The Telephone Collectors International (TCI), a nonprofit educational and historical association that is the largest of its kind in the U.S., will hold its annual meeting this year in Lancaster, Pa., on Friday and Saturday, June 13 and 14. The annual meeting brings together telephone hobbyists from across North America. Attendees bring items from their collections for demonstrations and learn from each other about telephone history and about how to restore and maintain telephone equipment produced since the telephones invention in 1876. The TCI annual meeting is open to the public on June 14 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The location is the Farm & Home Center at 1383 Arcadia Road, Lancaster, Pa. More information can be found by visiting the groups website at www.telephonecollectors.org under Shows & Events. One emerging area in keeping old telephones alive is adapting them to the internet age with voice over IP (VoIP). Part of the exhibit space will be dedicated to Switchers Corner, where members will demonstrate various communications and dialing techniques among equipment from different eras, all interconnected with VoIP. Exhibitors will also be able to call TCI members around the country and the world, who have set up antique equipment with compatible adapters on the internet over a virtual private network. A major activity at the meeting is buying and selling telephone equipment, parts, and related material to build collections and keep them running. The public can talk to experts and learn how to add old phones at home, fix ones they have, and connect them to their modern wideband or cellular phone service. The members who attend the annual meeting include experts in various aspects of telephony who are happy to answer questions. While some started out in the telephone industry, many became interested in telephones without specific knowledge other than as users. Some are interested in the equipment technology, some in the designs, some in the impact on society, and some in the complex relation among telephone businesses, economics, regulation, and public policy. Those are issues that continue to echo today. Many collectors start because they would like to get the kind of phone that they first used while growing up, then clean it up, fix it up, and use it again. The open portion of the TCI meeting is a family event to learn about old crank phones, rotary dial phones, no-dial phones that connected directly to switchboards, and payphones. For additional inforamtion, contact Paul Wills at 610-384-4250 or paul.wills@telephonecollectors.org.