CS-SIS Grant Winner Lacy Rakestraw on the 2016 AALL Exhibit Hall

Lacy Rakestraw, Director of the St. Louis County Law Library, received a grant from CS-SIS that enabled her to attend this year’s AALL Annual Meeting and Conference. Here’s what she had to say about it:

No trip to an AALL Annual Conference would be complete without a visit to the exhibit hall, and at the recent conference in Chicago, I did just that.  I was immediately struck by all the bright colors, glowing lights, and flashy screens. At one point I stopped at the end of a row and looked down the alley.  From that viewpoint I counted at least 17 computer screens at 10 different vendor booths.  I stopped and thought how foreign this must look to librarians who have been in the business for the past 10 or 20 years.  As a digital-age millennial, all these screens are par for the course for me.  But what exactly did the exhibit hall of yesteryear look like?

I asked around, and the more seasoned librarians told me what they remembered.  There were obviously less screens and visual effects.  And apparently there was less swag. (maybe lanyards weren’t a thing in the 1990s?)  But what there was in the 1980/1990 exhibit hall was print.  Because that was what these vendors were selling.

In today’s vendor market, that’s why there is a proliferation of screens and flash at conference exhibits; because now that’s what vendors are pushing. Even those vendors who are print based had laptops with them at their booths, presumably to look up their company’s online catalog to check the availability of a product.  Or perhaps they had laptops in order to pass the time while conference attendees visited the bigger, more digital based vendors.  It did make me wonder how much longer we would have book-based vendors at the AALL Conference exhibit halls.

It also made me wonder, in 10 or 20 years, when I’m one of the more seasoned librarians visiting the Conference exhibit hall, what will I see?  Will there even be vendor reps, or will they all be machines, telling me to assimilate and that resistance is futile?