Pay phone

Whew, full day today! This morning began with the new member breakfast, which started at 7:00 a.m. That’s approximately five in the morning for Denver time… On my way to the breakfast, I noticed a pay phone, and decided it would be a good photo op for Riley’s bear. How quaint, a pay phone in the middle of the block in the center of a mostly residential area! The breakfast went well, though, everyone else seemed to be pretty alert, and I got to meet some new people, both new members and people who’ve been around for a while (longer than a minute for sure, I met this guy tonight, and his first ATLA conference was in 1962. That’s even before Mark was born, that’s so long ago!)

I went to a couple of other ATLA conference events too during the course of the day. There’s a new interest group in the association that is focused on Teaching and Learning (that’s actually their name), and the first session that I attended after the keynote was all about how theological librarians can reach out to the faculty in their institutions. Sound kinda like what I described happened yesterday? The program was very similar, and was led by the same person.

Lunch was free because I listened to a sales pitch for EBSCO. They are the company that my library has the most subscription databases through. The company has some new products that will be coming out between January 2009 and December 2010, that they will be selling. So, free lunch isn’t always free, but it was pretty good nonetheless (and there was no monetary cost involved!).




After lunch, I chose to go to the Library and Archives Canada, and hear about what the catalogers there do during their workday. They have 80 people working fulltime just cataloging government information from Canada (national and regional and the “state” level). Because they have a national library (unlike the U.S.), the place where I went was actually in a government building. There were buses hired to take us from the conference hotel to the Library Archives Canada and the bus drivers were given the wrong address, so this one required some searching. English and French are both official languages of Canada, that's why the sign appears in both languages.