Christina Swendsrud, CLRC Professional Development Award Recipient, Talks About the 2025 ALA Conference

Since entering the library field over ten years ago, I’ve hoped to attend an ALA Conference. Being awarded CLRC’s Special ALA 2025 Professional Development Award opened the door to my first-time attendance. This year, I was particularly interested in attending ALA to participate in a conference centered on academic freedom, information literacy, and diversity, and I was so excited to spend three days learning from such a wide range of library professionals.

As my fellow librarians promised, the conference was truly a bounty for library-folk. I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer number of sessions I wanted to attend, lamenting my boundedness to time and space – if ever I could have triplicated myself, ALA would have been the place to do it! The immersiveness of the conference enhanced the learning and networking experience. Not only did the conference center feel like a mini library-centric city unto itself, but the whole surrounding area was bustling with library-related people and activity. I didn’t expect to feel so inspired and strengthened simply by the sight of so many gathered with shared goals of information access, literacy, and social justice, but that was one of the most powerful takeaways from the conference.

This feeling was only emphasized by the keynote speakers, hosted in the largest gathering space, The Grand Hall. In particular, Carla Hayden’s keynote address, in conversation with Kwame Alexander, provided both inspiration and resolution to the gathered audience, as she shared the story of her career and recent dismissal as the Librarian of Congress. With the utmost poise and humor, she encouraged all of us to remember the values that libraries strive to uphold, and that collaboration and unity are our strongest tools in the current political environment. With Kwame, it felt like a conversation between friends that we were all privileged to witness.

Another highlight was attending a keynote by George Takei, during which he spoke about his forthcoming book, It Rhymes with Takei, a graphic novel memoir about his coming out. He shared about his experiences as a young boy in Japanese internment camps, and the life-long influence that early racial oppression had on him. He explained how he drew strength from this oppression, and leaned on his parents and the value they placed on education and perseverance as he has advocated for the marginalized throughout his life.

Attending ALA also provided an opportunity to gain a greater understanding of, and inspiration from what’s happening in other library sectors. As an academic librarian, I especially valued attending interactive sessions, such as Citational Privilege: Disrupting the Patriarchy and Empowering Students Through Feminist Citation Practices, presented by Laura A. Sheets and Rebecca Stanwick from Bowling Green State University. This session prompted my tablemates and I to discuss our practices in directing students to sources, sparking a unique conversation between a community college librarian, a K-12 educator, and me, an archivist and history librarian.

The poster sessions really encapsulated the amazing array of backgrounds, creativity, and areas of focus in our field, too. I went from learning about generative AI’s ability to answer reference questions in an academic setting, to chatting at length with members from a public library’s teen department that’s helping fight food insecurity and promote healthy eating habits in their community. Then I found inspiration in learning that some academic libraries, like their wonderful public library counterparts, successfully lend out museum passes, too! So many incredible projects and ideas were packed into that short 1.5 hour poster session.

In addition to the many session offerings, I met up with three former classmates, colleagues, and friends at ALA, which required these photo ops to capture the moment (I was too busy catching up with the other friend and we forgot to take a picture)! These encounters, alongside with the new connections I made over the course of three days, make me so thankful for the warm, welcoming, and brilliant community of library professionals across the nation.