MARAC Morristown - Saturday

On Saturday morning, the MARAC Conference starts with our business meeting. The business meeting is the opportunity to report to the membership about what is going on with the organization. Currently before the organization is a plan to take credit cards and process online transactions. Our organization (and profession for that matter) is somewhat antiquated and as a rule, resistant to change. However, the time has come for us to move into the 20th century, seeing as we are now six years into the 21st.

The business meeting is also an opportunity to reinforce the concept of the "next meeting is the best meeting." If you have done local arrangements for MARAC, we came up with that saying, which is defined as, you go to the next meeting after yours and sit back and watch as the people run around like chicken with their heads cut off and remark, "did I really look like that six months ago?" So at today's business meeting, we got a preview of the next meeting location, which will be held in Scranton, PA. I am already planning to make an endless CD of the Harry Chapin song, "Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas."

After the conclusion of the business meeting, attendees headed off to the first of two session blocks. I went to a session titled, "Desperately Seeking Solutions" (which was posted on the hotel announcement board as "Desperately Seeking Susan") and dealt with the topic of electronic records. As a newly minted electronic records archivist, it was the session of the conference for me to attend.

First up to talk was an archivist from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) who tag-teamed her presentation with a professor from Louisiana State University (LSU). The two of them had conducted a survey of College and University Archivists to see what they were doing in the field of electronic records. The next presentation was by an archivist / records manager from the Kentucky Department of Library and Archives who entertained us with the problems and issues surrounding electronic records at the state level. The final speaker was from the National Archives, who spoke about the ever-widening project at the National Archives, ERA.

I did not attend a session in the final block of sessions, nicknamed the "death slot." There may need to be some discussion about how to better handle this slot as the speakers often get short shrift.

As the conference concluded, we all went off in our separate directions until we meet again in Scranton.