After 5 great days at the AALL Annual Meeting in St. Louis, I'm finally back home in Vegas. I've still got lots of conference-related blog posts and photos yet to come. I hope to slowly get everything up on the site over the next few days.

However, all the session summaries and pictures in the world still can't capture the truly great moments of this conference:

• finally meeting many of the law librarian bloggers I've been reading for ages
• getting to personally thank some people whose articles and websites helped make my job easier
• a long, geeky conversation about OPACs over drinks in the hotel bar
• a lunch with several people I'd never met before that turned into a thought provoking conversation about the future of the profession
• a chance encounter with a library educator that provided an unexpected opportunity to mentor library students
• reconnecting with a former classmate who turned out to be just as passionate about this profession as I am
• getting to attend a breakfast meeting because a library director I barely knew offered me his ticket
• bouncing my crazy ideas about library programming off a recent library school graduate on the plane ride home
• plugging this blog at every opportunity

And that barely scratches the surface.

My biggest takeaway from the conference is also the biggest surprise. Before I got to St. Louis, I didn't really care much about recruiting new people into the law librarian profession. Honestly, I'd never really given it any thought. Yet, now I can't stop thinking about it. There's so much misinformation (or in many cases, a complete lack of information) about this profession floating around at library schools and law schools, and we need to do everything we can to change that, to get the word out about what we do and why others should want to do it, too.

I also learned the hard way that while my new MacBook is a perfect tool for just about anything, it's not particularly well-suited to editing photos. All the pictures that looked so bright and vibrant on my laptop screen, looked very, very dark when I finally viewed them on a regular monitor. After I finish the rest of my blog posts on the meeting, I'll be re-processing the photos I've posted so far to make them look considerably better.

Stay tuned for more coverage, and I'll see you next year in New Orleans.