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This evening I got in from the South Carolina Library Association conference. I spoke there for the College and University Section on “Adapting to a Changing World: Exceptional Services for a New Information Environment.” If you’re interested in the presentation, I posted it over on my blog.

I really enjoy seeing how different library associations work, as well as their conferences. SCLA is an annual conference that is in Columbia, SC every other year. In the years that it’s not in the capitol, it rotates from being on the eastern end of the state and the western end. The conference was a little smaller than NCLA, located in one hotel, but still had a lot of participants and vendors.

I was able to meet with two of the committee members (and Mary Horton!) for dinner the evening before the conference. It was fun to hear about USC (especially since two of my fellow RITS team members went there, and Mary now works there), and to learn a little about how SCLA works. As is often the case when several librarians get together, we found that we’re all facing similar issues.

Earlier in the day, Mary gave me a tour of her new library and part of the USC campus. The library looks fairly small and cozy from outside, but there are five acres of library below ground! There’s also a lovely reflecting pool outside the building.

Today, I spent the morning preparing for and giving the presentation. We were anticipating about 30 people, but one of the organizers said they stopped counting at 60 attendees. You know you have a topic that resonates with folks when they’re willing to sit on the floor! 🙂

Afterwards, Mary and I continued to catch up a bit, and then we went to a general session luncheon. Award winning Jonathan Green was the speaker, a South Carolinian artist. He was an entertaining speaker, but equally entertaining was the slideshow of his art that ran throughout his presentation. Beautiful work!

After that, I came on back to Winston-Salem to do a little cooking for tomorrow’s RITS retreat. I had a great time at SCLA; catching up with Mary, meeting nice people, having a receptive and big crowd for the presentation, and beautiful fall trees for the drive there and back all contributed to the lovely experience. 🙂 Fun stuff!

On another note, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Library101 project. It was unveiled at Internet Librarian, and I did a little bit of writing for it. If you’re interested, I posted about it over on my blog.