Amber Cain
AALL Annual Meeting, Boston, 2023
I want to first say thank you to the NJLLA Grants and Awards Committee for granting me the AALL Chapter Grant Registration, which awarded me a full registration to the AALL Conference that took place in Boston this year. I was a student member of AALL in law school, and I had planned to attend the 2020 AALL Annual & Meeting Conference as a student (which I was so excited about), but…well, we all know how that unfortunately turned out. That meant that this iteration of the AALL Annual Meeting & Conference was my first time attending in person. On top of that, just in case that wasn’t enough excitement for me, I was presenting! So, I am extremely grateful to have been awarded the Registration Grant, which assisted me in attending my first ever in person AALL Conference to present.
My presentation took place at the Cool Tools Café on Monday of the Conference, where I presented on how we at Seton Hall Law’s Rodino Center use Power Automate to make our lives easier. For those of you who may not know, Power Automate is integrated with Microsoft Office 365, and it allows you to automate tasks and processes via “workflows” (which, simply put, are just ways of triggering an event or occurrence). Automations are extremely useful for streamlining information gathering and dissemination, creating routine notifications, et cetera. I specifically presented on how we use Power Automate in the Rodino Center to gather and distribute feedback from users about our integration of Springshare’s Chatbot into our Service Desk Chat, but I also demonstrated how easy it is to build an automation by doing one live for my audience so that I could gather emails to send a PDF of my handout to those who were interested. Despite it being a bit nerve-wracking at first, presenting on that topic was exhilarating, so I was extremely thankful to be able to be there to have that experience.
I was also very glad to have been able to attend some panels (when I was not pacing around my hotel room, repeating my presentation to myself). While I know AI was a hot topic of the Conference, my personal favorite panel was the one titled “Moving Beyond Print” that took place on Sunday. While our library has an abundance of online resources, and it is generally the format that we teach with and our students use, I really enjoyed hearing other perspectives on implications of moving to electronic resources and whether (for some libraries) a paperless environment is possible. That panel was enlightening, engaging, and extremely candid in its discussion of the topic, and it is definitely one that stuck with me after the conference was over.
I also was able to attend a plethora of networking events and parties while at the Conference. It was invigorating to be able to finally meet so many colleagues in person, many of whom I have only been able to correspond with via videochat. I was also delighted to see more of my fellow NJLLA librarians again and spend some much-valued time with them. While I am thankful for technology that allows us all to stay more connected to one another, nothing really beats the in-person networking (and in some cases, bonding) that you are able to have in the spaces provided by an event like this Conference.
All in all, I had an amazing time, and I am again very grateful for the NJLLA Grants & Awards Committee for assisting me with getting to experience the Annual Meeting & Conference. I look forward to presenting and attending another iteration of the Conference sooner rather than later!