Monday, June 25, 2007

Librarians Wait to Cross the Street

The American Library Association Conference in Washington, D.C. is almost over. I heard unofficially that it was a record turnout, but I have no numbers. That will be coming in the next few days.

What will also still be coming are more reports on the programs on this and many other blogs, as bloggers find time to sit down and write. There is a list of bloggers covering the conference on the ALA conference wiki. You can probably spend weeks going through all the reports.

My favorite program so far was the presentation by Ken Burns on Saturday morning.

My worst experience was a program on academic humanities librarianship (I won't be more specific) at which the moderator went on and on, almost forgetting to let her panel speak. In that same program, no one on the podium could figure out how to run the slide show that one of the panelists had on a CD. Another of the panelist knocked all of the Internet sources in his discipline. The program was a downer and I left early.

I enjoyed meeting several people with whom I've had numerous virtual conversations.

While the conference experience this year has not had the sense of mission that we had last year in New Orleans, it was still good. My list of books to read and websites to check is much longer.

2 comments:

CogSciLibrarian said...

I heard 27,000 attendees, but that's unofficial.

Going Crunchy said...

So were the librarians more of rule followers (wait for proper time to cross) or rule breakers (jaywalk). I couldn't decide which when looking at the pic.......... Shannon