It's almost like being there: SAA 2007 Conference Report

What a great trip! The SAA 2007 conference was my first national conference-- and it was exhausting and amazing. In addition to the general conference festivities, I found myself involved at many levels: I went to a workshop on user studies, took the Certified Archivist exam, spoke to a couple of roundtables, and presented a paper.
Rather than write it all out here, I'm going to refer you all to my notes and to some great blog posts by others.

My "Schedule at a Glance"
8/28

• Workshop Notes: I attended an all day class on ways user studies can impact the archival profession, aptly called Applying User Studies Findings to Archival Practice

8/29

• Certified Archivist Exam: 100 questions, scan-tron sheet, not fun. I took the CA exam Wednesday morning, amidst the pounding of hotel construction in the hallway outside our exam room. Fortunately for me, I had earplugs. I could narrow all the questions to 2 answers, though between those 2 it was pretty tough to find the "best" answer. The results should arrive in the next few weeks.
• Research Libraries Group Workshop: Digitization Matters: Breaking through the barriers - scaling up digitization of special collections. Because I was in the exam all morning, I only caught the end of this workshop. What I saw was quite thought-provoking and it was held at the Newberry Library! Great notes can be found on the hangingtogether blog.
• Research Libraries Group Roundtable: the RLG folks invited the NWDA folks to talk to their roundtable about our three rounds of usability testing and lessons we learned.
  

8/30

• Opening Plenary: SAA president Elizabeth Adkins ponders diversity in the archival profession.
  
• Session 205: Ships That Pass in the Night? Evaluating Archival Users Tools with a User-Centric Perspective. This session was chaired by Jodi Allison-Bunnell and asked us to listen to the users and work to develop a personal relationship with them. My notes can be found here.
• Session 307: Reference Service and Minimal Processing: Challenges and Opportunities. This was my big moment! My session was held in a big ballroom and there were roughly 500 people there. You can find the text in this blog post.
  
  

8/31:

• The big activity for Friday, in addition to the all member party in the evening, was the Manuscript Repositories Roundtable. The invited speakers discussed Digital Personal Papers & Digital Archives in manuscript repositories.
  

9/1

• Finally, in-coming president Mark Greene gave his closing remarks, which can be found, in full text, by clicking here.
  

I welcome questions about my trip, Chicago, and what it was like to stand in front of so many people and hope what you are saying makes sense to them!

Thank you to the library for supporting me, it made all the difference to feel like I was working for both myself and my institution.