AL eh?

This conversation actually happened:

"Hey!"

"How's it going? Great to see you at ALA."

"Great seeing you as well- thanks for sending that information, by the way."

"Sure, not a problem. Uh... what did I send again?"

"Umm... I don't remember off-hand... but I'm pretty sure it looked useful."

"Well, then- you're welcome?"

How to debrief yourself

So last week I went to the ILLiad International Conference in Virginia Beach to sequester myself by the sea along with a few hundred of my closest resource sharing colleagues to share ideas, compare best practices, and try our hardest to resist the siren call of the ocean. Despite ever-shrinking budgets, short staffs, and the (albeit painfully incremental) progress in virtual conference attendance I'm still a huge fan of the real deal, as I firmly believe that the physical experiences of travel, serendipitous conversations, and late-night bull and/or brainstorming sessions over a couple of drinks by the fire pit is an experience that the digital world can not yet fully replicate.

No offense intended to Second Life, but actually going somewhere else other than your office for several days also means that you may fully immerse yourself in an alternate reality so that your conference experience may be transformative as well as edifying. There's a certain magic at work at a good conference that makes you almost intoxicated with all of the new possibilities that are revealed by simply getting a glimpse of what other people in your field are doing, thinking, and aspiring towards. But how do you keep that magic alive, once you return to your daily grind? This is a challenge that I've struggled with over the years, but I think I've finally made a breakthrough in bottling up your conference magic and making it a renewable resource of inspiration.

When you do finally get back to work, before you do anything else of substance and definitely before you attempt to dig yourself out of your email, your inbox, or whatever it is that has piled up in your absence (trust me- a few more hours of accumulation won't harm anyone) go back over your conference notes in their entirety. I like to use Twitter as my preferred form of note-taking at conferences, as not only am I following the conference hashtag anyway, but by going back and cutting-and-pasting everything posted to that hashtag I can capture not just my own conference notes but everyone else's as well. This can be especially useful if you are at a conference with multiple tracks, many of which you may wanted to take but couldn't due to scheduling constraints.

So what I do is take the whole Tweetstream for the conference period, copy it into Word as text only, then paste that again into Notepad - actually I use Notepad++ because I like its additional editing functionality - so I can go through each individual Tweet line by line. Then I edit this text for content, deleting all of the interpersonal Tweets (and most of the jokes) until I've boiled it down to useful information for both myself and my colleagues at work.

While I'm going through this editing process, I will inevitably stumble across ideas I'd like to follow up on, interesting books I should read that were mentioned by other presenters, and colleagues whom I will remember to email to ask about X, Y, and Z. Assuming that most of these tasks are simple enough to do in a minute or two, I will do them as I edit, so that I don't table the thought and forget about it, as there's nothing worse than being inspired by a good idea at a conference and then completely failing to explore it once you get home.

While I'm making this pass through the Tweetstream, I can't help but recapture a lot of the enthusiasm and excitement of the conference itself - this is a huge shot in the arm for me, especially when I've just gotten back and am vulnerable to the post-conference blues - not to mention hashtag withdrawal! As I send out emails, Facebook notifications, and Tweets to follow up with other attendees I'm hoping that I'm sharing a little of the magic as well, and then when I organize my Tweet notes into a conference update for my colleagues here at work (I'm also planning to share my ILLiad 2012 notes online) I will keep the inspiration flowing in a positive feedback loop.

As luck would have it, I actually had a job interview here at Harvard today as well. While going to a library conference is generally a good way to get into the right frame of mind for an interview, I found that reviewing my conference notes this morning really energized me about the issues I ended up talking about. I'm curious to see if anyone else out there has any additional practical strategies for keeping the "conference buzz" going after the fun is over - if so, please feel free to share!

Make It Happen 2012: Day 5

Professional development is always a tricky prospect, because to a very large extent the opportunities are defined more by external factors than internal motivation. That being said, even during these times of declining library budgets I've been able to attend a few more conferences than I otherwise would have been allowed to go to by presenting instead of simply attending. My presentation about international interlibrary loan at the IDS Conference in Oswego, New York in the Summer of 2010 garnered a couple of additional invitations from impressed attendees, and I was just informed that my joint proposal with a colleague to present about our electronic document delivery service (aka Scan & Deliver) was accepted for the 2012 ILLiad International Conference in Virginia Beach.

What I've really missed, however, are the ALA Conferences, which have been more or less off the table for a few years due to reduced travel funds. This was a bitter pill for me to swallow at first, especially as I was only just getting my feet wet as a budding library professional with committee work when the hammer came down. Fortunately Boston comes up on the Midwinter circuit frequently enough that I've been able to attend two of the January meetings, but aside from one summer in Anaheim (2008) I haven't been able to attend the Annual Conference since then. Now that my wife is finishing her Masters in Library Science this June, however, I would really like her to experience the full library conference experience- the fact that Annual will be returning to Anaheim this year means that we could even bring our daughter and make a Disneyland vacation of the long weekend while we were at it.

So I put in for the travel funds today, emboldened by the news that due to some recent departures we might actually have enough professional development money to go around. Even if I don't end up getting approved, I suspect that my wife and I will find a way to Make It Happen anyway, because 2012 is shaping up to be that kind of year. Just the same, I'm hoping for good news. And who knows? Maybe ALA will become a regular gig again, and I'll be able to pick up where I'd left off with my committee participation. Now that's optimism!

After the sky

There are Giants in the sky!
There are big tall terrible Giants
in the sky!

Maybe it's just the air travel that always makes me think of this song from Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods whenever I go to a library conference, but the more I reflect upon the phenomenon the more I'm convinced that there's something deeper going on. Having just returned from Interlending & Document Supply in Chicago, I thought I'd take a closer look at the lyrics and how they apply to the library conference experience.

When you're way up high
And you look below
At the world you left
And the things you know,
Little more than a glance
Is enough to show
You just how small you are.

Conferences provide both perspective and context. Simply being removed from one's everyday library environment is an important aspect of this shift in perception, and one of the main reasons why virtual conferences (as relatively cheaper and useful as they may be in certain circumstances) will never be able to replicate fully the experience of traveling and meeting your colleagues in person.

One of the more humbling aspects of Interlending & Document Supply was the international scope of the conference. Even working for a major university library I routinely felt that each speaker was opening up vistas that I could only dimly apprehend before, giving me a true sense of my place in the grand scheme of global research sharing.

When you're way up high
And you're own your own
In a world like none
That you've ever known,
Where the sky is lead
And the earth is stone,

You're free, to do
Whatever pleases you,
Exploring things you'd never dare
'Cause you don't care,

Being at a conference can be absolutely liberating. While you may have some colleagues there whom you look forward to seeing again, often you will find yourself in an unfamiliar setting (perhaps in a city you've never even been to before), speaking from the heart and sharing your thoughts and opinions with total strangers. As much as this social aspect of conference-going can be daunting, I always look forward to those serendipitous encounters that bring me in contact both with new colleagues or people I've actually been doing business with from afar for years.

In that light, it's funny and a little frightening how one's reputation can precede oneself among your peers. On the first day of ILDS I was standing in line talking with someone when suddenly the person in front of us whirled around and said: "Wait! You're Tom Bruno?" As it turned out, she was a colleague at a library that we have a lot of dealings with, many of them rather complicated and headache-inducing for both of us to resolve. Never in a million years did I think I'd meet the person at the other end of those ILL requests, but now that I have I feel a much closer kinship than I had before. I had worried that I was at the very best a "frenemy" in her list of resource sharing contacts, but by the conference's end we were fast friends.

When suddenly there's
A big tall terrible Giant at the door,
A big tall terrible lady Giant
sweeping the floor.
And she gives you food
And she gives you rest
And she draws you close
To her Giant breast,
And you know things now
that you never knew before,
Not till the sky.

I'm a fairly extroverted guy when I need to be. but the library conference experience always pushes my limits in how social I can be. After an exhilarating day of engaging presentations and thought-provoking conversations with fellow libraries during coffee breaks and over lunch it can be sorely tempting to crawl back to your hotel room and zone out in front of the Food Network for the rest of the evening, but a conference is charmed time. You only have it for so long, and once the opportunity is lost you will almost certainly regret having squandered it on something mundane that you could do any day of the week at home.

There are indeed giants in the sky, but the rock stars and superheroes of our profession are more accessible than you might think. After hours is the time when keynote speakers, distinguished presenters, and guests of honor mix and mingle with the rest of the conference attendees, and there's literally no telling who you may end up talking to after the first two glasses of wine. It's okay to be a gobsmacked fan- I must have amused the heck out of the folks of the Center for Research Libraries by telling them over and over again that visiting their library facility was on my "Bucket List" of things I wanted to see before I died- but it's not okay to be a wallflower.

Only just when you've made
A friend and all,
And you know she's big
But you don't feel small,
Someone bigger than her
Comes along the hall
To swallow you for lunch.

And you heart is lead
And your stomach stone
And you're really scared
Being all alone...

And it's then that you miss
All the things you've known
And the world you've left
And the little you own-

The fun is done.
You steal what you can and run.

No conference can last forever. At some point your brain will be filled to bursting with new ideas and you will be so emotionally tapped out that even the prospect of gourmet food and an open bar won't be inspiration enough to spend another night out on the town with your fellow librarians. It's funny how quickly this threshold can be reached at a good conference, which is perhaps all for the better that some of the best library conferences I've attended over the past few years have kept it short and sweet. No sooner have you accepted this caffeine and adrenaline powered whirlwind of ideas as your reality than it is time to leave- and suddenly you are rushing to make your travel connections because you pushed your conference agenda to the very envelope so as not to miss so much as a minute of the magic.

My flight out of Chicago on Wednesday night was sufficiently late that I was able to take that Bucket List tour of CRL I had always wanted, plus visit the brand spanking new Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, where robotic cranes pluck items out of high-density storage bins and whisk them up to a glittering reading room under a glass dome. Between the charter bus scheduled to ferry us from library to library and the thought of having to ride two subway lines to get back to the airport- not to mention the prospect of having to run the TSA gauntlet once I got to O'Hare!- I was already sweating bullets as the conference was declared closed in the early afternoon; fortunately, however, my colleague at the University of Chicago helped me avoid a full-bore panic by arranging for an early tour of the robots at Mansueto and even drove some of us to the nearest L station (thanks again, David! You are a prince among librarians).

Fortune favors the bold- sometimes it even smiles upon the foolish...

And you scramble down
And you look below,
And the world you know
Begins to grow:

The roof, the house, and your Mother at the door.
The roof, the house and the world you never thought to explore.
And you think of all of the things you've seen,
And you wish that you could live in between,
And you're back again,
Only different than before,
After the sky.

Coming home is always a mixed blessing. On the one hand it's nice to be back among friends and family, and who doesn't look forward to sleeping in their own bed after several nights in a hotel? But returning to the office can be jarring, even after just a short conference. When I was a support staff member I would invariably dread whenever my supervisor came back from a library conference, as she'd want to implement all of the new ideas she had picked up from her colleagues... usually all at once!

Now that the tables have turned and I am the one coming back to the office in a hyperstimulated state of mind, I more keenly appreciate the dilemma my previous boss must have found herself in. I try to temper my enthusiasm, but at the same time I don't want my time up in the sky to have been all for naught. Trying to share the creative energy one brings back from a conference without overly disrupting your support staff's daily workflows is a more delicate balancing act than I had imagined when I was on the receiving end, but it's the most important part of attending a library conference in the first place.

This is why we go to conferences, not only so that our experiences there change us for the better, but so that we can share our experience and effect positive changes of our own when we return. It will be a long day indeed -- if ever!-- before this transformative aspect of conference-going can be replicated by other means. Until that day arrives, I will always look forward to the next opportunity to visit the giants in the sky, and as a manager and future administrator I will be sure to advocate that this kind of professional development be properly valued for what it is.

Librarians should be going to conferences not despite declining financial fortunes and shrinking travel budgets, but precisely because of these pressures. It has never been more important for libraries and librarians to share what they know, and there is no better way to facilitate such an exchange of information and experience than by coming together in person. Our email boxes are filled to bursting, our RSS feeders overwhelmed with blog entries, and our social networks are already jammed with so much noise that it is difficult to cull any meaningful signals. Library conferences on the other hand provide an intense albeit brief period where most if not all of our mental and psychic bandwidth can be devoted to absorbing ideas and contributing to the Big Picture issues which so often elude us in our workaday lives.

We need the giants. We need the sky. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a cynic or a fool.

There are Giants in the sky!
There are big tall terrible awesome scary wonderful
Giants in the sky!

PAX Postscript!

Hey, remember when I editorialized that PAX East was way too big for its Hynes Convention Center britches? Apparently I wasn't the only one who noticed this- according to Boston.com, PAX East 2011 and 2012 will be held at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in the Seaport District. I'm already looking forward to it!

It's funny- when ALA Midwinter came to town this past January I was not pleased in the slightest that it was going to be taking place at the BCEC and not at the Hynes. But after spending the past few days elbow to elbow with tens of thousands of gamers, the prospect of the larger venue's wide open spaces (and infinitely superior wi-fi) make me appreciate the new convention center for what it is.

Conference debriefed

ALA Midwinter has come and gone once again, and my head is spinning after meeting so many people, absorbing so many new ideas, and just generally having a great time! Although my Monday conference plans were thwarted by six inches of wet snow early this morning, I feel like I accomplished quite a bit over the past several days. And yet, mindful of the Set Sail For Fail discussion I participated in on Sunday at the Networking Uncommons, I have the urge to examine my conference experience and see what wisdom I can offer for future ALA attendees:

1. Put everything in your planner. Even if you're only tangentially interested in something, or you are already double or triple booked for that time slot, don't omit anything from your conference schedule if you think it might be worth going to. Plan for the unexpected, and be sure to have readily-accessible options in case your day radically changes on you. Although ALA does a great job of making the information available both in print and online, trying to figure out where you should be next when you're wandering around the convention center is more difficult than you'd think.

Next time around I'm going to load up my Google Calendar with everything I might possibly want to do (and, just as important, where everything is taking place!) so I have a quick reference wherever I go...

2. Don't be afraid or serendipity. No matter how well you've planned your schedule, you'll run into a million different opportunities that you hadn't even considered before you shipped off to the convention. You'll run into a colleague you haven't seen in ages, or stumble into an interesting program in progress. I know that many of you are here for specific purposes (some of them pertaining to committee membership, some of them work-related) and there is often little margin for happenstance, but try to be open to it if you can.

Over the past several years I have swung between going to ALA with a completely open agenda and overprogramming my time here with section-related meetings and other business, but this time around I seem to have struck a nice balance between the stuff I ought to be doing and the stuff I want to do. For example, I made sure I made the time to meet up with several librarians I only know from Twitter and other virtual correspondence. Not only was it great to put names to the faces, but I can't wait to see them all again at the next conference.

3. You will not be able to do it all, but you'll love every minute of it nonetheless. Going to ALA is a lot like visiting Disney World- there is no way to ride every ride, see every show, and eat every churro. Due to the fact that the conference was in Boston this year and I needed to be mindful of both the logistics of my commute in and out of town and the fact that I had a family who wanted to see me at least once or twice during the long weekend I knew that I was going to have to make some sacrifices about what programs I could attend and how many people I could see.

Instead of obsessing about what you can't do, be sure to enjoy what you're doing! I may not have been able to see everyone I know who was at this conference, and I'm still kicking myself over some of the meetings, events, and receptions I missed, but I did a lot of things. I caught and Tweeted some excellent presentations (including LITA's Top Tech Trends), met with some excellent colleagues-- such as Andy Woodworth and JP Porcaro of 8bitlibrary.com-- and even won a $25 gift card from Barnes and Noble for sharing my sad tale of Fuzzy Bunny Fail.

Needless to see, I'm already looking forward to my next conference- safe travels to all of you who made the trip to Boston, and see you in Washington D.C. in June I hope!