Scenes From Sunday, Annual Conference 2010

The ALA10 Winning Team From the University of Pittsburgh, "Night of the Living Librarians"

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Sunday featured some new-classic Annual Conference entertainment, namely the Book Cart Drill Team and the Parade of Bookmobiles. Excited fans waved at the sixth annual Book Cart Drill Team competition, which showcased library workers performing dance routines accompanied by themed costumes. Yesterday’s victors were the University of Pittsburgh’s “Night of the Living Librarian” team, who won the audience over with their scary costume and fancy moves. For more images, see the competition’s slideshow.

Sunday afternoon’s 4th Annual Parade of Bookmobiles, a celebration of bookmobile services, featured some fine specimens of automobile libraries from Virginia, Maryland, and Ohio. If you want to see the parade slideshow, check it out here.

The Auditorium Speaker Series continued yesterday morning with Marlo Thomas, best-selling author, social activist, and That Girl, discussing her memoir Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny. You can read American Libraries Editor Leonard Kniffel’s report on the speech at the Inside Scoop Blog.

Dave Isay, founder of Storycorps, followed up with his talk about Storycorps as a grassroots historical record. To demonstrate, Isay played an excerpt of an audio interview between Taylor and Bessie Rogers about Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, available on the Storycorps website. You can hear some of Isay’s speech here.

Sunday’s PLA President’s Program featured New York Times Crossword Puzzle Editor, and one of my favorite NPR regulars, Will Shortz, talking about the world of crosswords. Greg Landgraff of American Libraries reports here.

One of the favorite Sunday panels was LITA’s Top Tech Trends. Everyone had something to say about iPads and their affect on libraries and the publishing world alike. Joan Frye Williams delivered, quite possibly, the most tweeted quote of the day: librarians need to “stop being the grocery store and start being the kitchen.” You can read some of the discussion from the twittersphere at #ttt10, and you can read American Librarie’s Sean Fitzpatrick’s coverage of Top Tech Trends in Inside Scoop — here’s part one and part two.

Sunday was both an entertaining and productive close for the weekend. With the wee bit of Conference fun that still awaits us (Amy Sedaris!), be sure to rest up, folks!