ALA Report: Nerdy Goodness

Hey all, a quick morning update while I laze about until my 10:30am program. (I have taken copious notes on paper, because I'm not awesome enough to pay for the interwebs everywhere I go, and will post those when I get home and organize some more brilliantly constructed posts.)

Friday - Friday I attended the Business Reference 101 preconference put on by RUSA's BRASS, and it was great. I met some fun people (shout-out to Patrick from UNLV) and received some really fantastic bibliographies. As the liaison to our econ department, a lot of the material was also useful for me in that vein. It was very very basic, though, so if you're a starting-out business librarian, you probably already know everything that's covered. Would have been good for supernew fresh out of MLS librarians. Final thoughts: Not recommended (it was an expensive preconference), but could be useful if you're brand spanking new.

Friday night - I attended the LITA Happy Hour at the Menage Hotel (which was a heck of a walk from my hotel), and had a beyond wonderful time. I got to meet a whole mess of Twitpeeps (I already knew Griffey, but I met awd, PigsinSpace, and a whole mess of others who definitely helped dispel my feeling of new-kid-on-the-kickball-field). It was great, I made some personal connections, and I've been seeing these folks peppered throughout the conference, which has been fun. (Always nice to recognize faces in a throng of 20,000). Friday night I also met Laura and Courtney, who I will be presenting with at Internet Librarian - we're in the same hotel, so I popped over for some sleepover-like conversation. Also on Friday I met my conference roomie #1, Amanda, who was beyond awesome. She's spunky, involved, and energetic - just the way I like my librarypeeps! (She also has a talent for hunting down excellent sushi in the unlikeliest places!)

Saturday - I spent Saturday morning in my RUSA-RSS-User Education & Info Literacy committee meeting with Paul Victor from Florida and a bunch of other very energetic folks. We actually - *gasp* - got things accomplished and planned. Forgive me - this is anathema to almost everything I know about committees. We've got a research agenda, plans for presentations, and even a planned article. W00t! I did not make it to my CODES materials reviewing committee, but I'm hoping they won't hate me too much, since I'm a virtual member. Also on Saturday I lunched with Sara from Arizona (who works with my copresenter Laura), and we discussed poetry and our love of dessert, among many other things before my poster sessions for the "Learning Virtually" program. My very first poster session, and it went great! Mental note: next time, bring handouts, and don't forget your business cards back in Tennessee!!!

Saturday night I met up with about 19 twitpeeps for dinner. After changing clothes in the parking garage with Jezmynne (because we are wild and crazy like that), we clomped to (eventually) Bubba Gump's, which was not awful, and where the wait staff was hysterical. We ended up at another bar where the Facebook shindig was supposed to happen, but that never really got rocking. I went home early on blisterified feet, and my stuff is still in Jez's car or with Cindi - mental note to check on that today.

Sunday - Sunday was supposed to be a completely full day for me, but it didn't end up that way. I made it to the "Energizing Your Instruction" program and it was already full, so I received a bibliography (though later I was told by multiple people that it wasn't particularly useful to them, so I feel less bad about missing it). I was supposed to do Bites with LIRT from 12:30 to 1:30pm and then the Tech on the Front Lines program at 1:30 in the Disneyland Hotel. I hate being late, so I skipped lunch and headed to Disney - a good thing, since it took me about 40 minutes to walk over there with Julian. I snagged a caesar salad from the minicafe in the hotel and THAT program was really fantastic - it covered a 2.0 initiative in a public library system (which wasn't terribly new or informative), a "roving tech monitor" program which sounds like a great idea for larger libraries with a student staff, Courtney Greene from DePaul in Chicago presented on how her library dealt with the loss of autonomous IT staff and being folded into university IT, and Joe from NCSU gave some really great details on the beautiful info commons and digital signage there. Another lovely librarian pointed out the shuttle back to the convention center, so I gave my feet a rest and did that instead of walking.

After that, I headed to the Hyatt to wait for the OCLC blogging salon - I sketched out a research agenda as well as the bare bones of a brief article (sans the research, of course). The blogging salon was fantastic - it was full, there was an open bar, I got to chat up the new media editor at Library Journal (shout out to Raya and her LJ fellow Norman Oder), and my Twitpeople arrived and we spent a goodly amount of time chatting up LJ about Twitter. My roomie Amanda made it, I met Twitpeeps HiddenPeanuts and some others, and generally enjoyed the frantically social time. Amanda and I decided to do dinner on the way home, and buzzed out of Ruth's Chris steakhouse after I choked when they brought us the menu (because I'm tacky like that, and will totally leave if I can't afford dinner). Just as well, since Amanda found us a great sushi place just where the neighborhood turns shady, and we talked about everything under the sun on our way back to pajamas and sushi time.

That brings us up to today. Again, the remainder of my schedule is here if you want to find me, but you can also text me. (No, I'm not on Twitter while ALA-ing, because I can't even consider getting forty bazillion tweets.) Today all of my programs are in the Disney Hotels, which are in the ass end of nowhere as a walker, so I'll be using the bus quite a bit today.

My new roomie also arrives today (I am very sad to be losing Amanda. *sob*), so I'll get to meet Sai. Right now, I'm off to shower and snag some free breakfast before figuring out how to get my booty over to Disney with the least effort possible. My blisters have blisters, though my feet are slowly forgiving me as long as I stick to Danskos. Another mental note made.