From the Pages of Andy Warhol’s Diary

Okay, here’s why I love ALA. Keep in mind that I’m shy and also still very new to the profession.

While waiting for the shuttle to take me from the airport to my hotel, I met Judy Luther, a former academic librarian in Florida, now working as a library consultant in Philadelphia. It seems that sometimes you have to fly across the country to meet your neighbors.

After check-in, I had lunch with Nancy Hinkel, a publishing director for Knopf Books for Young Readers at Random House Children’s Books. If you want to find out which public libraries are doing really cool stuff, talk to a publisher or a vendor. They work with a lot of libraries every year, so it takes a lot to impress them. Fortunately, it seems, a lot of libraries are doing impressive stuff. I hope to write a post on that later.

After registering, I went to a WebJunction party where I met up with PLA Blog coordinator, Andrea Mercado. Andrea introduced me to a soft-spoken information professional at the University of Kentucky who, like me, is a recent library school grad who’s married to a yoga instructor (I wish he had business cards, because I’m spacing on his name); Walt Crawford, who was every bit as kind and thoughtful in person as he seems in his blog; Howard Besser, who’s doing fantastic work at NYU in film and video preservation, and who just landed a landmark grant from IMLS; and Roy Tennant, who’s helping to do the kind of stuff at OCLC that I’m really, really glad is happening at OCLC. In my little checklist of Things To Do at ALA, I’ve got a dot next to “Figure out how to expose the Collingswood Public Library’s records in WorldCat at a price we can afford,” though I’m hoping that dot becomes a check by Tuesday. Added to my to do list: become very familiar with everything the amazing Karen Calhoun writes on her new OCLC blog.

After WebJunction, I ate dinner with Andrea, Steve Roskowki, LJ’s Library Paraprofessional of the Year, ALA Council member Heidi Dolamore, and Laurel, a way-cool Oregon-based librarian and fellow Drexel alum. Along the way, I also ran into some of my favorite colleagues from Penn and Temple, and a colleague at PALINET who’s been helpful in helping me get my bearings at Collingswood.

Again, this isn’t a post about how I’m so popular and cool, because I’m neither; no one’s going to be dropping my name on their blog or with their colleagues. The point is, through conversation which each of these people, I learned how I can be a better librarian and how Collingswood can become an even better library. And the conference is really just getting started. This all took place a day before the opening general session. I cannot wait to see how the rest of the conference goes.