In This Issue:

• Welcome
  
  
• Director's CorNER
  
  
• A Word About the Name
  
  
• Ill Advised
  
  
• Know Tech
  
  
• Tres Chic
  
  
• Membership Drive
  
  
• Wise Guys
  
  
• Links
  
  

A Word About the Name

As we started to plan and develop the newsletter, we had trouble settling on a name for it. We brainstormed several over the course of the summer and early fall, but nothing seemed to fit the tone that we wanted to set. We decided to ask you, our potential readers, to offer suggestions and announced that we would hold an election during the NAHSL conference to select the name.

We received several good suggestions. One of them, the NER'easter, was on the ballot and received the top number of votes. Several people made the casual suggestion that we "regionalize" it by adding a New England pronunciation . We liked it so well that you see the adjusted spelling as the title.

As a transplant to New England, I've always found the weather phenomenon called the nor'easter an interesting one. My first experience with one occurred early in my first winter here. It started early on a Saturday morning. We had started off for the mall on that Saturday morning to do some holiday shopping. It was snowing, pretty hard, and I suggested that we turn back. The driver, a brave and intrepid New Englander, said that we had too much to do and drove on. As we entered the center of town, though, he agreed that our trip out and about could probably wait for a few days. We stopped at the video store, stocked up on movies and returned home. It snowed for hours, we lost power and phone service for a day and a half, made tea and coffee in the fireplace, made sandwiches and built a snowman just off of our deck. It was in the aftermath of that storm that we met our neighbors for the first time and that I learned the concept of "snow angels". I also learned that New Englanders are helpful in emergencies and creative in their methods of solving problems.

I hope that this newsletter will give all of us in the New England region a forum for sharing ideas and finding solutions to the information needs of the people in our unique region. And, I hope that you enjoy reading it!

Debbie Sibley, Associate Director