In case you weren't able to make it to this year's American Library Association's Annual Conference, guest blogger Matthew Kendall is providing us with a multi-part insider perspective of just what went down! Today he'll talk about his experiences on day one of the conference.

ALA Conference Friday, June 22nd:

The Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California hosted this year's American Library Association Conference. As a first year SLIS student and the son of an enthusiastic librarian, it didn't take much convincing to tag along with my mom to experience the mother of all librarian gatherings.

The ACC is a pretty impressive building with a huge glass façade surrounded by a forest of palm trees. It's in walking distance of Disneyland and looks pretty fantastic under the bright, cloudless Southern California sky. I was told that Anaheim gets its name both from the nearby Santa Ana River and the German word for home ("heim") as it was settled by German wine makers in the early 19^th century.

Checking in to the conference was very easy. We were given a nice reusable bag which we would need as a number of handouts, books, flyers, and gifts of all sorts would be mercilessly foisted upon us. The conference had an outstanding mobile application, the ALA Scheduler. You could see all the events taking place in chronological order, where they were, and detailed information about them. You could bookmark events that you were interested in and filter your search for just those or recommended similar events. There was also a filter for events happening in the next hour which was an enormously useful feature.

After checking in, we slid back to our hotel where an Indian buffet awaited us. Perfect fuel for a convention goer….

From lunch, we attended the opening ceremony in a huge ballroom. A rousing introductory speech by outgoing ALA President Molly Raphael was followed by an awards handout to some special members of the librarian profession as well as a preview for nominees in two new awards the ALA was about to hand out: best book in fiction and best book in non-fiction. Raphael talked about some funding drives to raise money for the Association as well as about the newly elected incoming president. She then introduced the main speaker, Rebecca MacKinnon. MacKinnon was a CNN Bureau Chief reporter in Beijing and Tokyo. Her speech was mainly about the roles that global companies and state governments have towards internet privacy. It was a pretty exciting speech to listen to because it was very blunt and opinionated on a pretty controversial and edgy topic. She just published a book on the subject entitled "Consent of the Networked."

After that, the Exhibitor Hall opened. It was the first time in my life that I saw a mad rush of stampeding librarians. A very polite and orderly stampede….

The Exhibitor Hall was a HUGE room with over 1500 exhibits. Many of the exhibits were publishers, internet start-up companies, authors, library schools, and a few platforms for more speeches and demonstrations.

A lot of browsing was accomplished. I survived my first day of ALA.