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American Library Association
Annual Conference Report
Rebecca Baker
July 25, 2015
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Sessions Attended
Gloria Steinem:
Gloria Steinem spoke in a very casual, conversational tone partially about her upcoming book
but mostly about the work she has done in her life, how librarians have helped her and how she feels
our work relates to an overarching struggle for equality and social justice. It was truly inspiring and such
a unique and wonderful opportunity to see such an important leader in the fight for gender and social
equality.
“If we make it, will they come? Could introducing creative spaces add value to your community?”:
This LITA-sponsored panel session featured the Education Director from SparkFun Electronics
(who also is the president of a makerspace in Colorado), the founder of NoiseBridge makerspace in San
Francisco, a public librarian who does Vex robotics with his kids in Ohio, an academic librarian from UNC
Chapel Hill who just opened a makerspace, and a school librarian with a robotics team, and was by far
the best session I attended at ALA. Panelists discussed how their creative spaces functioned, and it really
illustrated how makerspaces really need to respond to the community they are in (like any library
service really). The education director from SparkFun, who was representing her makerspace at this
panel not her company, said that many libraries she has worked with jump in to making with 3d printing
and that is not the best idea. There are so many better approaches and she outlined some of those.
Some of these we have already done at Blount County (like soldering), but others we are hoping to
expand with our learning lab. This session was just jam-packed with great ideas, and was so beneficial.
Additionally I learned that SparkFun has professional development in making for education and libraries
that I will be using and sharing with a project I am working on with state continuing education
coordinator.
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Conversation Starter: Making and Learning: An Emerging Framework for Libraries and Museums:
This IMLS session was the beginnings of a framework the IMLS is going to release for
makerspace standards for museums and libraries. This session was very special for me in particular as an
ITRL2 student. Thanks to opportunities afforded to me by job and the IMLS (via ITRL2) making and
collaborative with technology has become my niche. It has become a vital part of how I teach young
people and approach education, and I have been integral in BCPL’s Learning Lab which will be opening
later this year. This session focused on developing a framework for makerspaces in museums and
libraries. I didn’t really learn a lot in this session, but I felt a lot of my education inside and outside the
classroom from the past three years echoed back at me. The framework was very simple because
making is very broad and can encompass so many tools, products and communities. The framework,
though broad, really fit what I am excited about in librarianship. Bringing together communityresponsiveness, technology, the old and the new, and building collaborative community learning spaces
for people of all ages.
LITA Emerging Technologies Interest Group Discussion:
This conversation session I chose to go to because many of the best sessions I attended were
sponsored by LITA. Unfortunately this was not the most well-organized and well-thought out event. The
chair of the emerging technologies committee sat down to a room of about 10 people and said, “Well
what do you all want to talk about?”. Like most unstructured discussion with no back-up questions or
prompting this quickly fell apart. Eventually we shakily ended up on the topic of open-source ILS use
with some people very strongly for it and some people indifferent. I was the only public librarian, and
also the only person to suggest that at a library with only one IT person and employees with pretty low
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tech skills in a rural area this may not be the best option. I was wholeheartedly rebuked by an academic
librarian from Princeton University and told that librarians who didn’t feel comfortable with technology
needed to get with the program. I suggested that probably his reality and mine were a little dissimilar
and proceeded to skip out on what was left of the meager conversation to be had. There were a few
other times that this academic/public divide was sharply visible.
PopTop Stage: Diverse Books Need Us:
This session was a play based on the “We Need Diverse Books” campaign which I contributed to,
so I was excited to get to go to one of these sessions. The point of this session was to get authors,
publishers and librarians together to talk about ways librarians would like to see the publishing industry
improve. This was a really enlightening session and really awesome to meet YA authors of diverse books
I love! One very interesting conversation that illustrated the structural inequalities built into publishing
diverse books focused on book covers. One librarian from an inner city area, asked authors and
publishers why there were not more books with people of color on the covers even if they featured
diverse characters. As a librarian, she said that she said this relating to a cover photo was really powerful
motivator for reluctant readers especially to pick up books they otherwise would not regularly read.
Several other librarians echoed this sentiment. An author offered a succinct answer. There are no stock
photos of people of color. It’s not in the budget so they end up using settings or objects because doing a
photoshoot would exceed the book’s budget. Another author talked about her book which features a
lesbian interracial couple, and Indian woman and an African American woman, and those photos just do
not exist. Much discussion was had to remedy this, maybe a Kickstarter for diverse photos, but I just
thought it was such a good illustration of how structural inequality works, in publishing and in the world.
It’s not active, but it does make a huge impact on what gets read.
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PopTop Stage: Rachelle Lee Smith: Speaking OUT: Queer Youth in Focus:
Rachelle Lee Smith is photographer whose work I had seen in various places online, so I was
excited to see that she had a book that was being released and was speaking at ALA. She worked over a
decade taking photographs of LGBT+ youth (many homeless) and letting them write over their portraits,
giving them a chance to tell their stories and self-identify. They are very powerful portraits, and you can
really tell in some of them this is the first chance some of these kids have been given to express
themselves and be seen and heard the way they want to. It is beautiful work and very moving. Mostly
her subjects were focused around Seattle and San Francisco. Overall her message was a hopeful. While
there were some challenging stories in her book, her work over the past decade definitely had an “it
gets better” tone. One boy, maybe 13 or14, was pictured with the text: “We won. Get over it.” Clearly,
he was from California.
Stonewall Book Awards:
I was also very excited I got to attend this award session! For the first time they did not make
this a paid brunch or dinner event and it was packed! The award winner this year was This Day in June
by Gayle Pittman and her acceptance speech was so moving especially in the wake of marriage equality.
This Day in June is about Pride, specifically San Francisco’s Pride parade. She wrote it because she felt
like many LGBT+ books sanitized the community for straight consumption and she didn’t like that. She
saw too many “lessony” bedtime books with cis, white middle-class gay parents completely removed
from gay culture. This Day in June had dykes on bikes and leather daddies and gender-nonconforming
folks and families and but it still really accessible and easy, with a guide for how to talk about gender
and sexuality with kids of different ages in the back.
Main Takeaways
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Overall the American Library Association was a great experience. It was large and a little
overwhelming. The technology sessions I attended were very valuable and gave me some great ideas for
use in our learning lab, but also in children’s programming. It was also a good reflection of how much I
have learned in such a short amount of time, and that I am doing the right thing. In the IMLS session
they had a picture of the saying Chattanooga’s 4th floor which says “You are in the right place.” I really
felt like in that room talking about making in libraries I was in the right place, thanks to opportunities
afforded to me by IMLS and UT so that was very special.
It was interesting to participate in conversations in person rather than just digitally, like the We
Need Diverse Books campaign. It’s interesting to see how the magic happens, how campaigns and
kickstarters and these things that shape the discourse in the profession “become” based on discussion
at conferences. On the other hand, as with the LITA discussion group, sometimes conversations can be
difficult to engage in. It’s important to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and was strange
to experience that divide that can sometimes occur between different types of libraries.
Finally, with sessions like the Stonewall Book Awards and Queer Youth In Focus, as well as
personal experiences in San Francisco I was just painfully aware of how far behind the South is in terms
of equality on that particular front. There is much work to be done, but it is also existentially tiring work.
Dr. King said that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Some days it feels too
long and you have back off and know that it does. I view my job as a librarian as pushing that arc just a
little more toward justice, as much as I can at least. ALA helped me put this in a broader perspective and
I am grateful for that opportunity.