Conference Summary

The 2011 Annual Meeting is now officially over. For us, it ended Friday night when we left Chicago. Our last day was a but different than the other two. I chose to skip the panels in the morning and get some sleep before checking out. In the afternoon, we had a bit of a treat. Amber was able to arrange a behind the scenes tour of the Archives and Rare Books department of DePaul University. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, DePaul University is a small Catholic University in Chicago. Their Archives and Rare Books collection contains a wide variety of material from University records to the papers of a number of prominent Catholic priests and nuns, to a theater collection. They even have an Emmy Award, a picture of which I will post online soon.

Overall I found the conference an enjoyable experience. Simply being surrounded by people with similar interests made the trip worth it. Admittedly it was a but awkward being a student since most of the professionals tended to ignore us. So this year was a trial run of sorts to help prepare for future meetings. It has been my experience that one must go to a conference several times to really get comfortable with, and take advantage of, the experience. I have also noticed at other conferences that there is usually a group of "regulars" that attend every year and SAA is probably no different. So I look forward to being able to attend next year's annual meeting in San Diego.

On a different note, the officers spent some time discussing the upcoming semester. Due to scheduling conflicts, the meetings for this fall have been moved from Tuesday to Wednesday. They will still be held at 3:30 PM in the Draper Student Lounge. Our first meeting will be on September 7th, which is in the second week of classes. We are also planning on having roughly one event a month. For the upcoming semester we have planned a trip to the USS Slater, a trip to the Rockefeller Archives Center and Sleepy Hollow, and a panel session with some local archivists.