A Shush of Librarians

A large shush* of librarians (400 school and a few public librarians) congregated in Ogden, Utah, today at the Eccles Conference Center. Today was the culmination of a year's worth of planning and hard work as the Utah Educational Library Media Association [UELMA] conference started early this morning. I have been going to this conference for eighteen years and served on the UELMA board for six years: 2006-2012, three as president elect, president, and past president (conference chair); and three as a board member. Only those who have organized or worked on a conference knows how much hard work and constant attention to the nit picking details it takes to make everything look smooth and easy. This year I served in a minor role as host/facilitator coordinator and helped a little with room assignments for the breakout sessions. Our conference chair was very organized and presented a worthy conference for the enthusiastic shush. I was able to host three interesting sessions and attend a forth session that one of my librarian friends requested to host.
Jason Chin (Island: A Story of the Galapagos), J. Scott Savage (Far World), Nathan Hale (Hazardous Tales), and Frank Cole (Hashbrown Winter) were our visiting authors who each had breakout sessions. The topics of the various sessions ranged from RDA cataloging to innovative ways to keep our libraries filled with students and have our libraries up to date on educational technology.  It is also great to have the handouts from most of the sessions posted on the UELMA web site so all we Utah school librarians can have access to the information from the sessions we were unable to work into our schedules.
It was nice to visit with my long time friends among the vendors as well as the veteran librarians I get to see only at the conference. It is good to see that there are a lot of us "oldies but goodies" still around and shakin' it up with the youngins.
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*"A shush of librarians," from Sacher, Jason, A Compendium of Collective nouns: From an Armory of Aardvarks to a Zeal of Zebras