Professional Development

Hello everyone. Greetings from sunny and warm Philadelphia. Much of my conference time is/will be spent doing association business; that doesn’t make for interesting reading, so I’ll try to keep it brief.

Yesterday, I met with the GODORT Steering Committee. This meeting takes place at the start of the conference and the chairs of the various committees and task forces meet with the roundtable officers to share information about what they are planning to do at the upcoming conference. We also talk about some issues that are of interest to the organization as a whole, such as virtual membership and the new push to open ALA-run listservs to all ALA members, not just those members of individual organizations.

This morning I met with my other committee, the ACRL Bylaws Committee. We approved proposals from two sections who want to amend their bylaws and forwarded those proposals on to the ACRL Board.

This afternoon I spent some time in the Exhibit Hall and saw a friendly face, Bill Kane, at the Alibris booth.

I was able to go to part of the GODORT update and did hear two good presentations that might be of general interest. The first was by David Oldenkamp from Indiana University. He talked about a search engine he had created: Intergovernmental Organization Search Engine. Google now has a set of tools that allows one to create a customized search engine, called Google Co-op. Other sites that allow one to create customized search engines include Eurekster Swiki. Other search engines that folks might be interested in include one for ALA-RUSA Best Reference Websites and one David called the ’search engine for the library world’: LISZEN.

Marilyn Parr then provided an update on several projects at the Library of Congress. If you haven’t taken a look at LC’s American Memory Project, I highly recommend it. And, I wouldn’t be a good government information librarian if I didn’t point out A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation especially. Also take a look at this video, which gives a vision for the World Digital Library that is in development.