Diary of an Underemployed Librarian

I feel bad for my long absence from my blog!  Believe me, I have not let this project fall by the wayside for good; I've just been very busy the past few weeks, making progress on some other efforts I've been making lately.  That's always a good thing!  For lack of energy to come up with some deep insights this week, I'll just give you a few brief updates on My Librarian Life.  (Because I'm sure you are all clamoring to know how a mostly-unemployed librarian keeps himself feeling sharp!)

First, of course, I am still "mostly unemployed."  I continue my work archiving the papers and documents of the Urban Design Project at UB, but lately I've only been able to get up there one day a week, so it doesn't really feel like a job of any sort.  Compounding that sense is the fact that I haven't gotten paid in a month due to some internal issues in the Architecture department.  Sigh.  Not the most encouraging part of life right now.

Other things are better though!  For one, I've been following along with a MOOC (that's a Massive Online Open Course, folks) all about metadata, which has been offered by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Now I already had a pretty good grasp on metadata from my studies at UB (thanks in particular to Dr. Valerie Nesset and Dr. Brenda Battleson!), but I found the first week of the course a good review, and the second week drilled down into the history and function of the Dublin Core schema, which is always appreciated.  And next week we get into something I've never heard of.  Boldly going!

(I have fallen behind on the numerous webinars I tend to sign up for, but the archived recording s have been piling up in my inbox, so I will get to them.)

Volunteering at the local Dunkirk Free Library continues to keep me feeling connected to the public work I hope to make my career doing.  Recently got the greenlight to work on drafting an Internet and social media policy for the library, and I'm helping out with Library Card Month and Banned Books Week activities.

I've been cataloging my comic book collection.  It feels like really simple copy cataloging, so it's only tenuously beneficial to my life as an information professional, but getting myself organized and generating a searchable database of my comics makes me feel a little more respectable.  If any of you have a collection of comics you'd like to corral, I highly recommend Comic Book Database, which allows you to build a personalized collection from the titles you own!

Last and somewhat least, and as a followup to my previous post (my perhaps over-intense review of/rant about Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind), I read the second volume in "The Kingkiller Chronicles," The Wise Man's Fear.  It was a better experience than book 1.  Kvothe is still insufferably competent, but this one shows a few cracks in his veneer.  Seems a bit like a lot of wheel-spinning, though; I probably would have made some structural changes to the end of book one and the beginning of this one.  Not sure how Rothfuss plans to wrap it all up in one more installment.  Now I'm almost done with Redshirts by John Scalzi, another book with a lot of hype that I find over-inflated.  Perhaps more on that later.

That's all for now.  I'll try to be back with a more substantial post sometime this week!

Get Over Yourself, You Overgrown Damaged Adolescent: A Non-Spoiler Review of Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind

Bonus post!  I just wrote this over at Goodreads and thought I'd share my salty mood with you all today.  And okay, sure, there is maybe one very mild spoiler, but it doesn't really reveal anything.  Read on!

There's nothing worse than a good story poorly told, unless it's a mostly good story mostly poorly told.  I'm not sure which this book is, but either way it's bad news.

Image taken from www.goodreads.com

I've seen Rothfuss and his work ballyhooed for some years now and was really looking forward to the chance to get into the first book of "The Kingkiller Chronicles."  By all accounts, it seemed to be a genre-mover, an epochal work that moves the boundaries of fantasy forward while paying homage to the best of what came before.  I was intrigued by the promise of a frame narrative, of a famous man mysteriously brought low, and of a creeping, misunderstood, demonic threat.  There seemed to be echoes of my loves, "The Wheel of Time" and "A Song of Ice and Fire" in the promised themes of real-world events turning to legend and myth before our eyes and of the meaning made by stories determined by the skewed perspectives of the individuals through whose eyes the stories are experienced.  It all sounds so good!

Sadly the book does not deliver.  Or it only delivers up to a point, which makes it supremely frustrating rather than just bad.

First of all, Rothfuss' work needs to come with a trigger warning for grammar-lovers.  Seriously, how did this book get past first draft like this?  Who is this guy's editor?  He or she should be canned immediately.  Small but noticeable problems abound, the most frequent being an inconsistent and maddening lack of facility with the conventions of dialogue and tags.  "'I think,' he said. 'That you are pretty.'"--that is NEVER RIGHT.  (Okay, it's right if your character hesitates and makes the statement into two sentences.  But if that's the case you should let us know that that is happening.  And I know, Patrick Rothfuss, that you were just doing it wrong, because you did it 50-75% of the time.)

Sorry.  I feel strongly that writers should know how to write.

The next big problem: the main character, Kvothe, is a baaaad example of whatever the male equivalent of a Mary Sue would be called.  Let's say a Marvin Sue.  (Oh, I guess some people say 'Gary Stu.'  I like mine better.)  The point is.  Kvothe is perfect perfect perfect, he was better at everything as an 8 year old than you will ever be at your one passion in life at age 30, he runs rings around the authorities, and everything bad in his life is inflicted upon him by his enemies and/or his cruel destiny, boo-hoo for Kvothe, but wait, thanks to his daring and cunning, he always gets his way in the end!  This human being is SO. DAMN.  FRUSTRATING.  And yes, he's charming, and occasionally shows some sensitivity, just enough to get you to want to follow his story and feel bad for him.  But his entire personality is so much revenge porn for the downtrodden nerdlings of the real world, and, speaking as one of them, I feel like we deserve better than that kind of pandering in our fiction.

(To say nothing of Kvothe's supposedly rapier-sharp wit.  Seriously, he talks like the picked-on kid in the schoolyard who hasn't yet come up with any better coping mechanisms.  But Kvothe is rewarded with gales of laughter at every turn.  Sigh.)

Then there's this authorial tendency throughout the text to seem tragically holier-than-thou compared to all that *snooty voice* run of the mill fantasy.  We're constantly reminded how real life isn't like the stories and Kvothe has to work so much harder than the heroes of his world's folklore and mythology because god damn it there is no God or Narrator who's just going to hand us a win.  Rothfuss makes such a point of it that it's obvious we're supposed to perceive Kvothe's story as this somehow rarefied, uber-realistic version of fantasy that, aside from magical metaphysics, abides by real-world laws of cause & effect and rationality and whatnot.  At one point, he says something very much like, "I wasn't going to find their plans written out on an accidentally-discarded piece of paper!"

A few pages later, enter the convenient plot swineherd.  He only travels this remote area once in a while, but he happens to be here at the same time as Our Hero, with not only the info Kvothe's looking for but also additional intelligence to propel the plot forward.

Look, I'm all for dissecting fantasy tropes and realism now and then.  But don't preach about it and then substitute the deus ex machina you just had your character basically decry as lazy writing with another one that you hope your audience won't notice (or perhaps that you, yourself, did not notice).

The sanctimonious attitude gets old, and it extends to Kvothe's rhapsodizing about music, about how non-musicians just can't understand beauty and love and perfection.  Oh, God's body, get over yourself, Patrick Rothfuss, you overgrown damaged adolescent.

And yeah, now I'm reading book 2.  That's the most frustrating part.  I almost feel as though Rothfuss structured his story as cynically as possible, knowing that no matter how disagreeable readers find the first volume, they will want the full story on all the hints and clues and intriguing bits seeded throughout.  I feel manipulated, and I'm 7% in and grinding my teeth at the same old usage errors, but I'm not stopping.

And yet this book is as highly-rated as I've seen anywhere.  I don't get it.  I honestly don't.  I'm usually fine letting people have their taste and enjoy their enjoyment ("I don't want to yuck your yum"), but this book violates the various laws and maxims and pet peeves that I've seen cited by numerous readers complain about OTHER books.  (Poorly written--check.  Mary Sue--check.  Sanctimonious underpinnings--check.  Manipulative--check.)  And everyone is eating it up.  I am saddened.

Maybe this will convince you to trash this book: Rothfuss writes "make do" as "make due."  Twice.

*cheery smile*  I hate what you've done to us, Patrick Rothfuss.

Westward Ho!

Welcome back to my blog, y’all!  I had a great time in the mountains the past couple weeks, exploring Denver and that playground of the rich, Aspen.  I also visited some relatively more rustic and rugged locales in and around Pitkin and Eagle counties, hiking, eating, and taking way too many low-quality pictures.

If I’m traveling, it means I’m visiting libraries, for my edification and for yours!  And I explored some great ones out in Colorado.  The three that I was able to spend time in felt like they had a lot in common: they provided clean, peaceful environments for research and study, a variety of innovative programs, and each seemed suspiciously like they had been built or remodeled in the past couple of decades.  I thought this especially interesting since the three libraries served different population sizes and types of communities: one was the vast Denver Central Library, the next the modest, rural Basalt Public Library, and the third the Pitkin County Library, a hub of posh Aspen itself.  To me this speaks of a unity of mission of libraries in the state as well as an encouraging unity of support from the community.  Granted, three libraries does not a thorough investigation of a state make, and all three are in the orbit of some of the most monied people in America (at least for part of the year), but I thought that the consistency of excellence across these three distinct libraries must be indicative of a supportive environment.

(My theories of a unified environment are further borne out by Colorado Libraries Collaborate, a statewide resource sharing initiative sparked by libraries volunteering to pool their materials for the good of the people of the Centennial State.  That’s my kind of ethos!)

I won’t bore you with the details of my trips through each library, but I did want to call out a few of the coolest features I noted!

Denver Central Library

Located just down the street from my hostel and at the confluence of downtown and a somewhat less affluent area, this central library seems perfectly situated to serve the needs of a big city’s diverse population.  The building itself, completed in the mid-90s, is beautiful, constructed in a style I have come to recognize as de rigueur in classy mountain design--stained hardwood, rustic touches, clean lines.  It’s a very inviting edifice.

The coolest thing about the long central entry hall is the automated conveyor belt book return.  So neat!  Thrill to the sight of librarians scurrying about behind glass like ants in a charming childhood memory.  Seriously, though, opening up this ‘behind the scenes’ business of the library is a great bit of outreach.

Off in one corner was another interesting touch: power check meters available for patrons to check out.  Perhaps not unexpected in a crunchy city like Denver, but I thought this was really cool.  Seems like the kind of thing a lot of well-intentioned people might think about getting around to doing someday, but never do it because--well, where do you start to figure out how to check your power usage?  The library takes the question away and hands you the tool to do it.  Fo’ free.

Obviously, me being me, I had to check out the graphic novel collection.  It was pretty sizable and seemed focused on adult, literary titles, including some I’d never encountered before.  They’re also arranged on a series upright racks with mostly outward-facing shelving, making browsing a breeze.  No chance here of that old problem of freezing in the face of an over-stuffed shelf full of wee little spines.  

Basalt Regional Library

I was probably most excited about visiting this little rural library, since it hosts one of my favorite innovative services--a seed library!

But first, again, the building itself is lovely.  Possibly the loveliest I’ve encountered, all earthy greens and browns and surrounded by bright mountain flowers that just invite you to roll around in them like an oxygen-starved puppy.

This library struck me as a true gathering-place and central community repository for a spread-out area, its bulletin boards overflowing with notices for events near and far.  And it’s just comfy, with big windows letting in plenty of mountain light over a fireplace-equipped sitting area.  One section of the library was given over as a ‘business center’ with staplers, paper cutters, and so forth, a feature that neither I nor my fellow librarian companion had ever seen before.  And in a sop to my Pagan heart, a Lunar phases poster was tacked to one wall!

The star of the show is the seed library, though, which ended up being a slightly unassuming-looking area right in the front of the building.  Unassuming, but brilliant and, by all accounts, effective.  For the uninitiated, a seed library is just what it sounds like: a way for folks to share seeds and grow their own food, “borrowing” the seeds from the library that they then “return” in the form of the seeds from their harvest.  The library here offers delicious-sounding seasonal veggies and some flowers, with one stated goal being the adaptation, from generation to generation, of these plants to the local environment.  And again, this is a service that might provide on-the-fence patrons with the means, and thus the excuse, to finally get started on a long-considered project.  Library as to-do list trimmer FTW!

Pitkin County Library

What I liked about this one was the veritable explosion of adult and teen programming available.  All over the boards and their digital video screen were notices of upcoming events in the library and the community: adult story time, a tattoo talk, teen read-alikes.  They are all presented very professionally--someone on staff is good with design--and cover an interestingly broad range of topics.  Very nicely done.

The graphic novel section is much more super hero-y here, which I certainly enjoy, though the all-ages items are tucked away in the teen section.  I might make a different decision there, but perhaps space is a concern.

The extensive music collection downstairs offers not only popular and classical musical recordings, but a very impressive spread of music-related books.  Biographies on Brahms rub shoulders here with Beatles songbooks.  Aspen is, after all, the home of the Aspen Music School and Festival, an annual masterclass that brings upcoming talent together with some of the greatest names in contemporary classical performance, and a town where you can often find fresh-faced young musicians shredding away at their violins and cellos on street corners, giving you a taste of impromptu selections of Sibelius and classic rock and contemporary pop in between your pit-stops at Rocky Mountain Chocolates.  (Mmmm, chocolate-covered oreo…)  Appropriately enough, the library has a complete collection of Aspen Music Festival recordings available for your historical listening pleasure--though access is, reasonably enough, restricted.  (And, music students, please mind the signs posted and addressed to you on all major exits: return library materials before leaving for the summer!)

Thus ended my exploration of Colorado public libraries.  I’m quite impressed by what I’ve seen, and if the whole state is filled with such vital, responsive institutions, I’m jealous indeed of all you Coloradans out there--rivers of hail notwithstanding.  (What is up with that, anyway?)

B.Y.O.B.G.

Just a quick post today as I prepare (mostly mentally) to fly to Aspen and see my boyfriend at his summer gig as an orchestra librarian at the Aspen Music Festival...

If you’ve read through most of my dozen or so blog posts so far, you may have noticed that I have a thing for ‘modern’ board games.  Unlike most of the gamers of this type out there, I am a relatively recent convert, so I’ve dived in headlong and am trying to learn about the medium on several levels at once--its fundamentals, its pedagogical value, its library value, etc--while simultaneously trying to sample as much of it as I can.  

I just wanted to write briefly about another aspect of the whole thing I’m pretty jazzed about--not merely consuming board games, but producing them.

It’s a really cool, rigorous mental exercise, and it’s fun too.  You can make a board game out of anything--go ahead, pick your favorite novel and try it.  The puzzle is in how to express the source material or domain’s flavor thematically, what game mechanisms to use that will be fun and play into the chosen theme, the ever-confounding matter of game balance, the object of the game, scoring, and how to trigger the end--it’s really hours and hours of the most fun labor you’ll have.

I’m currently working on my own little board game based on one of my favorite fantasy literature properties, the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson.  Okay, so it’s huge and sprawling and will probably take 20 hours to play (once I decide HOW to win the game, anyway, rather than my current play-into-infinity model--which is actually kinda thematically appropriate...).  

That’s the thing--in the world of modern board games, epic is okay.  And in this case, I didn’t want to ape the tendency other amateur designers have had to make a Wheel of Time territory control game (think “Risk” or my previously-reviewed “Game of Thrones: The Board Game.”)  Yeah, armies marching and nations falling are very important in these books, but there’s a human and interpersonal element that trumps all that.  The modern board game is a great medium to explore these more literary concerns, and actually put living human beings in the position of enacting them--getting them to think more deeply about the events of a book, and the conventions of a genre, as they do so.

But I’ve just had a ball deciding such things as whom, exactly, each player is playing; how to represent the world’s unique magic system, which is described like a kind of metaphysical weaving of five different materials into beautiful and destructive patterns; and just as important, how to represent the books’ pervasive theme of mistrust and intrigue and hidden danger alongside the rewards of all-too-infrequent collaboration.

I guess you could say it’s sort of like “Guess Who?” meets “Battleship” with, yes, a hint of “Risk” in there.  It’ll all take place on a giant map, after all.

Board game design would make an awesome library program, one that I intend to experiment with as soon as some nice library decides to hire me.  The games that our patrons create needn’t be as complex as the one  I describe and the ones that board game enthusiasts love to dig into; but of course, they needn’t not be, either.  Who knows what our patrons might come up with when we let them loose with some knowledge of game design?

To make a program even more library-relevant, if a little less free-wheeling, make it a challenge for participants to design a board game based on a classic work of literature that they choose.  Deciding how to represent Wuthering Heights on a piece of cardboard with a plastic “Sorry!” pawn representing Heathcliff might teach young adults more about the novel than any SparkNote could.

(And thank you, Wikipedia gods, for informing me that there actually is a Wuthering Heights role-playing game, which I did not know when I wrote that paragraph.  But--point proved!)

I would like to base my next game design venture on another topic very near and dear to me: librarianship.  Dear readers, what do you think some critical elements of a good library board game would be?

Opening Up a Can of Libraries on All the World's Problems

I’ve been thinking a lot about the world’s big problems lately.  Fracking poisoning our water supply, pesticide cocktails killing off the bees, climate change, privacy and the government’s reach (and the public’s inability to adequately gauge appropriate levels of either)--it’s all so overwhelming.  I believe that staying informed and voicing our opinions on these issues can help, but it’s a minor kind of help at best, a lot of the time.

So I like to go looking for domains in which the efforts of the little people can have outsized positive consequences. Luckily, my own lovely librarianship is one where small-scale and grassroots efforts are doing incredible things for communities, the country and the world by bridging access gaps, addressing special needs, promoting literacy and so much more.  Here are just a few of my favorite examples of such efforts--I hope they brighten your occasional gloomy outlook!

• The Volunteer Librarian Brigade: This radical, grassroots effort based in New York City brings the ‘roving librarian’ concept to a whole new, and necessary, level.  It doesn’t occur to many people out on the street to go to a library to get help, so these folks bring the library to the streets.  Professional librarians train volunteers in the basics of reference and research work, then they all head out to make a difference.  If you’re in the New York area, consider joining up!
• Librarians Build Communities: In the same wheelhouse, this is a web-based service pairing librarians (and their skills) with communities and organizations in need.  It’s another kind of roving, this time focused on the things librarians do that are not necessarily book-oriented.  Why haven’t we been doing this for decades?
• The Internet Public Library: Another go-where-they-are entry, this website brings reference services to the masses over the non-threatening medium of the Internet--and as a bonus, it provides real-world experience for LIS students, which is always great (and somewhat rare!).  Search their site or submit a query, and dedicated (or dictated) volunteers will soon have a detailed answer for you.  It’s hosted by Drexel University’s College of Information Science and Technology, so you can trust their quality-control to have some cred.
• Little Free Library: As far as i’m concerned, this one is almost venerable at this point--not because of age, but because of the impact it’s made during its existence.  So simple, so good.  The mini libraries built with the support of the folks running this show are cute, artsy, and/or surreal in form, and they’re popping up all over--taking ‘take a book, leave a book’ up a level or twelve.
• ALA Think Tank: Social media drives this community that underscores the quirky, funny, and unabashedly rough-hewn side of librarianship.  This group is an incubator for great ideas and great librarians.
• LibraryReads: This is a brand-new book recommendation initiative.  It’s extremely open--any employed public librarian will be able to contribute recommendations and reviews once the service launches in the fall.  Sure, it’s a major undertaking with a snazzy website and everything, but by its nature this kind of reader’s advisory has a very personal touch.  And of course, pulling book recommendation out of the hands of the publishers’ echo chamber and the rarefied ivory tower of the critics can only be a good thing for readers!
• Libraries Changed My Life tumblr: A great public outreach tool.  What better way to pump up the public than by asking them to share their own beautiful bibliotecky memories?  The posts so far are funny, sweet and throat-lump inducing.  And it’s a tumblr blog, which is just so full of win right now, to use the argot of the day.
• Queer For Books: An individual effort that fills a serious gap, this evolved from an LIS student project into what is, in my ever so highly qualified opinion, the go-to resource for LGBTQ resources and knowledge for the information professional.  LGBTQ patrons tend to languish on the underserved side of public institutions, due to the population’s innate tendency toward invisibility and a lack of awareness of those knowledge gaps on the part of non-LGBTQ professionals.  This fills those gaps most admirably for librarians.  Big kudos to my web-friend Sami Gardner for building this.  If my readers do nothing else with my blog, please put this site in your toolbox!
• The librarian who banned a book: I love this guy and what he did and why he did it.  He made a stir over what is often an ossified  issue that is often condemned by rote, or worse, ignored entirely.  Of course we all mostly oppose book banning, but until it happens in our community, we are rarely moved to agitate for the right of freedom of expression and inquiry.  If that sounds gloomy for this hope-oriented post, take a page from DiMarco and...ban a book at your library?  Never thought I’d be saying that...
• Librarians LOUD: Okay, so this might be a little bit of tooting my own horn. I was part of a group of library students at the University at Buffalo who staged this three-day event last year, which included a game-filled festival, lively panels, an information booth, visible read-outs around campus, and a rally outside the university president’s office building.  The goal?  To raise awareness that we exist, that we have voices, that yes, you need a  master’s degree to be a librarian.  We hoped to get students and faculty talking about those noisy, kooky kids with the silly signs out on the pavement--and we succeeded.  Now we’re planning Librarians LOUD 2--Louder and Librarian-er! (That’s not what we’re calling it.)  This year, we’re hoping to get other schools and libraries involved, too.  Wanna be loud with us?  Email me at andalex34@gmail.com!

The point of all of these examples is that everything librarians touch turns to gold.  Okay, maybe not gold, but we do a lot of things to make a lot of things better--our patrons’ lives, their communities, and our own profession.  Radical, individual, and/or grassroots expressions of the knowledge, power and importance of librarianship help move society forward.

That makes me feel better.

Foster the Best Impulses

I visited friends over the weekend in Ithaca; one of them is staying there to work for the summer, and it was the first geographic opportunity for four of us, friends since high school, to all get together in the same place at the same time in many years.  It was a wonderful reunion, but I won’t get into all the boy-watching debauchery here.

The three of us who were left on Saturday found ourselves armed with a set of ridiculous photo-booth pictures and decided we had to arts-and-crafts them into commemorative picture frames.  Cue the trip to the pharmacy to make copies and to Bed, Bath & Beyond to tiredly heckle a sweet assistant manager named Isaac (we love you, Isaac) and buy matching frames, followed by a frantic slice and dice until we had three charming keepsakes for our walls.

One of my friends mentioned that if we hadn’t all been together to put this together, it would likely have stayed on her to-do pile for months, if not forever.  The rest of us agreed.  It didn’t matter whether we had all the supplies and the best will in the world; it would get pushed off, superseded, a folder in the good intentions file.

But together, we had the positive pressure of community, the immediacy provided by shared experience, to spur us to complete our task.  I use the word ‘task,’ but it’s a pleasure--the first thing many of us decide is not important enough to take up space in our busy lives--and a pleasure heightened by working on it together.

Libraries can provide that community and that immediacy, spurring patrons to get down to brass tacks on those feel-good projects right away.  Whether the library budget can sustain the collection of art supplies or participants have to bring their own, there is no price for those primary, invaluable  commodities.  

Market your library as the place for get-togethers of all types to end up.  It could be a small reunion like the one I had this weekend, or it could be the bachelorette party, the retirement gala, the high school reunion.  Instead of leaving the commemoration or memorializing to one person or a committee, let it be the capstone of the group fun.  Leverage the sense of community and immediacy into a way to keep your community’s to do lists uncluttered and happy!

And provide that feeling for those who aren’t part of some big group or formal event.  Set a table aside for patrons to gather and foster a feeling of community even among strangers.  These resources, these ineffable feelings that occasionally drive us, need not be rigidly situational.  Libraries are the perfect place to set up the conditions for the community to thrive creatively, so foster those impulses while they’re hot and stoke them when they’re cool!

There's too much sad and discouraging news today to do a blog post--including people's reactions to some of that sad and discouraging news.

I'm off on a little trip this week, but I'll try to find time to post something more substantial at some point.

It's a Point of Contact: The Importance of ALA Annual

Looking forward to ALA, I thought I would have a ton to say about it on my blog.  And I do--I just don’t want to provide a pointless rehash of the sessions I attended and vague descriptions of the people I met.  I have to keep my audience in mind--a habit I am striving for--and that means providing entertaining relevance.  And maybe a little ranting.  

 

I suppose that general impressions of such a major event  are not to be despised, since I’m a first time attendee and a major conference is always quite the bouleversement.  But I don’t want eyes to glaze at this, of all times.  Because if there was ever a time for you to be excited about the fact that I’m a librarian, it’s now.

ALA taught me that I’m going to take my MLS and smash everything.  Based solely on the sessions that I attended, I am going to integrate immigrants into my community, rescue homeless LGBTQ teens, turn 20-somethings’ library ‘mehs’ into ‘MMMMs!’, and transmit the love of truth and justice down through the generations in delicious four-color funnybook format.  I’m going to schmooze charmingly, make great professional friends, speak French as if I’ve been doing it every day, and stare Cory Doctorow right in the mean mean FACE every freaking day!

I sound like I’m joking.  I’m not.  As far as ALA would have me believe, I am capable of all these things.  ALA took one set of PLA jumper cables, set me in a puddle of LGBT Roundtable, and turned on the overly-loud-and-earnest Brandon Sanderson juice.  And I met Gene Luen Yang!  ALA completed my life.

I know this euphoria will wear off, but I think that periodic jolts of this energy will keep me flying through my career.  I want to live up to the expectation those librarians, newbie and veteran, up on the stages and panels lit in me.  It doesn’t even look that hard to BE them!  I can do that!  I can talk for 15 minutes about Librarians LOUD!  I can!

Look, I had an amazing time.  I need to thank my three great library-buddies, Esther Jackson, Natalie Bennett and Bryan Sajecki.  I wouldn’t have even been able to go if they hadn’t invited me to tag along with them.  The car ride was hilarious.  Our shared hostel room was chill.  Wandering around Lincoln Park was lovely.  And knowing, even when we split up to go to the various sessions that interested each of us, that we’d be reuniting in a few hours to chatter about what we learned and who we saw and how dumb some things were and what we wanted for dinner...well, that took the whole thing beyond level of ‘professional development.’  Thank you for sharing it all with me.

I also really have to say that it’s not as overwhelming as everyone makes it out to be, this big conference.  Maybe it’s just me and my experience with comic-cons and weekends at Times Square, but the people-crush stress actually struck me as rather mild--moderate at most.  If I can offer any tips to feel merely whelmed: familiarize yourself with the layout of the venue; be aware of where you’re going and when you have to be there; and remain flexible to avoid stress if things don’t work out as you planned.  Sometimes it’s good to deviate from the schedule if opportunities to network or schmooze come up.

In fact, I only got stressed out on the occasions when I was forced to deviate from my schedule against my will due to transit issues, and this brings me to my major gripe with ALA as an organization: they seem not to have given any serious consideration to the needs of lower-income attendees such as little old moi.  My main evidence is the utter lack of transit support for anyone who might have chosen to stay outside of the handful of high-priced hotels ALA recommended for our use.  My friends and I chose to trade off proximity for the economic benefit of staying in an affordable hostel in the Lincoln Park area, only to find it very difficult to navigate to the conference on the first morning we tried; even after we had it all figured out, the trip took about an hour, and we were spending significant amounts of mental energy trying to piece together alternate routes that might cut the commute down.  

Look, I know you can’t provide every attendee with curbside limo service at a thing like this.  But some nod in our general direction would have been appreciated--like a warning among the first-timer material that the commute from outside the immediate city core will take an inordinate amount of time, or an insert among the other transportation materials about the closure of a key metro station along the way.  (That would have saved us one mega venue-overshoot, but to be fair, I guess, the city of Chicago didn’t do a great job making that clear either.)  And would it be that onerous an undertaking to poll prospective attendees on their intended accommodations and say, “Gee, if these guys are choosing to stay somewhere that cheap, maybe we should spare them a little time and money by providing a shuttle to that area”?  Perhaps more attendees would then choose to stay in the littler, cooler neighborhoods of a given city, better spreading the librarian love around our conference site.  (Every bartender and drunk bystander we informed of our profession was endlessly fascinated.  I quite enjoy the “You need a master’s degree for that?!” conversation.)

It wasn’t so bad, in the end, and I love public transit, but I’m just kind of offended that our economic bracket was so low on the list of concerns.

If at all possible, go with friends.  Look up buddies from your LIS program if you’re not particularly close to current co-workers.  Yeah, it helps keep costs down, but that’s the smallest part of it.  My friends and I had such a wonderful time; we built in-jokes, proudly represented our field, fed off each other’s excitement from good sessions and relieved each other’s boredom from bad ones...I’ve already covered this territory, but it bore repeating.  Don’t go alone!

Now, besides recounting my trials and triumphs at this year’s conference, I would like to talk about the importance of ALA.  I’m very aware that what I’m about to write is pretty touchy-feely, maybe naive, and definitely pro-status quo.  There are lots of things wrong with ALA, and groups like ALA Think Tank on Facebook do a good job of articulating them and providing alternate voices, a chorus of which I hope to be a part; but I also happen to think that the annual conference is where the best of ALA comes out.

So...what is the best of ALA, its importance?  What does it reach beyond its bureaucracy and occasionally out-of-touch policies?  The excitement, the ideas, the sharing, the opportunities for expression. It’s a point of contact, where librarians of all shapes and sizes bump up against each other and where intellectual osmosis works its wonders.  It’s the availability of easily copycatted ideas, because when it comes to making our libraries work, there’s no such thing as plagiarism--or at least we’re all more willing to cite our sources than the average high school paper-writer.

It’s a point of contact, again.  The engaging that members of our profession do with another city each year, making a positive impression on a population--the engaging of the profession as a body with a city as a being.  Actually I would like to see this done more self-consciously in future.  Let’s paint Las Vegas librarian.  I don’t want a single gambler to be unaware of what’s going on around their slot machines next June.

Jiff--the world's most photogenic dog!

It’s a point of contact, for small photogenic dogs and brash cynical hipster chicks and a forlorn representative of the National Library of Qatar and a transitioning MTF teen and blue-collar Muzzy executives and a self-published Beowulf comic creator and OA aficionados and Snowden apologists and an interactive robot and and and and and...

ALA, I hope to join you in painting Las Vegas librarian next year.

Lincoln Park, you've been painted librarian.