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February 27, 2007
Props to ALA for conference info
It's amazing just how much planning I'm doing, just how far (and not so far :D) in advance. Right now I'm prepping for the PLA Symposium this weekend (blogging and presenting), and trying to put together the March Netguides calendar (an entirely different post, I promise). I'll also meeting with a few librarians who requested tours of my library's RPLWiki later in March, helping out with LSTA grant programs throughout March and April while I also teach classes and wrangle Netguides, attending MLA in early May (and possibly blogging it for MLA) as well as presenting a social networking talk to the MVLC Youth Services committee, and heading to ALA in June, since my contract with PLA is being renewed again (w00t!).
Today, I received an email from the ALA Public Programs Office (PPO) listserv about all of the programs they'll be offering at the annual meeting. I thought to myself, "My, how organized and proactive! I *love* PPO." Most other ALA conferences are a mire of poorly delivered information, in my experience, which is either spread out too thin in too many places to be coherent (very little on the web site, then really confusing in the horrible online meeting planner, then more/less information and some redundancy in the wikis), or non-existent. I often have a really, really hard time planning travel for ALA conferences because I don't know what I want to attend (and what I want to cover for PLA) until just a month or less before, when they finally publish real schedules (but by then, who knows where the real schedules will be, and if they won't be painful to look at), which makes requesting time off a bit difficult.
So, in an effort to not have Kathleen harass me to give her my travel dates, I thought I might try checking the conference site to see if, just this once, there would be information to help me be proactive, too. PPO distributed a really nice listing in email, so I figured what the heck, I'll check.
My my, is there information! Preconferences are listed. The special events section is already nicely fleshed out. A preliminary overview schedule of programs and sessions is available in HTML format, and the preliminary schedules for each day and a programs by track in .pdf form.
In *February*. For a *June* conference.
It might have something to do with the early bird registration deadline on March 2, and I don't know if that's unusually early, since I don't normally keep track. I do know that when I've tried to plan this far in advance in the past, I've been unable. So props to ALA.
Now, if they could just figure out how to fit the wiki into the information distribution better (less redundancy, HTML formats instead of all pdf, the idea of a single point of digital service), and implement a better meeting planner if they insist on having one (I often wonder what the usage stats on that thing are, searches vs. actual schedules, etc.), I'd be super-duper impressed. This, however, is a great start.
February 27, 2007 7:06 PM