The ACRL conference is a terrific lead-in to National Library Week. Get all the librarians pumped up on a mix of new ideas, camaraderie, and vender-funded coffee, and then send them back to their libraries glowing with the joy of librarianship. For the record, I bought my own coffee, but I got pretty hyped up seeing what’s happening in academic libraries and hanging out with my awesome librarian friends.

I’m really pleased this year’s theme is “Communities Matter,” because really they do. As a Horrendously Awkward Teen, my only friends were the ones I met in the library’s teen volunteer group. A few years later, my community was the extremely quirky group of library pages I worked with: the only thing any of us had in common was that each of us was extremely passionate about some utterly random thing. When I graduated library school and left the public library, I didn’t join a book club or a tutoring group, but I was was building a community. It was a community of librarians, sometimes awkward, most working in different libraries, always passionate about some random thing.

Who’s in your community?