In January the three of us - Helen, Henry and Jack - submitted an abstract for a poster session we wanted to present at the ALA summer meeting in Washington. The title was "So how do I do this now?" and was about revising and upgrading the Cataloging Department's Procedures Manual. The manual was still NOTIS-based at the time, and needed to be re-written to reflect the changes resulting from our migration to Voyager. Our abstract was accepted, and we were invited to ALA to present the session.
Unfortunately Henry wasn't able to attend ALA this year. But the two of us went to DC, having just finished mounting the revised manual onto Cataloging's web site; we also had the manual loaded on the LRAC laptop. We were, and are still, very grateful for the use of that laptop, it was the very best way to demonstrate the manual to interested parties.
And there were plenty of people interested in the poster session. The subtitle, "Adapting a Web-Based Processing Manual for Voyager", was a big selling point. Many other libraries are contemplating a major system migration - some to Voyager - and more than a few people simply wanted to know how our transition went. People from the Library of Congress stopped by, as did folks from the National Library of Medicine and from many other libraries around the country.
We arrived early, and were lucky to be assigned one of the most prominent places on "poster session row". We had planned to set up in time to have a half-hour or so to relax before beginning, but things didn't work out that way. Even before we were quite ready, people were dropping by and asking us about the manual and the migration.
On our table we had several print copies of the manual, the online version on the LRAC laptop, some blow-ups of a few of the more colorful screens, and a stack of strips of paper which had our e-mail addresses and the manual's URL on them. We handed out about 70 of these strips, encouraging people to look up the manual itself on their own computers. We know from subsequent e-mail messages that several people were interested in accessing the manual after we returned home.
Below are a few pictures taken during the poster session.
| This image was taken early during the session. Note the laptop on the table. (Thanks again, LRAC!) | |
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And here are more people checking us out - it was great to have a topic in which there was so much interest. |
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Some of our friends from Auburn stopped by, and we also got to see old friends like Donna McCurley and Dawn Anderson, who have since moved on. |
| And here, in a rare posed shot, are the two of us, along with Dottie Marcinko. |  |
| This last shot is off-topic, but we thought we'd include it anyway. This is a photo of the interior of the Jefferson Building, one of the main library buildings of the Library of Congress. What would it be like to work in a place that looked like that? |  |
