It's Academic

Break out! Plan a session for the PaLA Annual Conference

April 4, 2015

tags: conference, pala, professional development

The 2015 PaLA Conference Program Committee is now accepting conference session proposals for the 2015 PaLA Conference, PA Libraries: Engage, Educate, Enrich. The conference will take place October 4 – 7, 2015, at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel in State College, Pennsylvania.

If you are, or know someone that is, an expert on a topic that you feel will be of interest to librarians, we invite you to submit a session proposal. The Program Committee is particularly interested in receiving proposals on topics suggested by previous PaLA conference attendees. You can view a list of these suggested topics here.

All proposals should be submitted via the online program proposal link. For a working copy of the form, or to view the questions in advance of submission, a PDF of the form is available for download. The link to both the online form and PDF are available on the 2015 Conference Information Page of the PaLA website, accessed by clicking on the “Annual Conference” button in the right-hand menu of the PaLA homepage.

The deadline for submission of proposals is Friday, April 17, 2015. The program committee will notify all submitters regarding the acceptance of their proposal(s) in early May. Poster session proposals will be solicited in mid-April through mid-May.

Thank you in advance to all that submit proposals, we appreciate your dedication to PaLA and to Pennsylvania’s libraries!

Register now for the 2015 ACLCP Spring Program!

April 2, 2015

by Nathan Pease

Registration is now open for the 2015 ACLCP Spring Conference.

This year’s theme is “People and Place: The Evolving Academic Library”. Our three speakers will share their perspectives and insights on the newest “letter” generation, the continually changing nature of our jobs, and the spaces that make up our workplace.

The conference is on THURSDAY, April 16, 2015, at the Holiday Inn-Harrisburg, but the registration deadline is April 13.

See the flyer for details about the speakers, registration, and conference events: http://www2.aclcp.org/documents/program-spring2015flyer.pdf. Or go straight to the registration form: http://goo.gl/forms/zinPIuTdla. Both are available on the ACLCP website.

We hope to see you there!

For questions, please contact:
Ben Hoover (bahoover@bucknell.edu) or
Denise Shorey (dshorey@ycp.edu)
ACLCP Program Co-Chairs

Free Webinar April 13th: Common Core and Libraries

April 1, 2015

by Katie Stewart

The Teaching, Learning, and Technology (TL&T) Roundtable is hosting a free webinar for librarians titled “Common Core and Libraries.”

The webinar will be held on Monday, April 13 from 4:00 – 6:00 p.m. It will feature Allison Mackley, a National Board Certified Teacher-Librarian and Instructional Technology Coach at Hershey High School, and Ellysa Stern Cahoy, an Education Librarian and an Assistant Director of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book in the Penn State University Libraries.

You can register for the webinar at the following link: http://www.palibraries.org/events/event_details.asp?id=618104#

You will also find a brochure there with more information.

For more details, contact:
Christine Iannicelli
Chair of Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable
610-647-4400 ext. 3831
ciannicelli@immaculata.edu

PaLA Northeast Chapter Spring Workshop Call for Proposals

March 31, 2015

by Adam Balcziunas

The Northeast Chapter of PaLA is currently seeking proposals for breakout sessions for our Spring Workshop on June 5th at the University of Scranton. Our theme this year is Today’s Librarian. Librarians’ roles in the library and the community in general are changing every day. We are seeking to showcase and explore the new, innovative ways in which librarians are meeting the challenges of 21st-century librarianship.

We are particularly interested in presentations concerning these topics:
• Leadership
• Change Management
• Technology and Innovative Services
• Outreach and Marketing
• Intergenerational Workforce

To be considered for a session, please submit the following form
http://bit.ly/1BEDNqq by April 17th. We look forward to receiving your proposals!

Pennsylvania Library Leaders Announce New Initiative to Increase Access to Commonwealth’s Digital Collections

March 31, 2015

tags: digital identity

by John Barnett

From Catherine Wilt, Executive Director, the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium (PALCI)–

Efforts to make digital collections held by Pennsylvania libraries, museums, and related cultural heritage organizations widely and freely available via the web are under way. In August 2014, a state-wide group of library leaders from the Office of Commonwealth Libraries/the State Library, Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania State University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the University of Scranton, Access Pennsylvania/HSLC, the Keystone Library Network, the Interlibrary Delivery Service (IDS) of Pennsylvania, Scranton Public Library, and the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium (PALCI) convened to explore opportunities and interest in collaborating to this end. The first step is the appointment of the PA-DPLA Planning Group, which is working to establish a Pennsylvania hub on the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

The PA-DPLA Planning Group has just completed a survey of cultural heritage organizations to determine which have digital collections and which are able and ready to participate in the early phases of this effort. With 207 institutions responding thus far, half of the institutions report they have digitization collections and related activities in place where the others do not. More information on the findings from this survey is available here.

A proposed organizational model has been developed to address governance and management, technology, metadata, standards, and content. Active involvement from information and collections professionals from across the Commonwealth will be needed to make this project a success. Therefore the PA Digital Listserv has been established as an open forum for discussing Pennsylvania digital collections and the PA-DPLA project, specifically.

Stacey Aldrich, Deputy Secretary of the Pennsylvania Office of Commonwealth Libraries, acknowledges the importance of this effort. “Pennsylvania is a state rich in history and culture. Our libraries and other cultural institutions have been collecting, preserving, and connecting people to the resources that tell the story of our state and country for over 200 years. This important project will make our stories more accessible and available to the world.”

Through this project, PA-DPLA will become one of the partner hubs in DPLA, supporting a state-wide technology infrastructure to make the Pennsylvania digital resources available through the DPLA portal. Partner hubs in DPLA include a wide variety of institutions including the National Archives; UCLA; state-wide groups in North Carolina, Minnesota, and Georgia; and the New York Public Library to mention a few. DPLA’s goal is to bring together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage sites, and make them freely available to students, teachers, researchers, and the general public.

“This is an enormously exciting and long-awaited moment for Pennsylvania’s libraries and cultural heritage organizations,” notes Joe Lucia, Dean of Libraries at Temple University. “It opens a path for the global sharing of the uniquely rich materials in our collections and supports the development of educational and research applications that will serve many audiences across our state and the world, from children in Pennsylvania’s K-12 classrooms to scholars of colonial American history working in offices a continent away. Our DPLA service hub project demonstrates the direct value of collaborative action by libraries and cultural institutions to serve the public good.”

How to Get Involved

While this project is in the early stages, we invite libraries and all cultural institutions to get involved now and stay informed through the channels listed below.

Fill out the survey

Have you completed the PA Digital Collections survey yet? Please do so here: https://bciu.formstack.com/forms/padigitalcollectionssurvey
Real-time survey results are available here.

Subscribe to the PA Digital Listserv

Send a message to listserv@listserv.albright.org.
Type SUBSCRIBE in the subject line.
Type only SUBSCRIBE PADIGITAL Firstname Lastname in the body of the message and send.

Direct questions about the discussion list to Scott Thomas at scott@albright.org.

Contact the Pennsylvania DPLA Planning Group for more information