ACL Conference - Part D

Wednesday
I may get to bed early tonight.

The morning stayed busy. Following a praise and worship time, a business meeting with elections was held and the conference photo was taken. A long break time for checking out the vendor exhibits and the poster sessions was followed by another workshop presentation time.

For this morning's workshop, I caught a presentation on training student workers. It made me think a bit more about how we have handled training and policies. There were some interesting and good ideas--polo shirt "uniforms," mandatory meetings, more formalized training (the presenter is working on creating a DVD for her library), and evaluations. I'll have to spend more time evalutating and considering these and other good ideas that I noted.

The first workshop presentation I attended in the afternoon was on information literacy. I didn't pick up as many good ideas, but found the panel's experiences interesting and the other attendees comments encouraging--I'm not the only one that has problems with information literacy. I'll need to e-mail the presenter and request a copy of their information literacy curriculum.

The second afternoon workshop presentation I attended was much more theoretical. Titled "What is Academic and an Academic Librarian?" the presenter led the attenders in discussion. The recurring theme was how is the MLIS degree perceived and what library faculty can do to be treated with the same respect as classroom faculty. There were several things that I was "convicted" about doing/not doing, such as not attending chapel (as faculty are encouraged and even required to do). Now if I can just remember why it is important at 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning when I've just gotten into the middle of a project and know I'll be uninterrupted for at least 20-30 minutes.

I rounded out my afternoon by attending the Christian Library Network (CLN). Membership in this group provides discounts from about 3 vendors and encourages free ILL between member libraries. Membership is only $50, so I know the school wouldn't bulk at paying it, but I'm not sure how I would really justify it, if pressed. The discounts provided are comparable (if not the same) as discounts we already have available through Solinet and CLN doesn't have nearly the same number of vendor relationships as Solinet has. On the ILL front, with less than 85 members (scattered across the U.S.) and fewer than 70 with their holdings in OCLC, we have much better chances of finding lenders (and probably faster fill rates) through the hundreds of libraries we have agreements with through Solinet and LVIS. On the other hand, the meeting included a presentation by OCLC on the general idea of OCLC group services. The group is very interested. I don't know if PHC could get better pricing through the group services and how that might affect our pricing of services we might opt to choose outside of the group services. I'll probably go ahead and join for a year or two and see how it works out.

By skipping the evening CILA meeting, I was able to join friends in a .25 mile walk out to the point. From there we were able to see the river, some of the tall buildings of Columbia, and the state penitentary. The weather was beautiful for sitting in the gazebo and chatting.

About 9:00, we enjoyed an ice cream social followed immediately by ACL Jeopardy. Three teams of two answered questions in categories such as Early English Translations, Chistian "ism"s, and ACL trivia. Much fun was had. One team had two people who only began attending conferences in recent years--they made a respectable showing and came in second with $1, after loosing most of their "winnings" on the final question. One team was anchored by a man that has been attending ACL conferences since 1973--WM. That team had a very solid lead, but lost everything on the final question. The winning team was powered by KW who--with his degree, teaching, and on-going interest in theology and greek--dominated in the categories relating to Christian history.

The ACL Jeopardy idea was inspired by ACL member Grace Veach who competed on Jeopardy 10 times and won $23,000+. Her final appearance on Jeopardy was shared with the group.