Continuation of my wrap-up of the American Library Association’s annual conference, otherwise known as #ala10. Part One is here.
Onward!
The District
Man, I love Washington, DC. It is such a great city and #ala10’s location this year satisfied both my government and librarian nerdery. It was very hot and humid, however, and the weather made it tough to be outside for longer than 15-20 minutes. Brynn and I kept repeating to ourselves, “it is very hot and very dangerous” anytime we ventured out. I downed a lot of water and several times needed to sit down in order to recover from the heat. Ok, enough about the weather.
DC has world-class restaurants and all of the restaurants we visited featured attentive, friendly, and over-the-top awesome wait staff. The service was remarkable, hence my remarking on it. As I mentioned, I went to Veritas on Friday night with my friend Melissa and her fiance/Veritas-owner Adam. I went back twice with Brynn. Every time the service was phenomenal.
The combination of our busy schedules and the oppressive heat prevented us from exploring the city much but we did enjoy a 10:30pm visit to the Lincoln Memorial and walk along the Vietnam Memorial on Monday night. Just when we got too hot to continue walking, a cab pulled up and we hopped in. That brings me to my final point about the city: the ease of catching a cab and their relatively low cost made grabbing a taxi a really nice option when we didn’t want to hoof it.
Convention Center
Washington’s Convention Center was built in 2003 and it is beautiful, enormous, and full of light. Being from Buffalo, I have severe convention center envy and am now convinced that we really need to tear ours down and rebuild. Anyway, over 25,000 people attended #ala10 and the WCC handled us all. The bathrooms were always clean, well-stocked (including free tampons for women, awesome), and honestly really nice looking. There was plenty of seating in the forms of benches, leather couches, and soft carpet. The rooms were, with a few exceptions I experienced, able to handle the crowds for speeches, programs, and workshops. Again, this place is ENORMOUS. So big that I feel the need to use all-caps.
I’m kind of sad that the next ALA conferences, at least through 2017, will not again be in DC. Related: Las Vegas, really? Ugh.
Social media
I decided to create a twitter account specifically for the conference because my main account is private. I tweeted throughout the weekend using the #ala10 hashtag, and really enjoyed the virtual conversations I had with other conference attendees. I’d like to keep up some of the relationships I made so that next year I can meet people in person. This year’s conference was too overwhelming and besides, I don’t have well-developed relationships with library bloggers and tweeters yet. All in due time.
Anyway, the real reason I wanted to write about social media was to express how awesome it was to tweet during a program and not feel rude! Throughout my sessions people pounded away at their Blackberry and iPhone keyboards, and not because they were bored and texting but because they were taking notes via twitter.
ALA partnered with Boopsie to create an app for the conference and I downloaded it to my Blackberry. From it I was able to access the following: the conference schedule, a list of programs starting within the hour, author signing schedules, twitter feeds from the conference, the exhibitors plan, and my own schedule for programs/exhibitors. It was a little wonky and slow at times but overall, I was pleased with the app.
Next up: Part Three, the substance
