San Antonio, Day One

I am in San Antonio for the next few days for the ALA Midwinter Conference. My director, supervisor, and I flew out of Jackson shortly after noon. We arrived in San Antonio at about 3:30 p.m. We hitched a ride in a Holiday Inn courtesy van that was intended to carry only a couple of airline people-- a pilot & flight attendant. I saw the van right as we were leaving the baggage pickup area. I walked across the street and asked the driver if they were going to the Holiday Inn we were staying and he was, and so I motioned my director and supervisor over to the van. We put our luggage in the van and were driven to the hotel.

I checked in and entered my hotel room a little before 4:30. I checked my email. I got an email related to the college's SACS reaffirmation work. Fortunately, this question could be answered pretty easily. The requested documentation is available on the Internet-- I hope, anyway. I had asked my director and she had mentioned that the more recent the data, the better.

I didn't realize how painful and tedious SACS work can be. In the course of a year, I've helped write and edit narratives, ensured that citations followed editorial guidelines that we were given, requested books consulted for SACS work via interlibrary loan, been an independent reader of all of the college's narratives-- not just those responses concerning with libraries and learning resources, and acted as a researcher.

Most of my day at the library yesterday was spent researching articles relevant to reaffirmation. Technically, I had the day off today, but since one of my responsibilities is interlibrary loan I checked OCLC firstsearch this afternoon when I arrived in San Antonio to see if the library had received any requests.

There were a couple of requests. I denied one. I think the requesting library in question mistyped the OCLC ID. One request was for a book that my college does hold. I sent an email to some of my colleagues to be on the lookout for the book. I've asked them to let me know when books arrive to be ready to be shipped either to the libraries that have requested to borrow them or to the libraries that we've borrowed books from as well as articles that I'm expecting from other libraries that were requested by a faculty member.

Another faculty member needed a book we borrowed from another library. We got the books for him. We've renewed a couple of them once already-- one of the books was a little slow in arriving.

Later that afternoon, about 5:30, we went to the Gonzalez Convention Center. We had preregistered. We just needed to get our badges, which we did. We also walked around the exhibits area and then went back to the hotel to put some stuff back up before going to this Mexican place called La Margarita.

Good food. Very filling. Lots of musicians.

I'm back at the hotel. I'm tired. It's been a long day, and I'll be attending a couple of meetings tomorrow and I'll wander around the exhibits area as well I suppose.