Today, we return to day two of the American Library Association's Annual Conference with SLIS student, Matthew Kendall.

Saturday, June 23rd:

A complimentary breakfast at our hotel and a foggy cloud cover to beat back some summer temperatures and we were off to the exhibitor's hall early. We were able to watch a staged presentation at a "What's Cooking?" area. Co-authors James Barry and Margaret Floyd of the book Naked Foods Cookbook were making an argument that we have too many starches in our diet and that there are ways to imitate pasta with vegetables if the vegetables are cut and/or cooked a certain way. There was a giant mirror above them so the audience could watch them prepare food on a table. The preferred instrument of cutting was something they called a "mandolin" which looked like a cheese grater on a slope. They turned various vegetables into various noodles, created "fake" lasagna, and cooked some veggie wraps by using steam heated collard greens as the wrap.

We moved on to the poster session. Poster sessions remind me of elementary school science fairs. Usually it will show the results of some study and it's a great place to meet the people who were involved in those studies. If you can find something of interest, meeting those people is a good starting place to bringing good ideas back home to your own library. There was one poster arguing for the use of QR codes on everything….another from, I believe, Indiana University about a program helping combat veterans get back into the classroom and the library while adjusting to civilian life. Another poster showed how some library (can't recall, but I believe it was a school in Florida. Perhaps Florida International?) had done away with their physical reference desk and had librarians roving throughout the library with iPads to help patrons…there was even a metadata poster from a Wayne State librarian, Meghan Finch.

We talked to a Google exhibitor. My mom is a librarian at San Jose State University and she was interested in SJSU's library being mapped by Google. Google will, completely for free, have your entire library mapped. You send them a .pdf or any file showing the floor plans and they will incorporate it into Google Maps. A person can walk into your library with a smart phone and find where everything is in your building on their own, if they wish, through Google Maps. They told us that if anything is moved in the library, there's a quick and easy way to notify Google so the map can be updated in a timely manner.

We also talked to Lynda.com. This website provides really excellent training videos on all sorts of computer-related things. It's a lot like the 6080 class I'm taking right now at Wayne State, although it is geared for those already in the profession who need to catch up. It's the sort of thing a business or library would subscribe to in order to make sure their employees are up to date on technology changes. They do offer accredited certificates for their courses, too.

From there, I bumped into a Wayne State booth and talked to some WSU staff and students. I received some excellent personal advice, in particular that it is never too early to lay down groundwork for the practicum I'll eventually have to take. Find a librarian to work with! It was nice to see Wayne State folks. Being a distance education student from California, I think I share the challenge all distance education students at all schools face in trying to keep personally connected to the school you attend.

We then attended a massive EBSCO luncheon to advertise how they are growing as a company, acquiring new databases, improving searches, and so forth. They have a discovery system which indexes books, journals, databases, special collections, institutional repositories, and such in one search. I was pretty much given the impression that when I go from being a library student to a professional librarian, EBSCO was a name I might need to remember….

In the evening, we attended a talk on ACRL's guide to Fair Use practices. The room was absolutely packed. It was in a small room intended to seat perhaps 40 people, but the enthusiasm was such that more than a dozen people sat in the back, packed like sardines. I'm sure dozens more were turned away at the sight of the room. Sadly, my mom and I had already seen these guys and heard their talk at a discussion panel months ago at UC-Berkeley. I don't know why we thought this would be different. So we snuck out half way through. But they talked about something very important to anyone doing research: they conducted an enormous and lengthy symposium on common research practices and have published guidelines on what they believe to be safe, what is risky, and what isn't good to do on copyright grounds. I honestly believe the work they put into their research is groundbreaking. The guide can be viewed here.

An excellent day, mostly used for networking and learning about some new ideas! On Sunday we were going to attend as many discussion panels as we possibly could.

Read Matt's take on the first day of the ALA Conference. Stay tuned next week to find out more about a SLIS student's experiences at ALA!