ALA - Saturday

On Saturday, I met up with a fellow SJSU student. We’re both serving as ALASC officers and planned to try to get in touch, then managed to randomly find each other around the registration area. I went to a panel about research, which included talks about an ethnography of college students doing research, observation and survey study about usage of library services in a coffeehouse (compared to usage in the library), and a discussion of virtual reference interviews. I found the last one particularly interesting, given that for my reference class we had to use two different types of virtual reference services to ask questions then analyze the results of the interactions.

After the panel, I met up with Paige. We wandered about the exhibits hall (huge!) looking for the poster sessions because there was one I was interested in. We finally found it about 5 minutes before they were going to take the posters down, but at least we found it! Afterwards we went to get lunch, which was an adventure in and of itself…

That afternoon, I wandered around the exhibits a bit more. I ran into (well, not literally) John Meier, a friend of mine from my undergrad years, as well as some of the AILA members that I’d met at the honor dance on Friday. I was trying to balance spending time at the conference and spending time with the friends I’m staying with, and since I was going to be at the conference all day Sunday and Monday I figured Saturday was a good day to head back early. We ended up grilling for dinner and enjoying the weather. Then we had some tasty clown cupcakes, picked out by my friends’ daughter. Mine had lots of sprinkles. We hung out for the rest of the evening, and thus ended day 2 of my ALA adventure.