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Mary Beth drove us to Chapel Hilll for the Conference on March 9. We arrived in time to sample a nice breakfast and met up with several colleagues from ZSR.

Rethink, Redefine, Reinvent: the Research Library in the Digital Age was this year’s theme for the LAUNC-CH Conference. It was just as well planned and organized as I had remembered. The conference is packed with exciting topics, including our own Kevin and Erik’s Digital Projects panel discussion. The one I will report on is “Outreach and Personalization.”

First Jacqueline Solis and Kim Vassiliadis presented their Course pages, which includes seventy-five courses ranging from American History to Biology to French. Each course page includes databases, reference resources, newspaper or media resources whenever appropriate, and of course, the contact information. They want to give students easy access and help them complete their assignments. They work closely with faculty to identify course goals and create a course page specific to that course. They will then have a library session to introduce the course page. They found out they are not able to do all of the classes and that not all classes need a course page. The pages that were not introduced were not used much. I was impressed, but then I heard our own Reference department is already doing it. Not being biased or anything, I liked our pages better, it is not as cluttered and it has links to all the important pages, including the Interlibrary Loan department!

After UNC library’s presentation, Richard Cox and Lynda Kellam from UNCG presented their even more aggressive approach that targets each student. They download information from Banner at the beginning of each semester to find out what each student takes and push relevant pages to them that way. It is integrated into Blackboard, so there is no reauthentisization when using databases off campus. They believe by spending less time on teaching them how to find the appropriate databes for their research, they can spend more time teaching them higher level thinking, like how to conduct a research paper. However, there is a slight problem with pulling information from Banner, since it may not be 100% accurate.

Megan von Isenburg, an Associate Director of Information Services at Duke Medical School talked about the use of Kindle for reading E-books. Kindle is an e-reader developed by Amazon.com. Over 90,000 books were available for download in 2007 and that list is growing. Megan was charged to explore and exploit new technologies to benefit their students. She got a grant to buy six Kindle E-book readers. Their text books are expensive and heavy. She likes the fact the Kindle is light weight, with no monthly fee and wireless connection, and it can also hold personal information. She gives those six Kindles to three rotation sites, so they can bring it with them to record information they gather onsite. One of the questions was raised about the possible damage or loss of the reader. She said they circulate IPod and the Kindle is about the same price. Her conclusion was that the project was successful and that getting faculty invovement is an important element.

This was a very informational session and I encourage people to experience it at least one time. The LAUNC-CH conference is always on the cutting edge. Friday Cener is easy to get to with ample parking and it is very affordable. Oh, and I can’t say enough about the food! I will stop right now before I start drooling!

Cristina