Welcome

The 47th Annual Preconference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries of the American Library Association will be held June 20-23, 2006, in Austin, Texas prior to the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.

This year's theme: "Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Twenty-First Century: Intersecting Missions, Converging Futures?" invites participants from the library, museum, and archival fields to join together in investigating common concerns relating to their shared missions to acquire, preserve, and make accessible the world's cultural artifacts and historical documents.

The two-and-a-half-day conference program will include a series of plenary sessions that will address a broad range of topics from comparative viewpoints, including collecting purposes and strategies, audiences and access, legal issues, and professional education and development. A variety of seminar sessions and facilitated discussions will complement the conference theme. Participants will also be able to take advantage of special tours of the recently renovated Harry Ransom Center and Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, and other local cultural facilities.

A major grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent Federal grant-making agency dedicated to creating and sustaining a nation of learners by helping libraries and museums serve their communities, will provide full attendance scholarships on a competitive basis to thirty new and aspiring library, archives, and museum professionals, especially from professionally underrepresented backgrounds. For more information and application procedures, go to the Scholarships page on this website.

The Ransom Center, located on the University of Texas at Austin campus, will serve as the conference host. One of the world's finest cultural archives, the Center houses 36 million literary manuscripts, one million rare books, five million photographs, and over 100,000 works of art. Highlights include the Gutenberg Bible (c. 1455), the First Photograph (c. 1826), important paintings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and major manuscript collections of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Tennessee Williams, to name but a few.

Check the Updates section of this website for the latest program and registration information

Graphics designed by Leslie Ernst. © University of Texas 2006. Photographs of the "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair, designed by Norman Bel Geddes, photographed by Garrison, from the Norman Bel Geddes Theater and Industrial Design Papers at the Harry Ransom Center.