study on free English as a Second Language tutelage for adult learners in Michigan. I was touched then, reading about how great it was for the people involved and the community at large. I saw this NYLA program, Libraries Pave the Road to Citizenship, as a chance for me to learn more about that subject.

I was surprised to learn that I would hear not only about libraries participating in teaching adult immigrants the English language, but also that there are libraries participating in aiding patrons with the naturalization process. The panelists were:

Continue reading →

Information Literacy Standards

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I’ve always found information literacy to be really interesting, not least because of its importance in being a good citizen of a democratic government and making wise decisions. Without knowing how to judge sources on their reliability and bias and critically analyze them, all information is useless.

So it is no surprise that the first program I chose to go to at the NYLA Conference in Saratoga Springs was called 21st Century Information Literacy Standards for Digital Learners of New York. The presenter was Fran Roscello, of Roscello Associates Information Literacy Consultants and the co-chair of the NYLA Information Literacy Task Force. Continue reading →

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse by Thomas McNamee

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  • Title: Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romanic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution
  • Author: Thomas McNamee
  • Publisher: Penguin Books
  • Year of Publication: 2007
  • Pages: 351

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse by Thomas McNamee

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse by Thomas McNamee

I don’t remember what exactly drew me to this book, other than the cover and the title, but I was drawn to it one day when we were in the bookstore looking for the Bouchon and French Laundry cookbooks. I didn’t get it then, but when I saw it at the ALA Annual Expo in Anaheim for $5 (2 for $10, actually), I had no other option. I had to get it.

Truth be told, I never heard of Alice Waters or Chez Panisse before reading this book. Before this summer, I was pretty ignorant of the foodie scene. I always enjoyed eating, and I sometimes enjoyed cooking, but I was pretty uninformed. Then I was given a copy of Phoebe Damrosch’s Service Included less than a week before our reservations at the famous Per Se in New York City in May. I hadn’t even known much about that restaurant or its proprietor, Chef Thomas Keller, before reading Damrosch’s book. I finished that book in a couple of days, just in time for it to intensify my dining experience at Per Se. And it really did!

I had an image of what to expect at the restaurant thanks to Damrosch. What may have otherwise been completely overwhelming and intimidating became an immensely pleasurable journey through food. I hadn’t known much before, but my eyes were now opened. I wanted more.

Luckily, shortly after that experience, I spent four weeks in California. (Food tastes very different in California.) Continue reading →

Day Three At ALA 2008

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Day three at ALA was my last day in California, after about four weeks of traveling throughout the state. By that point, I was very tired, and only managed to attend one program before heading home. The program I attended was called Hey! I Want to Do That Too! Gaming and the Elementary Age Child (1330-1500).

Hey! I Want to Do That Too! Gaming and the Elementary Age Child

Hey! I Want to Do That Too! Gaming and the Elementary Age Child

This program was presented by Dr. Warren Buckleitner, a former elementary school teacher, current New York Times contributor, current adjunct assistant professor at NYU, and current editor of Children’s Technology Review. His presentation was on creating a media center, or Mediatech (like biblioteca), for a public library. Dr. Buckleitner split his presentation up into two parts:

  1. the history of Mediatech at his library, and
  2. selecting the right materials to create a Mediatech of one’s own.

During the first part, Dr. Buckleitner explained how he developed a Mediatech at the library where he lives (and is a library trustee) in Flemington, New Jersey. Luckily for Dr. Buckleitner, when he pitched the idea to “VIPs in town” and the library board in 1998, he faced no opposition. In 2000, he already had the support of an attorney, schools, and library trustees to create a non-profit organization and begin fundraising. By 2001, they decided on the library as the location of Mediatech, and the library board contributed a $100,000 trust to renovate the space. Mediatech opened on May 23, 2003, marking the anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris.

Dr. Buckleitner’s media center has about eight computers, all of which were donated. Most of the games available at Mediatech were donated by Dr. Buckleitner, himself, as he writes reviews for them.

Reflection on My Third Day at ALA Annual 2008

Dr. Buckleitner was a very good speaker. His presentation was engaging and informative. He definitely knows about children and what they want. However, I don’t know how useful this program would have been for someone who attempted to set up a media center, faced opposition, and was looking for advice. Dr. Buckleitner’s story almost sounded like a fairy tale; everything important went the way it should have. There wasn’t a struggle, which is a common thing in public libraries in America… what with the budget cuts and libraries closing everywhere.

I think this program could have been more useful if the speaker presented strategies for succeeding in cases where not everything goes the way it should.