In June of 2005 I went to the ALA conference in Chicago. I had been attending grad school for about a year and to be able to go to a national conference was an extremely exciting adventure for someone so new to the library world. That was the year that blogging was really taking off with librarians and OCLC hosted their Library Blogger party. Now they're having spontaneous twitter meet-ups at the convention center in Anaheim. How cool is that?! Just think of how fast all of these librarians are able to connect with each other and share information. Things have changed so much in just the past three years. I guess I'm feeling pretty envious that I didn't get to go this year. I no longer have a membership to ALA, it lapsed in October. I put off renewing it because, well, every month there was something more important we needed to pay for.

I've recently been thinking about some of my interests and how I can put them all together in a way that would make some sort of contribution to the profession. I've been knocking around some ideas and I think I've come up with something. One of the applications I filled out last week asked me for any published research that I may have done (zilch) or any areas I may be interested in researching. I recently embarked on an endeavor to teach my 22 month old how to speak a second language (I'm half Norwegian), which got me thinking, how does information literacy behavior in multilingual individuals differ from those who only speak one language. One of the books I've been reading, Raising a Bilingual Child, advocates the use of learning a second language at an early age because it apparently helps brain development and problem solving skills. Now linguistics isn't my thing but I do have family members who are multilingual. I'm kinda bilingual. My mom is bilingual. My brother speaks several languages mostly fluently and is working on his dissertation that requires him to do research in different languages. My mom has a website that requires her to do a good deal of research online and she mentioned to me the other day that she hardly ever thinks to do her google searches in Norwegian. She speaks English fluently without hardly a hint of an accent so you wouldn't think there would be much of a difference, but maybe there is.

I should probably mention to her that Google has their very own Norwegian search engine. I wonder how different her search results would be if she used Google.no instead of regular Google. What about the search terms she uses. Does her language duality enhance her search or hinder it. How does the process differ? The results? Take it a step further and ask what about those people studying subject areas that require them to do research in databases/online using languages like Chinese or Arabic. It's possible that there's already a bunch of research on this. I haven't found a much yet but I only have access to EbscoHost and Google Scholar didn't give me much either.

At any rate, I think I've found a research subject that allows me to combine my interests in information literacy, international librarianship and possibly even intellectual freedom (think closed countries). I can't tell you how wonderful this feels since I've been searching for an "idea" that embraces everything I'm passionate about for three years. I came back from ALA Chicago buzzing from the overload and I've been coming down from that ever since. It's taken a while. This summer may not have brought me Anaheim, but it didn't definitely bring me focus.