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On Thursday, March 16, 2017, I had the good fortune to travel with colleagues Stephanie Bennett and Karen Feeney (WSFCPL) to Asheville for the SNCA Annual Conference. Karen was kind enough to drive us over to UNC-Asheville and back.

The plenary speaker was Dr. Darin Waters, a professor at UNC-A, who spoke on the importance of using primary resources….this was music to everyone’s ears. Dr. Waters explained how he found letters from his grandfather, who owned an apple orchard in the 19th century, in the archives of Biltmore House.

The next session I attended was Uncovering African American History. In this presentation, a panel of speakers discussed their individual efforts to research African American history. The panel was Richard Cox, UNCG Libraries; Christy Hyman, Nebraska Wesleyan; Marcellaus Joyner, High Point Museum; and Erin Lawrimore, UNCG Libraries.

Following lunch, I presented on Irish Ink: Printing and Visualizing the Dolmen Press Collection. My co-presenters were Aaron Smithers (UNC), who presented on Collecting Music Scenes in the Southern Folklife Collection and Kristen Merryman (NC Digital Heritage Center) who presented on The Challenges of Finding and Digitizing Materials from Underrepresented Communities.

The final session I attended was Social Media Archiving by a panel of individuals who are going beyond Archive-it to collect social media. This was a great and fascinating conference with terrific presentations.