LibraryTechtonics

I got home Tuesday night, after much ado about delays at the airport, and my friend and travelling partner Jen’s luggage being put on another flight.

It really took me a day or so to really digest the fact that I was home, and to start the process of unpacking my stuff as well as my notes from the conference. I’m still making every effort to get my last few posts up on the PLA Blog, as well as post a few things here about my conference experience.

I can say that Annual was an amazing difference from Midwinter. The annual conference is way bigger in terms of scope, physical layout, and number of attendees, and the physical and mental toll were multiplied exponentially for me. Wifi wasn’t nearly as accessible to the conference area this time around, so instead of posting my notes as I created them, I’ve got a backlog of stuff to post now, as opposed to really being able to share the experience as it happened. I also got to see and meet way more people at Annual than I did at Midwinter, and I’m finding that I’m building a conference set of people that I see routinely, which is fabulous.

So yeah, it may take me a while to unravel everything from the conference, especially given that this is a holiday weekend, and I’d very much like to enjoy being home.

I don’t read much about the officialy member business at ALA. Perhaps I’m not reading the right blogs or sites, but it just doesn’t seem to come up in my daily reading, or even in the conference blogging bits.

Jessamyn convinced me to go to the ALA Membership I meeting on Friday, right before the Barack Obama speech. Overall, it really was quite interesting. Robert’s Rules of Order Sturgis Rules of Order* were in full effect at this meeting (as far as I could tell), and Carol Brey-Casiano was very, very effective in moderating the meeting; you could just tell she was a leader, and very much in charge.

The big thing seemed to be that the meeting would be under quorum (which I think is less than 80 members is 75 members in attendance*), so that “work could really get done”. I’m not certain what happens when there are more than 80 members in attendance, but at this meeting everything was going to a raised-hand majority vote.

What I didn’t get were the proposals on the table: encouraging (not telling, or enacting) divisions to lower the retired member rates, and encouraging the withdrawl of troops in Iraq in order to free up funding that could eventually go to libraries. Now, I’m not saying that these weren’t important or valid proposals, only that our profession seems to have so many other issues that need to be addressed that would more directly, and expediently, affect librarians and really get things done.

All the same, the meeting was well run by the moderator as well as the attendees. Everything was in order, people really tried to move things along. Proposals appeared on large screens at the front of the room, and changes were added on the fly and shown to everyone, which I thought was a rather simple and nifty use of technology that made governance more efficient. I was quite impressed. However, I do wonder what a bad membership meeting looks like, and how often they happen, since bad meetings are where you see the real flavor of an organization.

I may try to get to more of these meetings in future, to learn more about an organization I am admittedly mostly unfamiliar with.

I attended to Midwinter in Boston, and that was pretty hectic, even though I’d be told it was really no comparison to an annual conference. I believed it, but now I have a real concept of how ginormous this thing is.

Seriously, this conference is bigger than the word huge. In a city like Chicago, where everything is very spread out, it’s even bigger and more unwieldy. Some of the festive challenges I’ve faced thus far include:

- Wifi fun: The locations I’ve travelled thus far have only had pay wifi (there are hotel lobbies that have free wifi, and I just really haven’t had access to them). While I did put together a page of information on free wifi locations in Chicago for the ALA conference wiki, I’m finding it impossible to get to these locations and still keep up with the conference. So I’ve been trying to blog in my room at night, which has proven to be interesting after many exhausting days.

- Time? What’s that?: Even though I liberally sprinkled my schedule with open blocks of time, and have reorganized my schedule on the fly (I *heart* wiki pages for this) to afford myself more free time to blog and just chill, it’s almost like the time gets sucked into a black whole of unexpected incidences. Some of these happenings are good, like Dick Kaiser sponsoring me at the Proquest Scholarship Bash, or having dinner with fabulous bloggers. Some of them are not, like the unpleasant shuttle situations.

Both of these challenges have really put serious kinks in the whole “blogging as timely sharing” concept for me.

Cranking aside, I am having a good time. I s’pose I’m just trying to reconcile having a good time with doing my job (blogging) and having fun sharing (blogging).

I finally have something resembling a schedule.

Have a plan. Plans are good. However, it is important to remember that plans are not *God*, and that flexibility can happen. In any case, I’ll definitely be at a preconference on Friday for PLA, I’m most definitely going to Wired NextFest on Sunday afternoon (I’ve got my ticket and everything), and I’m not missing David Sedaris for the world.

Yeah, like that. Keep and eye here and at the PLA Blog for festive conference fun over the next six days.

After much debating, I’ve decided to make an effort to have librarians who went to Wesleyan, or who are associated with Wesleyan, meet up at the PLA President’s Reception on Monday, 6/27/2005, in the Hyatt Regency McCormick/Regency Ballroom around about 7:30pm (the reception goes from 6:45p-8p, and I’ll need a little time for blogging before I can go to the reception). I might be wearing a Wes baseball cap, or, alternately, my Library Raid Gear, we’ll see. I’m going to add this to the Unofficial Calendar of Events on the ALA wiki, so’s it’s out there.

Hopefully I’ll see you there!