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Wireless at ALA Midwinter

… I wish. Liz Lawley commented at Internet Librarian that wireless access for attendees is now matter of course for most of the conferences she attends (as a professor at RIT who has “crossed over” from librarianship). Not so for ALA. We don’t request it as a conference service, we don’t push it as a benefit (even if we had to pay for it), and as members, we don’t demand it.

This points to our chronic time-lag with technological innovations, and begs some larger, more pointed questions about who we are as a profession. Can we really be “information professionals” if we are chronically four to ten years behind the rest of the world?

(Note: I did contact the San Diego conference center about wireless, hoping against hope. If I read the message correctly, it’s $25 a day and may be limited in range to the exhibit floor. Our state conference, in Ontario California, didn’t offer wireless at all, and I think I’m the only one who missed it. But on the bright side: I once thought that when I returned to California I would be overwhelmed by the vast technical sophistication of the library community, but it turns out that’s one less thing I have to worry about!)

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This was written by K.G. Schneider. Posted on Wednesday, December 3, 2003, at 6:05 am. Filed under American Liberry Ass'n. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.