Anna Ercoli Schnitzer
InfoPoint Librarian
Health Sciences Libraries
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

The four-day Ann Arbor Art Fair in its 49th year, came to a close on Saturday evening, July 19, 2008, and this year for the first time the University of Michigan Library was part of the action. Although Booth #12 in the Non-Profit section of this huge fair was originally reserved and rented by the Health Sciences Libraries, we opened our tent flaps to affiliated library volunteers from the Science, Graduate, Undergraduate and Business libraries as well. It was an extra pleasure to have a cross-section of library collaboration, and we needed all the help we could get, since we had to provide staffing for a total of 45 hours.

The week was a warm one, and we had one fairly severe downpour along with a number of cooling sprinkle showers. When we finally folded our wet little green tent at 6 pm on Saturday, we had distributed all of our hundreds of MedlinePlus pens, plus a number of beautiful blue M-Library pens, a broad assortment of brochures, almost all of our individually-wrapped candy, and a great deal of immeasurable good will, along with pertinent information about our favorite online reliable consumer health site, MedlinePlus, as well as library availability and accessibility. The little notebook with our statistical tally revealed that the number of personal interactions (beyond those involving solely grabbing a piece of candy) was 830. It was a huge fair visited by thousands of people each day, so we had the opportunity to do lots of promotion of MedlinePlus and of our libraries. Apart from a short downpour that caused a veritable torrent at the rear of the tent for a time and definitely dirtied our new banner, we suffered no adverse effects. The people-watching was terrific, and the collaboration/cooperation by our team members was equally terrific. I am sure that the Non-Profit Section will expect us back next year. We even came up with a few creative ideas that we can incorporate to advantage in the future.

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