It's Academic

Conference 101

June 23, 2007

Conference 101

I got to this program 10 minutes before it was scheduled to start and there wasn’t a free seat available. The room was set up with 15 tables, 10 chairs at a table. At least 50 more people eventually were seated around the room. Some dragged in chairs from another room. The President of the New Members Roundtable gave a little commercial about joining the Roundtable. Then a guy named Michael (I didn’t quite catch his last name) went through the program book telling us page numbers for all of the important things that we should know about–maps, schedules, freebies. He said that, being the librarian that he is, he organized all of the cards that he got in the mail from exhibitors by booth number. Silly me, I wasn’t even going to bring mine! Diner was great. We ate at a tapas restaurant. It’s a good thing that we had reservations because it was very crowded.

ALA Conference

June 22, 2007

by CRD of PaLA

Well, I’m here at ALA. Margaret Craft and I came together. We checked in to the hotel, but we can’t get into our rooms until 4:00pm. We walked the 2 blocks to the Convention Center. It’s 3 blocks long! After we picked up our badges, we wandered around a bit and found the Internet Cafe. I’m going to Conference 101 at 4:00pm which is a program for first time attendees. This evening we are being taken to dinner with one of the library’s vendors.

Attending ALA

June 21, 2007

by CRD of PaLA

I will be attending the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Since this is my first conference, I thought that some of you might be interested in my experience. I’m not there yet and I’m already feeling a bit overwhelmed by how large it is. There are so many programs, meetings, and events that ALA has created an online Conference Planner to help you schedule your days.

Logging the Academic Life

June 14, 2007

by CRD of PaLA

Our recent workshop, “Logging the Academic Life” at Lehigh University, was a great success. We had about 60 attendees turn out on a hot, summer’s day to hear Scott Carlson of the Chronicle of Higher Education and Richard Sweeney from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, our two keynote speakers, give two highly entertaining and stimulating presentations.

Folks also attended one of the three breakout sessions, one by Suzanne Kellerman, Penn State, and Chris Raab, F & M, on their experiences digitizing student newspapers, a second by Richard Griscom, Univ of Penn, and John Osborne, Dickinson College, on what their institutions are doing towards digitizing the best student scholarship, and the third by Julia Maserjian, Lehigh University, who showed us some of the nifty projects faculty, students, and library staff are collaborating on.

Look for a more complete write up of the workshop in an upcoming issue of the PaLA Bulletin.