ARS - pt. 1

The best part of any ASDAL conference is meeting everyone else who has come to the conference. And most of them usually show up for the Adventist Resources Section pre-conference. So it can be difficult sometimes for the person responsible for the ARS program to drag everyone away from the registration area and into the meetings.

The meetings this morning have been pretty good. Rich Carlson, the Union College Chaplain did the worship and shared some interesting stories of staffing the information desk at the recent General Conference Session. People who had lost things at the 2000 session in Toronto wondering if those things had been found and were available now at the lost and found desk, that sort of thing.

Then Jim Ford gives us some bad news. Merlin Burt, our first presenter, has to be back in Michigan to be with his family. His mother-in-law is possibly about to pass away, so we prayed for his family before we started. Then Jim managed to give Merlin's presentation from his notes. And we got to meet the new director of Southwestern's EGWhite Research Center, Mary Ann Hadley, who shared some stories and insights of how that center was set up. Gave us something to think about as we're in the process of seeing if we need to start one at Southern.

We also get to meet the new Library Director at Southwestern, who adds some more details to the story. Apparently we're going to have plan very carefully for staffing and funding issues if we ever want to get something like that off the ground.

Tony Zbaraschuk is now telling us what sort of resources we need to consider when building our own SDA resources collection. And it's not only informative, but also surprisingly entertaining.

So we're off to a good start.