Last night, I spent a good hour looking working on my committee volunteer requests (The ALA President-Elect is accepting requests until 12/4). Only five minutes of that was spent actually filling in the form, the remaining 55 was spent visiting the ALA website and surfing the bewildering number of ALA committees (21) and council committees (16) — here’s the full list. If that wasn’t intimidating enough, almost every division and roundtable has its own set of committees (and subcommittees) as well. I’m leaving the math on that as an exercise for the reader.

Happily (?), I only needed to select from the list of ALA committees and council committees. After reading over everything (hint to ALA: it sure would be nice to have a brief summary of all the committees on one webpage — clicking 36 separate links was not a fun task) , I decided to request the Web Site Advisory Committee and the Training, Orientation & Leadership Development Committee. My technical background would be useful on the Web Site Advisory committee, plus I have a few annoyances with regards to the website that I’d like addressed such as speed on certain webpages (getting ketchup out of a bottle is faster) and with broken links.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I also requested to serve on the NMRT Midwinter Social committee for 2010-2011 as well. Oy.

In spite of all this, I’m looking forward to learning more about the inner workings of ALA and working with some interesting people doing interesting things. This should be interesting.