in General, Libraries/Info Sci

ALA 2005 – 6/24 Summary

When: Friday, June 24 2005
Where: McCormick Place, Chicago IL
My Role: Attendee
note: re-posted this after I realized I hadn’t use structured blogging.

What a great day!

Picture is of the participants in the Library Journal Blogger’s Roundtable.

Left to right: Luke, Me, Aaron, Laura, Meredith, Sherri, Michael

Discussion was fascinating, and very well moderated by LJ. A photographer took a number of pictures of us, and the whole experience is going to be turned into an article (!) in either the August or September issue.

I started the day with a trip to the Wired Nextfest, as recounted and photographed in the next post down.

After that, I attended ALA’s job placement center orientation for about an hour. Met up with Lori, Emily and Melissa from Pitt there – was fun to see some familiar faces.

Next up was a lunch break. I treated myself to some ribs and tacos at the giant outdoor food festival descending across Chicago’s parks this weekend.

Afterwards, I quickly dashed through the beatingly hot sun to see Chris Anderson (Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine) speak on The Long Tail at the OCLC Symposium. Took lots of notes, so that’ll be a separate entry. As a nice touch, they had a glossy reprint for everybody of Anderson’s “The Long Tail” article from last October.

I had to leave after Anderson spoke, missing out on the followup speakers and Q&A session. But it was worth it, for 3-5 was the aforementioned Bloggers’ Roundtable. What an amazing group of people! I was really caught up in the discussion, so didn’t take any notes. But the whole thing was recorded for use in the article, and I’m sure Library Journal will sum it up well. I’ll link to the story when it appears. Topics included: Effects of blogging on our personal/professional lives, allowing comments on official library blogs, differences between blogs and listservs, collaboration, blogging ethics, etc. Those are just a few off the top of my head.

Afterwards Aaron, Michael and I went downstairs to the LJ techblog meetup / mission discussion. Aaron in particular had some excellent ideas, and I think the whole setup will really be whipped into shape soon.

Next up, stumble exhaustedly back to the hotel. Went for a very late dinner with Nadia and Dan, and here I am.

Fulfilled and exhausted.