Conference Reports

Science & Technology Section Celebrates 40th Anniversary in San Francisco
ALA Annual Conference, June 15-18, 2001

The San Francisco conference was several months ago, and I am now feeling a sense of great fulfillment having chaired the Program Planning Committee for the 40th Anniversary celebration. We had a terrific committee who shared great enthusiasm for the occasion and each of them love the vitality, collegiality and their personal affiliation with the section. We had programs, parties, and trips; brought together partners and friends; and truly reflected and celebrated. San Francisco was among the perfect places to do it. This celebration reinforced the sense of community and special attributes of the ACRL Science & Technology Section.

Julie Hurd, chair of the Section, launched the conference and anniversary festivities when she called to order the first Council meeting Friday evening. The usual committee meetings and discussion groups met and on Sunday evening, we celebrated as "ISI Salutes STS on 40 Years" got underway at the Merchants Exchange Building. San Francisco's Bay Bells greeted us and this event brought together the Section membership, ACRL leaders and the special corporate friends and partners.

The Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) hosted an elegant reception. Following introductions of the ISI top management and ACRL leadership, STS presented Jacqueline (Jay) Trolley, Director of Corporate Communications, with a gift and salutation, "ACRL Science & Technology Section Honors Jacqueline Trolley for her innovative spirit, support and being a Special Friend. San Francisco, 17 June 2001."

The section program, "Quantum Leaps by Decade: Forty Years of Science Librarianship Through Collaboration," was on Monday, June 18. The program was a series of serious and anecdotal reflections by thematic issues that have defined and contextualized each decade of the past forty years. Five distinguished speakers provided informative and entertaining presentations:

• The 1960s: "From Sputnik to the World Wide Web: A Retrospective View of Citation Indexing," by Dr. Eugene Garfield, Information Scientist & Chairman Emeritus, Institute of Scientific Information,

• The 1970s: "Partnerships for Education: Libraries, Museums and New Forms of Scholarly Communication," by Dr. Marian Cleeves Diamond, Professor of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley,

• The 1980s: "The Digital Age," by Dr. John Warnock, Chief Technology Officer, Adobe Systems, Inc.,

• The 1990s: "Sustaining the Networked Environment and Building Virtual Communities," by Dr. Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information,

• The New Millennium: "The Crystal Ball: Relationships of the Past and for the Future," by Eugenie Prime, Director of Libraries, Hewlett Packard.

On Tuesday, June 18, STS members had the chance to visit the Stanford Linear Accelerator on an all-day field trip. A report of the trip by James Crooks is included in this issue.

As we begin another period in the Section's history, I remain convinced that we are on the right track with our commitments and pledges to create new models of scholarly communications, refine our strategies for information literacy, increase our collaborations with partners in industry and publishing to make science librarianship the exciting and rewarding career that it is. We will do this with programs and activities such as those at the San Francisco conference to guide and support us.