A New Librarian Goes to AALL

As someone new to Chicago and new to law librarianship, I was somewhat surprised to find myself, a mere two months into my new job as a reference librarian, jetting back to my home state of Pennsylvania to participate in the 2015 AALL conference.

It would be my very first conference, and I had no idea what to expect—of the programs and workshops or of my fellow librarians. In library school, we had felt the effects of an ongoing tension between researchers and practitioners. We had all been frustrated by endless discussions of the true meaning of information and were tired of climbing the data-knowledge-wisdom pyramid. A classmate had gone to a conference in Vancouver and returned bearing tales of irate practitioners berating researchers over the irresponsibility of small sample sizes. I wondered if those debates were what awaited me in Philadelphia.

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