Editorial: Unabashed PLA Fan
Inspiration at its best
By Francine Fialkoff, Editor-in-Chief -- Library Journal, 4/15/2006
The 11th Public Library Association (PLA) conference in Boston in late March was one of the best library conferences in years. Attendance skyrocketed to 11,000, and the number of librarians alone (8,459) nearly equaled the entire showing at the last PLA in Seattle. It’s not just the numbers that made this PLA such a smash. In the spirit of the meeting, always a best practices conference, here are a few PLA “bests” and “worsts,” though it is difficult to come up with the latter.
Dubbed “The Best Conference for the Public Library World” by its organizers, it is one of very few shows that lived up to its label. It is the most approachable conference, even with 11,000 participants. There was a lot less of the frustrating duplication you find at most meetings. There were rarely more than two programs on the same topic, or track (e.g., serving adults), going on at the same time. There were only eight tracks.
The conference was carefully planned, and a half-dozen of the sessions most likely to be popular had “encore” presentations. Those included the program on developing a library tech plan and that wonderful Denver PL trio on designing targeted branch services. There were long breaks between sessions that gave librarians time to visit the exhibits or confab with colleagues. PLA clearly appreciates the support of exhibitors and vendors and tries to be sure they get the traffic they need.
On the downside, the unexpected crowd meant that people couldn’t get into some programs unless they arrived 30 minutes early. They couldn’t stand (or sit) around the perimeter of the rooms, either. Several sessions were expanded to other rooms that had video screens, like the Opening General Session featuring baby boomer Linda Ellerbee. In fact, the TV newswoman, breast cancer survivor, and author filled ­several ballrooms. Nevertheless, PLA may want to look for future speakers who might appeal more directly to the twenty-, thirty-, and early fortysomethings who increasingly dominate conferences. (This is not a call to ban baby boomer speakers! I am one, and love to hear them.)
Though planning for PLA began in 2004, the programs were current, not canned or dated. Most sessions were hands on and practical, like “You Are, but IM,” which gave ten core values and examples of trends for YA services. “Readers’ Maps” showed how to combine not only fiction and nonfiction but movies and other media for a new kind of readers’ advisory (RA) that tracks a particular theme or “itinerary.” There was eloquence, too, like that in Mary Catherine Bateson’s presentation on “Productive Aging.” She spoke of the “need to move people’s imaginations” and to raise consciousness among older adults so they can have effective impact on “American life…and how we think about the future.” Bateson, a culturual anthropologist, is the daughter of Margaret Mead (read her short, brilliant memoir of her parents—her father is Gregory Bateson—With a Daughter’s Eye).
In addition to being technologically up-to-date, PLA focused important programs on librarians who select and order books (and audiobooks), do RA, and read. The exhibits abounded with publishers’ book displays, authors, and RA tools. Even better, the conference kicked off with Nancy Pearl’s Book Buzz, an alert on the forthcoming books you’ll be ordering—and reading—for next fall and winter, plus some spring titles you may have missed.
My personal favorite: the reception celebrating the first two winners of LJ’s Best Small Library in America award, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Haines Borough PL, AK, and Milanof-Schock PL, Mt. Joy, PA. The event was all the more lively for the attendance of participants from a day-long rural advocacy training workshop run by the foundation, which paid the way for three rural librarians from every state to attend both the workshop and PLA. The workshop exemplified the next phase of Gates’s U.S. library program, which the foundation’s Marth Choe described as “put[ting] a megaphone to libraries and public access computing.” The Best Small Library in America winners have already done that. As Donna Howell, from Mountain Regional Library System in Young Harris, GA, said, “The recognition for those libraries so often overlooked was inspirational.” The same could be said about PLA. It was “inspirational.”
