After a day of flying and an early meeting, I finally had a minute or two to get online. Unfortunately, there is a charge for wireless at the convention center, so I waited until I could get online at the hotel (just now).
Coming in was fun. For those of you at work, it turns out Sarah was on my flight!
This morning I had my first committee meeting: It was an ALA Council Committee, the Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship. We talked about a lot of exciting things: working on an annotated bibliography of works dealing with issues of women in librarianship (I’m hoping to get in on this), working on developing a history of the committee, developing ties with other organizations focused on similar issues, and planning the Annual program for the 30th anniversary of COSWL. We hope to have a panel of speakers from COSWL’s past to form an understanding of the history of the committee. We also want to work on an oral history project, interviewing women leaders in librarianship or librarians who made an impacts on young women. We’ll start really working on this part in June. Finally, we also are putting together something to send to council during this session, so that’s exciting. This session was great not only because the committee is doing so much interesting work, but I also learned a lot about how ALA works. We talked about procedure, the structure, and the rules that we need to follow due to our tax status–very informative in many ways.
I spent the next little bit on the Riverwalk, which was fun and pretty. I found a Starbucks, but didn’t have as much luck finding wireless.
I also participated in most of the public part of the Association of Research Libraries second Annual Leadership Symposium. The sessions I heard were a welcome & introduction by Jerome Offord, Jr., Director of Diversity Initiatives for ARL; From Library School to Career, by Allison Sutton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Sutton offered several extremely practical tips!); Personal Leadership by Kathryn Deiss of the Metropolitan Library System (Deiss was an extremely engaging speaker and ended talking about what an exciting time it is to be in libraries due to a lot of the social web developments); and Strengthening Your Professional Writing Skills by Kaylyn Hipps of the Association of Research Libraries (Hipps also gave some very practical advice). I had to duck out a little early to get to my next meeting.
I ended up at the Women’s Studies Section membership meeting a little late. I didn’t participate as much in this as other sessions during the day, but this group is also doing a lot of interesting work. Everyone seemed extremely nice, too.
I ended up in my room a little late to get to the last event I had for the day. I hate that I had to miss that, but it wasn’t critical in the way the committee meetings were, and it’s been nice to settle in for a bit.
I looked at Bloglines and was overwhelmed with what’s going on out there. (That’s what I get for not checking in for two days!)
Tomorrow will be as full as today… I’m looking forward to it!
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