ALA Wrap-Up

Greetings! I got back late Tuesday night from the ALA Annual Conference in beautiful New Orleans. Rather than do a daily blog, I decided to do an all conference wrap-up at the end.

This was my first annual conference and I'd like to share with you some of what I did while there and what I took away from it. (I will spare you descriptions of the food, but suffice to say, it was really, really good. And if you ever go to New Orleans, make sure to check out the Hurricane Katrina bus tour by Gray Line. Sobering, but enlightening.)

So, without further ado -- highlights!

One of my favorite panels was "Science Fiction, Fantasy and Information Sciences: looking at the present and future of Information Science and Information Technology through the eyes of a panel of science fiction and fantasy authors", put on by the LITA Imagineering Interest Group. The panelists included Orson Scott Card (!), Jim Ottaviani, John Scalzi, Carrie Vaughn, David Weber, Bill Willingham and Gail Carriger. While all seven of these writers trade in the world of science and fantasy fiction, they represent a wide swath of technological savvy (from not having a smart phone up to a being a former nuclear engineer) and reader demographics (teen, adult and comic book readers). This variety made for a very interesting discussion from a lot of different perspectives.

As seems to get brought up in every discussion of libraries and “emerging technology” lately, it was asked what role librarians played in a world increasingly connected to vast repositories of information through the internet, accessible at all times via smart phones and similar portable devices. I generally say to people, when asked if I think the physical library will become a dinosaur in the age of digital resources, that I think users will always need help sorting through the information. John Scalzi put it much more eloquently than I, though, by relating an anecdote of his response to the question, “Who would you take an alien visitor to when they first landed on the planet?” His response was, “A librarian”. The rationale was that anyone else – political leaders, scientists, etc. – would ask the alien many questions, whereas the librarian would be the only one to give the alien information. He argued that the vast majority of people are information specialists, in that their knowledge is deep in one subject, but not particularly broad across multiple subjects, and that makes most people “information aliens”. Librarians, then, are the interface between these aliens and an overwhelming abundance of unfamiliar information; librarians as gates and guides to the information will always be needed.

Another particularly interesting point raised during the panel was the idea of “technological decay”. What happens when we lose the device that can read the format or language in which writing is published? If the future doesn't have their own Rosetta Stone, then which written items from the current time will survive and which will be lost? What will future generations know about our society from its writing if what they can and can't read of it is a result of luck? How far into the future do we need to look when considering in what format to preserve literature? Tied to this point was a discussion of copyright, and whether or not it serves the public interest if what's most important is that the works be disseminated. Gail Carriger even suggested that book piracy on the internet was acceptable to a point, since it meant that the works were getting out into the public consciousness; she argued that nothing ever dies on the internet, making it's the perfect vehicle for dissemination. The panel discussion went on for the entire alloted time, and I got the feeling it could have gone on a lot longer if time had allowed.

On the topic of information wanting to be free, I also attended a screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” – and then had the honor and pleasure of hearing Mr. Ellsberg himself speak afterward. If you haven't seen the film, especially if you're too young to remember this period in history and not a student of history, I highly recommend it. It details Ellsberg's release of top secret government papers concerning the Vietnam War to more than a dozen newspapers, and the Nixon administration's subsequent effort to supress the information by forcing the newspapers to cease publication. Not only just a very well done film, the documentary brings up many issues of particular importance to us in the library field, including transparency and intellectual integrity, censorship, and freedom of speech.

Another highlight was the ALA President's Program, which was a talk by Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of Wikimedia (the home of Wikipedia). (Is anyone else sensing a theme here?) Gardner spoke eloquently and passionately about the purpose and importance of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects, the basis of which is an altruistic collaboration between people all over the world with the common goal of providing free and accurate information to as many people as possible, and making it available in a format that allows anyone the opportunity to participate in the editing community. (And for those of you who wonder about the success of this experiment as far as accuracy is concerned, there have been a number of independent studies conducted that have found the percentage of misinformation in Wikipedia to be fairly equivalent to that found in the venerable Encyclopedia Brittanica. This article on the topic is interesting, and check out the props given to librarians.)

And lastly, though certainly not least, I must mention the screening of the Comic Book Literacy Documentary. If you still are under the impression that comic books and graphic novels are just entertainment with characters in tights, you need to see this. The documentary explored the history of comics, and highlighted the ways they have been used as teaching tools. The film explored opportunities for comics as educational tools for adults with low literacy, for example, or learning a second language, and related some history of the format you may not know about, such as that a comic book was used (successfully) to teach Texas history in a public school – in the 1930s.

Among the other fun and useful things encountered at ALA, while wandering the exhibit floor:

• Boopsie, who develop mobile device apps that allow patrons to do things such as access Overdrive books and check out physical materials directly from their smartphones

• Insight Publications, an Australian publishing house who is expanding their market to the US in the fall, and publishes study guides that appear to be more comprehensive and analytical than Cliffs or Spark Notes
  

• LibLime Koha, an open source library automated system

• So many YA advanced reader copies and author signings, my luggage came home 20 lbs heavier

If you have any questions about my trip to the conference (or just want to see pictures), let me know. I'm looking forward to ALA 2012!