Lisa A. Raney

Above: Dawn in Dallas

I started writing a blog detailing my time in Dallas for ALA's Midwinter conference, but at this point I've been back in Cincinnati for almost a week, so I'll be more succint:

The next time I go to conference, I will be staying longer. My time in Dallas ended up being shorter than planned due to a number of flight rebookings and delays.

Regardless, it was a wonderful first conference experience. I met many fabulous librarians in the span of a day and a half, caught up with my colleague/friend/roommate Liz, took advantage of ALA's Job Placement Center, and even did some brief sightseeing of Dallas' Arts District.

My favorite parts were the Occupy Wall Street Peoples' Library lecture series and meetings with the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) and the Progressive Librarian's Guild (PLG). Those took up a good portion of Saturday. On Saturday evening, I traveled with some of the OWS Librarians and some members of the PLG to the YALSA happy hour and then had a delicious dinner at with the PLG group.

What stuck with me was how natural it all felt, being surrounded by librarians whose opinions and actions on librarianship, social justice, and humanity are similar to my own. It gives me encouragement to continue being the sort of librarian that I want to be as I begin my professional career and to put into place a mode of critical librarianship. This is not to say that I am not surrounded by supportive people at my current position, because I am, but interacting with a larger network of librarians throughout North America through debates and exchanging ideas puts into perspective the bigger picture of what every single librarian is doing.

And so it follows that our actions together is huge. It is not always easy, especially in the example of the OWS Librarians at Zuccotti Park, but it is a wonderful thing. And is a grand time to be a librarian.

photo credit: me