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ALA Marginalia
- What Does Virtual Annual Look Like to You?
For the first time this year, “big ALA” experimented with offering a virtual conference component of its Annual Conference. While some of the divisions have done this in the past (ACRL, PLA) and AASL is currently running a parallel virtual event, this was the first time we’d tried this for the monster, “big kahuna” Annual Conference.
While you may be thinking about MidWinter because it’s just around the corner, we’re thinking about Annual, so the Conference Planning Committee has already started talking about how to improve next year’s virtual Annual. We have a three-year contract with Learning Times, so that will be the platform, but many of the other pieces are up in the air at this point, which makes it a good time to ask for some input.
We can’t promise anything at this point, but what’s your wishlist? There are already some “givens,” but building a structure around them, what would you like to see? Here are just a few of the questions we have, but feel free to give us feedback around other issues, too.
- We can’t do this for free, not if we want to offer a quality, stable video feed. Keep in mind, though, that our members do tend to stream some of the more popular sessions, such as Top Tech Trends, and that will continue. Which sessions are you okay with as volunteer streams versus quality feeds?
- We can’t stream the keynotes because the speakers don’t give us permission, and in fact, they usually forbid it. Otherwise, though, what types of sessions do you want to participate in remotely?
- What does “participate in remotely” mean to you?
- Where are the price points that fit? Are there tiers or does one-size-fits-all work in this type of situation?
- Where can we add value to improve your virtual conference experience? Are you more interested in just sessions, or do you want virtual hallways, networking opportunities, and other comparable experiences, too? If it’s the latter, what do they look like?
- If you’ve seen this done well somewhere else, we’d love to hear about it. Just give us a URL and a description of what you liked about it.
This is your chance to give us input to help shape the future of virtual ALA conferences, so please share your thoughts!
- MentorConnect on the Launchpad
Update: MentorConnect is now live – go to your Connect profile and give it a try!
We’re excited to announce that next week, we plan to launch a new service within ALA Connect called MentorConnect. Now that we’ve finished phase one for the site (collaborative work space, profiles with networking, and offering the ability to create communities that live outside of ALA’s hierarchy), we’re focusing on implementing two new services aimed at members who want to get involved professionally, but not necessarily at the committee level.The first of those projects is MentorConnect (”MC”), a service that allows ALA members to create mentoring profiles that highlight their expertise and experience. After they’ve joined MC, any ALA member can search for a mentor using a variety of criteria (gender, type of library, ethnicity, etc.) and request mentorship. Once created, the mentorship is tracked within MC, with a space for providing and archiving feedback. The system will even prompt you every few months to make sure you’re staying in touch.
Here are some screenshots that show some of the features. This first one is an example of a mentee profile. Mentor profiles look pretty much the same.
Once you’ve created a profile, you can then search for a mentor.
MC keeps a record of all of your mentors and mentees, including past ones.
At any time, you can view the feedback for a particular mentorship. When you add new feedback, the other person will get an email notice, and she can log in and reply.
The MentorConnect tab will appear on your profile next week, along with a link to it in the left-hand sidebar. If you don’t like something about MC or if you encounter a problem using it, please let us know. If you do like it, let former ALA President Jim Rettig know, because he funded this initiative during his term. Thanks, Jim!
- Green Report on 2009 Annual Conference
ALA’s Conference Services director Deidre Ross has shared a report from McCormick Place, venue for the 2009 ALA Annual Conference exhibits and many meetings. During the meeting we diverted 65% of waste from landfills.
Deidre explains, “The report was provided by Allied Waste which shows the total tonnage of a variety of recyclable materials that were reclaimed during our event, along with the percentage of waste which was diverted from landfills (diversion rate) and the environmental impact of these efforts. The report tries to focus on two main statistics which evaluate overall performance: the diversion rate and the total tonnage. The diversion rate is a great indicator of successful capture of recyclable or reusable materials. The year to year changes in total tonnage may indicate changing habits by exhibitors and attendees which include the reuse of materials or bringing fewer materials which may go to waste.”
She continued, “We also sent out a green questionnaire to exhibitors and if they answered the questions correctly as to their recycling efforts, they received a “Green Exhibitor” sign for their booth. If we all partner together we can continue to improve and save the environment.”
Deidre is optimistic about diverting 70% … or more … at the ALA Annual Conference is Washington, D.C., June 24-29, 2010.
Karen
(I think if you right click on the image you can view it with type large enough to read … still learning to embed images.)
- ALA Holiday: Labor Day
The ALA offices will be closed Monday, September 7, 2009 in observance of the Labor Day Holiday. Regular hours (M-F, 8:30-4:30 Central Time for Chicago, and 8:30-4:30 Eastern Time for Washington and Choice) will resume on September 8.
- Summary of Online ALA2009
Everyone knew there would be a lot of online activity during the 2009 Annual Conference, but I think even we were surprised at just how much people came together on social media sites around the event and the sessions. Clearly there’s going to be parallel event online for all future ALA conferences, one driven completely by people and not by planners.
So here’s a benchmark for future measurements, because for the first time, we’ll have an archive we can refer back to, at least for Twitter, which was the most heavily used site during the conference. Here’s a summary I wrote for Keith Michael Fiels, ALA’s Executive Director.
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Some numbers:- Flickr: 4,011 pictures
- A Google Blogsearch says there are about 14,000 posts using the tag ala2009, but that’s not really right because it includes the Flickr pictures, comments on blogs, etc. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to get an exact count. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of the posts are recaps of someone’s conference experience, followed closely by summaries of sessions, and links to presentation materials (in that order). Some samples:
- Twitter: 10,362 tweets using the #ala2009 tag by 1,321 authors (including the ALA Annual account and other ALA units)
- tweets before: 765
- tweets thu: 680
- tweets fri: 1380
- tweets sat: 2390
- tweets sun: 2250
- tweets mon: 1725
- tweets tue: 589
- tweets after: 583 (7/15-24/2009, although tweets continue to appear so this number will still increase a little)
- by tag:
- #ala2009 – 8517 (this was the main hashtag that we asked people to use)
- #ala09 – 415
- #alacouncil – 82
- #membership – 39
- #totebag – 265 (an unofficial snark channel)
- #unala2009 – 450 (the unconference)
- #acrl101 – 22
- #ala09_is – 8 (ACRL Instruction Section)
- #ala2prom – 26 (Library 2.0 session)
- #lib2.0 – 118 (Library 2.0 session)
- #ttt2009 – 35 (LITA’s Top Tech Trends)
- #toptech – 43 (LITA’s Top Tech Trends)
- #bigwig2009 – 13
- #clene09 – 10
- #clenets09 – 6
- #godort09 – 3
- #mobile_lib – 50 (WO panel)
- #rusaht – 6 (RUSA Hot Topics session)
- The reason I can give you such specific stats about the tweets is that ALA member Heather Devine offered to create an online Flickr/Twitter tracker for the conference a couple of weeks before the event. She finished it just a couple of days before Annual started, having done most of the work while she was on vacation. You can see it still running, and she’s going to give us the code and database so that we can 1) archive it, and 2) implement this for other conferences in the future. I can’t begin to describe how lucky we are that Heather did this, because there’s no good way to archive tweets right now, and we don’t have the resources to create this ourselves. The site got a lot of notice and a lot of hits during Annual, with Roy Tennant in particular noting it. I’d like to request that ALA to send Heather a letter of thanks if possible for this herculean and incredibly valuable effort.
- LJ very smartly did a daily recap of what they considered to be the “best” tweets of the day. Reading through them gives an excellent overview of the conference.
- Saturday
- Sunday
- Monday
- Eric Hellman did an analysis of the ala2009 hashtag
- Then there was the interesting, but relatively harmless, appearance of the anonymous alasecrets and alasecrets2009 accounts on Twitter. While they were discussed, retweeted, and linked to online, those tweets didn’t spill over very much into the mainstream hashtag, and in fact, it allowed the really nasty stuff to stay out of the ala2009 space, which was good for us. One media blog picked up on it and noted it in a post, but that was about it. Someone shut down the original alasecrets account when it devolved into sex talk, but others had saved the tweets and posted them on Scribd, and the alasecrets2009 account took over where the first one left off. LJ did an interview with the anonymous originator of both accounts.
- According to Boopsie, more than 1500 people downloaded their ALA2009 application. I’m unclear if this figure includes people like me who accessed it on the web. It garnered a lot of praise online, with a couple of people tweeting that it helped them find a session when they didn’t know where it was.
- There are also a ton of great videos on YouTube from the conference, including several of the book cart drill teams and a wonderful fake fight between Neil Gaiman and James Kennedy for the Newbery Award.
- The staff of American Libraries did their usual, wonderful job covering the conference. See their blog posts on Inside Scoop, videos on AL Focus, and the Post-Conference issue of AL Direct for a full overview of everything that happened at #ala2009.
I know my conference experience was better because of these online components. What was your experience?
- Holiday: July 3
ALA staff in Chicago, Connecticut (Choice), Pennsylvania (ALTAFF), and DC (Washington Office) will be enjoying a holiday, Independence Day, on Friday, July 3, with all ALA offices closed. All offices will reopen at 8:30 a.m. local time on July 6.
- Use the Conference Materials Archive
Last year we inaugurated the ALA Conference Materials Archive, on a wiki at http://presentations.ala.org/. The wiki already includes links to materials from earlier conferences, along with links to similar material from some of ALA’s units. The goal is for all collateral conference material to be linked in some way from this wiki.
So, if you are a speaker at the ALA 2009 Annual Conference in Chicago, this is *the* place for you to upload your handouts, or to publish links to your material, if it is resident on another site. Posting materials prior to conference ensures immediate access by attendees — waiting until after the conference means missing a valuable opportunity to share their knowledge and insights.
Go green! Post your handouts to the wiki before the conference–and you don’t have to make paper copies! Just note their availability during your presentation (add “view or download more information at http://presentations.ala.org/” to your last .ppt slide, for example). This does work–the SLA conference has been largely paper-less for two years now.
Unlike last year, the wiki is not pre-loaded with program titles, but it is organized by day/time. When you add your program, please be sure to include the full text of the listing as in the final program, especially including unit acronyms(!). Full instructions on using the wiki, including the attribution license, and a suggested convention for organizing materials and links, appears on the wiki.
If you will not be with us in Chicago (still time to change your mind!) or if you have one of those inevitable conflicts, know that there is now a place to find the conference material, this year and into the future.
Please also know that you can always contact the ALA Library (library@ala.org) for assistance with locating more about a particular program.
Karen Muller, ALA Librarian
- ALA Connect Update and Schedule
If you’re an ALA member, you should have received an email about ALA Connect yesterday. We’ve been doing PR for the site through other channels (American Libraries, AL Direct, etc.), but this was the first time we’ve directly contacted members. Initial responses have been positive, and according to Google Analytics, we had more than 2,200 people visit the site yesterday alone.
So today seems like a good time to do an update on statistics and to talk about Connect’s immediate future a little bit. First, some new, aggregate numbers for April 6 – June 16 (roughly 10 weeks).
- Total # of users who have logged in: 3610 (3196 ALA members + 414 non-ALA members)
- Total # of posts: 406
- Total # of online documents: 265
- Total # of calendar events: 162
- Total # of polls/votes: 25
- Total # of discussions (in forums): 143
- Total # of images: 19
- Total # of comments: 761
- Total # of new communities created: 81
So usage is consistent and steady, and we’re not seeing a major drop-off, which is a good sign. Now that we’ve let everyone know about the site in as direct a way as possible, we’ll continue watching these numbers. The Google Analytics chart below suggests even greater usage since it’s for only an eight-day period.
Now that we feel like we’re through the official launch phase, we’re moving on to the next big thing for Connect. We’re currently migrating from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, and we hope to go live (seamlessly) with the new version after our Annual Conference. Then the “really big plans” kick in.
We’ve worked with ALA President Jim Rettig to implement two exciting initiatives from his campaign. We plan to integrate a mentoring network by the end of July and an “opportunities exchange” by the end of August (think grants, volunteering, fellowships, awards, etc.). After that, we’ll be implementing a new search engine and then the new conference event planner for Midwinter 2010.
It’s a pretty packed year for Connect, and your feedback will be critical as we implement all of this. Let us know what you think!
- New Member Benefit Discount from Books-A-Million
Good news: we’re unveiling a new Member Benefit discount with Books A Million on purchases in-store and online this week.
As a preview, members can simply use your member ID number to get 10% off at www.booksamillion.com/ala or 20% off at over 220 store locations around the US. Other details for Organizational members will follow soon. And keep your eye on the mail for a special discount card from Books-A-Million, exclusively for ALA members.
We hope that this new benefit program will help you stretch your personal and library budgets. Contact John Chrastka, Director for Membership Development, for more information at jchrastka@ala.org.
- ALA to be closed Memorial Day
After a grueling winter, spring finally arrived in Chicago this week! And it arrived just in time for the psychological starting point of summer: Memorial Day.
We and our colleagues in the ALA offices in Connecticut (Choice), Pennsylvania (ALTAFF), and DC (Washington Office) will be enjoying a holiday, Memorial Day on May 25, with all ALA offices closed. All offices will reopen at 8:30 a.m. local time on May 26.
