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John Waters: I am by no means a prude and loved his interviews in “This Film is Not Yet Rated” but I thought his luncheon speech at ACRL was inappropriately irrelevant. We should attract students to the library by appearing in the nude? And that was one of the mild suggestions!

“Perceptions of Campus-Level Advocacy and Influence Strategies among Senior Administrators in College and University Libraries” sounded like a good research project but yielded inconclusive results. The premise that peer influence strategies are differentiated by size and type of library institutions (expressed in Carnegie classifications) was largely unsubstantiated. There was a helpful review of the dimensions of influence and strategies for influencing peers on campus.

General thoughts: In my view, ACRL is a very worthwhile experience for academic librarians. The presentations are generally of higher quality than you will find at ALA. An additional benefit is the fact that no committee meetings are allowed so you have 3 days of uninterrupted, high-quality presentations focused on academic and research library issues. There is a notable public service slant to the themes, so if you are a public services librarian you will find more posters, panels, presentations and discussions on information literacy and reference and emerging technologies than you can absorb! This conference put out its call for papers well over a year ago – and that sometimes backfired, as two of the presentations I attended had abstracts submitted 18 months ago that never actually materialized. Still, I would recommend ACRL strongly to all ZSR public service librarians.

Tomorrow: University Libraries Group

Lynn