Greetings from the Big D

Hello and welcome from Dallas, Texas, home of the 2012 ALA Midwinter Meeting. ALA Midwinter is a little different than the annual conference in June in that it is mainly committee meetings. I'm not technically on a committee but I was very impressed with the work of the Committee on Literacy last summer and wanted to see what they would be discussing at midwinter. Among other things, one of their iniatives is digitial literacy and decreasing the digital divide, which is a problem that we certainly are aware of. Another exciting part about ALA Midwinter is that there is a live press conference in which the winners of the Newbery, Caledecott, and Print are announced. This will be the first time I will see the announcement live. My nine year old self would be very jealous, right now. (Well, about the Newbery. The Printz didn't exist, yet.)
If you want, you can follow the conference on twitter (which you can from either our account or your own. I created a twitter account in which I don't post but just so to follow events such as this) To follow midwinter, go to @almamw and to follow the discussion others are having about them type in #alamw12 in the search box when logging into twitter. It's only 140 characters, so some discussions are better than others. (Speaking of Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media, did anyone check out this great photo from the Milwaukee Public Library?)
As for Dallas, I just arrived this afternoon and will go to the literacy committee tomorrow. I just missed gettting my ALA name tag for the next several hours, I am walking around Dallas without a name. I did visit the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which is basically the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald fired his shots on November 22, 1963. My parents who vividly remember JFK's assasination were horrified at the idea of going there, but for me, it's always been a part of history, and an important one for not just our country but for Dallas. I was reading a book about the tv show, Dallas, and there was a mention made that the city had been solely identified with the assasination until the show became a hit. The museum was very interesting and not only discussed the shooting but also JFK's legacy and presidency. Some of the more negative parts were left out, but they weren't relevant to the message of the museum. Those of you who did live through the assasination (like my parents) may very well find it hard to visit a museum like that, but I thought it was fascinating to see places that I had only seen in news footage, including the grassy knoll and Dealey Plaza. It was very surrel, actually.
On a lighter note, I did take a walk around the downtown area and was pleased to discover the building used for Ewing Oil in the later years of Dallas, and the building that JR used when he tried to strike it on his own. Haven't made it to Southfork. Not sure that's going to happen on this trip.