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I think Schooner knows something is up.
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We depart for the airport.
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This time we park in the Express lot.
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Another picture taken by accident that actually works. BWI is a very busy airport.
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We can tell we’re in Maryland by the color scheme.
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Waiting for our plane.
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We’re near Detroit. I’m not sure what the bright yellow fields are. Canola, maybe?
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We take a taxi from the airport to the hotel. I hardly ever take taxis, but the alternative seems to be to take two buses and several hours. Seattle and Atlanta do airport transportation a bit better.
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We check into our room. Windsor, Ontario, is just across the river. If I had brought my passport, if it hadn’t expired, and if I had transportation, I could have gone to Canada for some Grey Poupon mustard. You can’t get the real thing in the States.
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My phone thinks I’m in Canada. Eventually it figures out I’m not. This is one of the advantages of being a smart phone.
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Night falls.
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Breakfast time! Usually American tea is a teabag floating in a cup of lukewarm water. This time it’s four teabags floating in a cup of lukewarm water. Or is it five?
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We have some extra time, so we walk to John K. King, Used and rare books. It’s a lot further than we thought it would be.
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...but well worth the trip.
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We find a few books. Fortunately, they ship. I don’t think I could have gotten back to the hotel carrying those.
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Detroit has a lot of beautiful architecture. And some that isn’t all that beautiful. This one is in the beautiful category.
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We find the convention center...
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...and register.
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The conference begins! Breakfast is provided, but my doctor suggested that I should cut out pretty much everything available here. We meet Karen Alcorn from Massachusetts and Carolyn Ching Dennison from Hawaii.
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The Chicken is not unknown here, and we meet more friends. L to R: Abby Dowd from Salt Lake City, Christine Hislop, and April Wright, both from Baltimore.
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Brian Baker (l) and I have been exchanging messages for years, but this is the first time we meet in person. Margaret Henderson and Julie Esparza complete the group.
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The opening ceremony! MLA President Shannon Jones and SLA President Seema Rampersad address the audience.
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Craig Robertson gives the Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA address. He spoke about filing cabinets, and made it much more interesting than one might think. I hadn’t known that the card catalog antedated the filing cabinet. Librarians are often in the forefront of innovation.
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We attend the Vendor Roundtable put on by SLA’s Biomedical and Life Sciences Community. As president-elect, I need to know more about what I'll be doing.
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We meet Darra Ballance and Donna Gibson of the Biomedical and Life Sciences Community.
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Lunch time! I’m not sure why my camera thinks the main conference room is blue.
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Sonya Lemke of the Arkansas Colleges of Health Education contacted me when her institution was considering Koha as their ILS. They went with another choice, but that’s ok. Our bitter, lemony tears fade, eventually.
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And we run into Erika Sevetson and Michelle Kraft.
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You never know who you’re going to run into. MLA President Shannon Jones, for example.
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Michelle Kraft gives the Janet Doe lecture. She talks about medical librarians and fake news.
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We attend a talk on recruiting, hiring, and retaining Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. It was a great talk, but hard to get a good picture. One of the people sitting at our table turns out to be Terri Givins, presenter of the afternoon’s John P. McGovern Lecture.
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Lunch time, today an exhibitor lunch and learn. A stroke of great fortune lands us at the same table as Steve Greenberg, recently retired from NLM. We catch up on things.
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We meet James Edwards from OpenAthens. Our IT department changed our network settings so we can’t use IP validation, so now every one of our users, including users in the library, has to go through OpenAthens. We have a lot of questions.
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It’s afternoon, and time for Terri Givens’ talk. Her topic is “Radical empathy: finding a path to bridging racial divides.” It’s also the title of her latest book. We buy a copy at the book signing.
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Earlier in the year, I took part in MLA Reads, an online book club. MLA President Shannon Jones leads a follow-up discussion on the project.
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You’d think that such an educated street would be able to spell. Or maybe that’s not an adjective.
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We take a short break. Conferences can be exhausting!
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Last Day! We take another trip through the exhibits. All the OpenAthens people are missing. I hope I didn’t scare them away.
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TDNet is another component of our online access setup. We’ve worked with them for years, and we drop in to say hi to Doug Madigan.
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We’ve worked with Prenax for years, too. We say hi to Delores Denault and her colleague Pete Prentice, President of US operations.
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And no conference would be complete without a visit to the Wolters Kluwer booth.
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We go to a talk by A’Llyn Ettien, one of the co-authors of “Librarians’ Perspectives on Restricting Literature Searches to the “5-Year Rule” and Other Strict Search Criteria.” My colleague and boss Layla Heimlich is another co-author, so I thought it would behoove me to attend.
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We run in to our friend Nina Exner.
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I probably had something really clever to put here, but I can’t remember. I should have written it down at the time.
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Time for the NLM update! Dianne Babski leads the revels.
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One of the problems with sitting in the back of the room because one didn’t get there on time is that taking pictures of screens doesn’t always work. Here, Patti Brennan, NLM Director, addresses the crowd by video. She retired at the end of September, so this is the last time we’ll hear her speak in that capacity.
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We are granted an audience with Diane Babski.
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Lunch time again!
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Ahh, this is where the OpenAthens folks were! Glad to know I'm mostly harmless.
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The convention center has a beautiful view of Windsor.
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Tara Douglas-Williams of Emory University says hello.
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Damien Ihrig, Elizabeth Stone, and Eric Ensley talk about their library’s rare book collection at the University of Iowa. Had my career gone slightly differently, I might have been giving a similar talk.
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We visit the NLM booth. George Franklin welcomes us.
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The conference comes to an end. Shannon Jones and Seema Rampersad wrap up.
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And then Shannon Jones and incoming President Amy Blevins celebrate 125 years of MLA with a cake.
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We take a bus back to our hotel.
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A trip to any new city includes exploring the local beers.
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A last look at out the window.
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It can be kind of disconcerting when a heavy rescue squad and a hazmat truck pull up outside the hotel. I think they were there for another event, just in case.
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I manage to change our return flight so we can spend time with our amazing colleague Margaret Hoogland. She’s more relaxed now that she’s gotten tenure. Congratulations!
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We visit the Henry Ford Museum.
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This is a very clever poster, and much more effective than the methods used by Ignaz Semmelweiss. I must say, though, that we’ve learned a lot about the value of handwashing since his time.
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Margaret drops us at the airport...
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...where we check in. Yes, I still check a bag.
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I really wanted to have genuine Detroit-style pizza with Margaret, but we ran out of time. I eat in the airport instead. Not the same, but good nevertheless.
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Our chariot approaches.
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I like to sit in the back of the plane because it’s more likely to have an empty middle seat. This time I have an entire row. Do I look like I bite? No, don’t answer that.
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And since I checked my bag, we’re in no hurry to get off the plane.
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Waiting for my bag gives me a bit of time to stretch before going home.
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And now, the wait for the shuttle.
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BWI has an up-to-date, state-of-the-art, real-time bus tracking system.
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In principle yes, but there are a few corrections to be made.
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But our bus eventually arrives. It’s more of a surprise that way.
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Home again!
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And no COVID!
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"And remember, if you ever need to fill a blank spot in a photo album, you can't go wrong with a picture of a teapot."
--Grace Hopper (attrib.)
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