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 site [...]
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 [...]
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 claws [...]
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Note: the ALA policy manual online is six months out-of-date; I had to get corrected text from an ALA member.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 enter [...]
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. - 4:3o p.m. OCLC Symposium, Sheraton Denver Downtown, [...]
ALA is offering us a chance to submit questions to its presidential candidates by YouTube.
We have TWO great candidates — I think highly of Roberta Stevens and Kent Oliver — and I am sure they will do justice to the post, regardless of who’s elected. So I am struggling to come up with a question, [...]
I was told this was the “hard” direction — coming back to the U.S. from Australia. It hasn’t been too rough — though I wake up feeling as if I’ve been nailed to the bed — which makes me wonder if I ever really switched over. We jostled our way across so many time zones [...]
I have written off and on for American Libraries since 1996. Of the two major magazines for LibraryLand, they were the first to run a regular technology column (for actual modern technology, not “here’s how to use a Dialog blue sheet”). AL has now just implemented some very interesting changes.
1. The weekly e-newsletter, American Libraries [...]
I will never get this written if not now, so here ’tis.
A lot went right at ALA. I saw many friends, sat on many committees where Things Were Accomplished (including a meeting for LITA Forum 2009 that my awesome friend Zoe wrapped up in an hour!), did some fun booth demos (including one where someone [...]
So Sandy’s car is kaput (of course, since she’s temporarily between jobs — isn’t that how it works?) and I am going to bequeath her my trusty Honda Civic and get a new-to-me set of wheels. Probably not brand-new. I’m thinking a gently-used Prius or Mini-Cooper — exactly what I was thinking these last few [...]
