Conference Season Is Upon Us

ALA’s annual conference gets underway today in Anaheim, CA. For me, ALA is the New Year’s Eve of conferences. Usually, on New Year’s Eve, I stay at home and watch the night unfold on television. One year, though, my wife and I went to Times Square to celebrate. It’s the same way with ALA: usually, I stay at home and follow the conference through blogs by attendees. Last year, though, I went to the conference in Washington, DC.

If I am going to attend one library conference a year, I pick SLA’s annual conference, which was recently held in Seattle, WA. I’m presently the chair-elect of the Government Information Division, so you could say I’m a bit biased. But even if I weren’t involved in a division, I would still opt to go to SLA. To continue to the holiday metaphor, SLA is like Christmas. It’s a time for me to get together with library and information professionals with related interests to mine. I find that SLA is more specifically geared towards issues that I would encounter on a regular basis.*

That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t sessions about government information and government libraries to be found if you’re heading to ALA. I went through the preliminary conference program and picked out a few sessions of interest:

Sunday
10:30 am to 12:00 noon
What Is the State of Federal Libraries

1:30 pm to 3:30 pm
Gov 2.0: Going Further with Wikinomics

Monday
8:30 am to 10:00 am
EPA Libraries Forum

10:30 am to 12:00 pm
Libraries & Government: Issues, Services and Strategies

This is not the complete list, so if you’re interested in government information and government libraries issues, look for sessions sponsored or co-sponsored by the Federal and Armed Forces Libraries Round Table (FAFLRT) or the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT). These two round tables can cover a lot of your government information needs at ALA.

One of the most worthwhile sessions FAFLRT puts on is the Careers In Federal Libraries [PDF] pre-conference session. If you are looking for work in federal libraries and want to get a sense of the types of jobs that are available, this is an essential session to attend. Of course, I’m telling you about this program, which requires registration, the day before it happens. I don’t necessarily recommend crashing it, but hey, you never know if space opens up.

Don't worry if you can’t make it, though. The Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC) posted videos from last year’s session. I especially recommend the presentation [PPT] by Amy Loughran, librarian for the U.S. Army Training & Doctrine Command (TRADOC). She explains how to apply for a federal position, and suffice to say, it isn’t a matter of just sending in a cover letter and a resume.

* As an aside, to continue the conference-holiday comparison, Computers In Libraries is the Thanksgiving of holidays, where I get together with my librarian friends and, usually, go out to eat. Internet Librarian, meanwhile, is like Labor Day. I never do anything for Labor Day, although I suppose one of these days I’ll throw a barbeque or something. Similarly, at some point I’ll make it to Internet Librarian as well. There are other conferences that I could compare to other holidays like Halloween or St. Patrick’s Day, but why belabor the metaphor further?