ASDAL 2006 - ARS, pt.4

The two presentations in the afternoon are follow-ups from last year's conference. And some projects that have been in the works for many years. Marsha Rasmussen reports on the Ellen G. White Estate Research Center that they've started up at Southwestern Adventist University. She has a slideshow that gives us a virtual tour of the facility, and it's pretty impressive. It's kind of small, but it looks good. I especially liked the etched-glass representation of the Christ of the Narrow Way painting. It looked very impressive. I'm going to have to get down there and see it sometime.

They also face the usual problems of limited space and budget, but I'm glad they're moving ahead. They are also moving ahead with some interesting programs aimed at kids to get them interested in Ellen White and denominational history. I'm glad they're doing something like that, and it sounds like they have some interesting plans for expanding this ministry.

Then Michael Campbell presents what has been happening with the SDA periodicals digitization projects. There are more titles available, but the existing ones aren't quite complete yet, so there may be some way we can work together to fill in those gaps. Poor Michael, he says he's running on no sleep. Sounds like he's had quite the adventure getting here. I'll have to get that story sometime. Maybe when he's more rested.

Fred Bischoff is here from the Adventist Pioneer Library project. They're about to come out with a new edition, and they've got some nice new additions. Unfortunately, Fred has brought his Mac, and I can't make it work with our data projector. We don't have the right adapters anywhere, and it won't recognize his S-Video output for some reason. Oh well. We didn't have alot of time, anyway.

Then we still have time for our ever-popular Business Session, as Jim puts it. With elections out of the way, there is some interesting discussion of how collections are coming along, what is getting cataloged these days, and how we can share this information with each other. Watch the Adventist Resources Section page of the ASDAL web page for some new sections and updates. So I have some work to do, it seems.

The group will get to go on a tour of Southern's Heritage Room and some archives, but I get to run back over to the library to grab some quick supper and help set up for this evening's poster sessions and ice cream social. Should be great fun.