{"id":4966,"date":"2019-06-27T21:45:41","date_gmt":"2019-06-28T02:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/?p=4966"},"modified":"2019-06-28T08:55:15","modified_gmt":"2019-06-28T13:55:15","slug":"another-library-conference-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/27\/another-library-conference-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Another library conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

This one’s in DC, and while attendance is higher than last summer’s conference held in New Orleans (that I skipped, with the happy result that I got to see the Madison fireworks<\/a> that are always before July 4, when I’m almost always at conference) it’s down for a DC conference. Normally conferences held in either Washington DC or Chicago get the highest attendance.<\/p>\n

I’m having a pretty good conference, I think, although I seem to have missed some good stuff, especially Sunday.<\/p>\n

Like I said I arrived early Friday with two suitcases, one mine and one stuff for the iSchool booth and reunion. I dropped mine at the hotel then trundled the booth crap over to the Convention Center and got registered.<\/p>\n

I saw a few things, got the booth set up, hung out at the booth for exhibits grand opening, then went to dinner with Mark and the LITA Board at a place called matchbox<\/a>. It was OK – kind of industrial chic, and we had a really in-your-face waitress. It was the typical awkwardness of a work dinner, plus we had two tables. While we filled one of them, the 2nd one only had 3 people. Mark & I split a pizza and a salad, and walked back down 14th St. to our hotel.<\/p>\n

Saturday Mark was up and out first; I got to go second. More meetings, and I went with Suzanne to a vegan joint<\/a> for lunch – I got a curried tofu wrap that was enormous. I only ate about 1\/3 of it – but it was good. They called it a Massaman wrap, and it did have some of the flavors of Thai red curry. Booth shift,\u00a0 then another couple of meetings, and another dinner with a crowd of LITA folk – the Top Tech Trends panel. This one was at Farmers & Distillers<\/a>, part of the Founding Farmers<\/a> empire (or three-restaurant group, anyways). Unfortunately, I wasn’t that hungry because of the lunch. Mark and I split an order of chcken dumplings and I had a kale salad: 2 colors of kale, hazelnuts, dates, radish, pecorino, lemon vinaigrette. Not as good as the Ottolenghi salad<\/a> I like to make with kale instead of spinach<\/a>, but I cleaned my plate.<\/p>\n

Sunday Mark got to stay in bed a little later, and I headed off to conference. I went to Chinatown first because I knew there was an Aveda<\/a> where I could get some travel-size shampoo & cream rinse. I thought I didn’t need to take any with me, because I usually only wash my hair once a week, and I just washed it before I left for our week-long trip – but it’s hotter in DC than in Wisconsin. Anyways, the two sort of funny coincidences were there actually was an Aveda\u00a0 a lot closer to the hotel<\/a> that I didn’t see until we went for Thai on Monday night, and Mark was also in Chinatown<\/a> – no doubt we were minutes apart. I got a banana & coffee and went to do a booth shift before my 10:30 meeting.<\/p>\n

Where I met my friend Kevin and we went to get tacos for lunch. It’s a tradition.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Bamba Taco<\/a> in Washington – next to the Renaissance<\/p><\/div>\n

Then it was three more meetings, LITA’s big show, top tech trends, a session about privacy, with speakers from the Library Freedom Project<\/a>, and finally LITA prez, with Meredith Broussard<\/a>. Her talk was called “Artificial Un-intelligence” about the bias in computer science because it’s based on math, and tempering quantitative data with qualitative observation. Later at dinner, I couldn’t convince Mark of her example, which was two guys who jump from the Titanic, one lives, because he jumped away<\/em> from the boat and didn’t get sucked under; the other dies because he jumped straight down. Mark called it a terrible example, because it\u2019s pure math – it’s all about angles. But her point was that the only reason we know about the angles was because other people in the lifeboats saw<\/em> them, providing the qualitative data.<\/p>\n

In between the program and dinner, I met Allison at the booth where we collected the suitcase full of booth schwag and took a Lyft to another hotel for our reunion. Which was rather poorly attended, off in a remote second floor meeting room, about 16-18 people and we had food for 35. So of course I ate some of the fancy cheese and crackers, and bought a beer and a bottle of club soda that were both the same price, $9, and ate one each of the butlered tomato tarts and shrimp tempura. And had some good conversations with the folks who did show.<\/p>\n

Dinner Sunday was at the original Founding Farmers<\/a>. Like Saturday I wasn’t all that hungry, but felt like I should go through with it anyways. It was just me and Mark, not a big group, but it was crazy noisy. I had the Crazy Corn Chicken, a big salad with mixed lettuce, roasted sweet corn, hominy, caramel corn, avocado, mango, cotija, cornbread, chipotle buttermilk & cilantro lime vinaigrette. Mark got crab cakes.<\/p>\n

Because I was at the reunion, I missed Mark’s retirement cake at LITA happy hour.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Monday I went to a 10:30 meeting, OCLC research, then a session on big library systems, then I went off to work at the Northwest One DC Public Library<\/a>, that’s in a community center. I wanted to go to the Mies van der Rohe one, but it’s closed for renovation.<\/p>\n

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DC Central Library designed by Mies van der Rohe, closed for remodeling<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

I worked until I only had four assignments left to grade, then I moved down to A Baked Joint<\/a>, where I got a cookie and iced tea. It was a more pleasant (privileged) environment, even though I had to use my iPhone personal hot spot to connect to finish grading, because no WiFi. I said privileged, right?<\/p>\n

Our last dinner in DC was Thai food, at Baan Thai<\/a>, light enough that we went out for a scoop of gelato after, at Dolcezzo<\/a>. I had noodles with chicken and Mark had a chicken and rice dish. Mine said crispy pork skin which turned out to be a spray of thin sticks<\/a> on the side of the dish.<\/p>\n

A few more DC photos – the old Carnegie Library that’s now an Apple store; peanut butter toast at A Baked Joint; a flower that fell from a hanging basket; mesh fencing around a construction site that reminds me of John<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[portfolio_slideshow pagerpos=”disabled”]<\/p>\n

Tuesday we had breakfast at a Belgian place – waffles – Mark took a picture<\/a>, but I did not. Then drove down to Colonial Williamsburg. That’s going to have to be another post.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This one’s in DC, and while attendance is higher than last summer’s conference held in New Orleans (that I skipped, with the happy result that I got to see the Madison fireworks that are always before July 4, when I’m almost always at conference) it’s down for a DC conference. Normally conferences held in either … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4978,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[19,18,14],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-ds83473gmail-com","4":"post-4966","6":"format-standard","7":"has-post-thumbnail","8":"category-blogpost","9":"post_tag-eating-out","10":"post_tag-library-conferences","11":"post_tag-overeating"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4966"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4987,"href":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4966\/revisions\/4987"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debslunch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}