This article is more than 5 years old.

In my experience, Saturday is almost always the busiest day of any ALA Conference. The cab driver on the way in from the airport asked why librarians had their conferences over the weekend because most other professional groups start on Monday. Good question. In any case, I found myself with three things I wanted/needed to attend in the Saturday 10:30-12:30 time slot. My committee obligation won out, so I attended the ACRL/University Libraries Section/Communication Committee and conducted the normal business on the ULS website, newsletter and brochure. That got out a little early, so I dashed over to the MARS program on “The Next Evolution in OPAC’s and Search Engines” just in time to hear the presentation on EBSCO’s implementation of Grokker, but not in time to hear what I really wanted to hear about Endeca and Aquabrowser. I saw the back of Susan’s head at the program but had to duck out in time to meet my lunch partners – three public librarians from Phoenix who did the 3 Day Walk with me last November. On the advice of the hotel concierge, we went to Wild Ginger, a lovely Asian fusion kind of restaurant, sort of along the lines of Xia in Winston (which if you haven’t gone to yet, you need to). After lunch they were all going shopping (where is your work ethic? I teased) but I went back to a Google presentation from 1:30-3:30. I love Google; can’t help it. The staff are all so fresh and idealistic, ya gotta love ‘em. A lot of things I already knew about Google Scholar and Google Book Search and Google Earth, but I learned some new things too, especially Google Co-op, which I had never heard of and is kind of a conservative wiki-type enhancement to Googling. UT-Austin was just announced yesterday as the latest Google Book Search partner, mostly to add the strength of their Hispanic collections. I made lots of notes to ask various people about on my return. At 3:30 I needed to attend a meeting on SOLINET business and that ran late until almost 6:00 so I had to miss the SPARC program on scholarly communications that I wanted to attend. Bill and I had a dinner date at 7:00 pm with his new boss’s boss, in the midst of which I heard from my brother that he couldn’t find or reach our mother who was visiting in Florida (looooong story I won’t bore you with on the blog) but finally when we got back to the hotel he had talked to her and all was well. That was the end of a long day.