Riot Librarian

Category: ALA

  • The Infinite Collection: OCLC Symposium on Resources in the Digital Age

    OCLC held a symposium after their Americas Regional Membership Meeting on digital resources. They brought together Clifford Lynch, Rick Anderson, Bobbi Newman, and Brian Schottlaender to share their thoughts, and it was a thought-provoking and engaging session. It ended up being the one of the best sessions I attended, and I hadn’t even planned to…

  • ALA 2011 Wrap-up

    I got back from New Orleans last night, after spending five days attending ALA Annual. I decided this year that I didn’t want to haul my laptop around from session to session, so I instead took copious notes in a little steno pad, with the intention of taking some time each evening to write up…

  • On my Way to ALA

    I’m getting on a plane tomorrow and heading to my first ever ALA Annual. I’m hoping to meet lots of new people, learn some new things, talk about the library stuff I love (metadata, technology, and metadata), and eat a TON of great food (ok, I will admit, I think I’m more excited about the…

  • ALA Annual in New Orleans

    All the arrangements are made and my schedule is quickly filling up: I’m going to ALA in New Orleans next month. I’ve never been to Annual, and I found Midwinter to be fairly overwhelming, so I’m sure this is going to bowl me over a bit. But at least I will have a purpose, at…

  • 21st-Century Academic Libraries

    I just finished reading Checking Out the Future: Perspectives from the Library Community on Information Technology and 21st-Century Libraries, a policy brief from the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy. Yeah, I’m a little late to the game on this one, seeing as it was published over a year ago. There’s not a whole lot…

  • More thoughts on ebooks, and preservation

    I haven’t had a lot of time to sit down and write up a polished piece on ebooks and my growing reservations, but I wanted to get a few thoughts out of my head in the midst of the madness that is my life these days. My growing reservations are really around one of the…

  • The Presidents’ Panel

    Perhaps I was a little harsh yesterday on the Twitter, when I was at the RMG Presidents’ Panel. Maybe I shouldn’t have said the Innovative rep was being petulant. Maybe that wasn’t very professional of me, but you know what? It was really unprofessional of him. I guess ILS vendors and their reluctance to provide…

  • ALA in the Morning

    I attended ALA Midwinter for the first time when I was still in library school. I wasn’t actively involved with ALA, and I spent most of that meeting wandering around trying to find a place to sit down and plug my laptop in, trying to find someone, anyone, to talk to, trying to feel like…

  • Conferences, Conferences

    ALA Midwinter is in my hometown this year, and seeing as it’s right after the holidays, I arranged to stay in San Diego an extra week after New Years to attend. And because this conference will be relatively inexpensive, with no airfare or hotels necessary, I’m also going to be going to ALA Annual this…

  • The ACRL Task Force on the Future of the Academic Library

    Of course it has taken me almost a month to write anything significant about my ALA experience. So many thoughts were percolating through my head the whole long weekend, and it probably goes without saying that much of it isn’t quite as vivid now, after the new semester has started and my normal life has…