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Some of you
may be interested in attending the following: The ACRL
Western European Studies Section is pleased to announce the latest in its
continuing series of conference presentations, “Topics in European
Studies,” to be held at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim on Sunday,
29 June 2008 from 1:30-3:30 P.M. at the Hilton Anaheim Oceanside Room. This
series gives conference participants the opportunity to present proposals or
preliminary findings from research projects and to receive constructive
feedback from colleagues. The event will appear in the ALA program schedule as
the ACRL WESS Research and Planning Committee meeting. The papers to
be presented in Anaheim (with authors’ abstracts) are as follows: "After
the Deluge: Long-Term Responses to Library Disasters with Some Lessons for the
Future" (Mark Peterson). Libraries across the
world are under threat from disaster and war. It is the responsibility of
librarians and, more and more, governments and the international community to
not only protect the world's collections but also to recover effectively when
disaster does strike. This has proven to be very difficult. Not only are the
efforts of saving materials very complicated, but getting funding and help
organized often brings together very different groups and agencies. It does not
help that books are often the last things on people's minds when they are
dealing with the injured and with threatened infrastructure. In this paper, I will be discussing the
responses to the Elbe flood of 2002 in Germany and the Czech Republic. This
historic disaster caused tens of billions of dollars in damage in Central
Europe, including the flooding of the basement of the Czech National Library.
My focus is on the institutional efforts to save books and libraries. How
effective were they and how have the efforts to recover from the disaster been
going? My greatest interest is in the long-term efforts to bring things to
normal by European countries, the aid that the rest of the world has provided,
and what we can learn from this for the situation in other library disasters
around the globe. Other
two papers are: “A
Good Ride?: The Views of Academic/Research Librarians with Subject Doctorates
on the Workplace and Profession” (Thea Lindquist). “Madmen,
Hypocrites, and Degenerates: Readers and Their Books in the Late-Eighteenth-Century
German Novel” (Kathleen Smith). Nancy E. Kraft |