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ALA Mid-Winter: a new experience
by Kristine Baker, Senior Regional Sales Manager, East
recently attended mid-winter ALA, her first ALA experience…

John Elliott, Director Sales Western U.S., Kristine Baker, Senior Regional Manager Eastern U.S., and Hester Campbell, GOBI Product Manager: Friday evening before Grand Opening Reception.

Attending mid-winter ALA for the first time was all that I anticipated. The conference was hosted in Seattle, Washington this year which was especially nice for me since I had never been to Washington. The conference was held at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center, located in the heart of downtown Seattle. Our hotel was within walking distance to both the convention center and many good restaurants and shops.

I arrived on Friday afternoon in time to freshen up for the Conference Reception on the Exhibit floor from 5:30- 7:30 p.m. The reception was a relaxed evening of socializing with customers and colleagues. YBP held a raffle Friday evening to start the festivities. Customers were asked to pull a poker chip from a bag - red poker chips won candy bars and green chips won a copy the book New Librarian, New Job (ISBN 0810858517, ISBN 13 9780810858510), by co-editors Reeta Sinha, YBP Regional Manager, Collection Management & Development Group and Cory Tucker, University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Mike Walmsley, Director Sales Central U.S., holds up candy bars for the raffle.

For exhibitors, the conference consisted of full days on Saturday and Sunday and part of the day on Monday. We had many customers and librarians visit our booth throughout the weekend. A topic of many conversations was the recent press release announcing ebrary partnering with YBP to distribute eBooks, as well as the November announcement regarding YBP partnership with Ebook Library (EBL). Both are in development stages now with an estimated completion date of June 2007.

We spent a great deal of time discussing and demonstrating the upcoming GOBI redesign: Code Name Falcon. In a test environment, we demonstrated some of the new functionality to give customers a preview of the changes. Phase one of the redesign should be in place for mid February.

Jim Shetler, Vice President Library Technical Services YBP booth before Grand Opening.

The highlight of the weekend was our GOBI Users Group Meeting held on Sunday evening. The meeting introduced customers to our new GOBI Redesign and our development plans for other initiatives including eBooks, eReference, and enhanced cataloging services through our OCLC Plus program. A reception was held following the meeting.

The exhibitor hall closed on Monday at 2 p.m. We completed tearing down the booth and shipping items back to our headquarters office in a couple hours. The general consensus amongst all was this was another successful ALA. For me, it was truly a pleasure to attend the conference as I met so many people that I had known only by name until the conference. I returned home to New Hampshire late Tuesday night, exhausted from a very busy weekend but with a sense of accomplishment. No longer am I the ALA novice.

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