Annual Conference preview and early numbers

New Orleans will be library central in a couple of days. Librarians and staff, library school students, vendors, and their friends will fill the Morial Convention Center, hotels near and far, and the French Quarter. I suspect attendees are doing what I'm doing: frantically packing and planning for meetings, events, and socializing with friends and colleagues.

A few facts and figures from HQ as of June 20, 2011:

• Paid registration is at 10,007, compared to 11,163 for DC (2010) and 11,775 for Chicago (2009). The week-to-week gain in paid registration was 231.
• Total registration as of this morning is 11,273, compared to 12,967 for DC (2010) and 12,966 for Chicago (2009).
• There are 845 non-members registered, plus a couple of one-day registrations.
• There are 328 international registrants, including all categories (e.g. students, members, non-members.)

 Want to really dig into what's happening? Check out this fantastic document put together by Mary Ghikas.

ALA HQ: NMRT and Executive Board Observer

The great thing about being onsite in Chicago is the opportunity for face time with the people I know and work with at ALA. I used my post orientation time to meet with staff in HRDR on New Members Round Table (NMRT) work. This included selecting and placing orders for NMRT ribbons to be available at Annual, get an update on our fund raising efforts for the 2009 Awards Reception, and preparing for my work as President for 2009-2010. Much to my surprise I spent a lot of time working!

When I was not in an ALA staff member’s office generating a to do list to execute when I returned to Pittsburgh, I was observing the Executive Board 2009 Spring Meeting. The current Board met on Friday morning to hear a presentation by Jenny Levine on ALA Connect. The presentation got me excited about using Connect more to do just that, connect with members in the association. It has a great deal of upside particularly for committee work. I hope NMRT will use it, especially those committees currently working with googlegroups and yahoogroups. I also learned about new developments with the at your library Web site.

Saturday's agenda very full. This included a membership update, development office report, research survey results, several reports related to finances, and closed executive session (I could not observe). There's a lot going on at ALA. The meeting agenda and documents are available from the Executive Board page.