Kristine Fowler
fowler@math.umn.edu

For your information and to assist in your planning, here is a preview of PAM's programs for the 2002 meeting in LA. If you have comments or suggestions about these tentative plans, please let me know while there's still time to modify them.

• We're hoping to offer a continuing education course Saturday afternoon (6/8/02), entitled "Let's Get Physical! Physical Science Reference Fundamentals for Non-Scientists"; the proposal was submitted to SLA in early September and is awaiting approval.
• PAM and the Engineering division are jointly arranging a tour of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for Thursday (6/13/02).
• All the traditional activities you've come to know and love will naturally be offered again: the early-bird dinner; roundtables for astronomy, physics, mathematics, all of PAM, vendor updates, and computer science (Sci-Tech will take the lead this year); newcomers' lunch; two evening open houses; the annual business meeting and breakfast; and of course board meetings.

Special notes on the scheduling:

• The Astronomy Roundtable is scheduled for 11:30-3 on Wednesday (6/12/02), which is fairly late in the conference, but perhaps least inconvenient for astronomy types also interested in the JPL tour;
• The open houses in the hotel will once again be on consecutive nights--Sunday and Monday (6/9-6/10)--a decision largely dictated by the prohibitive cost of the suite;
• The conference venues are widely dispersed, so the official schedule set by SLA includes half-hour gaps between programs for transportation.

Topical programs:

• Information access in developing countries, to be planned by the International Relations Committee and Brenda Corbin, in follow-up to PAM's Global 2000 program on the same topic;
• E-journal user behavior, moderated by Steve Gass, who has arranged for both HighWire Press and the University of California to present preliminary results of their research;
• "You Don't Look Like a Librarian," in which Ruth Kneale will discuss results of her survey on public perception of librarians in the Internet age.

This all adds up to a very full schedule; you could go (and will, I hope) from one PAM activity to another for days...