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Sunday morning started bright and early with the Alibris User Group breakfast at 8:00 am. I serve on the Alibris Collection Development Award panel and the winners were announced at the breakfast. When I read the finalists’ applications this year, I promised myself I would never complain about our acquisitions budget again because these were libraries that had NO budgets. They were trying to meet the needs of their clients in any way they could. This year there were three winners: YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, for books for sexual assault survivors; the Bahia Street project, providing books to girls on the streets of Brazil; and Granby Public Library, to replace books destroyed when an irate citizen literally bulldozed the library along with 12 other public buildings. I am not making this stuff up. In the small group sessions at the breakfast, I told about our plans to incorporate the Alibris Donate-a-Book feature in the “South” course that ZSR will participate in with Drs. Smith and Hattery this summer. The public library system in Hancock County, Mississippi will list the books they lost in Hurricane Katrina and the 20-25 Wake Forest students in the class will solicit their families, friends and colleagues to donate these books from the Alibris website. I hope it works out.
Next, I attended the ACRL Presidential Candidates forum. EBSCO promised light refreshments but instead it was a lovely full-blown lunch! I came to support Erica Linke, Associate Dean at Carnegie Mellon, and one of our University Libraries Group (ULG) colleagues. I lost some of my appetite for the ALA and ACRL bureaucracy years ago, but I do admire those who continue to make slow progress year after year, committee by committee. They do good work for all of us and I feel we all owe them our support.
Although I didn’t originally intend to, I went to the ALA President’s Program, “Learn to FISH” about the world-famous Pike Place Fish Market and their unique customer/employee experience. Bill and I had walked through the Pike Place Market on Thursday and saw the super-friendly guys in orange rubber jumpsuits. The four guiding principles to their work (that we could all learn from) are
- Play
- Make Someone’s Day
- Be There
- Choose Your Own Attitude (my personal favorite)
I left the FISH program early to attend the end of a Director’s reception with Ex Libris (our new ILS vendor since they merged with Endeavor). My first contact was positive, with an Ex Libris staffer based in Jerusalem, but then I was surrounded by ex-Endeavor employees and I made a quick exit. More on that when we get back to the ranch.
So now I sit in the hotel room, hoping Tom Brady and New England don’t blow the game to the hated Peyton Manning…but they did.