ACL Conference - Part E

Thursday

The last day of the conference. I missed the beginning of the devotional time this morning, but made it for part of the community praise and worship.

David Mash was the keynote speaker for the morning session. He reminded us how the advent of each new communication technology was forcasted to obliterate the preceding forms of communication, particularly the printed word. Particularly, the advent of digitization and ebooks brought many forcasts of printed books becoming obsolete. Yet Mash presented a variety of statistics to say that printed books are still thriving and digitized works have not gained popularity, as predicted.

The afternoon brought the final two opportunities to attend workshop presentations.

First, I attended a cataloging workshop. As many more experienced and dedicated catalogers all around the room shared their questions and ideas about cataloging, I was felt quite incompetent. Even so, I picked up on several little things that I can do to improve our library catalog. One of the ideas I particularly liked in theory was using a page of commonly misspelled words to find errors in the catalog. Of course, that takes time, which I don't have much of. There were a couple of other reminders that I picked up that are more practical.

The second presentation of the afternoon I attended was on access to serials. This presentation walked through what their library considered in choosing a system to make their periodicals available from with-in their non-full-text databases. I'm seriously wanting to work toward making this type of access available to our students. But it'll be at least a year down the road, as the systems I've looked at cost a few thousand dollars/year. Still, I found the presentation helped me to think about what it will involve and some of the comments and questions at the end helped to clarify some of the options.

Everyone attending the conference was encouraged to read Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner before arriving. Through the week, there were a number of formally organized and spontaneously generated discussions about the book. On Thursday afternoon, author Lauren Winner joined us at the conference to add her voice to the discussions. Thursday afternoon, there was a time of Q & A with Winner. People asked her such questions as "How heavily was the book edited from what you wrote?," "Why was the title 'Girl Meets God' chosen?," and "What are your favorite books to read?"

The traditional banquet was held Thursday evening. Many who were involved in organizing and pulling off the conference were recognized. A couple of awards for service to the organization were presented. The next year's conference was promoted (especially as next year will be the 50th conference).

After the banquet, Lauren Winner spoke in a more formal setting about memoirs as a literary genre. Afterward, she autographed books.

While many needed to pack and prepare to catch early morning flights, few seemed eager to end the week of fun and fellowship.