On the road and back again

Road trip!

The Special Libraries Association (SLA) annual conference was in Seattle, WA this year and a great time was had by all. Great sessions - more about those later -, wonderful tours of the Seattle Art Museum Library, the Experience Music Project and the Paramount Theater, lots of wonderful sightseeing and more salmon than any one person should eat. Oh yeah - and the coffee! Even the hotel room coffee pot has good coffee!

Some exceptional formal conference sessions included Using Controlled Vocabularies to Enhance Access to Cultural Information; "I Don't Know Art, but I Know What I Like": Critical Visual Literacy and Distributed Digital Preservation: the MetaArchive Approach. To view these presentations (and more), go to http://www.slideshare.com/ and search "sla 2008." So, while the sightseeing was grand and the food divine, the real reason to go to these things is truly to learn. And learn I did. Also, a very special thanks to Traci Timmons, librarian of the Seattle Art Museum for her time and suggestions.

Good News Department: Our IMLS Grant got extended for another year so that Nancy Mosley can continue doing what she does best - making our catalog truly reliable and authoritative! Thank you Nancy and looking forward to another great year!

New Titles Department:

• Courtesy of the Barnett Newman Foundation, we just received a copy of the hefty Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonne. Fabulous resource.
• Nine to Nineteen: Youth in Museums and Libraries: A Practioner's Guide - Just in from IMLS, a slim volume chock-full of resources, case studies, and practical information from their "Engaging America's Youth" initiative.
• Elizabeth Currid's The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art & Music Drive New York City which is, as the author describes, "about how creativity - particularly artistic and cultural creativity - happens and why it happens in some places . . . more than others." This book "explains how the cultural economy works - and why it is vital to all great cities." Required reading for fall?
• Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels and Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels - Long unavailable reprinting of wordless novels using woodcuts to tell their stories. Thank you Joel for requesting these sensational and powerful books!

From the Newstand Department: Quiet Spirit, Skillful Hand: the Graphic Work of Clare Leighton is featured in the latest issue of Journal of the Print World (Vol 31, No. 3 Summer 2008). (And cool! It evens mentions the MintWiki!)

Just around the corner I swear Department: We are so close to getting MARCO live we can almost taste it. Stay tuned.