“I’m descended from a long line of book worms and librarians. They would be very proud of me for being here with you.” Caroline Kennedy’s revelation at the beginning of her Auditorium Speaker Series talk at ALA Midwinter set the tone for the entire session.
A simple fact about me: I can be a little set in my ways about what type of books I like to read. My mom has always told me I was a book snob. From an early age, she says, I would look at what she was reading, and make comments along the lines of, “Why are you reading this trash?”
Lisa Genova, neuroscientist and bestselling author of Still Alice (2008), Left Neglected (2011), and Love Anthony (2012), presented the Arthur Curley Memorial Lecture on Saturday morning, January 27.
At a customer lunch on Saturday, electronic publisher ProQuest offered some insight into the wealth of primary source materials in the company’s digital History Vault resource.
Librarians learned a dazzling array of tips and tricks for increasing their public relations efforts on Facebook in a Midwinter ALA Masters Series session today.
Libraries must be engaged with their communities. Community engagement requires political engagement. This is unfortunate, but I believe libraries cannot be apathetic to the political process if they are to succeed. That is why I attended the Saturday morning Washington Office Update; I felt it important to get a political overview as it pertains to libraries.
ALA President Maureen Sullivan moderated “The Promise of Libraries Transforming Communities,” a panel of three civic innovators held Saturday morning at Midwinter in Seattle. The panel served as a first step in building a sustainable, scalable national plan for library-led community engagement.
Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, offered his personal observations on the project’s survey report, “Library Services in the Digital Age” (PDF file), released January 22.
I like to plan. I also like to throw plans out the window. Before coming to any given ALA conference, I pore through the online scheduler. I look at the schedules of people I respect to create a skeleton schedule, and then I go look through the raw data of the ALA scheduler.
