jessamyn

Reports from New Orleans

People have been writing up their experiences from the ALA Conference in New Orleans. I’ll be linking to a few of them here. Feel free to send on conference summaries [not just conference blogging] and I’ll link to them.

Proud to Swim Home, New Orleans After Katrina by Karen Coyle
Notes on ALA Annual 2006 by Jim Casey
On New Orleans and the American Library Association by Phil Tramdack director of Bailey Library at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania

You can find more incidental reportage and pictures by checking the PLA Blog, your favorite sites for the ala2006 tag or browsing HitchHikr’s ALA 2006 Annual Conference section which actually does pretty much the same thing with slightly more together layout.

I had a very good time in New Orleans. My small photoset is here on Flickr. There was an appealing synchronicity to the city’s struggles and renewal with a lot of the things that have been going on in my own personal life. It was a good time to do a lot of walking around and thinking, interspersed with talking library talk with friends and co-workers. I have been to New Orleans many times in the past fifteen years, and the city is so clearly changed. A lot of that change carries baggage, feelings of betrayal, of abandonment, of regret.

I found the librarians were well-received and it felt good to feel that money spent in New Orleans may have been helping a larger recovery effort. By the time I left, late Wednesday after the last Council meeting, the city felt empty and a little hollow. It was easier to pretend that things in New Orleans would be okay when there were 20,000 shopping and eating librarians populating the place, but by the time most people had gone home, there was an eerie emptiness and I just kept feeling “I hope things are going to be okay.”

librarian joke

Posted on 25Jun0625Jun06 by jessamyn

I went to a panel discussion the â€œCatalog Transformedâ€ featuring Andrew Pace, John Blyberg, Jina Wakimoto, Jill Newby and Cindy Levine. Andrew showed off their Endeca-based OPAC and explained why it had a feature set that ran circles around all the other currently available tools. Cindy did some sample searches and generally showed the thing off. John Blyberg, speaking about his ILS Customers Bill of Rights started out this way, “How many people in this room are satisfied with their OPAC?” No one raised their hand… except for, after a moment, Andrew Pace. Bump, set, spike.

See you at the PLA Blog

Posted on 25Jun06 by jessamyn

I’m in New Orleans and arrived safe and sound depsite the same travel problems that everyone else seemed to have. I’m in the Council information session listening to Leslie Burger talk about (I might say “defend”) her Library Corps idea which I have mentioned before in these pages. It was interesting to see some people’s responses to it, and her responses to them. I should be blogging for the PLA Blog on and off over the next few days.

Answers, we have Answers

Posted on 24Jun0624Jun06 by jessamyn

Sarah points to an article on SearchEngineWatch by Danny Sullivan about Yahoo Answers.

I’m interested in this particularly because I moderate and contribute to a similar but more blog-oriented site called Ask MetaFilter. The idea is simple. It’s a place where the 38,000+ members of the MetaFilter community blog can go ask each other questions and get answers. You can categorize and tag your questions, and everyone in the community gets to ask a maximum of one question a week. There’s a feature for marking “best answer,” marking favorite posts to keep track of, and asking anonymous questions which is quite popular. Each question has its own RSS feed. So does each tag. There’s a $5 [lifetime] barrier to entry that keeps the site from becoming just a one-off “free questions answered here!” site and there’s a group we informally call the MeFiBrarian Posse of info professionals (some of whom I’m sure you know) that answer questions like this one that I answered this week which seem like more typical reference questions. I’ve answered over 2300 questions since the beginning of 2004 and you can read every one of them. Going to where the user is, indeed.

I don’t know much about the traffic side of things, but MetaFilter is one of Technorati’s Top 100 blogs and AskMetafilter gets about as much traffic as the main part of the site. I spend a lot of time there keeping questions on track, helping write and organize the FAQ, putting out fires, enforcing the community guidelines, and being one of the human faces of a very effective website. I am the only librarian on a staff of three. I know I spend an awful lot of time talking about my small libraries and their trials and tribulations, but it’s worth knowing that there are also jobs in the online world at all that can test the mettle of even the most super-social and savvy librarian.

ALA, en route

Posted on 24Jun06 by jessamyn

Here is my schedule for ALA. I am even more interested than usual in meeting new people or hanging out with people I don’t see often enough. I know this would be easier if I had a cell phone, but hey I’ve got Wifi in the bizarre swampland they call JFK airport . I also know there’s free Wifi in the convention center [instructions here], so remember my contact info from the previous post and get in touch.