ACRL 2011

The ACRL 2011 flyer arrived in the ol' inbox this week. So I opened it up. ACRL, bastion of academic libraries and research and cutting-edge user experiences--wait, what's this I see? Oh, the keynote speakers for ACRL 2011. I bet they'll be amazing---wait a minute. None of the keynote speakers are in the library business. Or even the publishing business. Or even the library advocacy business. Or even the intellectual property business.
There are three keynote speakers. Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards and co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Raj Patel, academic researcher on the food crisis. Clinton Kelly, co-host of What Not to Wear.

I consider Tiffany Shlain to be acceptable. Mostly. Although apparently she likes to show her own films at her speeches, which I find sort of self-centered and weird.

Raj Patel is definitely an important person--to other researchers on economics and the food crisis. ACRL claims that because he writes about interdependence in the market, he should be a great speaker, because ACRL's theme this year is also interdependence. I feel like maybe they went to the Guest Speaker Database and typed in keyword "interdependence" and took the first person on the list.

Clinton Kelly. I don't need to even say anything, do I?

Anyway, I'm not going to ACRL this year, for reasons not related to their keynote speakers. However, I think that originally I felt worse about not attending than I do right now.