Improvements for ALA Annual: Suggestions

A few things I've been thinking on the flights back to Chattanooga from Anaheim today.


One problem with having everyone submit their programs by the end of July for next Annual? Things get stale. If I had to sit through one more talk on how someone implemented a Library 2.0 program I was going to scream. Very few of those had anything new to say about it - if there's no new spin, it's just rehash. I'm not into hash of any kind. Hot Topics and Trends type programs are great, but the rest of the programming suffers a bit.


The in-between time. Morning programs ran from 8:30 to 10:30, and then the next program sessions began at 10:30. I don't know about you, but I am not made of magic. Even ten minutes would have been appreciated so that we could have attended more programs per day. Of course, this could be a ploy to give us downtime so we can troll the exhibits and be wooed by vendors. (Props to the Ibis guys for the flying monkeys. Those were a *huge* hit.)


ALA should really require presenters to sign contracts swearing that they won't read their PowerPoint slides, on pain of death and/or being bludgeoned to death via rotten vegetables by their audiences. Or perhaps ALA can hand out kazoos in the ginormous Bag O Goodies they give out so audiences can give melodious raspberries to those who commit such heinous crimes.


I really enjoyed Annual - I had a great time, I made it to some fabulous programs, and I appreciated the opportunity to attend. I just think with a few small tweaks, it could really be improved. And given that so many people blow their entire year's worth of professional development funding on this one conference, if we can find improvements that can realistically be made, we should figure out a way to do it, n'est-ce pas?

Comments

James Milles said…
AALL is the same way with planning programs a year in advance. Tech-related programs are pretty much useless. At least they give us time between sessions to get from one room to another.
10:17 PM
warmaiden said…
Yeah, the tech presentations suffer most. I was thinking the same thing about Internet Librarian, since presentation materials have to be in by August, but at least that's only a 3 month lead time and not a whole year of lag...
10:21 PM
Anonymous said…
They could also choose a city that was more pedestrian friendly. I almost got run over three times by drivers who don't understand red lights and cross walks. ;-)
2:50 PM
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