PLA Blog

Hello. My name is Catherine Moffatt and I am a Public Services Librarian in the Reference Department at a public library in Southern Maryland. This is my first time blogging for PLA at an ALA event so here is goes.

Friday
I arrived at the ALA Annual Conference on Friday afternoon. After checking in, getting my badge holder, and bag of conference materials, I sat down and became acquainted with the materials and where all of my events were going to be located. As this was my first time going to events other than just visiting the exhibits, I decided that going to the Conference 101 sponsered by ALA NMRT at 4:00 pm that evening was a very good idea. I was glad I did. It was very informative and gave me much information that has been helpful as far as navigating not only the conference events, but also the materials given at check-in. From this I also noticed in my program guide that my alma mater, University of South Florida, had a booth at the exhibits and was going to be at the Library School Reunion Event on Sunday evening. One more fun activity to go to and to hopefully see some old professors and classmates. From there I went home, since I live locally, and got myself prepared for my exciting first full day.

Saturday
Saturday I arraived bright and early to the Convention Center at around 8:30 am. I had my rolling bag with me so I was all prepared for going through the exhibits. I moved my way over to the The Stacks area and waited for the exhibits to open up at 9 am. I wondered up and down each row looking through all the different booths of interesting products to buy, both personal and for libraries. Even after wandering around until 12:30 pm, I still hadn’t seen everything there was to see. So loaded down with my goodies, I went to my next program I wanted to attend during the conference. At 1:30 pm I attended the Electronic Databases: Training that Works presented by RUSA MARS/RSS over in one of the conference rooms at the Grand Hyatt. It was a very easy walk on such a beautiful day. At this program I saw Marty Onieal, Margaret Mohundro, and Michelle Y. Roubal each present ways that their library systems went about training their staff on different databases that their systems had available. I came out of there with many ideas to take back to my library to help with training our staff on the different databases that we have available. When it was completed I returned to The Stacks to try and look at the booths I didn’t manage to see before the program I attended. So all in all it has been a good conference so far and I am looking very forward to another full day on Sunday.

Tags: ALA2007, conferences, event, freebies

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.