ALA Midwinter 2011: Smaller Showing, Bigger Issues
By Francine Fialkoff Jan 11, 2011Downsized booths amid a robust show floor, fewer meetings (about 1000) by half than in the past, and energized attendees and presenters who tackled major issues, including funding, patron-driven acquisition, ebook (and device) distribution, the move to mobile services, and government funding for broadband connectivity, among others, drove this year's American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in San Diego.
Midwinter has been a shrinking affair for several years now, as travel money has plummeted along with library budgets. This year's preregistration figure the day before the January 7 show opening was 5,180 (not including exhibitors), 14 percent lower than last year's Boston preregistration of 6,043; Denver drew 6,903 preregistrants only a year earlier. One librarian (anonymously) told LJ she'd gotten only $1500 for 2011 travel, which meant that she had to shell out the remainder for three 2011 conferences.
(UPDATE:This year’s event drew 7,549 attendees and 2,561 exhibitors, compared with 8,526 and 2,569 for last year’s Midwinter Meeting in Boston and 7,905 and 2,315 for the 2009 event in Denver.)
Award winners
Beyond the focus on issues, Midwinter brought announcements and/or celebrations of prestigious awards, including the John Cotton Dana PR Awards, the RUSA Book and Media Awards, the Newbery and Caldecott medals, as well as LJ's own Librarian of the Year Award, to Nancy Pearl. Many reacted to that award with, "What took you so long?" At the dinner honoring Pearl, her daughter Katie, commenting on her mom as a superhero action figure, said, "Her superhero action is not to shush people, but to get people talking."
Tech topics
There was a decided edge to conversations between librarians and vendors of proprietary ILS products, although most companies have followed the trend toward greater openness and engaging directly with libraries. Just before the conference, Darien Library, CT, had migrated to the Polaris ILS, driven in part by the company's willingness to give Darien more access to the library's own data, and Queens Library, NY, recently went live with a platform developed in collaboration with automation company VTLS.
(Prominent traditional and open source ILS company executives addressed the issue during LJ's ILS Roundtable discussion at ALA Midwinter, which will be published in the April 1, 2011 issue of LJ.)
David Burleigh, director of marketing at digital media distributor OverDrive, told LJ that it would soon be opening up its application programming interface (API) to libraries and ILS companies, allowing them to create OverDrive-specific applications on their own—a capability, he said, that had long been requested.
Another emerging tech trend: data analytics. During the conference's Top Tech Trends discussion, Monique Sendze, associate director of information technology at Douglas County Libraries, CO, stressed that libraries should be leveraging their patron data to make better purchasing decisions and provide more in-depth services. Bar Veinstein, VP of resource management solutions at library automation company Ex Libris, told LJ that his company was focusing on products that would allow libraries to better analyze statistics to predict trends—what he called "data-driven decision making."
Check back for updates to Midwinter coverage this week.
