First on Saturday, we went to see the legendary Nancy Pearl speak....err, sorta. What it really turned out to be was Nancy Pearl interviewing a filmmaker who just made a documentary about the filming of To Kill A Mockingbird. Interesting, but not really what we thought we were going to. Next we went to a panel of romance writers. Now, I've never read any romance, and I wasn't particularly excited for this program, but it sounded more interesting than anything going on during the same time slot. However, it ended up being one of the best programs of the weekend! Every writer (there were six total) discussed their writing process and how the library related to that. Typically, I am immersed in conversation about libraries from a librarian's point of view, so it was interesting to hear about libraries from an author's viewpoint. My own bias made me assume that romance writers were vastly overweight middle aged single women who lived with their cats in a fantasy world where Prince Charming would really show up on their doorstep on a white steed. Instead, all of the women were very intelligent, articulate, and very funny! They came from a variety of backgrounds, including one who is a published professor of art history. Other programs attended include: the Feminist Task Force's Introduction to Women's Issues, Career Development for New Librarians, and Self-Censorship. The opening remarks were given by Toni Morrison, who is a fabulous speaker. She told a story about how she first "learned the brutal power of words". She truly is a wordsmith with amazing delivery and her speech was really one of the weekend highlights.
Sunday, we decided to conquer the exhibits hall, which featured 42 aisles of exhibitors, of which we had barely made a dent in visiting Saturday, despite three trips to the hall. The exhibits included everything from job recruiters to library furniture, to book ATMs, to database vendors, but the best part was definitely the 10 aisles of publishers. There was everything to the big publishing houses like Random House, Harper Collins, & McGraw-Hill, to tiny independent presses. They were giving away books like candy, and Lis and I both made a killing! Many of the novels we received aren't even out yet, and we are both excited to dive in to them. We concluded our conference weekend by attending the sixth annual Book Cart Drill Team Champions ships, where four teams from every corner of the U.S. competed with their book cart dancing...yes, I said book cart dancing, librarians know how to really blow off some steam!
