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Category Archives: American Liberry Ass’n

ALA Conference Survival Tips — 35 Conferences Later

By my count, since I first attended ALA at Midwinter 1992 (San Antonio), I have attended roughly 35 ALA conferences, if you include Midwinter “meetings”–so many that I have founded the (actually nonexistent) Old Members Round Table, which sports a hashtag on Twitter of #OMRT and has its own Facebook fan page. There are many [...]

ALA 2010 Preliminary Schedule

Away, away, to ALA… I have attended all but three of the combined Midwinter and Annual conferences since January 1992, and I know one thing for sure: there is no “final schedule” for me–it evolves throughout the conference! I’m really looking forward to reconnecting with friends, colleagues, and vendors, and bouncing along with the whole [...]

ACRL and “diversity”: A rainbow has more than one color

My Place Of Work is one of the most diverse universities in the United States. That’s a fact we’re very proud of, and it’s an environment I enjoy. Diversity was a matter-of-fact reality in the middle-class San Francisco neighborhood I grew up in, and throughout my life, when I’ve been in environments flavored with only [...]

Boston: It Could Someday Be San Francisco

Ok, that was me trying to being funny about what is really one of the few cities to rival my glorious hometown. I always enjoy Boston, and the 40-ish weather, while worrisome from a climate-change perspective, certainly makes it easy to get around. But I spent most of today doing vendor stuff (wrapping up the [...]

Top Tech Trends, Wish Fulfillment, or Nightmares?

Note: be sure to read this post if you AREN’T going to ALA Annual — because there’s some free (as in zero-cost) participation opportunities here.  For this conference’s LITA Top Technology Trends, I am part of an online team honchoed by Cindi Trainor that will facilitate a concurrent online discussion. I will post to here, [...]

ALA Annual 2009: My Schedule

Another year, another ALA! The following is my tentative schedule. This one has a lot of booth time, but I’m only on one committee (how did that happen? Shhhh don’t tell!) and so it may not seem as crazy as Anaheim. As I get ready, I’m enjoying ALA Connect, the new ALA social space. The [...]

A Dozen Neat Take-aways from ALA Midwinter 2009

My killer-app moment was with Summon, a new unified-search service from Serial Solutions that does what we really want a product like this to do: natively indexes data from its sources (databases, ebooks, OPACs, etc.) so that retrieval is fast and consistent. Summon makes your typical metasearch tool look like a rusty wagon with square [...]

Back from Rockin’ in the Rockies

ALA ALA Midwinter came and went in a flash, and I’ve been back for a day or so plowing my way through Stuff while Sandy is out of town. The cats have been obnoxiously slutty, crawling all over my desk all day and slumping against my skull at bedtime, humming as they dig their needle [...]

My ALA YouTube Contribution: ALA’s GLBT Policies

I’m posting these American Library Association policies as an accompaniment to my YouTube video for ALA’s presidential candidates. Note: the ALA policy manual online is six months out-of-date; I had to get corrected text from an ALA member. So no quibbling from the candidates that this submission is a day late! 7.1.1 The ALA will [...]

My Action-Packed ALA Midwinter 2009 Schedule

I bet this won’t be the last version of this, but it still gives my Denver-bound colleagues some idea of my 411 in Denver. Thursday, Jan 22 Thursday afternoon, arrive in Denver Thursday night dinner, MJ Friday, Jan 23 Friday morning booth setup Friday 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. confab w/colleague Friday 1:30 p.m. – [...]