One of the perks awarded to the BIALL Chair is the opportunity to attend the AALL Annual meeting in the summer. I had been once before, as a BIALL bursary recipient, to Washington DC in 1999 and knew that there would be a great deal to observe and learn apart from the main conference programme. The scale of the American conference is, of course, very different to ours: nearly 1800 delegates compared to the 400 we had in Liverpool in June; 74 scheduled conference sessions and several hundred business meetings, a conference centre over a mile long (!), and of course the whole “larger than life” experience of being in Orlando. I knew the heat would be a problem for me, so I opted to stay in the Peabody Hotel just across the road from the conference centre, with its twice-daily “Duck Walk” to the fountain in the hotel lobby.