Conversations on Saturday

Saturday was a jam-packed day that started off my ALA conference experience. My first session was all about books and babies and included a very inspirational presentation about the Brooklyn Reads to Babies campaign (which won the John Cotton Dana Award Public Relations Award this year), the Read to Me program, and the Mother Goose Program. All of these programs are rich in content and gave me some ideas to think about for future prenatal and new parent reading parties. One of the things stressed by each presentation was the importance of the conversation with the baby because this is how the baby makes sense of their world. I think this is a great concept for us to be reinforcing in more obvious ways.

I attended three more programs this day (whew!) and one was about information seeking patterns in children (and adults), and another was about online social learning theory. The theme of "conversations" continued to repeat throughout many of these discussions (and on the exhibit floor) and I feel this underlines the change in philosophies and expectations of libraries today. Making connections with people, connecting people with information, connecting people with their communities...these all can only be accomplished by initiating a conversation in some form.

In other more mundane news, after I finished with the conference for the day, I joined up with Stacy and Dave for a marathon walk/jog through all the monuments. The good news is that I have nine more stamps in my passport! The bad news is that I wore out my shoes.