Boston Diary - June 11

Today was a busy day at the conference. After devotions, I had to run to a different building where I was co-presenting with 3 other librarians about Web 2.0 technologies. Today was vendor day so all the exhibits were open after that presentation. We had sandwiches for lunch. There were two presentation sessions in the afternoon which I attended. Then we had section meetings. After that was a CPI (Christian Periodicals Index) indexers meeting. It was actually during the supper/dinner time period in a smaller dining room, but some of us decided to go eat seafood afterwards. We went to Tony's Clam Shop here in Quincy. Folks around here had been raving about it, but I told them they need to go to Kennebunkport to the Clam Box. The clams in Maine are much better! Of course, Tony's did have better clams than we get in Tennessee. (Sorry, I didn't take a photo.) I'm calling it an early night!

Boston Diary - June 10

Today was the first full day of conference. After breakfast at the hotel, we arrived on campus where we attended devotions and then the first keynote address by Dr. Em Claire Knowles of Simmons. After that, we had a business session, then lunch on campus (pizza), and our first round of presentations. Since I'm primarily in technical services, I went to the cataloging roundtable. After that we had "professional tours." I had signed up for "make your own tour." We went to the Boston Public Garden, Boston Common, and Old Granary Burial Ground rather than touring one of the libraries of the area.

Here are some gorgeous purple flowers that are in the public gardens. They look like oversized purple dandelions but they don't seem to blow quite like the dandelions.

Guess who was swimming?
The ugly duckling became a beautiful swan!
On the common is a tribute to football!
The frog pond with part of the city in the background.
This is the Tremont Temple.
A close-up of the top of Tremont Temple.
Old Granary Burial Ground. It dates back to 1660. This is just one of the gates.
One side of the ground.
Memorial to victims of the Boston Massacre, including Crispus Attucks.
John Hancock.

Paul Revere.
Paul's wife, Sarah Revere.
Mother Goose.
Samuel Adams.
I'm grateful to Charles Ewer for founding New England Historic Genealogical Society.

Ben Franklin's parents.
You just never know when you'll run into some other librarians in an old cemetery!


The spire of the Park Street Church (Congregational).

A view down Park Street.
We came back to Braintree and ate at Legal Seafood. This is the Summer Cape Cod dinner feature. It had lobster, scrod, smoked applewood bacon, and a corn sauce that had tomatoes. YUMMMMMMMMMMMMM
Dessert was Boston Creme Pie!

Boston Diary - June 9

I had breakfast in the hotel. Then we headed over to campus. Once again the heat was awful. However, I decided to head to Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. I hopped on the T and took the red line to Harvard Square where I caught a bus to the cemetery. This is a wonderful garden cemetery.

Information is located in this chapel. They have a video that tells about this cemetery's history. It was nice to sit in air conditioning for awhile.
Some of the cemetery's beauty!




Some notable burials include . . .

Isabella Stewart Gardner

Oliver Wendell Holmes
Mary Baker Eddy - This is just the top of her monument!
And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (front and back of monument)

I would have loved to stay longer, but the heat was sweltering. As it turns out, it was good that I left when I did because there was a train that became disabled in front of us on the T, and we had to wait for awhile at several of the stations on the return trip to the Wollaston station. I was so hot that I skipped lunch and opted for a frappe at Brigham's instead. (Thanks for reminding me about them, Bill.)

It wasn't long then until the Presenter's meeting at the conference. Since I'm presenting, I had to attend. Then was had the first conference meal--carved roast beef!

Our opening reception was at the Josiah Quincy house, a few blocks from the campus.
"John Quincy Adams" spoke to us at the meal and then joined us at the reception where he spoke to us in character. Some of us from Tennessee considered telling "Mr. Adams" that Andrew Jackson would like to face off with him in a duel, but I don't think any of us did.
After that I had a liberal arts section leadership team meeting.

ACL 2007 Workshops

LibraryThing was down when the workshops for it were scheduled. I felt sorry for the presenter who had to rely on PowerPoint backup, but at least he had that! They were having a bookcover pile contest while it was down. We considered having a pile of librarians who were trying to access librarians while it was down and submitting that, but we didn't!

One of my colleagues and myself have talked several times about the workshop that showed how one library is using Facebook to reach its students where they are. I believe that we'll all be talking about how we can utilize Web 2.0 technologies to reach students in the coming academic year.

Another very interesting workshop was the one on customized toolbars which allow one to search things such as the library's online catalog, databases, and citation style guides. I'm already trying to figure out what we would need to include on one for our students. The presenters did tell us that it took time to develop them because of the code involved, but it is so useful that it will be worth the time.

I went to two cataloging workshops--one on authority control and one on metadata. I was very pleased with the direction the authority control presenter took. She approached it from the how it is changing and is likely to change perspective rather than it being a "how to" workshop. I know there were some in attendance who were looking for something a bit more hands-on, but having experience in the area, I was grateful for a more futuristic approach. The metadata was a good review for me of some of the skills that I'd been taught at a workshop back in about 2000. I really had not utilized this except in one digitization project since that time, and it was helpful to see the core elements of metadata for libraries once again.

The picture book update was great! This is the workshop where we get to pass around a lot of picture books which came out in the previous year. It's always interesting.

Networking Night at ACL

I didn't take a lot of photos of people at ACL this year, but here are a couple from Wednesday night's "Networking" event.

This is a photograph of the "photography" group.

This was the largest group of the evening--the games group.

Christian Publishers Just Don't Get It

One of the events at this year's Association of Christian Librarians' Conference was a publisher's forum with representatives of Kregel, Zondervan, Baker, and Eerdmans speaking as panelists. It became very clear to the librarians that although the publishers stated that our libraries were very important to them that when push comes to shove, they just don't understand the digital revolution in libraries and are doing nothing to serve our needs. A few of them have a few downloadable books available, but these seem to be marketed to individuals rather than to libraries because they require different platforms. Libraries are more interested in having electronic books available which can be read in a web browser by their patrons and which require no additional software installation beyond Adobe PDF which is usually already available. They aren't interested in software which requires special readers or devices in order to read them. These publishers seemed very much mired in the print world of the 1960s and early 1970s rather than in the 21st century. I believe that if these publishers don't quickly get into the 21st century, that they are going to cause their own demise. Several of them kept making an excuse about "being fair to the authors" in regards to royalties; however, if publishers such as Oxford University Press are doing it, there is no excuse why those models cannot be studied and an acceptable one established. There is also one other thing that was disturbing to many of the librarians in attendance. It was clear that the publishers didn't understand how books are used by academics. They did not seem to appreciate the fact that many persons use only portions of books in electronic formats. Do they not realize that the same thing has been going on for years in academia? If a researcher is seeking information, they may only use one chapter or a few pages that they've located using the index in the back of the book. Most researchers do look at the context to determine if there is additional information relevant to their work as they utilize the information. They don't really take it completely out of context which is what the publishers seemed to think happened if the entire book was not read. It is hoped that the four publishers present and other publishers in the Christian book industry will move into the 21st century before they are replaced by publishers who publish electronically and will print on demand as needed. The model is already out there. An few upstarts could come along and revolutionize Christian publishing if those not already in the industry don't take the lead.

Eating in Boston - ACL 2008

On my flight home, I was browsing the latest issue of American Way aboard the airplane. I came across a review of eateries in the Boston area entitled "The Boston Eat Party." Ming Tsai's Blue Ginger has been on my wish list of restaurants to visit for awhile. It's one of those that I just didn't have time to visit on my trip late last summer.

Grand Rapids

Gerald R. Ford Museum

Association of Christian Librarians

On Saturday (the 9th), we flew into Grand Rapids. After attending church on Sunday morning, I spent most of the rest of the day in metings. Monday was my "tourist" day until the conference began that evening. We went to Holland to visit the Dutch Village and to Holland State Park so that we could see the lighthouse. The conference's opening reception was held at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum. Tuesday night was "trivia night," and I was fortunate enough to be part of the winning team. We got to wear stickers on our name badges the rest of the week to designate us as the champs. Wednesday night was networking night. At first I tried to join the "travel" group, but when we decided to travel to the local ice cream establishment, we discovered we had all flown and no one had a car available. I ended up joining the "knitting" group. However, no one was knitting, and it ended up being an all craft group. I did take a photo of the photography group at one point. I don't want to comment on specific workshops and sessions attended in this message but will save it for a later post. I will post a few photos soon!