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Charleston is just about the sweetest place for a library conference ever. Bill and I drove down Tuesday and I read a really interesting book in the car, Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. Members of the Coffee Shop Group and 4th floor Renovation Team will want to read Chapter 4 on recruiting students to design their own spaces. The ethnographic methods in the book are similar to those I used in my dissertation research so they made a lot of sense to me. Check it out: (it’s fully downloadable from the ACRL website). I had the morning free on Wednesday to do some walking, trying to get in shape to walk the half-marathon at Kiawah on December 7. Trying to ignore that it was once a slave market, the Charleston Market is now a source of livelihood for many local women. I bought a Gullah basket here last year and have it in my office.

The Great Southern Drought is very much in evidence along the Charleston waterfront.

Continuing on to Battery Park where the Civil War began (or the War of Northern Aggression, depending on your point of view), one has to ask, “What were they thinking?”

In the afternoon, I visited the Vendor Showcase. The two best booths were Alibris (of course) and Cambria Press, where I met Toni Tan for the first time. Toni and I became good friends over email during the publication of my book. When she learned I was a librarian, she picked my brain on how to market books to academic libraries. I told her if Cambria only went to one library conference, it should be Charleston, so she took my advice and came down from Buffalo, NY. Here is a picture of Toni and me (My eyes are closed in about 80% of the photos ever taken of me).

After Bill’s Juried Product Development presentation, we went to dinner at an unnamed Irish Pub. All went well until I reached for my water glass after dinner and found a cockroach (euphemistically called a Palmetto Bug down here) floating there.

Yuck! The manager kindly did not charge us for dinner, but I don’t think we will be returning there at future Charleston conferences… Lynn