ALA Mid-Winter 2008 Recap: Convention Center

I’m back!  Back from sunny, sandy, tropical island breezy Philadelphia.  I jest!  Twas cold, though nice, and sunny for much of the conference.  Had the center been built like the sadly lacking Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York (Brilliant Notion: Let’s turn a greenhouse into a convention center!) the sun might have been a problem, but Philadelphia lent itself nicely to being overrun by librarians.  There was a burst of rain on Sunday night, but on the whole spirits were high and the streets were dry.

So!  I’ma gonna done recap you up.  Not entirely.  I won’t walk you through every minuscule detail of the convention (example: The Philadelphia Conference center’s handsoap in the ladies’ restrooms smells like white ginger – this is true) but I’ll touch on the highlights.  Skip to the part you want to read via handy dandy headlines.

REGISTERING: Roller coaster rides and cliff faces

When you walk into the a convention center where ALA has managed a takeover, you are always surrounded by large helpful signs that direct up and down and across and under and through.  I missed the opening night reception, but was able to find the Registration area fairly easily.  There were odd tiers set up above your head where librarians would perch in comfy chairs and survey their tiny antlike peers below.  It looked like something out of King Kong.  You half expected a large malevolent ape with an MLIS degree to start hooting from above.

There was also a Guitar Hero set-up.  I played Medium level on a Strokes song on Guitar Hero III.  It was not pretty.

I’m getting better at working the convention floor.  In the past I was inclined to take 50 posters and 200 books with me, struggling all the way.  Now I’m pickier.  I’ve noticed that the posters either rot in my home or, when I take them to work, join the hundreds of other posters we already have.  Plus with the upcoming Donnell Library move, it doesn’t make sense to be bringing stuff in to the library.

I don’t usually go all girly on you, but it’s too spylike not to find at least a little neat.  Runners-up included a lace headband from, again, Random House to promote The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray.  And third was a pen from Hyperion talking up the Kadir Nelson book We Are the Ship.  Pens are of infinite use.  If every book had its own pen I’d be that much more inclined to read them.

ALA NOTABLES

I attended a couple talks while at the conference, but the most interesting by far was the Notables.  ALSC (the Association for Library Science to Children) selects the best books, recordings, software, and videos for kids each year and makes a list.  The book committee is one of the few that anyone can sit in on.  As the committee discusses each title and debates the relative merits of one book or another, you find yourself watching them, discussion list in hand, as editors, agents, librarians, joe schmoes, etc. sit around you.  At the back of the room are all the books being discussed, which you can look through for reference.

Of course, due to conflicts of one sort or another I always end up sitting in on the non-fiction and poetry discussions.  This is fine except that more often than not I haven’t read most of the books they are discussing.  This year was no exception.  They’d already discussed Tasting the Sky at Annual, so I wasn’t able to hear them talk about it.  At the very least I heard them regard Strong Man by Meghan McCarthy and The Wall by Peter Sis.  I heard them tear into the book Walker Evans by Thomas Nau because the photographs had been cropped and discuss whether or not the lack of index in Edward Hopper by Susan Goldman Rubin was a problem or something they should ignore.

Not everything makes it onto the discussion list.  Books that were missing for reasons I cannot hope to begin to imagine included:  Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney, Leepike Ridge by N.D. Wilson, What Will Fat Cat Sit On? by Jan Thomas, Faeries of Dreamdark: Blackbringer by Laini Taylor (though they may have classified it as YA), The Owl and the Pussycat illustrated by Stephane Jorisch, and Grumpy Bird by Jeremy Tankard.  So, as you can see, they miss things along the way.  The full list is not up yet, but I’ll keep an eye out for when it is.