Wanna get involved in LITA? Here’s how, part III.

Having spent the last few years immersing myself in LITA, I’m trying to articulate things I’ve learned in case you want to get involved, too, but are looking for places to start. The whole series can be read at the how to get involved in LITA tag. Stay tuned for more over the next few days!

Conferences

The LITA Program Planning Committee is an awesome force of deadline-driven productivity and puts on a good show at conferences. You should go to their stuff! You should propose stuff!

ALA Midwinter theoretically doesn’t have programs (it’s an amusing theory), so you need to be part of an interest group or committee or similar to put something on, if I understand correctly. ALA Annual has lots of programs (though fewer now than in the past), and the call for proposals will be announced via the formal communication channels mentioned in the previous post in this series. The LITA Forum 2013 call for proposals is now open (that’s the committee I’m on; please propose stuff!)

LITA Happy Hour is usually Friday evening of Midwinter and Annual, at some nice nearby bar. If you take only two things away from this series, this should be the second. It’s always a fun time and it lets you meet lots of people who are really involved with the association. This Midwinter it’s Friday, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm, Elephant & Castle, 1415 5th Ave.

Please come say hi to me if you’re there. I will be trying to do the social whirlwind thing of saying hi to All The People in Too Little Time, but if you are a LITAn, or prospective LITAn, I have not met I seriously want to meet you and I will also introduce you to all the fun, smart, friendly, interesting, funny people I am busy saying hi to.

I went to Happy Hour my first day of my first conference, halfway through library school, all by myself – an uncharacteristic move for this introverted, shy-in-unfamiliar-settings, no-history-of-bar-going type – and right there I met half the people who have come to be tremendously important to me in years since. A huge name, someone we’d talked about a ton in one of my classes, bought me a drink; someone else tipped me off about the Emerging Leaders program, which I subsequently did, due to that scrawled message on the back of a business card; it was a blur and I had a completely amazing time meeting people way out of my league, who were great to me. So seriously. Come to Happy Hour.