Librarians conference, first day

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Today was the first day of the librarians conference. Seminary librarians from many countries in Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe have gathered to discuss topics of interest, to discuss problems and to explore the idea of developing co-operate interlibrary loan programs. There was general agreement that journal articles as they can be sent electronically by fax or by e-mail. Books are another matter as they have to be mailed and there are countries where the postal service is not only not reliable it is almost non-existant. One librarian said he tells his students if they take a book to their home town and it is due back in the library not to mail it as it will never be delivered. His request is they simply keep the book until they return to the school. He will not charge them an overdue fine. The reliability of postal services apparently varies greatly from country to country. Another librarian said that ten years ago it would have been folly to mail anything within her country, but that now the postal service has become very reliable.

Nancy’s presentation on “Cooperation Through Interlibrary Laon” was well received. She gave them concrete suggestions on steps that can be taken in the development of interlibrary loan agreements and in steps that can be taken in putting such agreements into play. She started by giving a short history of how the Maryland Interlibrary Loan Organization (MILO) moved from pre-computer days to how now any citizen in Maryland can access the holdings of all cooperating libraries in the state from their home computer and request book and other materials from their home.

Prague seems to be another of those places where if you do not like the weather wait five minutes. Today we had periods of broken clouds and sunlight and periods of snow. All-in-all about an inch of snow fell today ... soft gentle big flakes of snow slowly swirling down out of the sky. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the children enjoyed being out in the snow much more than the adults.

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