I finally have a minute to decompress and put down some thoughts about my experience at ALA – my first professional conference.
First of all, I have to say that I had an excellent time overall and absolutely plan to continue attending ala (and/or other library conferences) in the future. By and large, the sessions I attended were interesting and inspiring, the people I met friendly and encouraging, and the networking opportunities plentiful.
A couple of highlights: meeting Susan Gibbons from Rochester, one of my librarian idols (and seeing her speak about some newer Rochester research), the STS breakfast where I got to have a great discussion about user experience, hearing David Lee King (at least I think it was him, I was in the back) get REAL about the need for library staff to be computer literate, the NMRT social and proposing some DISinterest groups for LITA (mine is second life), and watching Pitt claim third place in the Book Kart Drill Team championships. I also made Library Journal’s “Top Tweets” for Sunday =) …on that note, did anyone ever find Junot Diaz?
A couple of frustrations: the slow, tedious process of taking the shuttles back and forth between the hotels and McCormick place, difficulty in determining what was and was not appropriate to just show up at uninvited (probably not so hard if you’re not a first-timer, but still), snobby vendors who didn’t want to talk to students (hey, I really AM curious about your catalog plug-ins and not just trying to scam you for a mini snickers).
One serious complaint: the Placement Center. Now, I’m having slightly better results in terms of job searching than many of my classmates, so this wasn’t quite as big of an issue for me, but the Placement Center was about the most depressing room I have been in outside of a funeral home. There were exactly 12 organizations there, only about half of whom were actually hiring (and I hear that even those were not too interested in students). To me, this is terrible. While the availability of interview space & resume review services is great and there should always be space for these services, I really think that if you can’t even hit double digits of employers looking to hire, just don’t bother. All it does is discourage students and other jobless librarians who are already facing an incredibly tough job market. In other words, if you can’t do it right – don’t do it at all.
But again, the GREAT definitely outweighed the bad and I’m so glad that I made the trip. Hopefully once I have some money, I can join a division or two and get on some committees and be more involved in all of this in the future.
Outside of the conference, I also had a great time walking around Chicago and seeing friends. This is the second summer in a row that I’ve had perfect weather there, and it has definitely left a great impression on me.
