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The meeting for my second ALA committee (LLAMA BES/LIFE=Library Leadership, Administration & Management Association, Building & Equipment Section/Library Interiors, Furnishings and Equipment Committee, whew!) took place this morning. The sole purpose of this committee is to generate programs for ALA Annual. Program planning takes about 18 months from conception to execution and has to go through much vetting. Since my first experience with this committee at midwinter, there has been no activity on my part as one or two committee members will take on a proposal and shepherd it through the process. I was glad this morning to finally get a chance to volunteer to assist one of the in-process programs being developed. That will be the best way to learn how things work in this bureaucratic organization, and make myself useful in the process.

I finally had to give in and take a taxi to ensure that I arrived at McCormick Place in time to see Roz’s panel juried paper presentation on Reviews of Web Guide Software for Libraries. It was an intimate presentation due to lack of marketing by ALA, but was very informative, as you would expect!

Next stop (luckily, still in McCormick Place) was BIGWIG’s Social Software Showcase, where we broke into small groups and heard lightening round discussions of a variety of social software applications and technologies including cloud computing, Google Wave, mobile, drupel, mashups and facebook pages. The presentations are available on the BigWig site and tweets about the sessions can be found through the hashtag #sss09.

After a shuttle bus ride back to the same hotel where my first meeting was this morning, I’m heading into an interest group session on Scholarly Communication. So more later!