Poster Child

I got up early in the morning and walked to the conference site, leaving Jayne on her own for the day. My path took me through one of the most beautiful urban parks I have ever seen, with gigantic chestnut trees towering over an expanse of at least 160 acres, to my estimate. What a lovely green expanse after seeing so many Spanish towns without much shade to speak of.

The ICA conference is huge, with over 900 archivists from all over the world in attendance. I found myself talking with a couple of guys from Turkey who were a real hoot. The one chap noticed my pocket watch and excitedly showed me his wrist watch, declaring we were both dinosaurs since everyone on earth tells time by their cell phones these days. (I had left our phone with Jayne.) My poster turned out pretty nice, and I spent some time talking with the fellow who designed all of them from data the presenters had sent in. He told me mine was unique, and the people on his team could not believe mine had anything to do with archives since the illustrations were comic book covers! The poster was placed on the way to the stairs in one part of the meeting hall where the wall narrowed against the plate glass window, so it is a pretty safe bet that hundreds of people saw it. (After the conference was over I walked back to the place with Jayne and had her take a picture of it since I cannot take it with us.)

I spoke to an enthusiastic, albeit small, group of Catalan archivists who were fascinated with the artwork and the goals I am attempting to accomplish. They were a great audience. Tomorrow I will be back, probably sitting in on sessions having to do with photographic collections since the program description sounded pretty interesting.