Thousands of librarians converged on Boston. It was January, time for the annual midwinter meeting of the American Library Association. The convention center hummed with activity. Entire hotels were filled to capacity with men and women of all ages, wearing smart business suits, cowboy hats and jeans, dresses with apples and school bus pins like the ones I remember my elementary school librarian wearing. And me, of course, wearing pigtails.

It was my first professional conference. I was astonished by the pure volume of activity. I pored over the conference program, puzzling together my schedule from the hundreds of meetings. It seemed like there were three places I wanted to be at all times. Meetings for public librarians, law librarians, prison librarians, rural librarians, academic librarians, meetings for librarians who weren’t working as librarians but in other fields of information science. There was so much I wanted to do.

Each day of the conference a newspaper came out detailing the events, the door prize winners, the exhibitions of publishers and technology vendors and a wrap-up of the day before. My first big session was a day-long workshop in library advocacy. Through a series of speakers and group activities we all worked together to draft advocacy plans for our workplaces, ways to make our libraries sustainable, visible and effective ways to garner support for our libraries in the state legislatures. We shared our drafts with other librarians in similar fields and in similar locations.

The next day, I attended a breakfast sponsored by the Alexander Street Press. The event had a long waiting list and I was lucky to have been registered well before the conference. The speaker was David Hilliard, former chief of staff of the Black Panther Party and author and historian. He described his experiences in the party, his work with the Breakfast for Children program, presented a slide show of political activity and discussed the process of creating the party archives. After his speech librarians lined up to ask him questions and buy his book, This Side of Glory, for their collections.

During those whirlwind days I attended meetings on technology in public libraries, committee work on rural and tribal libraries, preservation initiative groups, career workshops and diversity committees. There was a job placement center and information for library school students. I had a chance to meet students at Simmons Graduate School of Library Science and tour the campus. Most exciting for me was working with the Former Task Force on Rural School, Tribal, Native and Public libraries. I learned about initiatives that were taking place to create support systems for rural librarians, to bring them out of the background and better connect them with ALA, to acknowledge and assist with the particularities of their work. I had a chance to help the task force and support their venture to become a standing committee of the American Library Association. I am looking forward to working with this committee throughout the rest of the year, as an intern.

The strength of the Association was incredible. Few professions seem to be backed by an organization with so much clout, that is so respected and organized, so inclusive. I felt like a small part of something much bigger than I was, something I could rely on for support, something I could participate in and make better. The diversity of the library community itself combined with the commonality of our goals is the source of its strength.