RBMS 2015 Blog

This year, the planning committee is excited to offer nine (count ‘em, NINE) separate tours of a few of the many wonderful cultural heritage institutions in and around Richmond, Berkeley, and Oakland. Conferences like ours not only represent opportunities to improve the depth and breadth of your knowledge and professional practices or network with your colleagues, but to learn something new about a location you may never have been able to visit. To ease your touring experience and aid in planning, we have created a custom google map of all these tours and their stops. You can access it here.

Tours include:

Historic Richmond (see previous post for more information), where participants will travel to the nearby city of Richmond for the day on Tuesday, June 23^rd. Stops will include public art at the newly renovated Richmond Civic Center, the nationally-renowned Richmond Art Center, the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National  Historic Park, and the Richmond Museum of History. Lunch will be catered mid-day at Assemble Restaurant.

In Berkeley, we’re pleased to be able to offer a wide variety of free, low-cost, guided, and self-guided tours. UC Berkeley, with its many libraries, museums, galleries, and exhibitions, is understandably the epicenter of many of our tour offerings, including a general campus tour of university buildings and landmarks (Tuesday, June 23^rd), the general Bancroft Library (Thursday, June 25^th), the Bancroft Library Gallery (Thursday, June 25^th), the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library (Thursday, June 25^th), the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (Thursday, June 25^th), and a general campus-wide, self-guided tour of current exhibitions  (Thursday, June 25^th).

If staying close to downtown Oakland is preferable, conference attendees can tour the African American Museum and Library on 14^th Street (Tuesday, June 23^rd), which has a collection of rich materials relating to Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, Africa in relationship to the African-American experience, genealogy, and California history, along with personal papers, diaries, and records of prominent families, pioneers, churches, and social and political organizations. Another option is a tour of the Oakland History Room at the Oakland Public Library (Tuesday, June 23^rd), also on 14^th Street, which is an important center for the study of the history and current development of the East Bay. Its collection contains a wide variety of materials relating to the history of Oakland and the larger Bay Area, including books, magazines, pamphlets, newspaper clippings, photographs, postcards, sheet music, trade catalogs, and scrapbooks.

We hope you’ll come along and see all that Oakland and the surrounding areas have to offer! Please note: many of these tours have restrictions on the number of attendees. Sign up in advance so you don’t miss the fun! If you have already registered, you can add an event to your existing RBMS 2015 registration by calling (800) 545-2433 and selecting option #5, or emailing registration@ala.org.

– Elizabeth DeBold, Folger Shakespeare Library