From May 17th through May 20th, Judit Ward, Bill Bejarano, and Helen Castro traveled to Chicago to attend the Medical Library Association (MLA) conference, entitled MLA ’14: Building Our Information Future. While attending last year’s MLA conference in Boston, Helen and Judit noticed a rush of activity at the journal’s exhibition booth as well as a keen interest in Judit’s poster detailing the history of the interdisciplinary services at CAS library. That interest manifested into a newly created panel at this year’s conference, entitled “Celebrating Our Information Future Using the Treasures of the Past”. Having been the inspiration for this new panel, it seemed only fitting that the CAS Library should be one of its presenters, so when the opportunity arose, we submitted an abstract detailing the efforts that our library has been making to access, preserve, and utilize our unique historical resources. And just to add a little more fuel to the fire, we decided to submit a poster proposal as well.
We were pleased to later receive a notification that both our poster proposal and presentation abstract had been accepted to be included as part of the conference! And just to round out the Center’s presence in Chicago, Helen would represent the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs on the exhibition floor throughout our time there.
We got to work right away on our two related but distinct projects. Our presentation had the title “Looking forward, looking back: Celebrating 75 years of Alcohol Studies”, and its focus was a further explanation and update of what Judit’s poster had introduced the year before—namely, the chronology and outcomes of the preservation and digitization of our Center’s historical collection, and the world of possibilities that it opened up. As we were slotted last on the panel, we decided the best way to wake the audience up would be for Judit and Bill to present alternating slides, so that they were not hearing one static voice throughout the presentation. The panel’s audio was recorded by MLA, and we have saved the .mp3 of our segment on our shared drive for posterity.
Our poster, entitled “Cabinets in the ALCVault: Your Secret is Safe Here”, depicted a visual representation of the various types of documents we are dealing with during our digitization efforts. We decided to show this by designing a Cartesian plane that shows two continua, one (the y-axis) going from fully public material to that which is exclusively in-house, and the other (the x-axis) showing material whose digitization process can be more automated versus that which needs more human processing. To turn our ideas into reality, we were lucky enough to have a graphic designer in tow, our part-time librarian Debbie Fanslow, who helped to lay out the poster’s design. She more than earned her spot as an author on the poster. And its interesting design paid off, as we received so many questions about our poster that our throats were getting dry from giving so many explanations!
It is important to note our continuing push of the Center as a whole above each of our individual efforts. Learning from the big boss, we sprinkled plenty of commercial messages throughout our presentation and poster sessions. And we even saw some tangible results. Upon returning to staff the booth shortly after we had presented, we were pleased to see a member of our audience who listened to our advice and showed up to the booth to talk more about the Journal, and even take a complimentary copy. All in all, the Center was well represented from many angles, and we did our best to make our presence known and market ourselves from both a historical and contemporary point of view.
–Originally published in the September 2014 issue of the CAS Information Services Newsletter