Heather Harrison is in her second year of the LIS Program at Wayne State University where she serves as Vice President of the ALA student chapter. She assists the WSU chapter in planning events, library tours, and workshops for fellow students. In addition to her studies, Heather works as a Graduate Student Assistant at WSU’s David Adamany Undergraduate Library. She has a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and also works with WSU librarians Lothar Spang and Deborah Tucker on their ongoing Poetry Chapbook Information Literacy Initiative with Detroit area K-12 school children.

What field of focus are you studying and why did you choose this field?
My focus of study is reference services. I chose this because I enjoy helping people directly, puzzling out answers to difficult questions, and making someone feel glad that they stopped at the reference desk.

What office or area of Conference did you work with during Annual?
ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. I worked with a wonderfully dedicated group of ALA staff members.

What were you able to take away from this experience to help you with your studies?
Several sessions I attended gave me new perspectives on the people we serve in libraries and I am taking these ideas to the desk with me every day. I was also energized by the Privacy Revolution session. Attending this session heightened my awareness of privacy as a crucial issue in the field. Corey Doctorow’s comments about CCTV cameras has made me start noticing them everywhere!

What was your typical Conference Day like?
I attended presentations in the mornings and spent most of my afternoons helping the OIF prepare for their scheduled sessions. I also had the delightful opportunity to walk around the Convention Center with the OIF’s very own Privacy Revolutionary, aka Bryan Campbell. My evenings were spent hobnobbing with other librarians at receptions, dinners, and impromptu parties.

What tips or ideas would you like to share with future Student-to-Staffers?
If you are a naturally shy person; don’t be during Conference. Introduce yourself to people sitting around you during sessions and chat with the presenters afterward. I met so many lovely people. The library field is filled with interesting, dedicated, and fun librarians. Get to know them at Conference.

The New Members Round Table (NMRT) held programs at Conference designed to help its members become more involved in ALA, meet other members, and work on their career development. The NMRT Resume Review Service allowed members to have their resumes reviewed by librarians with a background in hiring; at the NMRT Student Reception Student Chapter awards were presented and attendees had the opportunity to network and learn more about ALA involvement opportunities….

ALA NMRT Student Reception: 2008 Annual Conference
The New Members Round Table (NMRT) Student Reception was held at the Hyatt/Grand B on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 from 6:30-7:30 pm. Approximately 80 people were in attendance. At the reception, sixteen ALA groups were represented, giving our student members a chance to learn about opportunities for involvement in ALA, and to network with ALA representatives, and with each other. Also, at the reception, the NMRT Student Chapter of the Year Award and Runner-Up was announced. The winner was the University of South Carolina Library and Information Science Student Association (LISSA), and the runner-up was the ALA Student Chapter of UCLA. Many students indicated that they appreciated the opportunity to learn more about ALA and NMRT, and to ask questions of librarians currently working in the field.
- Terry Buckner
Chair, ALA NMRT Student Reception Committee

ALA NMRT Resume Review Service: 2008 Annual Conference
I had my second experience as a NMRT Resume Review Service reviewer in Anaheim. It's been a great experience and a fascinating way to use my supervisory/employer expertise in an expanded venue. I've had the opportunity to work with a variety of applicants--several new young librarians just graduating from library school and looking for their first job; a number of career change library school students who have had diversified experiences and questions on how to best coordinate their previous work experience with their new library skills; mid-career librarians looking for the next best challenge; and experienced librarians thinking about downsizing, relocating and retirement. Having the chance to talk with such a variety of enthusiastic job applicants was a great addition to my conference experience.
- Ma'lis Wendt
Retired, Associate Director, Staten Island Libraries, The New York Public Library

Over at Library Journal, there's John Berry. You probably know of him, as he was editor of that fine publication for over thirty years. Since retiring from that position, he has continued to share his viewpoint on all sorts of library topics in a series of editorial columns called Blatant Berry, and I find myself reading these first when looking at LJ. He also keeps up an infrequent blog at the LJ site. Like a lot of the people who have been around the profession for a while, Berry sometimes looks at what is new through the prism of what counted for 'new' over all his many years in the profession. Typically that means an insightful idea about the direction of librarianship, an infrequent flub into the 'past was better' realm, and an occasional grand slam where he takes a matter of the highest importance and calmly articulates it with a wisdom and skill that the rest of us can only hope to attain by the time we have reached an age (ahem) where he is now.

Berry gets it with the first pitch in his latest Blatent Berry column that appears in the current issue of LJ, conveniently published on the web. Berry's topic: managing a library. His key truism: there is no formula for management. Berry captures in words what those of us who manage every day already know. We live it, and when he describes it, we know exactly what he is talking about. Management is an art not a science. Managers respond based on intuition and skill developed over many years. Good managers have an innate sense of how to proceed, especially when events are moving fast and time is short. Management is a combination of instinct, experience, foresight, and sensitivity. Managers don't calculate the area under the curve using derivitives. There is little math or science involved once you'e analyzed your data. Decisions come from within, and Berry's description of the real essence of library management is the best one for librarians that I have read in a long time.

Eric C. Shoaf
Editor, LA&M

For nearly a decade, the federal courts have addressed the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a federal law enacted by Congress in 1998 to protect minors from viewing sexually explicit materials published on the Internet. The law was intended to improve upon the Communications Decency Act (CDA), Congress' first effort to regulate sexually explicit Internet materials, which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in 1997.

The Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF) has been involved in the litigation challenging COPA since 1999, filing several amicus curiae briefs in support of the plaintiffs.

On Tuesday, July 22, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals once again upheld a federal district court's decision to overturn COPA, stating that "COPA cannot withstand a strict scrutiny, vagueness or overbreadth analysis, and thus is unconstitutional." It found that the law's content-based regulations -- which mandate fines and jail terms for anyone who "knowingly" posts "harmful to minors" materials to the Internet -- unlawfully sweep in a broad swath of constitutionally protected speech. It further concluded that COPA is not the least restrictive means of achieving the government's stated goal of protecting children, given that parents concerned with protecting children can use software filters that block sexually explicit Internet content without impairing adults' ability to freely access the Internet.

The government will review the opinion and consider its next steps. It can appeal the Third Circuit's decision to the full appeals court or to the Supreme Court.

The court's opinion is available online.

More on the court's decision from Wired Magazine.