I've survived the first two days of orientation at the American Library Association's Midwinter Conference in Boston. I spent just about all of Friday at an orientation/workshop for chapter leaders including state association presidents, president-elects and ALA councilors. We heard excellent presentations from a number of librarians and library association executive directors. I hope we can send our President and/or President-Elect to this orientation/workshop in the future.

Today I attended orientation for ALA councilors. I got to hear from the current ALA President and ALA's executive director. I also learned more about my role as a councilor and what my life will be like for the next three days, (pretty much solid council meetings and forum discussions...and some receptions.)

The highlight for me today was sitting in the dead center of the second row of the grand ballroom where I got hear Al Gore give a riveting 75 minute talk about his new book on the environmental crisis which is written for children and young adults, (unlike An Inconvenient Truth.)

I would be remiss if I didn't mention a little something about the exhibits. As you might imagine, the major vendors put together truly luxurious displays, mini-auditoriums and meccas to draw you in, but I must confess, their actual sales people or reps often seem more interested in talking to each other than welcoming conference attendees. It would be like if you approached the welcome desk at your library and the handful of librarians at the desk were all wearing Armani suits and chuckling amongst themselves. I really don't get it!

I'll be uploading some photos I took today to our Flickr account, so feel free to take a look if you'd like, http://www.flickr.com/photos/nhlibrarians.

One last thing for tonight. I'm also doing some tweeting during the day. You can read my tweets at http://twitter.com/nhlibrarians. In one of my tweets today, I discussed my initial inclinations as to who to support in the current ALA presidential election.