If I do any “real” ALA-related posts, it won’t be until I’ve gone through the full set of Bloglines feeds waiting for me (380+ library-related posts, 200+ others), at which point I can determine whether I have anything to add that’s worth adding.
Meanwhile, a few random thoughts (just got back yesterday evening, balancing various sorts of catching up, and semi-coherent):
- I’ve never agreed with the notion that ALA’s Annual Conference is just too big. Now, I’m not so sure.
- Kudos to Gale for the shuttle service: It was so well planned that I used it (a lot), which I rarely do. Of course, I was at the Hilton, and the Hilton:Conference Center run couldn’t have been easier, but still…splitting the conference hotels into nine small subsets made loads of sense. And must have cost loads of money.
- Kudos to OCLC and the It’s All Good crew for the library bloggers gathering. Certainly the youngest event I attended at the conference, and one of the most enjoyable. (And they did have “My name is” tags so we could add our Nom de Blogs to our real names, for those with less transparent blogonyms. Oh Gaia, I’m using net neologisms. My only excuse is fatigue.)
- No kudos whatsoever to the conference registration/exhibits entry layout, a total disaster on Saturday and not much better on Sunday. When you have safety marshals keeping people from getting on escalators, something’s terribly wrong. See the first bullet in this list.
- Strangest moment in the conference: Not the library bloggers thing, but the Moonies arriving at my hotel in force on Monday evening. And I do mean in force.
- Striking change for me: being in the audience at Top Tech Trends for the first time.
- Overall: I attended more programs (but fewer discussion groups) than usual, learned something, and ran into lots of people I know from ALA (as always) and some that I only know through net media (that’s new).
More later, if there’s more useful to say. Now, this evening, to get back to writing after a full month outage…
I couldn’t agree more that the blogger “salon” was one of the highlights of the conference. Being in a room full of tech-savvy, forward-thinking librarians — of any age — is a rare treat for me, and stood in marked contrast to the rest of the conference (save perhaps the LITA Tech Trends talk, which gave me that same hopeful, energized feeling). It was great meeting you, too, Walt! Good luck going through your Bloglines feeds (my backlog has grown so big I’m afraid to look at it!).