ALA Recap Part Two

As I noted in my previous post, the major reason I attended the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago from July 10-14 was to do the first signing for my new book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Today I’ll briefly note some of the sessions I attended, with links to investigate further. Although I have been teaching since 1996, I still learned a lot from Preparing Yourself to Teach: Touching all the Bases, sponsored by LIRT (Library Instruction Round Table). The three presenters (Lisa Hinchliffe and Beth Woodard, both of the University of Illinois-Urbana; and Monika Antonelli, Minnesota State University) all had interesting perspectives on developing teaching skills. The increasing importance and intricacies of digital collections was examined in Collecting for Digital Repositories: New Ways to Disseminate and Share Information. The three speakers (Paul Royster; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Sayeed Choudhury, Johns Hopkins University and Dianne McCutcheon, National Library of Medicine) made their subject seem doable, even with its inherent complexities. Michigan-based public librarians Holly Hibner and Mary Kelly led a lively session aimed at public library reference librarians, Thingamabobs and Doodads: Why Tech Support IS Reference. I enjoyed talking to both afterwards, and discovered that their blog, Awful Library Books, is developing a cult following. The Power of XML to Enhance Work Flow and Discovery explained and demystified a lot about the history and practical applications of XML in libraries. I had interesting conversations afterwards with both presenters, Patrick Yott of Brown University and David Ruddy of Cornell University. Finally, the Library History Round Table Edward G. Holley Lecture, Five Studies of Readers of Journalism, by David Paul Nord, a journalism and history professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, was a thought-provoking way for me to end the conference. I also enjoyed my brief talk with him after his lecture. Tomorrow, one final ALA-related post on my encounters with a few participants who are not librarians, and have no connection to my book.