FROM THE EDITOR
Jain Fletcher
This final issue of 2004 follows the very successful OLAC Conference in Montréeal. Along with nearly a full complement of regular and semi-regular offerings, this issue is largely devoted to reports about and related to the Conference. These include, of course, the minutes of the OLAC meetings held at the Conference (CAPC, Executive Board and Membership). Moreover, there is a highly streamlined version (due to space considerations) of the OCLC News, the full version having been compiled by Jay Weitz as a Conference handout. But most of all, there are the reports of the Conference activities themselves.
Jan Mayo, the Conference Reports Editor, started her work months ago, assigning reporters to the full line-up of the Conference offerings. Assistance in this effort came from Mary Curran of the University of Ottawa, a member of the Program Committee, who helped Jan identify some of the potential reporters and was instrumental in garnering a French language version of one of the French-speaking sessions. Following the Conference, Jan kept a strict deadline on submissions and then edited all of them into a single document. The full set includes the 2-day pre-conference workshop, two plenary sessions, multiple workshops, two showcase sessions, a panel discussion, poster sessions, round tables, and "birds of a feather" sessions. There is also a perspective on the Conference from the OLAC Scholarship recipient, Jaime Anderson.
Jan was phenomenally successful, ensuring coverage of a more complex set of meetings than OLAC has ever held. So successful, in fact, that her final submission was 33 full-size pages long. By itself, the set of reports would convert into nearly 60 pages when put into the Newsletter format. This is quite long; if it had been anything but the once-every-other-year Conference reports, it would have been severely edited. However, I could not, in good conscience, reduce the contributions of each of the reporters about this topic just to save space. Neither could I have put out an extra bulky issue, considering all the other contributions needed for it (which would have resulted in higher production expenses and mailing costs). Finally I arrived at a solution to this dilemma: the Conference Reports will be broken into two "installments" for the print version--one in this issue and the other in the June 2005 issue. However, the electronic version of the December issue will carry the entire set of reports. Only after the second installment appears in the June print version will the online version split the reports into two "installments", thereby bringing the online version back into sync with the print version. Until June then, if you are looking for the full set of reports, please refer to the OLAC Website <http://www.olacinc.org/conferences/2004.html>.
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Last updated: December 24, 2004
http://www.olacinc.org/newsletters/dec04/.html
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