This past week I attended the annual meeting of the American Theological Library Association. This year's meeting was held in Ottawa, Canada. On Saturday I gave a presentation titled 'Before PowerPoint: Lantern Slides in Theological Collections' that sketched the history, uses and preservation practices related to magic lanterns and glass lantern slides. Michael Boddy (Union Theological Seminary - NYC) and Martha Smalley (Yale Divinity School) also participated in the session and discussed their respective collections.
During the week I also participated in a poster session for the International Collaboration Committee. I discussed our current digitization project between Africa University and Drew University. The Methodist Librarians' Fellowship meeting was also on the agenda. It was nice to learn what some of the other schools affiliated with the Methodist tradition are doing in the way of publications and projects. There is current interest in digitizing various Books of Discipline and conference journals. I'm currently searching for funding to begin a project to digitize all of our annual conference journals (several thousand publications) over the next academic year (2008-2009).
