I attended my first ALA 26 years ago and my rough back-of-the-envelope math tells me that the 2026 one was my 13th or 14th ALA annual over the course of my career. Just like my first one, this one was in my favorite big city in the US – Chicago. ALA has changed a lot over these 26 years – in many ways. The first one I attended in Chicago in 2000 had almost 25,000 attendees while the one this year was just shy of 15,000 – so it has shrunk substantially. But on the positive side, the exhibit floor now welcomes zine creators, comic book illustrators, gaming booths (Magic the Gathering was even holding ‘how-to’ sessions), and a much more diverse set of vendors, authors, and illustrators.

I am going to give some summaries of sessions I attended and link to images of posters I saw, but I think what I most want to convey is that there is still real value in going to the ALA Annual Conference – maybe not every year – but to see the depth and breadth of our profession in one place is humbling and reassuring. We are not all fighting the same fights, but we are all fighting for our patrons, our information environment, our communities and to be in the presence of so many other fighters is invigorating. There are real issues in ALA right now, and real issues in our profession, but the people and the work they are doing in their public, academic, school, and special libraries tell the story of why what we do matters so much. And any chance to learn from others doing hard things, exciting things, innovative things, creative things, is not to be taken lightly. So if you have ever thought ‘I wonder what an ALA conference would be like’ I encourage you to talk to your supervisor, chat with me or any others of us who have been, and keep the possibility open of attendance. Next year it will be in New Orleans, so if your ideal weather is, like my oldest son’s, ‘terrarium’ – you should totally go – but after that it’s Denver.

OK – off my soapbox and on to what I saw and heard.

• The opening session ended with a Q&A with Rachel Maddow who walked out and looked at the crowd and said ‘I HAVE A CRUSH ON ALL OF YOU’! She spoke eloquently about the work we do and how without archives saving things she would never have been able to do the work she does. But she also told a great story about how so many of the books in her personal library were formerly library books and she asked if we cried when we got rid of them – she was taught the word ‘weeding’ and hated it
• The Impact of Tariffs on Libraries: This was a session put on jointly by my ACRL Section the Politics, Policy, and International Relations section and the Government Documents Round Table. It was actually fascinating! The first speaker was a law professor from University of Chicago and he walked us through the tariff process and seemed to appreciate that his audience was very familiar with classification systems so when he showed tariff numbers and explained the components we all kept up with him! Other speakers discussed how tariffs are impacting purchasing, ILL, and special collections.
• AI Chatbot: the university of South Florida created (with the help of an internal grant) a site-wide chat bot (called LINK) in an effort to pull some of the more mundane questions about their library and policies out of their chat – freeing up librarian time. And it worked but they also acknowledged that with the increased use of ChatGPT and such to find out basic information that it might not be needed much longer. It was resource intensive to develop (they used CoPilot Studio) and remains time-consuming to keep up. You can test it out by clicking Ask Us on their web site and clicking ‘Continue with LINK’.
• Ethical AI Use in Libraries: This session drove home a theme I heard a lot around the conference and that is that libraries are one of the few institutions that most Americans still trust (despite the small but loud contingents out there yelling about them) and that we should not go so far into AI that we lose that trust. We need to be vigilant about AI content creeping into our databases and catalog and take action when we find it. We need to speak up when vendors bring AI to their products in unwanted ways (one speaker mentioned that Overdrive is introducing eye tracking for ALL users – even children!). But the panelists also said that we can’t bury our heads in the sand because our job is to help users navigate our information environment and that environment is saturated with AI so just deciding not to use it or teach about it is not an option.
• There was a session on the academic job market for librarians that I thought was going to be more about what job seekers need to know but was more a presentation on the CORE Best Practices for Academic Interviews which focuses on the recruiting institution and what we should be doing (we are doing most if not all of it). There were some good questions from job seekers at the end that showed what they were concerned most about (many mentioned how stressful meals are – something for us to think about, perhaps).
• I always find Poster Sessions to be the most interesting thing at any conference and this one did not disappoint. I grabbed images of several that might have interest or relevance to folks here in ZSR ranging from spaces, to instruction to outreach. If any of these are of interest and you want to get in touch with the folks who did them but can’t get the info from the poster, I can look up contact info on the ALA app so just reach out.
• I had an interesting vendor dinner with Coherent Digital where I learned about a nascent verification idea they are working with called TrustMarc built on the idea that much grey literature (what Coherent specializes in) has gone through rigorous verification pathways at their home organizations even if it’s not technically pure peer review.

All in all a successful ALA Annual Conference!