The Opening General Session is a huge event in a huge auditorium with a huge amount of people. Yes, huge. There is something comforting, however, about sitting in a room with thousands of seats and finding yourself suddenly sitting next to a librarian friend from your home town. This, I believe, is the power of electricity. Literally. We were both looking to sit in a place that would allow us to plug in our laptops… battery power can only last so long at one of these events.

The General Session began with a short film that highlighted some ALA successes in the past year. We learned about the partnerships ALA has undertaken with the @ your library program. The film included footage of how ALA contributed to the disaster relief in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Thanks to Sarah Houghton, the Librarian In Black, for pointing to a nice resource to learn more about MySpace at How Stuff Works.

Learn How MySpace Works and read about safety issues.

For even more on MySpace, read what Stephen Abram has to say in his new article “How Can MySpace Inform Library Portal Development?”

George G. Morgan, noted author and trainer in the genealogy world, has made his bibliography of genealogy materials available online to the public through his company, Aha! Seminars. Get more information about it at his “Along Those Lines” blog.

From the site:

“The books, magazines, and software products shown on this page represent the best available materials in their respective subject areas. For the individual researcher, you may want to consider purchasing titles to build your personal genealogy reference collection. Genealogy librarians will want to consider the addition of these titles to their library’s collection as they will complement such larger collections as the DAR Patriot Index, Germans to America, William Filby’s landmark series, Passenger and Immigration Lists Index, and other individual volumes and series.”

Here is an article recently published on the Red Herring site (from the April 10th print issue) — The Future of the Internet: in a decade, the Net will dig deeper into our lives*.