#calibconf 2011 Wrap-Up

This past weekend, November 12th and 13th, 2011, Ashley and I attended the California Library Association conference in Pasadena, California. What follows is my wrap up of the conference experience broken out by themes. It is not a comprehensive guide to everything I experienced, just brief (well, brief for me) expostulations on the conference as a whole and broken into parts.

On Being My Second Conference
My very first library conference was the 2009 CLA conference two years ago also in Pasadena. I went into it having just graduated library school and not knowing very many people at all. I wandered through the exhibit hall and the sessions in a daze of solitude interrupted by activity. I did meet a few people, but didn’t make any very solid connections. The experience was as overwhelming as it was underwhelming; even though I had not worked as a professional librarian yet, the sessions I attended seemed strangely lightweight. I only kept going to them because I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do. That definitely wasn’t the case during this conference.

After almost two years of working as a librarian and being a relatively active part of the library world online and off, I came to this conference with the primary goal of making personal/in-person connections. Certainly, there were sessions, but due to my previous conference experience I felt no qualms putting them on the backburner. This resulted in my inserting plenty of free time into my conference schedule. Contrary to the 2009 conference where I spent far too much time with my nose buried in a book, this year I was able to spend time around the conference center’s main thoroughfares and be sure to run into people I knew. Being at a regional conference like CLA, I really got the sense of how small the library world is. The good thing about that is the opportunity it affords to chance upon well-known people doing wonderful things and have insightful conversations with them (lots if superlatives there, I know).

Interest Groups (impact groups)
As a person who has never had anything to do with CLA interests groups I was surprised how much I enjoyed the ones I attended at this conference. Being a small section at the beginning of the conference booklet (as opposed to being put in-line with the sessions) they’re easy to miss, but my feeling is that interest groups have the potential to be the best thing that the CLA Conference offers attendees. My rationale is that because most of the sessions are either too basic for the working librarian (read: they are for library students), not interesting to me, or case studies of one or several library projects that may or may not be applicable to anything I’m doing, and hallway conversations are generally much too informal, interest groups provide the perfect outlet for advanced librarians looking to have serious conversations about their topics of interest.

The best thing about interest groups is that they can do whatever you want them to do within reason. The ones I went to were pretty small, about six people each, so there was discussion aplenty. In the new Volunteer Engagement Interest Group, we sat together shared answers and suggestions for specific questions. We also learned from each other about useful resources. At the end, my notebook was full of stuff to follow up with and I felt like I had gotten some of my sticking points as a Volunteer Coordinator off my chest.

The Information Technology Interest Group was a little different; it was longstanding group that had dwindled to a few members and was being reinvigorated by new leadership. Here, our discussion centered not so much around shop talk as program ideas for the Spring Fling and in what direction did we want to take the group. I think maybe I talked too much for a group that is for me more a personal (rather than professional) interest. Still, Mathew and Suzana are capable leaders and were able to reign me in giving everyone else a chance to talk as well as furthering their own ideas.

My suggestion for anyone reading this who is a member of the California Library Association and an advanced librarian is to get involved in at least two interest groups now, when the planning process for upcoming activities is still underway. And next year, forgo a session or two to attend your interest groups. You’ll find it well worth the time.

Sessions
Bookview 101: An Author Panel: Highlighting Authors of Books that Expand our View of Our Neighbors, our World and Ourselves

Was going to let the afternoon go by without attending a session but saw Ron Koertge‘s name in the program and him being a poet I recognize (I saw him read his off-kilter humorous poetry at the HAMMER museum a while ago and bought a book), I wandered in. The session featured two more Los Angeles-based writers discussing their books, how they work, and all kinds of other stuff including Los Angeles literary places (Libros Schmibros was mentioned) and “accessible” poets to add to library collections and pitch to patrons. Though the temperature in the room was very hot, the back-and-forth between the authors and the audience kept me too engaged to worry about discomforts. I ended up buying a book about the history of poetry in Los Angeles and promising to buy another about Los Angeles “saint” street names.

California Reads from the California Council for the Humanities and the California Center for the Book

This was actually a program to discuss a grant and most of the audience-members represented libraries that were in some stage of receiving the grant. I only found this out when I was in the session and since I liked the presenters I decided to stay, listen, and learn. All I learned, I already knew and that is that the California Center for the Book and the California Council for the Humanities are two organizations that do exemplary work for our state’s bookpeople.

SCAN Jose – Augmented Reality Brings History to Life

The potential of augmented reality is a continuing interest of mine and so I attended this program in which IDEAS Manager (what a job title!) Sandra Stewart and Web Librarian Nate Hill explained step-by-step how they created their SCAN Jose initiative, in which they combined geo-location capabilities of smartphones and tablets with their local history collection to get a smooth walking tour (browser-) app. Maybe when I have time I’ll ask Nate to let me study the code. As a general note, though, more libraries should be doing projects like this; relatively low-threshold coding / collection mashups that are easy for patrons to access and infotastic to use.

Exhibit Hall
The Exhibit Hall is actually the least interesting part of the conference for me. I wandered through it for a total of maybe twenty minutes, looked at a few things, and left without much enthusiasm. I’m not in a position to buy anything for my library and even if I was, I don’t think I would do it at a conference. To me, the exhibit hall is basically a giant waste of space. I can understand why it would be useful for some people though..

Battledecks
Battledecks is a competition in which competitors must deliver a presentation from slides they see for the first time on stage. It’s the ultimate in improvisation because no theme is given; all that exists is the competitor, the slides, and of course, the audience. Each performer is given five minutes to talk about ten slides. Because I’m a big show-off, I volunteered to be a competitor. While I highly recommend you watch the whole competition, my part starts at around 9:15. Enjoy!

As you can see, a couple of slides stopped me cold. I didn’t see the joke in the book burning slide and the social media one I just didn’t “get” (see all the slides at MC Patrick Sweeney’s blog). It was fun though I didn’t win. Still, definitely a good public speaking workout. Maybe sometime I’ll even do it again, this time with the advantage of experience behind me.

And in Conclusion…
Ashley and I had a good time at CLA 2011. I’m not sure if we’ll be going to the 2012 conference in San Jose due to the necessity for time off and funds. We will, however, very likely be heading to the 2012 ALA Annual conference in Anaheim.