Conference Highlights

Additional Speaker Notes and Announcements

Join Us on a Library Odyssey

Namibia, Wisconsin caves, radio air waves, El Salvador, the Milky Way, Iowa farmlands, the Mississippi-what an odyssey! Travel around the globe and up into the stratosphere, just by coming to La Crosse this April. Whether you're a virtual tourist or a real one, this conference is for you.

The conference committee has worked hard to schedule a varied program, with speakers on professional, personal, and peripheral topics. A "national" librarian with Wisconsin ties, library director Rob Robinson of National Public Radio will entertain us with stories of on-the-air reference service. Dr. Lynn Connaway, UW-Madison SLIS graduate, is our electronic book expert from netLibrary, as well as a spokeswoman for librarians in corporate settings. Keeping with our odyssey theme, ACRL President-Elect Mary Reichel will delve into the future with her thoughts on scholarly communica-tion. The curator of rare books at the University of Iowa, David Schoonover, will help us explore by "Charting New Courses with Rare Books."

We have heard your suggestions, and therefore books will not be forgotten on the agenda-you'll see a number of programs celebrating reading. Besides the fun of the programs, there will also be extra curricular and extraterrestrial events, including trivia, comedy, and a planetarium visit.

We welcome our friends in every unit of WLA - sponsors and non-sponsors alike. And with a location like La Crosse, we hope that librarians in neighboring states might join us. We even have a Moo discussion to entice you Iowans...plus member rates for those who belong to your own state library association. We have tried to accommodate the "voyageurs" who must trek to Des Plaines at the end of the week for the Voyager User Group Meeting. We hope that by scheduling the more technical programs for Wednesday, you'll be able to join both groups that week.

Librarians, administrators, and all library staff should be able to find programs of interest to them. Special thanks goes to the entire conference committee crew and commanders Patricia Herrling and Paul Beck for overseeing the entire odyssey-from Tang to nuts.

Please join us-we look forward to seeing you!

Nancy McClements, Chair
Wisconsin Association of Academic Librarians