PLA Blog

I’m sitting in the San Antonio airport, waiting for the second of my three flights home. I have all kinds of exciting conference sessions to blog about, but in the meantime, I wanted to point to a few of these pictures of hurricane and flood damage in Louisiana libraries.

On Friday, Heidi Dolamore and I had the opportunity to tour some of New Orleans and Slidell (a suburb about 30 minutes away, across Lake Ponchatrain) with a librarian from Delgado Community College. I can’t say much more about it than what the photos show, which is both devastating, awe-inspiring, and, strangely, full of hope.

As of the ALA-APA meeting this morning, these are the total attendence numbers:

ALA 2006 New Orleans - Member registration:

• Advance = 9,047
• On-site = 2,765
• Total = 11,812

As a comparison, these are the numbers from Chicago and Orlando:

ALA 2005 Chicago - Member registration:

• Advance = 13,407
• On-site = 5,591
• Total = 18,998

ALA 2004 Orlando - Member registration:

• Advance = 10,201
• On-site = 3,137
• Total = 13,338

Overall, the difference between 2004 (where the Orlando location was widely criticized by members) and New Orleans is just over 1,500 attendees. The final numbers will be posted later this week.

Although it wasn’t very well attended (as I’m thinking ALA New Orleans has generally turned out to be), the annual Continuing Education Round Table’s session Saturday afternoon was very worthwhile.  CE trainers, teachers and coordinators are often called upon to energize a meeting with an “icebreaker,” often a koosh-ball throw (”Oops, sorry about your coffee!” and “Ow…that’s gonna leave a mark!”) which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.  Guess if it’s mine.
Anyway, at Good CLENE Fun, participants learned some new icebreakers to not only increase fun and energy, but also to help to focus a training session & get folks ready for the subject at hand.  Over a dozen new icebreaker activities were shared by 8 presenters.  The handouts to explain these activities will be posted on the CLENE website sometime soon (or so we were told).  I’ll try to remember to post the link when I find it.
Oh, and the icebreakers worked.  I knew no one when I entered the room and I felt like I knew everyone by the time I left!

Of course we librarians are fighting our stereotype down here in New Orleans.  They’re selling a T-Shirt on Bourbon Street that says “Librarians do it by the book,” and the nature of the street suggests what “it” is.  At a bar last night, I overheard a young man ask a young woman if she was a librarian.  He asked it in such a way as to suggest that being mistaken for a librarian was not another way of suggesting that the young lady was “hot.”  I leaned in and told him that I was a librarian.  I thought he might want to know.  He drank to that.  And, to his surprise, so did I.

First cool takeaway, A Small But Powerful Guide to Winning Support for Your Rural Library. Available online from these handy URLs:

http://ala.org/rural
http://ala.org/tribal
http://ala.org/native
or specifically at this page: Toolkit for Winning Support

Hey y’all!

I’m Anne Robert, a children’s librarian who works with the Jacksonville (FL) Library. I am a native Louisianaian; I lived in Baton Rouge (about 90 miles north of N’awlins) for 22 years. It’s great to be back in New Orleans - except for the humidity (one thing I don’t miss!).

I arrived here yesterday and acted like a tourist, taking pictures and absorbing culture. It’s nice to have time during a conference to look around before actually beginning the conference aspect.

Today I went to two sessions: That’s Tight! Teen Volunteer Success Stories and Tapping Resources: Serving Children Through Partnerships.

A brief summary of each:

That’s Tight!

• Teenagers should be treated with respect, just like the adult volunteers
• Three key words: Ideas, Investment, Reward
• Ideas: Create tasks for the teenagers before they volunteer at the library (so you won’t be flabbergasted when they show up)
• More Ideas: Have teenagers do more than just shelving, such as reading to the children, helping with projects, assist with collection development of popular items (CDs, DVDs, graphic novels), help with computers/databases, summer reading club helper, monitor programs
• Investment: Train them properly with verbal (words) and physical (paper) training; give customer service tips (as you would your staff)
• Reward: Always thank them for their help and hard work! Consider writing them a nice letter at the end of their volunteer term (could be used as a referral for college)

I have about 17 teen volunteers in my children’s department this summer, so this session helped me with new ideas on how to fully use them as great resources this summer.

Tapping Resources

• Develop community partnerships with groups outside your library, such as businesses, non-profits, and/or government agencies
• Partnership is a two-way street and each group should get something back
• Partnerships were compared to human relationships: they can be short-term (like a glance or date) or more long-term (like an engagement or marriage)
• Access your library’s strengths before beginning the process and use partnership as a strategic tool

Welcome to New Orleans! And as we say here, Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler!

LITA hosted a debate between Roy Tenant, Stephen Abram, and Joseph Janes about the future of search and how libraries will be affected. Will libraries have a place in society in the future? Will Google take over the world and leave us in the dust?

It fascinates me that this conversation keeps coming up. I know, it’s still relevant, but it seems like the messages that I heard in the portion of the debate I attended really seem to be the messages that I’ve heard over and over again since I was in library school 4 years ago.

Searching on the web sucks, as was mentioned in the session, and we all know it. Our patrons know it, too, but still they end up doing what they can with what they have, and really being OK with the first 10 search results they receive. Roy mentioned that Google will only outseat libraries if we let them, which I do believe is true, especially if we keep trying to compete in the same arena of search, instead of community. Points were made by Stephen Abram about how teaching boolean searching to patrons is really just silly, because they’ll never learn it, and that the new age of search is really about about solving problems in teams.

Roy relayed a story about how he explained the concept of WorldCat to an executive at Microsoft (I think, I could be wrong), and how the exec’s response was that it would be so awesome if WorldCat was just released to the internet wild, open source, with APIs that let people create applications that worked with and on top of it. Roy then said that he could imagine the people at OCLC freaking out (in a bad way) at the concept.

So what *if* we took WorldCat and made it *directly* open source? Why not create offer an API (Application Programming Interface) to allow poeple to create toys to make WorldCat work better and do interesting things for users? Why should we just be happy, as Stephen kinda put it, with WorldCat’s records being open in Yahoo? My response is that there’s a very defensive stance in the library world (especially with library vendors) about metadata, but it’s also, as Roy says, the issue of librarians not really being able to digest all the huge possibilities.

I live in a world where my friends share and keep up with friends’ lives on MySpace, LiveJournal, and Friendster, pictures are shared on Flickr, social plans happen through text messages and IM, on a daily basis. My friends are a hard-to-reach 21 - 40 with zero kids set in the library world, who use the same social networking applications as “millenials” (and play DDR and hang in Second Life and watch video on YouTube). We use open source applications, we happily play with the toys that come out of APIs for Flickr, Google, Yahoo!. And a good number of the people in that set live robust online lives, just like the millenials that Roy mentioned in his commentary.

Why this digression into my social set? Because the millenials aren’t the only group that exhibit these behaviors, and many of the people in my set are the new generation of *librarians* who are too often ignored. We see the value of these technologies and services, we want to integrate them into library services to adjust how we do things to reflect the affect online social networking is having on the offline, meatspace world. Not as a replacement, not as a way to unseat old-school librarians the way that people seem to think Google is trying to unseat libraries, but to find a way to take fun like tagging, social searching, and social bookmarking to serve a broader set of patrons.

So what’s my take? I agree with Roy, that Google and other search engines will only bump libraries if we let them. I agree with Stephen when he says we’re asking the wrong question, and we’re trying to compete in the wrong arena. We live in a world where information is power and yet omnipresent, and the ability to access that information is not the issue, so librarians just don’t own that market anymore. We need to stop clinging so tenaciously to the librarian-as-information-god-and-your-not defensive stance, and into a more open, community-oriented, socially-connected user experience stance.

Thursday morning I got up, dumped the hiking gear out of my backpack, filled it up with laptop, notebook, a few issues of The New Yorker, and my ALA schedule, and drove up to Cody to pick up my business cards and catch the plane.

My name is Laura Crossett, and I live and work in Meeteetse, Wyoming, population 351, elevation close to 6000 feet, where I’m the manager of the Meeteetse Branch of the Park County Library System (we’re between websites; hence no link). Our branch serves both the K-12 school and the town of Meeteetse. I am also still an MLIS student at Dominican University in the suburbs of Chicago, where I lived before I headed west to start my job in March of this year. I have three classes to go to complete my degree, and, thanks to the wonders of technology, I’ll be able to do them from Wyoming.

This is my second ALA annual conference and my first time blogging for PLA, though I have had my own blog for a little over a year. Thanks to Andrea for the invitation to blog for PLA, and thanks to you all for reading.

eli

Originally uploaded by heidi/quiddle.

Hi everyone. I’m Heidi, Youth Services Librarian with the San Mateo County Library in San Carlos, California. I also keep a blog, quiddle. I was just elected to ALA Council, so I’ve got a lot of organizational meetings on my plate. This morning was Council orientation, where I learned all about whereas clauses and which days there are free donuts before Council sessions (hey, they meetings are open, so help yourself).

This is Eli, the ALA parliamentarian, who introduced me to the Sturgis rules. (The picture says “Suffering is optional!!!”)

Yesterday I met up with a librarian from Slidell (across the lake from New Orleans). She took me on a tour of the library where she works, as well as the branch library that is near what is left of her house. I think a lot of us have a morbid sense of curiosity about how the city is doing, and I saw more than my fill of devastation and destruction. Which makes me even more grateful for everything that has been done to make our stay in New Orleans comfortable. Inside the convention center, it’s as if the hurricane never happened. I’ve been welcomed more times than I can count, and when people shake my hand and say, “Welcome!” there’s a firmness to their hand and a sincerity in their eyes that makes me glad to be here.

I started the official portion of the conference with two orientations.  The first, an intro to New Orleans, its artists, its troubles and its beauties; the second an introduction to ALA conference life in general for us newbies.

Many Voices, One Nation was an amazing kaleidoscope of readings, poems, dance, music.  The Guardians of the Flame Mardi Gras Indians opened the evening in full regalia with their feathered and beaded costumes.  They were followed by a slew of storytellers, poets, writers, some native to New Orleans, others who have lived here long enough to call themselves New Orleanians, and yet others from elsewhere.  The list included: Martin Pousson, Kimberly Willis Holt, Lisa Sandell, Kalamu Ya Salaam, Jose Torres Tama, Ashley Nelson and Abram Shalom Himelstein of the New Orleans Neighborhood Stories Project, Greg Herren, Lee Maitzen Grue, Ron Gauthiers and Toni Simmons.  They were coordinated by the energetic, exuberant Master of Ceremonies Jose Aponte.  These many voices spoke of their personal experiences, their view of the Katrina tragedy and aftermath, politics, loves (of land and people), community, and life.  It was a beautiful program that brought together many images of New Orleans to create a portrait of its people, its diversity and history, as well as its present state and what the future may hold.  This wonderful evening was capped off with hot beignets and coffee. Could I ask for anything more?

 The NMRT Conference Orientation provided a more practical guide to the conference experience.  I had heard much of this before, but repetition is often the trick for learning.  Among the bits of wisdom:

• Don’t be a TOAD (Tags On All Day)- take off tags as soon as you leave the convention buildings, both for personal safety and to avoid the “nerdy librarian” stereotype
• Talk to people- we can all spot the librarians on the plane, so why not meet some new friends? 
• Say “yes”- if you are invited, go!
• Take the free stuff, but only if you really want it.  Remember, you’ll have to carry it around the rest of the day.

I am excitedly looking forward to more great presentations.