Good morning. I can’t sleep. It may be that I am still on EST or that I just so excited to be here. My first conference and I’m entering my second day. Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend the ALSC Preconference on celebrating the Honor Books. Wow. We all know KT Horning, but just hearing her speak and the wealth of information she had to share was amazing. I tried to take some old fashioned notes using a pen and paper. I could go on and on about what I learned. Here are just a few hightlights: Honors were called “Runners Up” until 1971 The records are lost for who the Runners Up were in 1923, 1924 and 1927. What happened to them? KT Horning is determined to find out and I bet she will! Before 1958, an author could not win a second award. Would Robert McCloskey have…
Tag: ALAAC15
A Literary Walking Tour of San Francisco at #alaac15
Youth services librarians tend to stick together, but Conference is a great time to meet or work with members from other committees. Today I attended the Literary Walking Tour of San Francisco sponsored by the Staff Organizations Round Table (SORT), and attended by librarians of all stripes. Only on a librarian’s walking tour will you get a bibliography and annotated list for each of your 45 your tour stops! I love our job. From Union Square to the bay, we covered all the literary highlights. One of our stops was City Lights Books, which had people waiting outside for opening time. Nice to see a city that appreciates books. 🙂
Enjoy the sights!
I struck up a conversation with a very nice librarian (we’re easy to pick out of a crowd) in the airport yesterday. Both of us were traveling alone with nothing pressing on our agendas, so we rode the BART together into town and spent the day seeing the sights, riding the cable cars, and enjoying a great lunch at the Daily Grill. It’s easy to make new friends and have a great time at #alaac15.
ALA Ribbons at #alaac15
One of my favorite things to do at ALA is grab some free library gear! And the best way to do that is to select some ribbons for your name tag! As it says above the ribbons- “If you are one, take one”. Ribbons are great conversation starters with similar members! It helps put you in a club/grouping, which can be amazing when you are surrounded by thousands of librarians! Not all divisions have ribbons, but ALSC has two! I’ll be sure to add my twitter handle @merbrarian to mine! Librarians love to organize and catalog things, so why should we not catalog ourselves!
Learn How To Better Serve Your Community @ ALA Annual
The American Library Association’s 2015 Annual Conference is approaching. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to explore the Scheduler tool available to you on alaac15.ala.org. I’m excited to share with you several sessions for librarians and library staff aimed at how to better serve your special needs populations. If you are unfamiliar with the term, “Special Population”, I strongly recommend reading, “What Do You Mean by Special Population?” , by fellow committee member, Amy Musser. Here, Amy highlights the importance of creating services and programs for special needs populations as a way of making sure our libraries remain accessible. She urges us to remember, “…all patrons are individuals, not just members of one group or another.” With that, I have here a list of incredible programming available to you at ALA San Francisco: Library Services for the Incarcerated and Detained | Saturday, 06/27/2015 – 08:30am – 10:00am | Marriott…