Greetings from Heathrow Airport!
It’s Meaghan, your trusty Fellow for Dean’s Initiatives, and I’m on my way to Amman, Jordan with Dean Cloonan. For the next five days (Sunday – Thursday), Dean Cloonan will be co-leading a workshop on teaching management to LIS students for a group of Iraqi library science professors. I’ll be helping out with the administrative bits and pieces, and I’ll also be blogging throughout the week.
We flew out on Friday night after wrapping up the Lazerow Lecture (many thanks to Peter Hirtle & Sarah Thomas, who are a marvelous duo) and arrived at Heathrow at 6:00 AM local time. We’ve been browsing the shops, we had lunch, and we even had showers (it’s nice to travel with someone who flies as often as Michele – she can get us into the club rooms). We’ll be flying on to Amman in a few more hours, arriving at 11:00 PM Amman time. Class starts Sunday morning, which should be an interesting turnaround.
How did this all come about? Simmons has been training Iraqi librarians since 2005 thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can read a brief history of the program here. Since the conclusion of that program, many people have been working to secure funds for futher training sessions. Harvey Varnet — one of the original organizers, a GSLIS alum, AND a previous Beatley Library Director — was able to obtain a grant from the US Embassy in Baghdad. Training was supposed to take place in September at the American University in Kuwait (where Harvey currently works), but the Iraqis weren’t able to get visas into Kuwait. Harvey graciously reorganized and rescheduled everything, and here we are. Well, here we almost are.
If you have any questions about what’s going on, please leave them as comments and I’ll do my best to answer. Also, there doesn’t appear to be spellcheck in MoveableType, so please forgive any errors.