Usually, I find it easy to summarise what I thought of a conference and what I took away from it. This time, it’s not so easy.

All weekend, I heard people tell their story of how the storms affected them - at the conference, at Radical Reference events, in the street, and in restaurants that I ate in. Theirs are stories that need to be heard, and often.

In Australia, we got a lot of coverage of the storms for a couple of days before, and a couple of weeks afterwards. Since then, very little. I sought out more updates as I knew I would be coming to New Orleans, but if I hadn’t been traveling to the city, apart from ALA reports, I would not know what it is like there now. And it could be argued that this is reasonable since Australia is very distant and we are of course focused on the recovery of impoverished South-East Asian nations after the 2004 Tsunami.

But the key for me remains - how could what happened to the people in Louisiana and in Mississippi happen? We in countries outside the US need to pay more attention to what happened to study how the government responded, what resources we would have if we had a disaster, what response we would take. On the whole, Australia does not have many adverse weather events - there have been few earthquakes and we do have cyclones, but on the whole we don’t live with the daily worry of losing homes, libraries and lives. So we don’t plan for disaster. Even if it seems like it could never happen - we should.

As for the city itself, it is ready and wants more visitors. ALA was my first trip to New Orleans (though my 4th to the US). I found it to be a beautiful and unique city. Granted, I did not have the opportunity to travel outside Maurigny and the French Quarter, and it is far different beyond those bounds.

Apart from that, what people here need most is money. Not book drives, as we were told at Leslie Burger’s bloggers’ bash, but cash to buy new materials and help rebuild facilities. Many have only just begun and need help more than ever.

As for the conference itself, it was a great experience. It was kind of like ALIA, but on a huge scale. ALIA attracts about 800 delegates, ALA 2006 about 17000. My final list of sessions that I attended different somewhat from the list I posted previously, but I expected that would happen given the ridiculous range of choices on offer in every timeslot. I’ve never had more than 3 choices in a timeslot before - having up to 30 choices was definitely overload for me. Inevitably, I missed many of the things I was interested in too.

I have a couple of committee assignments for NMRT so I went to several NMRT meetings and events. NMRT is a great example for us to learn from in Australia in terms of how to provide programming and opportunities for new librarians.

I also went to the Radical Reference meeting on Saturday night at the Iron Rail Infoshop. It was a great opportunity to meet radreffies that I’ve seen on the list often and never had a chance to meet, as well as to discuss projects for the coming year. Monday I went to the Free Speech Buffet which was really fun.

As I mentioned before, no programme posts due to my being wedded to paper notetaking, but I hope to get notes up soon especially for the Long Tail presentation by Chris Anderson and the ACRL debate which was a wonderful session.

Thanks to the city of New Orleans for hosting us, and hello to all the wonderful library workers, bloggers and students I met over the weekend. It was definitely worth traveling so far to attend.