The PLA Blog | Official Blog of the Public Library Association
An Hour with Gregory Maguire, Author of Wicked
Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Mirror, Mirror, opened the ALA Auditorium Speaker Series with a very personal talk “Playing with Stolen Property.” Readers of his books know that he reuses characters from old children’s literature in writing new stories. His roots for storytelling childhood go back to when he [...]
Safety in the Library
Hello! My name is Ericka Dow and I serve as circulation supervisor at the Lake Jackson Branch of the LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library System and I am happy to be blogging for PLA along with the other event bloggers. My only ALA conference before this was DC in 2007. It was a blast [...]
YouMedia leads on the path to geeking out
I thought I’d seen it all when I saw the plans for the Mediaspace in Aarhus, Denmark- but here in Chicago new media literacy needs are being addressed at the public library as well! Yesterday after a day of wandering around at the ALA conference, I visited the brand-new Youmedia space and was pleased to [...]
Readers Advisory in a Digital World
Thanks to PLA for inviting me to blog a few sessions here at the ALA conference in Chicago. As a former staffer at both PLA and RUSA, the ALA division focused on reference, I thought a good place for me to start at conference was PLA’s program, “What Do I Watch, Listen to, Play or [...]
The Unconference at ALA
What was “un” about the Unconference? It was certainly not unfriendly, for 75 librarians spent the day together laughing and telling stories about their work. Uncontrolled is not applicable, as Michelle Boule, Meredith Farkas, and their volunteers kept speakers to their assigned times all day, something many program organizers fail to do. It wasn’t unappreciated; [...]
ALA Begins in Chicago
Welcome to Chicago! I’m Rick Roche, a reference librarian from the Thomas Ford Memorial Library in Western Springs, Illinois, one of Chicago’s western suburbs. I will be one of your reporters for PLABlog over this long weekend. The next few days should prove interesting as thousands of librarians descend on the city and others follow [...]
The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
Hello from Chicago! The ALA 2009 Annual Conference begins tomorrow in this fine city. It is going to be a blast, and we’ve got a whole crew of bloggers bringing you the action here on the PLA Blog, so pay attention! But… Before I get all caught up in conference mayhem tomorrow, I’d like to [...]
Baxter Village Library, Fort Mill, South Carolina
Check out the Baxter Village Library, aka the Fort Mill Public Library of the York County Library System (South Carolina). View Larger Map I think this is a pretty interesting situation. As I understand it, the original Fort Mill Library was in a building downtown. Roughly 10 years ago, when Baxter Village was built, the [...]
Planning Your Trip to Portland?
We’re putting together information to help you out. PLA registration and official housing will open in early September. Bookmark the PLA conference website, as you’ll want to keep checking back for updated information. In addition to the conference website, we’ve also created a section on PLAspace that contains some auxiliary information for you, as well [...]
Roanoke Library – Virginia
Yesterday, we pulled off of I81 in Virginia to check out the city of Roanoke and the library there. This section of 81 that we were following is actually a very old road called the Great Wagon Road which connected Pennsylvania to North Carolina. It was via this road in the 18th century that German, [...]
