Another library conference

ALA's annual meeting is next week, and I'll be attending. The last time I went it was the summer right before I started library school and I found the whole thing a bit overwhelming. This time I have a much more focused sense of what I find interesting and/or useful so it was much easier to narrow down the list of possible sessions to just the ones I want to attend.

Interestingly, now that I'm working in a special library and doing knowledge management, I'm finding that not many of the sessions are really relevant for the kind of work that I do. I've never been to an SLA conference, and I wonder if they would have more sessions that would be more directly relevant?

Despite that, there are approximately eleventy-billion sessions over the course of the conference so I did manage to find a few good ones. I'm particularly looking forward to:

• The (Screen) Casting Couch: Tips and Tricks to Effectively Use Screencasting Tools for Library Instruction
• Blasphemy! When Religious Values Clash with Intellectual Freedom Values
• Will Shortz

And of course, one of the real highlights of ALA is the exhibit hall and the load of free books and posters that one can acquire there.