Practical Librarian's To Do List

PLA Conference March 23-March 27, Portland, OR
I am excited and honored to be attending and presenting at the PLA Conference in Portland Oregon next week. Holly Hibner and I will be talking about Nonfiction Readers Advisory on Saturday, March 27.  If you are around please, drop by and say hello.  Our problem is always when to stop adding material to the show.  A new idea pops up all the time and usually one of us will have to call "enough".
I really love attending library conferences since it is an opportunity to step outside the day to day routine at a reference desk.  I also love to go to these conferences since I always find out that I am not the only "library nerd"  out there.  I also have never been to Oregon before and am looking forward to checking out some libraries and the city.

Awful Library Books
Believe it or not ALB is almost 1 year old!  Every time Holly and I think we are going to run out of material a bunch of stuff comes in or floats across our desks.  What has really surprised me is how much I have learned in collection development from the people leaving comments.  We have had the range of comments from downright crazy to subject matter experts that really take the discussion to the next level.  I am so impressed at the depth of knowledge and sharp humor from our followers.

The Book!
Holly and I finally finished (with much crying and mutual death threats) our book from coming out from Chandos.  Right now we are working with the final draft and indexing (which is a skill I have had to dust off from olden times...)  The worst part of book writing is actually stopping.  After something is written, there is a huge temptation to keep picking at it.  Thank God for deadlines or Holly and I would still be arguing and discussing some of the finer points.  If you want to see the preview from the publisher, click here.

Twitter
My latest technology fun has been Twitter. I used to think this was the dumbest thing ever created on the Internet and now I am a believer!  I have plugged into more interesting articles, discussions, websites through Twitter than I thought possible.  It is a gold mine of technology talk, libraries and of course trivia and humor.  If you haven't joined in the discussion, I suggest you get on board.

Mary (aka @librarymary40 via Twitter)