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67th IFLA Conference Logo  

67th IFLA Council and General Conference

Libraries and Librarians: Making a Difference in the
Knowledge Age

August 16th - 25th 2001


INDEX

GENERAL INFORMATION

PROGRAM INFORMATION

REGISTRATION & HOTELS

IMPORTANT ADDRESSES


IN THIS DOCUMENT:

Pre-Post Conference Excursions

Accompanying Person Tours

Saturday Sightseeing Tours


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[FRANÇAIS]

 

SIGHTSEEING TOURS

Pre-Post Conference Excursions

Boston and its environs offer an exciting venue for IFLA 2001 participants and their companions. There will be opportunities to shop, attend musical events, visit museums, and explore historic and cultural sites. You can walk the Freedom Trail, wander about Harvard Square, run along the Charles River Esplanade, or Cruise Boston's harbor and waterways.

Excursions are being arranged to the splendid mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, the villages and beaches of Cape Cod, the pastoral Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, and the quaint rockbound seacoast towns north of Boston. You'll even be able to experience the excitement of a whale watch off the New England coast or contemplate nature at Thoreau's house on Walden Pond. Other possibilities include the Mystic Seaport in CT, the Stockbridge Village and Lexington and Concord, MA., the White Mountains of New Hampshire or the Green Mountains of Vermont, the Isles of Shoals, and Strawberry Banks in Portsmouth, NH.

Please check the appropriate box on the registration form to receive more information concerning the pre- and post conference excursions.

Accompanying Person Tours

Boston - Yesterday and Today

    Date: Monday, August 20, 2001
    Duration: estimated 4 hours
    Time of day: Morning
    Fee: USD 35.-

    This bus and walking tour focuses on Boston as it is today and how it developed. Boston is America's oldest city and reveals its history in overlapping layers. Although there will be significant amounts of historical information on this tour, the primary interest is in current life styles.
    Highlights will include a tour of the Back Bay area, developed in the late 19th century, with a special stop at Trinity Church and at the John Hancock Tower for a view from the 60th floor Observation Lounge. We will also tour the South End, on the "cutting edge" in today's Boston where "gentrification" is gradually displacing an older mix of tenements and boarding houses.
    We will stroll through Beacon Hill, where in the early 19th century the wealthy merchant families lived on the sunny South Slope and where the working class and African American families lived on the less desirable North Slope. And finally, we will explore the North End, home in the 18th century to American freedom fighters such as Paul Revere and home today to a colorful mix of Italian Americans and yuppies.

Cape Cod

    Date: Tuesday, August 21, 2001
    Duration: full day
    Fee: USD 50.-

    This is a long day but for many people a visit to New England is not complete without a visit to Cape Cod.
    We leave early in the morning and head south to the Cape Cod Canal, approximately an hour from Boston. After crossing the Canal, we will make a break in Sandwich or Barnstable for coffee and a stroll out to the beach. From here we will continue along the King's Highway through charming villages as our escort provides commentary about what we are seeing. A special stop will be at the National Seashore Visitors Center before pushing on the Province Town.
    "P'Town" is situated at the far tip of Cape Cod and combines old Portuguese fishing families with artists, writers, tourists and alternative life styles. It is also where the Pilgrims first landed in 1620. We will spend several hours here, during which time you may stroll the streets of this delightful community, have a lobster lunch, observe the natives, rent a bike, or go hiking or swimming.

Salem and Marblehead

    Date: Wednesday, August 22, 2001
    Duration: estimated 4 hours
    Time of day: Morning
    Fee: USD 35.-

    Eighteen miles north of Boston, the two communities of Salem and Marblehead display the diversity of New England's maritime history.
    In Salem the period between 1800 and 1830 (known as the China Trade Period) saw merchant ships circling the world and bringing back fabulous wealth and treasures. We will visit the Peabody Museum which has for over 200 years been the repository of artifacts from the Far East, from the South Pacific and indeed from all over the world. This museum is one of the true gems of New England. We will also view Chestnut Street where the mansions of this merchant class still stand.
    Neighboring Marblehead is wonderful contrast. Here we will stroll the narrow lanes and passages between modest fishermen's homes (now sought after and expensive!) on our way to Crocker Park with a stunning vista over Marblehead Harbor, crowded with lobster boats, fishing trawlers and yachts. If time permits, we will conclude with a drive around Marblehead Neck with examples of lavish 19th century summer homes overlooking the water.

Museums of Presidents

    Date: Thursday, August 23, 2001
    Duration: estimated 4 hours
    Time of day: Morning
    Fee: USD 35.-

    Only the Boston area can boast of two presidential libraries! We will visit both. Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adamslived at "Peacefield", a lovely estate just ten miles south of Boston. The Adams family library displays the remarkable intellectual power of this family over four generations.
    Our other library is the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library overlooking Dorchester Bay. We will concentrate our visit on the museum, which focuses on Kennedy's life and illustrates the nature of the office of the President of the United States in the sixties.
    A special additional treat will be passing by the birthplace of a fourth American President. You will find out who he is when we get there!

Lowell - Where Women's Lib began

    Date: Friday, August 24, 2001
    Duration: estimated 4.5 hours
    Time of day: Morning
    Fee: USD 35.-

    Lowell National Park is devoted to the development of the American mill and textile industry that transformed New England from an agrarian society into an international industrial power. We will learn about the mill technology that freed America from the spinning wheel and handloom and lead to mass production and Henry Ford. But it was women who made up the first labor force in these mills. Here, for the first time, American women entered the commercial work world and started on the path that led to Women's Voting Rights and today's Women's Liberation.
    We visit two fascinating sites. One is a typical boarding house where you get a deep impression of what life was like for these women, how their days were regimented by the paternalistic mill-owners, but also how they took advantage of the opportunity for independence and self-sufficiency. Then we visit the Boott Mill, a restored textile mill where you will learn what working conditions were like, how the mill technology was developed and how succeeding waves of immigrant labor replaced the farm girls through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.

Saturday Sightseeing Tours

Whales!

    Duration: estimated 8 hours
    Fee: USD 50.-

    An immensely popular excursion takes us out on the "foaming deep" to view whales -- splashing, feeding, breaching, spouting (and sometimes watching us watching them!) The Stellwagen Bank area off the tip of Cape Cod is home in season to a large colony of these leviathans and our whale watching cruise boat, complete with highly knowledgeable commentary from professional narrators, will take us into the thick of them. This is one of those few experiences that cannot be duplicated in a theme park. You have to go where the whales are! This tour also includes a visit to the New England Aquarium.

Sturbridge

    Duration: estimated 7 hours
    Fee: USD 50.-

    A visit to Old Sturbridge Village is an opportunity to turn the clock back over 150 years and experience the life, work and celebrations of a rural New England community at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Sturbridge Village consists of over 40 restored buildings set on 200 wooded acres. Displays and exhibits include a clock gallery, folk art and portraiture, firearms and militia accouterments, a working farm, blacksmith shop, sawmill, shoe repair shop, pottery barn, cooperage, gardens of culinary and medicinal herbs, and much more.

Newport

    Duration: estimated 8 hours
    Fee: USD 50.-

    This is one of America's most fabled summer watering holes. To visit Newport is to jump into a different world where Astors and Vanderbilts thought nothing of setting aside $300,000 for summer entertaining -- in 1895! We will visit one of the lavish "summer cottages" that this pre-income tax group built for a ten-week season. We will stroll along the famed Cliff Walk and drive the scenic ten-mile Ocean Drive past one extravagant mansion after another. We will drive past Hammersmith, the spectacular (but modest in comparison) summer home of Jackie Onassis, scene of her wedding reception. We will shop and browse along Thames Street, admiring the splendid yachts that fill the harbor. Lunch is on your own.
    But the key to this trip is gossiping about all the people who lived here, beginning with Quakers and slave traders and ending with Claus von Bulow.

Gloucester and Rockport

    Duration: estimated 8 hours
    Fee: USD 50.-

    Following a drive north through some of Massachusetts' more affluent shore communities, we reach Gloucester. Longfellow was writing about Gloucester in The Wreck of the Hesperus, Kipling in Captains Courageous, Junger in The Perfect Storm. Gloucester has been a rough and tumble fishing community and seaport since the 1600's and still is a little raw. A tribute to the fishing industry is the famous Helmsman statue overlooking Gloucester Harbor.
    We will see the mountains of lobster traps, the battered fishing trawlers, the processing plants that define a "real" port, but we will also see the charming crooked streets and hazy seascapes that charmed painter Fitzhugh Lane.
    From Gloucester we move on to Rockport for a leisurely few hours. Rockport is a sweet little fishing port filled with colorful boats, granite jetties, shops and the smell of salt air. On Bearskin Neck some may spend their time in the shops, others may clamor out the end of the granite breakwater for the views, others may choose the peaceful quiet of the bluss overlooking the harbor. Something for everyone!

Outlet Shopping in Kittery, Maine

    Duration: estimated 7 hours
    Fee: USD 50.-

    Little over an hour north of Boston, Kittery boasts upward of 100 discount stores offering everything from designer clothes to bicycles. For international visitors, Kittery can be fabulous location for bargain shopping. Anyone interested in this trip should bring lists of sizes for the entire family.
    People have returned from this trip with blue jeans, suits, designer dresses, silverware, racing bikes, lawn mowers. On the drive north, the escort will distribute maps and explain how Kittery is laid out. During the stay in Kittery, the bus will circle around so that participants can move easily between one group of stores and the next. There will also be coupon books.

Boston - Yesterday and Today

    Duration: estimated 4 hours
    Fee: USD 35.-

    This bus and walking tour focuses on Boston as it is today and how it developed. Boston is America's oldest city and reveals its history in overlapping layers. Although there will be significant amounts of historical information on this tour, the primary interest is in current life styles.
    Highlights will include a tour of the Back Bay area, developed in the late 19th century, with a special stop at Trinity Church and at the John Hancock Tower for a view from the 60th floor Observation Lounge. We will also tour the South End, on the "cutting edge" in today's Boston where "gentrification" is gradually displacing an older mix of tenements and boarding houses.
    We will stroll through Beacon Hill, where in the early 19th century the wealthy merchant families lived on the sunny South Slope and where the working class and African American families lived on the less desirable North Slope. And finally, we will explore the North End, home in the 18th century to American freedom fighters such as Paul Revere and home today to a colorful mix of Italian Americans and yuppies.

A Concord Pilgrimage 19th century home of literary giants

    Duration: estimated 4 hours
    Fee: USD 35.-

    This tour will focus on the intellectual flowering of New England during the mid-19th century. These Transcendentalist writers were the "flower children" of their era and our tour will be interspersed with readings from all of them. (The tour will also be an opportunity for visitors to experience the charm of several New England communities outside the city.)

    We will visit one of the following (and see the others): Orchard House where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, Ralph Waldo Emerson's family home, the Manse where Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne honeymooned, or the Wayside where first the Alcotts and then the Hawthornes lived for many years. We will stop at the Old North Bridge where the American War of Independence began, made famous by Emerson's Concord Hymn. We will also pay homage to Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. Thoreau's writings have influenced Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. This is a thoughtful tour for fans of these writers, as well as of Horace Mann, Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, and Margaret Sydney. If you have forgotten some of these names, we will refresh your memory with a stop at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where they all rest.

EBSCO Publishing Tour

    Duration: estimated 6 hours
    Fee: sponsored by EBSCO Publishing

    EBSCO Publishing, a global leader in the supply of reference information to libraries, will be hosting a land and sea tour of its historic Ipswich based headquarters, the Essex River Basin and Ipswich Bay on Saturday, August 25, 2001. A traditional "New England Clambake" will be held in conjunction with this event. This event is going to be popular and availability is limited to the first 250 people who wish to participate. For more information about EBSCO Publishing please visit: www.epnet.com.


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