Valiant_200 (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} valiant_200) wrote,@ 2006-07-07 02:36:00 |
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The ALA Convention
For the past several years The Petal and I have been attending various conventions together, but always just for fun. None of them have been professional. This year, we decided to both attend the American Library Asscociation's Summer Conference which was held the last weekend in June at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.
Saturday was our first real day of the con. I had an "Exhibits Only" badge so my movements were somewhat limited. While Petalbreeze attended programs, I roamed "The Stacks," the Association's name for their exhibitor's room. First off, I made as quick of a dash as I could through the entire area to get a feel for where everything was. This thing was really big. There were all manner of booths packed into five of the large halls of the Convention Center, over 1,500 in all, according to the Exhibit Guide. Most of them were huge corporate vendors of things like furniture and databases and circulation management systems utilizing RFID chips and, gasp, even BOOKS. The exhibitors were nationally and internationally recognized names like Thomson Gale, McGraw-Hill, Scholastic Books and BWI, the giant book vendor to libraries nationwide.
Naturally, I was partial to the technical and computer oriented exhibits, the most fascinating of which were the large commercial scanners that scan entire books to digital files to the tune of 10,000 pages an hour. The RFID technology is interesting as well, but I already know how this technology works and I have my misgivings about its use, so I didn't spend a lot of time at those booths.
Since I don't work in the library profession, there wasn't much for me to look at seriously in "The Stacks," but there had been a few things that caught my eye. Unfortunately, most of them were the blinky, blingy promotional pins that several attendees were sporting. Those who know me understand my nearly uncontrollable fetish for little blinky lights. I had three hours to kill so I decided to settle on the dual goals of talking to some interesting people and to snare as much of that "electric sex" as possible.
So began my odyssey that would take me to dozens of booths, sometimes drawn in carny style, other times voluntarilly, and put me in conversations with people from places like Utah and Vancouver and Illinois who expressed varying degrees of ignorance regarding the mess that Katrina made in this area. I do not believe that their ignorance is necessarily their fault. I blame TV news, which stressed looting and violence over the human tragedy that resulted from the flooding, and I was happy to gently disabuse them of the notion that all is well in New Orleans.
Through these discussions, I learned that there is a not-so-hidden hidden message of the ALA Convention in New Orleans. The city wants to put a brave face forward in hopes of luring more convention business to the city and they intend to use the ALA show as an example of how functional the city now is. The message that I took away from it was that the convention center is fine and recovering, but the city itself is still badly wounded.
C-SPAN 2 was shooting "Book TV" on location, with their production bus taking up about three vendor stall areas in the back. There was an EFP crew shooting in The Stacks all afternoon that I presumed to be from C-SPAN. I mostly avoided getting in the shot. I did take a tour of their "Book TV" bus and took a bunch of pictures of the interior, which was all very nice and new, but much less advanced than I expected to see for a nationally distributed channel. The bus was very functional, with a small but complete studio and a small, spartan production room. There seemed to be little to no edit capability on the bus and I was surprised to learn that that the vehicle had no uplink on board. The most advanced technology that I could find in it was the two remote controlled cameras. Apparently, this vehicle is used more for promotion than for actual production.
By the time 5 O'clock rolled around, I had snagged three different varieties of blinky promotional pins. The first and easiset one was from Thompson Gale. I scored that one before Petalbreeze had even left for her programs. "Get some bling from the king," exclaimed a man in a kingly costume as we approached the booth. Clearly, these people will do anything to sell their reference texts, including stooping to the level of employing tacky costumes, but at least they have a sense of humor.
The second piece of bling I noticed turned out to be the hardest to find. It was from a group called "Backstage Library Works," which provides something called "Retrospective Conversion," whatever that is. The bling is a blue star with 5 red and one blue LEDs. It is cool looking, but the white text on a blue field makes it essentially unreadable when flashing, rendering it nearly useless for its intended purpose of promoting the product. In fact, because it was so poor in that regard, I had to ask at least three people where they got theirs before I was able to find the booth for myself. It was at this booth that I encountered the most profound ignorance about the plight of the Crescent City. The salesman was an older gentleman and his name badge told me he was from Utah. He seemed to believe that the problem of cleanup belonged firmly in the hands of the victims. "If they won't come back and clean up their own mess, who's going to," was his comment. When I told him that 2/3rds of my neighborhood was wiped out by the storm, he asked me why I chose to live there. Tough crowd, but I was there for the bling.
The Google people were much cooler and I scored a total of three of their blings, and no snooty remarks about the storm were to be heard. The Petal got a new ball cap for me from Google as well. It is an awfully nice hat for free which means it is probably implanted with an RFID chip so they can track me in real life the way they attempt to do online with their infamous "persistent cookie."
I met up with The Petal and Miss Linda from the library at the Hilton hotel at 5 PM. After a short wait, we were joined by 4 people from one of the vendors that services the library and we
all took a cab to Broussard's restaurant for dinner. If you are ever in New Orleans and you want a really good meal, AND you have deep pockets, Broussard's is the place for you. I had the red snapper and The Petal had grouper and both were excellent. At one point, a clumsy waiter spilled The Petal's wine all over her and her dinner, but the replacement dinner took only about 5 minutes to be served. That proves that they keep you waiting on purpose when you go out to dine. Dessert came with dinner and I opted for the cheesecake, which was sinfully good. A total pleasure all around, and I feel priveleged to have been invited.
We all walked back to the hotel which is quite a hike from where we were, just a block off Bourbon. From there, the others were ready to take a shuttle, but I still had some life left in me so I walked the bags we were carrying to the car. I then met up with The Petal and Miss Linda at the convention center. We all thought we were going to be attending a banquet, but there was some entertainment scheduled that none of us knew about. By the time I realized that we were about to attend a concert by Mary Chapin Carpenter, it was too late for me to escape.
This surprise concert was the worst part of the weekend. The opening act reminded me of something I might see on the old Hee Haw TV show but, thankfully, they only played a couple of numbers. Between sets we discussed how we would handle this. Miss Linda loves Mary Chapin Carpenter (MCC) and I didn't want to make a poor impression on her, so I agreed to sit through the show but I insisted that I be comfortable. Since I was parched, I went out to look for water. As I walked out of the auditorium, there before me was a portable cash bar. I quickly returned to get the girls and we all tanked up on strong booze, making the concert bearable, even for me.
For most of the show, I watched the three camera shoot that was going on in the room with us. MCC changed guitars after every song and after a while I began to dread the sight of her toadie appearing with a fresh guitar, knowing full well that meant I would have to sit through yet another horrid number. The show dragged on for about two hours. By then, it was too late for us to go back to the quarter, so we went back to the B&B for the night.
Sunday was the somewhat surreal book cart competition, where costumed participants showed their prowess with what can only be described as "book cart ballet." One group put on a halloween themed demonstration, with various monster costumes and a complex choreographed dance that went on for about five minutes. As I watched this, I couldn't help but think that this party needed a costume contest and a slave auction to liven it up. I didn't get very far with that fantasy before I embarrassed myself horribly by dropping my soft drink on the floor. I cleaned up the mess the best I could with napkins from a nearby condiment stand, but we fled the scene fairly quickly after that. I had seen enough of Dances With Bookcarts for one lifetime.
We spent the rest of the afternoon prowling around "The Stacks," with The Petal talking with vendors and me acting as a pack mule, carrying the two book bags full of literature and free books that we ended up with. It was a good time. We wrapped up the afternoon over at Semolina's in Metairie for dinner, then it was time to head home. It had been a fun weekend, but after I got home and started writing about it, I realized that we were set to miss the best part of it. The speaker scheduled for Monday afternoon was CNN anchor and reporter Anderson Cooper.
Monday, June 26, 2006
I wanted to see "Coop" in person very badly, but we were back on the coast and both scheduled to work on Monday. I spoke with The Petal about it and she had important business Monday morning and had to go in, but we decided to try and play hookey just enough to get back to the convention for the afternoon. My boss agreed to my request quite readilly, but The Petal's boss made her wait until nearly two in the afternoon to give her his blessing. With that cliffhanger out of the way, we were on our way back to New Orleans once again.
We got to the convention center just in time to catch Mr. Cooper at 5:30, but first there were awards to be given out. The awarding party in this case was the Public Library Association (PLA) and were, for the most part, meaningful only to the people winning the awards. The one that sticks in my mind was an award given to a library with a staff of just two people. The system was so small they couldn't afford to send either of their staffers, so there was nobody present to accept the award. I was left to wonder just how many people lived in the community that this two person system served.
After that, "Coop" was up. He spoke for about half an hour, then retreated to the lobby to sign books. The Petal bought a total of four books and, of course, wanted them signed. That meant that we had to stand in two different lines, but they moved pretty fast. "Coop" had to be on the air later, so his handlers were prodding people along like cattle. We were a little concerned that we might not make it to the table before he had to leave, but we made it and I even managed a picture of "Coop" shaking hands with The Petal. Her very own moment of zen.
We ended the evening chatting with some old co-workers of The Petal. One of them, a female librarian who worked with The Petal during her time with the Jefferson Parish Library System, now lives and works in Houston. It was good to catch up with old friends. Overall, it was a fun weekend. It was not as wild as going to a science fiction convention, but it was stimulating in a different way and definitely had its moments.
For the past several years The Petal and I have been attending various conventions together, but always just for fun. None of them have been professional. This year, we decided to both attend the American Library Asscociation's Summer Conference which was held the last weekend in June at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.
Saturday was our first real day of the con. I had an "Exhibits Only" badge so my movements were somewhat limited. While Petalbreeze attended programs, I roamed "The Stacks," the Association's name for their exhibitor's room. First off, I made as quick of a dash as I could through the entire area to get a feel for where everything was. This thing was really big. There were all manner of booths packed into five of the large halls of the Convention Center, over 1,500 in all, according to the Exhibit Guide. Most of them were huge corporate vendors of things like furniture and databases and circulation management systems utilizing RFID chips and, gasp, even BOOKS. The exhibitors were nationally and internationally recognized names like Thomson Gale, McGraw-Hill, Scholastic Books and BWI, the giant book vendor to libraries nationwide.
Naturally, I was partial to the technical and computer oriented exhibits, the most fascinating of which were the large commercial scanners that scan entire books to digital files to the tune of 10,000 pages an hour. The RFID technology is interesting as well, but I already know how this technology works and I have my misgivings about its use, so I didn't spend a lot of time at those booths.
Since I don't work in the library profession, there wasn't much for me to look at seriously in "The Stacks," but there had been a few things that caught my eye. Unfortunately, most of them were the blinky, blingy promotional pins that several attendees were sporting. Those who know me understand my nearly uncontrollable fetish for little blinky lights. I had three hours to kill so I decided to settle on the dual goals of talking to some interesting people and to snare as much of that "electric sex" as possible.
So began my odyssey that would take me to dozens of booths, sometimes drawn in carny style, other times voluntarilly, and put me in conversations with people from places like Utah and Vancouver and Illinois who expressed varying degrees of ignorance regarding the mess that Katrina made in this area. I do not believe that their ignorance is necessarily their fault. I blame TV news, which stressed looting and violence over the human tragedy that resulted from the flooding, and I was happy to gently disabuse them of the notion that all is well in New Orleans.
Through these discussions, I learned that there is a not-so-hidden hidden message of the ALA Convention in New Orleans. The city wants to put a brave face forward in hopes of luring more convention business to the city and they intend to use the ALA show as an example of how functional the city now is. The message that I took away from it was that the convention center is fine and recovering, but the city itself is still badly wounded.
C-SPAN 2 was shooting "Book TV" on location, with their production bus taking up about three vendor stall areas in the back. There was an EFP crew shooting in The Stacks all afternoon that I presumed to be from C-SPAN. I mostly avoided getting in the shot. I did take a tour of their "Book TV" bus and took a bunch of pictures of the interior, which was all very nice and new, but much less advanced than I expected to see for a nationally distributed channel. The bus was very functional, with a small but complete studio and a small, spartan production room. There seemed to be little to no edit capability on the bus and I was surprised to learn that that the vehicle had no uplink on board. The most advanced technology that I could find in it was the two remote controlled cameras. Apparently, this vehicle is used more for promotion than for actual production.
By the time 5 O'clock rolled around, I had snagged three different varieties of blinky promotional pins. The first and easiset one was from Thompson Gale. I scored that one before Petalbreeze had even left for her programs. "Get some bling from the king," exclaimed a man in a kingly costume as we approached the booth. Clearly, these people will do anything to sell their reference texts, including stooping to the level of employing tacky costumes, but at least they have a sense of humor.
The second piece of bling I noticed turned out to be the hardest to find. It was from a group called "Backstage Library Works," which provides something called "Retrospective Conversion," whatever that is. The bling is a blue star with 5 red and one blue LEDs. It is cool looking, but the white text on a blue field makes it essentially unreadable when flashing, rendering it nearly useless for its intended purpose of promoting the product. In fact, because it was so poor in that regard, I had to ask at least three people where they got theirs before I was able to find the booth for myself. It was at this booth that I encountered the most profound ignorance about the plight of the Crescent City. The salesman was an older gentleman and his name badge told me he was from Utah. He seemed to believe that the problem of cleanup belonged firmly in the hands of the victims. "If they won't come back and clean up their own mess, who's going to," was his comment. When I told him that 2/3rds of my neighborhood was wiped out by the storm, he asked me why I chose to live there. Tough crowd, but I was there for the bling.
The Google people were much cooler and I scored a total of three of their blings, and no snooty remarks about the storm were to be heard. The Petal got a new ball cap for me from Google as well. It is an awfully nice hat for free which means it is probably implanted with an RFID chip so they can track me in real life the way they attempt to do online with their infamous "persistent cookie."
I met up with The Petal and Miss Linda from the library at the Hilton hotel at 5 PM. After a short wait, we were joined by 4 people from one of the vendors that services the library and we
all took a cab to Broussard's restaurant for dinner. If you are ever in New Orleans and you want a really good meal, AND you have deep pockets, Broussard's is the place for you. I had the red snapper and The Petal had grouper and both were excellent. At one point, a clumsy waiter spilled The Petal's wine all over her and her dinner, but the replacement dinner took only about 5 minutes to be served. That proves that they keep you waiting on purpose when you go out to dine. Dessert came with dinner and I opted for the cheesecake, which was sinfully good. A total pleasure all around, and I feel priveleged to have been invited.
We all walked back to the hotel which is quite a hike from where we were, just a block off Bourbon. From there, the others were ready to take a shuttle, but I still had some life left in me so I walked the bags we were carrying to the car. I then met up with The Petal and Miss Linda at the convention center. We all thought we were going to be attending a banquet, but there was some entertainment scheduled that none of us knew about. By the time I realized that we were about to attend a concert by Mary Chapin Carpenter, it was too late for me to escape.
This surprise concert was the worst part of the weekend. The opening act reminded me of something I might see on the old Hee Haw TV show but, thankfully, they only played a couple of numbers. Between sets we discussed how we would handle this. Miss Linda loves Mary Chapin Carpenter (MCC) and I didn't want to make a poor impression on her, so I agreed to sit through the show but I insisted that I be comfortable. Since I was parched, I went out to look for water. As I walked out of the auditorium, there before me was a portable cash bar. I quickly returned to get the girls and we all tanked up on strong booze, making the concert bearable, even for me.
For most of the show, I watched the three camera shoot that was going on in the room with us. MCC changed guitars after every song and after a while I began to dread the sight of her toadie appearing with a fresh guitar, knowing full well that meant I would have to sit through yet another horrid number. The show dragged on for about two hours. By then, it was too late for us to go back to the quarter, so we went back to the B&B for the night.
Sunday was the somewhat surreal book cart competition, where costumed participants showed their prowess with what can only be described as "book cart ballet." One group put on a halloween themed demonstration, with various monster costumes and a complex choreographed dance that went on for about five minutes. As I watched this, I couldn't help but think that this party needed a costume contest and a slave auction to liven it up. I didn't get very far with that fantasy before I embarrassed myself horribly by dropping my soft drink on the floor. I cleaned up the mess the best I could with napkins from a nearby condiment stand, but we fled the scene fairly quickly after that. I had seen enough of Dances With Bookcarts for one lifetime.
We spent the rest of the afternoon prowling around "The Stacks," with The Petal talking with vendors and me acting as a pack mule, carrying the two book bags full of literature and free books that we ended up with. It was a good time. We wrapped up the afternoon over at Semolina's in Metairie for dinner, then it was time to head home. It had been a fun weekend, but after I got home and started writing about it, I realized that we were set to miss the best part of it. The speaker scheduled for Monday afternoon was CNN anchor and reporter Anderson Cooper.
Monday, June 26, 2006
I wanted to see "Coop" in person very badly, but we were back on the coast and both scheduled to work on Monday. I spoke with The Petal about it and she had important business Monday morning and had to go in, but we decided to try and play hookey just enough to get back to the convention for the afternoon. My boss agreed to my request quite readilly, but The Petal's boss made her wait until nearly two in the afternoon to give her his blessing. With that cliffhanger out of the way, we were on our way back to New Orleans once again.
We got to the convention center just in time to catch Mr. Cooper at 5:30, but first there were awards to be given out. The awarding party in this case was the Public Library Association (PLA) and were, for the most part, meaningful only to the people winning the awards. The one that sticks in my mind was an award given to a library with a staff of just two people. The system was so small they couldn't afford to send either of their staffers, so there was nobody present to accept the award. I was left to wonder just how many people lived in the community that this two person system served.
After that, "Coop" was up. He spoke for about half an hour, then retreated to the lobby to sign books. The Petal bought a total of four books and, of course, wanted them signed. That meant that we had to stand in two different lines, but they moved pretty fast. "Coop" had to be on the air later, so his handlers were prodding people along like cattle. We were a little concerned that we might not make it to the table before he had to leave, but we made it and I even managed a picture of "Coop" shaking hands with The Petal. Her very own moment of zen.
We ended the evening chatting with some old co-workers of The Petal. One of them, a female librarian who worked with The Petal during her time with the Jefferson Parish Library System, now lives and works in Houston. It was good to catch up with old friends. Overall, it was a fun weekend. It was not as wild as going to a science fiction convention, but it was stimulating in a different way and definitely had its moments.
