AALL 2009 Wrap Up Awards: The Wolf pack award

OK. So I am going to do this again because people seemed to like it and asked for it again, and it’s a good way for me to organize my thoughts about the conference. Let’s call it my annual AALL wrap up awards. This award is based on a quote from the comedy movie The Hangover from this summer. As quoted at IMDB.

“You guys might not know this, but I consider myself a bit of a loner. I tend to think of myself as a one-man wolf pack. But when my sister brought Doug home, I knew he was one of my own. And my wolf pack… it grew by one. So there… there were two of us in the wolf pack… I was alone first in the pack, and then Doug joined in later. And six months ago, when Doug introduced me to you guys, I thought, “Wait a second, could it be?” And now I know for sure, I just added two more guys to my wolf pack.”

This award goes to the Cool Kids (this is a whole other upcoming post) wolf pack. Because this is definitely how it felt. Having spent QT with Tom Boone, Meg Kribble and Sarah Glassmeyer at CALI I felt we had a pretty solid wolf pack. And yet, we still added more. AALL members like Bonnie Shucha, Katie Brown, John Beatty, Pam Brannon, Roger Skalbeck and others, too many to keep individually naming seemed to join in also.

It ocurred to me at some point during the conference that these will be my colleagues for many years. They will be the leaders of the organization, and library directors, and hopefully my friends for a long time. We see more experienced librarians running around in cliques (there are positives and negatives to this) who’ve known each other forever and we are starting to form our own.

There’s a lot to look forward to in this. I am looking forward to having a group of people to collaborate with, spend time with at conferences, call on for advice, and shape law libraries for years to come. So this award goes out to all of you even if I didn’t mention you by name.