The 45th 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 Monday, June 21 to Thursday, June 24, 2004. The conference will take place on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut prior to the ALA Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida. Entitled Ebb and Flow: The Migration of Collections to American Libraries, the preconference will focus on the history and current issues surrounding the movement of collections from the four corners of the earth into American repositories.

A full schedule of plenary speakers, short paper presentations, seminars and tours is in store for attendees. Plenary speakers include: Alice Prochaska, Yale University Librarian; James Raven, Director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust; Michael Winship, University of Texas at Austin; Robert Parks, Curator, Pierpont Morgan Library; Dr. Thomas F. Staley, Director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center; Robert McChesney, Director of the Afghanistan Digital Library project at New York University; and Anthony Rota, Bertram Rota Ltd., Antiquarian Booksellers, London. Seminars will cover a variety of topics ranging from implementation of the Text Encoding Initiative to special collections funding opportunities to curating exhibitions. All of these sessions will examine different aspects of the increasingly complex duties of librarians and archivists who are responsible for acquiring, preserving and providing access to cultural artifacts—artifacts that have often traveled great distances before coming to rest in American repositories.

Conference attendees will have the opportunity to visit and tour the Yale campus and the historic center of New Haven, as well as Yale's renowned libraries and special collections, including the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Sterling Memorial Library, the Yale Center for British Art, The Elizabethan Club, and the Yale Law Library and Rare Book Room. Within Sterling Memorial Library, several specialized collections may also be visited. There will also be a preconference tour on Monday, June 21, to the Lewis Walpole Library, in Farmington, Connecticut, and the Mark Twain House in Hartford, and to the Wesleyan University Special Collections, in Middletown, Connecticut. Evening receptions will include an opening reception in the gothic splendor of the Sterling Memorial Library, a reception and dinner hosted by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and a reception hosted by the Yale Center for British Art. Other events will include an all day workshop at Beinecke Library on the cataloging of manuscript music, and a second workshop on conservation, which will be held at the British Art Center.