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If you wear many hats but use gmail to send emails from these many hats, I bet you’ve wished for a way to have different signatures, depending on the context and the recipient.
A-ha! Look in “Labs” and you’ll see a neat trick called “Canned Responses”.
Enable that, save your settings.
Now compose a new email but in the body just type one of the signatures you want. Click the drop down “Canned Responses” (it should be in the same line with “Add CC” and “Attach a file”…) and select “Save >> New canned response”. Give it a name and click OK.
New Canned Response
Now after you’ve typed an email that needs that signature, just go to “Canned Responses >> Insert >> signature” and voila.
Insert Canned Response
Hurray!
Saturday, July 11th
The Exhibits
I remember my first ALA Annual in 2007 at Washington D.C. — I went through the Exhibits in a daze, having no idea what I should be doing or looking at and consequently left within about an hour, no freebies in hand.
Then at the last Midwinter (Denver) a friend gave me the low-down on Exhibits: see a pile of books? They’re *probably* free, especially if they say “Advance Reader’s Copy” on the cover. Voila, I suddenly had my arms full in just minutes.
This year I grabbed not only books, but bags, too and immediately took advantage of the ALA Post Office to ship my heavy load back home without even taking it out of the convention center. Bliss. Now I have all sorts of interesting, fluffy / serious, free books to read as soon as my last graduate class is over!
Later in the day when I caught up with the Chinese group, a few of them said they got several vendor demos in the Exhibits. Something for everyone. 
Sessions
In the afternoon, I went to a session called America’s War on Sex — which was *packed!* And kept getting even more people! The speaker, Marty Klein, was terrific as a presenter – animated, enthusiastic, funny – but the content sometimes seemed to be too much “preaching to the choir”, with a big assumption that we were all liberal, left-wingers. And maybe we were. But there was just enough “us and them” kind of rhetoric to make me wish for a bit more balanced approach to the topic.
The topic centered around the fear-mongering about sexuality so popular in our culture. He talked about the “illusion of the threatening sexual other” and made two major points: 1) the illusion is partly built on lumping sex and violence together when they are actually separate; sex is consensual, violence is not, and 2) exaggerating statistics of violence to make it seem scarier.
One of my favorite quotes from his presentation was “Sexuality is one of the last human rights to enjoy the American Revolution”.
After this session of “rah, rah, rah!” I grabbed a bite to eat and headed over to the Opening Session, mainly because I heard the Gay Men’s Choir would be performing. I had no idea who the speaker would be. Well, it was Christie Hefner, former CEO of Playboy. In many ways, Christie’s talk was much like Marty’s — the emphasis on freedom of expression, the First Amendment, the role of libraries to protect our right to expression.
But I have to admit – I have very conflicted views of Playboy. On one hand, I think women should feel good about being beautiful and sexy but on the other hand, I think Playboy’s presentation of “beautiful” and “sexy” is so freaking narrow it does more of a disservice to women than a help. So I wasn’t sure what to think of her talk and I’m still not. I find it extremely ironic that I was attending these kinds of sessions while the ALA Secrets tweets were getting shut down.
Social Hours
After the Opening Session, I joined the Library Society of the World crowd at Giordano’s for pizza. Let’s just say… I have video. Mwah ha ha!
I read my copy of Codslap on the bus this morning and I have to say it is a sweet little publication – just like a love letter, as the intro says.
ALA Annual is coming on the heels of (and sort of overlapping with) our most recent program at work with a delightful group of Chinese public library directors. I rode the train into Chicago yesterday with them and what seemed like half the librarians in Champaign-Urbana. It was fabulous! I think almost our whole car was librarians and I had great conversations with colleagues.
Yesterday afternoon was spent in Chinatown where we saw the Chinatown branch of Chicago Public Library and had a nice big Chinese dinner at House of Fortune. I had the wonderful sensation of feeling like I was in China — Chinese jokes flying around me from all directions and Chinese food all over the table. I was delighted to find I could recoginze a few of the characters in the big calligraphy poems hanging around the restaurant. Just a very few. I wondered if this is how we start reading as kids — we see a word here and there that looks familiar (“cat” “mom”) and the rest looks like jibberish. However, I haven’t connected the sound to the characters yet, only vague meanings.
This morning we all took the very first conference shuttle to McCormick and everyone was registered in mere minutes!! It was amazing! I was so happy. They ran off to their pre-conference and I went to the Emerging Leaders session. The most interesting part of the day for me was when we broke into small groups of 3 to each talk about one specific goal we had for the next couple months. My little group of 3 had excellent recommendations and suggestions for each other.
Then followed the poster session and it was nice to see what the other teams had been working on. It was also surprising to hear that our experience with our supportive, responsive mentors was not the norm across all teams. We also had one of the few tangible projects — many teams were doing research or surveys or maybe a website. Our team had to get a commemorative booklet ready for the printers by June 1st. Done. If you’re going to the International Librarians Reception on Monday night, you might even get a copy.
After Emerging Leaders was over, I went over to the International Librarians Orientation to check on my Chinese library directors. Lo and behold two of them won door prizes! And our Fulbright Fellow from Japan won a prize, too!
Tomorrow morning bright and early I will go with them to the Exhibits Opening. I’m not exactly sure how many options they have, as far as vendors go so this might be interesting. Good night, all, and good conference!
