ALA Marginalia

For the first time this year,  “big ALA” experimented with offering a virtual conference component of its Annual Conference. While some of the divisions have done this in the past (ACRL, PLA) and AASL is currently running a parallel virtual event, this was the first time we’d tried this for the monster, “big kahuna” Annual Conference.

While you may be thinking about MidWinter because it’s just around the corner, we’re thinking about Annual, so the Conference Planning Committee has already started talking about how to improve next year’s virtual Annual. We have a three-year contract with Learning Times, so that will be the platform, but many of the other pieces are up in the air at this point, which makes it a good time to ask for some input.

We can’t promise anything at this point, but what’s your wishlist? There are already some “givens,” but building a structure around them, what would you like to see? Here are just a few of the questions we have, but feel free to give us feedback around other issues, too.

• We can’t do this for free, not if we want to offer a quality, stable video feed. Keep in mind, though, that our members do tend to stream some of the more popular sessions, such as Top Tech Trends, and that will continue. Which sessions are you okay with as volunteer streams versus quality feeds?
• We can’t stream the keynotes because the speakers don’t give us permission, and in fact, they usually forbid it. Otherwise, though, what types of sessions do you want to participate in remotely?
• What does “participate in remotely” mean to you?
• Where are the price points that fit? Are there tiers or does one-size-fits-all work in this type of situation?
• Where can we add value to improve your virtual conference experience? Are you more interested in just sessions, or do you want virtual hallways, networking opportunities, and other comparable experiences, too? If it’s the latter, what do they look like?
• If you’ve seen this done well somewhere else, we’d love to hear about it. Just give us a URL and a description of what you liked about it.

This is your chance to give us input to help shape the future of virtual ALA conferences, so please share your thoughts!

ALA’s Conference Services director Deidre Ross has shared a report from McCormick Place, venue for the 2009 ALA Annual Conference exhibits and many meetings.  During the meeting we diverted 65% of waste from landfills.

Deidre explains, “The report was provided by Allied Waste which shows the total tonnage of a variety of recyclable materials that were reclaimed during our event, along with the percentage of waste which was diverted from landfills (diversion rate) and the environmental impact of these efforts.  The report tries to focus on two main statistics which evaluate overall performance:  the diversion rate and the total tonnage.  The diversion rate is a great indicator of successful capture of recyclable or reusable materials.  The year to year changes in total tonnage may indicate changing habits by exhibitors and attendees which include the reuse of materials or bringing fewer materials which may go to waste.”

She continued, “We also sent out a green questionnaire to exhibitors and if they answered the questions correctly as to their recycling efforts, they received a “Green Exhibitor” sign for their booth. If we all partner together we can continue to improve and save the environment.”

Deidre is optimistic about diverting 70% … or more … at the ALA Annual Conference is Washington, D.C., June 24-29, 2010.

Karen

(I think if you right click on the image you can view it with type large enough to read … still learning to embed images.)

Everyone knew there would be a lot of online activity during the 2009 Annual Conference, but I think even we were surprised at just how much people came together on social media sites around the event and the sessions. Clearly there’s going to be parallel event online for all future ALA conferences, one driven completely by people and not by planners.

So here’s a benchmark for future measurements, because for the first time, we’ll have an archive we can refer back to, at least for Twitter, which was the most heavily used site during the conference. Here’s a summary I wrote for Keith Michael Fiels, ALA’s Executive Director.

—————–
Some numbers:

• Flickr: 4,011 pictures
• A Google Blogsearch says there are about 14,000 posts using the tag ala2009, but that’s not really right  because it includes the Flickr pictures, comments on blogs, etc. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to get an exact count. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of the posts are recaps of someone’s conference experience, followed closely by summaries of sessions, and links to presentation materials (in that order). Some samples:
  • ALA 2009: A Perspective
  • ALA 2009 Wrap-Up (Warning: It’s LONG)
  • Displaced at ALA Annual
  • ALA lesson #2: The Power of Teh Intarwebs
• Twitter: 10,362 tweets using the #ala2009 tag by 1,321 authors (including the ALA Annual account and other ALA units)
  • tweets before: 765
  • tweets thu: 680
  • tweets fri: 1380
  • tweets sat: 2390
  • tweets sun: 2250
  • tweets mon: 1725
  • tweets tue: 589
  • tweets after: 583 (7/15-24/2009, although tweets continue to appear so this number will still increase a little)
  • by tag:
    • #ala2009 – 8517 (this was the main hashtag that we asked people to use)
    • #ala09 – 415
    • #alacouncil – 82
    • #membership – 39
    • #totebag – 265 (an unofficial snark channel)
    • #unala2009 – 450 (the unconference)
    • #acrl101 – 22
    • #ala09_is – 8 (ACRL Instruction Section)
    • #ala2prom – 26 (Library 2.0 session)
    • #lib2.0 – 118 (Library 2.0 session)
    • #ttt2009 – 35 (LITA’s Top Tech Trends)
    • #toptech – 43 (LITA’s Top Tech Trends)
    • #bigwig2009 – 13
    • #clene09 – 10
    • #clenets09 – 6
    • #godort09 – 3
    • #mobile_lib – 50 (WO panel)
    • #rusaht – 6 (RUSA Hot Topics session)
  • The reason I can give you such specific stats about the tweets is that ALA member Heather Devine offered to create an online Flickr/Twitter tracker for the conference a couple of weeks before the event. She finished it just a couple of days before Annual started, having done most of the work while she was on vacation. You can see it still running, and she’s going to give us the code and database so that we can 1) archive it, and 2) implement this for other conferences in the future. I can’t begin to describe how lucky we are that Heather did this, because there’s no good way to archive tweets right now, and we don’t have the resources to create this ourselves. The site got a lot of notice and a lot of hits during Annual, with Roy Tennant in particular noting it. I’d like to request that ALA to send Heather a letter of thanks if possible for this herculean and incredibly valuable effort.
• LJ very smartly did a daily recap of what they considered to be the “best” tweets of the day. Reading through them gives an excellent overview of the conference.
  • Saturday
  • Sunday
  • Monday
  • Eric Hellman did an analysis of the ala2009 hashtag
  • Then there was the interesting, but relatively harmless, appearance of the anonymous alasecrets and alasecrets2009 accounts on Twitter. While they were discussed, retweeted, and linked to online, those tweets didn’t spill over very much into the mainstream hashtag, and in fact, it allowed the really nasty stuff to stay out of the ala2009 space, which was good for us. One media blog picked up on it and noted it in a post, but that was about it. Someone shut down the original alasecrets account when it devolved into sex talk, but others had saved the tweets and posted them on Scribd, and the alasecrets2009 account took over where the first one left off. LJ did an interview with the anonymous originator of both accounts.
• According to Boopsie, more than 1500 people downloaded their ALA2009 application. I’m unclear if this figure includes people like me who accessed it on the web. It garnered a lot of praise online, with a couple of people tweeting that it helped them find a session when they didn’t know where it was.
• There are also a ton of great videos on YouTube from the conference, including several of the book cart drill teams and a wonderful fake fight between Neil Gaiman and James Kennedy for the Newbery Award.
• The staff of American Libraries did their usual, wonderful job covering the conference. See their blog posts on Inside Scoop, videos on AL Focus, and the Post-Conference issue of AL Direct for a full overview of everything that happened at #ala2009.

I know my conference experience was better because of these online components. What was your experience?

Last year we inaugurated the ALA Conference Materials Archive, on a wiki at http://presentations.ala.org/. The wiki already includes links to materials from earlier conferences, along with links to similar material from some of ALA’s units. The goal is for all collateral conference material to be linked in some way from this wiki.

So, if you are a speaker at the ALA 2009 Annual Conference in Chicago, this is *the* place for you to upload your handouts, or to publish links to your material, if it is resident on another site. Posting materials prior to conference ensures immediate access by attendees — waiting until after the conference means missing a valuable opportunity to share their knowledge and insights.

Go green! Post your handouts to the wiki before the conference–and you don’t have to make paper copies!  Just  note their availability during your presentation (add “view or download more information at http://presentations.ala.org/” to your last .ppt slide, for example).  This does work–the SLA conference has been largely paper-less for two years now.

Unlike last year, the wiki is not pre-loaded with program titles, but it is organized by day/time. When you add your program, please be sure to include the full text of the listing as in the final program, especially including unit acronyms(!). Full instructions on using the wiki, including the attribution license, and a suggested convention for organizing materials and links, appears on the wiki.

If you will not be with us in Chicago (still time to change your mind!) or if you have one of those inevitable conflicts, know that there is now a place to find the conference material, this year and into the future.

Please also know that you can always contact the ALA Library (library@ala.org) for assistance with locating more about a particular program.

Karen Muller, ALA Librarian

The March issue of American Libraries is shrink-wrapped with the preliminary program for the 2009 ALA Annual Conference. We on staff get issues of AL a bit sooner than they are in mail, but you’ll have yours in a day or so.

In between reference calls and staff questions, I’ve been paging through the program.

First, I checked that the program being planned by the committee I’m staff liaison to is there and accurate. It is (p. 79 … top of middle column). And it’s even in the right program track (on p. 41).

Then I noticed that there, on the inside of the back cover, is a short planning calendar–and better yet, a blank page facing it. The planning calendar was a feature of the preliminary programs when I first started attending annual conference, long before joining the ALA staff. And I’ve missed them. Yes, I have created them in any number of planning tools, but this one is immediately available as I page through the booklet. Handy place to note what catches my eye now so I can see if I can shoehorn in an extra or two, once I know the schedule for what I must do.

I looked at the field trips being offered by Camp ALA. Because the conference is in Chicago, I probably won’t be using Camp ALA this year, for the first time in years. If you are thinking of making your trip to conference a family vacation, know that kids enjoy Camp ALA and that the staff are wonderful and caring. Good destinations for the field trips, too.

What else?

• A great line-up of speakers between the division presidents’ programs (p. 10) and the Auditorium Speakers Series (p. 3) including several of my favorite authors
• 2009 Empowerment Conference for library support staff (p. 52 … good speakers … I’ll see if Val and Jessica would like to go)
• Scholarship Bash at the AIC on Saturday, Book Cart Drill Teams on Sunday … starting to look like I should get the kids exhibit passes, which reminds me that one of the nice things about an ALA conference is that it is family friendly
• Theme for the Membership Meetings: Libraries in Hard Times (p. 48)
• Forty (!!) pages of program listings … though some are awards receptions and special dinners and events, including the FRTF 40th Anniversary Gala … these will take more time to sift through. Some catch words: disaster preparedness, metadata, information literacy, influencing legislators, planning, partnerships … surely there’s something for everyone.

Yes, plenty of reasons to make me eager to attend, even after decades of “going to ALA”!!

Karen

Just in time for Midwinter, it’s the 2009 Midwinter Executive Director’s Report (127kb, PDF), summarizing recent accomplishments and upcoming events. Some of the ‘highlighted’ stories include:

• AL Direct, Special Tough Economy Issue
• Libraries and the Economic Stimulus Package
• Tough Economy Toolkit
• Building Statewide Coalitions for All Libraries in a Tough Economy Panel Discussion
• Add It Up: Libraries Make the Difference in Youth Education and Development
• ALA and Univision Radio Partner on First-Ever PSA Campaign to Target Latinos
• Registration Opens January 20 for AASL National Conference
• William J. Brennan, Jr. Award for Judith Krug.

And here’s some good news from the report:

“ALA Membership through the first quarter 2009 stands at 67,045, a 2% increase over the same period last year. Personal membership renewals are a key indicator of the membership ‘health’ of the association. Through November, personal renewals are 8% ahead of last year. In addition, new memberships are up by 3%.”

It’s that time of year again, when we’re all gathering in a cold place during the North American winter. If you’re heading to Midwinter this week, you naturally want to know about everything that’s happening there. To make sure you don’t miss any of the big stuff, check out Mary Ghikas’ biannual “What’s Happening” list. Here’s your Midwinter 2009 version (169kb, PDF).

Here are some interesting numbers that kick off the document.

“As of January 16, 2009, advance registration for the 2009 Midwinter Meeting was 5,840 – compared to 5,833 at the same point for the 2008 Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia. This included 671 first-time Midwinter Meeting attendees, compared to 371 in Philadelphia on January 4, 2008. (Note: In 2006-2007, ALA began asking conference participants to self-identify as first-time attendees.)

Ever wonder what that number includes? As of January 8, the total included 4204 regular
members registered, 231 student members, 60 trustees, 61 retired members 144 nonmembers, 78 former members, among others. California was most heavily represented, with 452 registrations, followed by Colorado (359), Illinois (352), New York (336) and Texas (268). There are registrants from all 50 states, from 9 Canadian provinces (a total of 53 registrants), from Puerto Rico, and from the Virgin Islands.

As of January 9, 2009, there are 96 international librarians from 17 countries attending the Midwinter Meeting in Denver. For the second year in a row, there will be an orientation for international colleagues. International attendees are coming from all across the globe – from Australia to Qatar to Nigeria to Denmark.”

The last two weeks have been a sort of “perfect storm” of online-related problems at ALA, and as the person here who probably does the most tracking of what’s said about us online, I think I’ve pretty well heard everything you have to say about that storm.

Except what we want to say. With the holiday breaks (ALA was officially closed on December 26 and January 2), it was difficult to coordinate some of the discussion, but now we’ve had a chance to talk about some of these things internally, and we want to update you on decisions we’ve made to try to fix some of the problems.

The first issue that came up was in a blog post by Jason Griffey, in which he praised ALA’s willingness to try something new and accept YouTube submissions of questions for presidential candidates.  He then questioned why we wouldn’t accept videos from non-members or anonymous posters. While we still won’t include videos from anonymous users, we’ve changed the guidelines to accept submissions from non-members for consideration. And actually, we hope non-members *will* submit videos, as well as members. The deadline to post your question is January 16 (see the instructions here), and we encourage those of you who are inclined to participate in the election this way to ask your questions, whether you’re a member or not.

The second issue came up on the ALA Council email list when councilors began trying to plan their schedules for Midwinter. Even though we’re on our third vendor for the planner and we’ve requested changes to what was the default service, clearly this tool still isn’t what it should be. We got some valuable feedback from Nicole Engard and Jessamyn West that noted other concerns, such as a notice that the site recommends Internet Explorer and security issues around making the password the same for everyone and then posting that password on the page itself. Mea culpa (us-a culpa?) on both counts.

We’re going to put this issue to rest once and for all by working closely with the Website Advisory Committee to research and outline exactly what members need and then create it. As some of you know, we’re currently beta testing ALA Connect, which is our new collaborative work/online communities site built on open source software called Drupal. Since each conference will be its own community in Connect and it already uses your ALA login and password, it makes sense to put the event planner there. Naturally, this is going to take some time, especially since we haven’t even launched Connect yet, but we’ll shoot for having a new planner ready for Midwinter 2010. We’ll keep you posted about progress over on the ITTS Update blog, which is also where you can track what’s happening with Connect.

The third issue that piled on top of the event planner happened on Monday when we opened registration and housing for Annual 2009.  I saw at least 27 tweets, not to mention complaints on Facebook and FriendFeed, plus a desperate plea from Karen Coombs on her blog (did I miss any – let me know). We’re truly sorry for the frustration this caused everyone, and it’s not going to happen next time. We’re still talking to Experient about this one since they’re the company to which we’ve outsourced this function, but we’ll be taking steps to make sure that the confusion, busy signals, and frustrated clicks don’t happen in the future.

We’re also going to talk about how to communicate better (differently) when something like this happens again. For example, I was thrilled to see Lorraine Squires tweeting help for the revised start time and Anne the Librarian retweeting that info. Don’t think we didn’t notice that, and thank you both for helping. In fact, thank you to everyone who cared enough to post about any of this in order to get our attention. Consider it gotten.

With Midwinter just over two weeks away,  hopefully we’re sailing into calmer waters, but let us know if you run into choppy water and we’ll try to help.

The opening date for registration and housing for the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, July 9 – 15, 2009 will now be on Monday, January 5, 2009. This is a change from our originally published date. The ALA offices now will be closed on January 2 (see prior post). Therefore, we delayed the opening because we want to make sure we have all our staff available to answer any questions or solve any problems you might have. January 5 will also be the date the Bundle buyers will be able to go into the system and make their housing reservations and sign up for any pre-conferences or additional events.

Thanks for your patience regarding this change. If you have any questions about it, you can contact Deidre Irwin Ross, Director, Conference Services.

Other bloggers are discussing the cost of attending an ALA Annual Conference. I’m going to help you do something about it!

Last year I prepared a list of all the travel awards from ALA and its divisions and round tables. This year, I’m happy to say that there is near one-click access to the entire list on the new website. Start at the home page, www.ala.org, click on “Awards & Grants” in the left navigation, then on “Publications, Research & Travel” next to the picture of the open wallet in the middle of the page. The listing you’ll find has all the travel awards in one place.

The time to get your application together is now, as for most of the awards the deadline is the first business day in December. Thousands of dollars in travel awards are available to ALA members and interested professionals through the generosity of vendors and other sponsors. Check out the requirements for these grants. Apply for yourself, or nominate a member of your staff or a colleague.

Karen