I arrived in Fort Worth around noon on Tuesday, which was pretty early, but it gave me some down time before the work began. I ended up helping the Conference Planning Committee chairs finish stuffing packets with copies of the program and registration receipts until well into the night.
The next morning (Wednesday) we were up bright and early to report to the Board meeting. Following that, we prepped the registration desk setup, and then met with the hotel contact to go over each room setup one more time. While this was happening, the poster boards were delivered, so I helped the hotel contact retrieve them from the truck that was too tall for the loading dock, and bring them in to where we would be storing them until the Great Ideas Showcase.
After our meeting, my committee chair and I grabbed some lunch and spent most of it talking about what we would have done different this year, which is helpful for me, since I’ll be chairing the committee next year. We returned from lunch just in time to introduce the first session of pre-conferences, and then hung out in comfy chairs near the registration desk catching up on email and other work. I enjoyed getting to visit with the colleagues and conference friends who were trickling in through the afternoon.
In the evening, I joined the board members for dinner at a restaurant with Texas-size servings. The food was amazing, but I could have eaten three meals off of the plate, and barely touched the jalapeño cheese grits that my table had ordered as a side, no matter how much I wanted to wolf them down. So far, I have not had a bad meal anywhere here.
In the midst of all of this, we’ve discussed topics ranging from library/vendor relationships, sharing metadata, discovery tools vs. specialized databases, and the quirks of punctuation in RDA serials cataloging, though for that last one, I mostly listened, since I prefer to stay as far away from cataloging as I can.
This morning I was up bright and early again to introduce another pre-conference session. I’m looking forward to the rest of the attendees arriving today. There will be many hugs.
