TLA
On a related note, I went to the exhibition hall of the Texas Library Association‘s annual conference here in Austin yesterday. Although I’m not a practicing librarian, I do have an MLIS and still support a great deal of those values, and my job here at the School of Info (when I was here, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science) still deals with a lot of information organization, presentation, access, etc. So I decided to join ALA and TLA officially recently, despite recent comments by Gorman about Information Science and blogs… At any rate, I’m still too poor to really attend the whole conference ^_- so I decided to go the exhibition hall, volunteer at the iSchool booth.
The exhibition hall was much bigger then I expected (and that’s because I’ve been there at least once before.) My parents were in town for the event (and mom was on a panel), so I met with them and heard all the stories about what’s happening in the library world and different views on the school and librarianship in general. At any rate, there were many, many, many vendors and booths there. I ran through the entire thing, picking up catalogs that I thought might be useful or interesting for work. And, I confess, one or two manga- DC, Tokyopop, and Viz all had booths and I got to hear vendors explain to librarians what manga was, why it was a good thing, why they “all look like Sailor Moon” and why some of them are read right to left.
I find it interesting that there are so many vendors there, selling fairly expensive things, when libraries haven’t really been receiving a lot of money to really purchase these types of things… it must very much be a competition for resources. I haven’t had a chance to go through the catalogs yet, but I’ll keep an eye out if there’s anything particularly interesting.