Two notable posts for people even a little involved in ALA.
- Leslie Burger reports on the situation in New Orleans, now just a few months before the annual conference scheduled to be there. As someone who went to Toronto during the SARS scare and enjoyed the lack of super-crowding (great for me, not so great for exhibitors) it will be interesting to see what this conference brings. And, on a related note, how nice is it to read a first hand report of what things look like down there that isn’t all press-releasey and absent any real information? This is the sort of things blogs are good at. This puts a compassionate and approachable face on ALA.
You can’t stay away from New Orleans. You must witness first hand the destruction of nature and the failure of government to take care of its people. It is an American tragedy and who better to bear witness and tell the story than librarians. These people need our help, they need our money, they need our support. Now more than ever before you have a reason to attend an ALA conference.
- Speaking of, my friend Michael Golrick is floating the idea of a Bloggers Roundtable at ALA. All we’d need is a hundred people and I don’t think this is much of a stretch. I’ve been a member of the Social Responsibilities Round Table on and off since I first started being involved in professional associations and it was a great way for me to learn about ALA and professional involvement generally from a position where I felt like I was among friends, or at least colleagues with similar interests. The New Members Round Table serves this purpose for a lot of library students, but I bet a Bloggers Roundtable would serve a similar function. One of the things that has always surprised me is how much I feel like I have in common with other bloggers in the library world — even ones that have different jobs, different outlooks and different approaches than I do — and how collegial I feel with many of them. The blogger get-togethers that happen at conferences are often the high point of these conferences for me.
I posted about my trip down to New Orleans. I spent a week in February working on houses. I doubt I’ll make it to ALA. http://biblicalparenting.blogspot.com/2006/03/rebuilding-new-orleans.html
Have any blogger get togethers been planned for Annual yet? It feels kind of weird for me to be able to say “if there is one, I’ll be there”.
Sounds great, but to curb the obsolescence factor, how’s about a Social Software RT? As a blogger, I’m already finding myself grappling with librarians’ roles in Facebook-style communities on campus, etc.
Oh, and we could raise the bar for ALA by holding virtual meetings. Maybe others will get the clue eventually.
(I tried to post this comment on Michael’s blog, but it wanted to make me join Blogger to do so. Bloggers want to be free.)
I think that’s actually a better idea and social software is more broad ranging and could allow us to get more people in under the umbrella. Plus as the SSRT we’d probably get a lot of mail intended for SRRT :)