Professional Development

Yesterday was a long day of travel, and introduction to ACRL, and a bit of exploring for me.

I left the Greensboro airport at 6:30 to get into Seattle around 1:00ish. I found a friend from the NCLA Leadership Institute at the Houston airport, so she, her husband, and I all took the bus into the city together. I checked into my favorite Seattle hotel, the Moore, which is an inexpensive (for Seattle!), older, quirky, independent place in a great location. My roommate for this conference is Rebecca (Kranz) Freidman, and it’s been great fun to catch up.

(photo by allaboutgeorge)

After checking in, I dashed off to the First Time Attendees session. I love the idea of these sessions, but didn’t hear about ALA’s until after I was pretty well versed in the conference. It was really useful, explaining what to expect out of this conference compared to others, how to get involved with ACRL, etc. The main differences I’m seeing so far: much smaller than ALA, no meetings (so it’s all about learning, yay!), much more compact, and many more familiar faces.

At this point I was really hungry, so I missed out on the speaker (though I lived vicariously through tweets) and went out to find my first real food of the day. I knew my schedule for the rest of the conference is scheduled for every minute, so I took advantage of the chance to get out and see the city a bit. I’m really glad that I did. The weather and views were just amazing, and it’s supposed to get rainy tomorrow. It looks like that was just about my only chance to see everything. Here’s some of what I did:

Today I’ve attended the scholarship breakfast, a talk on peer evaluation of teaching, and I’ve checked out the exhibits and cyber zed shed. I’ll do a real post on them for Friday’s post!

Today was a long travel day to arrive in Seattle for tomorrow’s start of ACRL 2009. Mary Beth and I caught a 6:25 am flight from Greensboro and arrived at our hotel around 1 pm (western time) after 7 hours of flight time and a stop in Houston. Roz flew on a different airline and showed up mid afternoon. Since the conference doesn’t start until tomorrow afternoon, Roz and I took advantage of the beautiful, if cold, afternoon to ride to the top of the Space Needle and visit Pike Place. We ended up at the Convention Center to pick up our conference materials so we can plan out the next few days (which we are doing as I type). The conference is being touted as being their greenest one ever. The conference bags are made from recyled material and the opening reception tomorrow night will use bamboo plates and compostable silverware. Tomorrow morning all three of us will taking advantage of a social networking opportunity as we join up with other conference attendees to go on a tour. Tune in tomorrow to hear about the “Chocolate, Wine and Waterfall” tour!