At the end of last week, I attended The Collective 2015 – a new conference drawing on the ‘un-conference’ model – held in Knoxville, TN. Chelcie and I were part of a panel session on digital humanities in libraries: we talked about our plans for build.ZSR, a service for scholarly digital projects at WFU; folks... more ›
Last Thursday, I accompanied Meghan and Rebecca to the Social Media Marketing Conference in Charlotte. It was an interesting conference for two reasons: it was non-library in nature and it featured participants from a wide range of experiences— novice to “maven”. (“Maven” is the preferred term for those well-versed in social media because of the... more ›
Last Thursday, February 12th, I attended the Social Media Marketing Conference (SkillPath Seminars) in Charlotte, NC with fellow Communications Committee members Chris Burris & Rebecca Petersen. This conference was billed as “a real-world guide to understanding social media” and offered lessons for how to use social media to connect with your audience, expand your market... more ›
I absolutely love calling North Carolina home. This captured my sentiments perfectly as my plane landed to the NC bright blue sky and awesome sunshine. I guess that is to be expected after experiencing winter in Chicago. None-the-less, the conference as a whole was filled with lots of great engaging conversation. During the BCALA retreat... more ›
The annual FYE conference isn’t a typical conference for a librarian. Dean Sutton first made me aware of FYE a few years ago and this is my second conference. There were 2000 attendees from 17 countries. Many were from Offices of Orientation, Advising, and First-Year Experience, but more and more divisions of the university are... more ›
The first session I attended at ALA Midwinter 2015 was the ERT (Exhibits Round Table)/Booklist Author Forum which was a panel discussion featuring graphic novel artists, Cece Bell (author of El Deafo, a 2015 Newbery Honor Book), Jeff Smith (creator of the BONE comic book series), Gene Luen Yang (author of American Born Chinese), and... more ›
Vendor highlights Lauren and I had a really good dinner discussion with a VP of a database vendor, talking about what is and isn’t important for researchers and libraries. That VP and our regular sales rep have already scheduled a campus visit to continue the conversation. I had a conversation with a publishing company’s VP... more ›
In honor of last Sunday’s Super Bowl, I considered beginning and ending this post with, “I’m only writing this blogpost so I won’t get fined,” but I might have a bit more to share. But only a bit, unfortunately, because this will be a shorter than usual conference post from me, because I spent much... more ›
The start of my ALA Mid Winter experience was spent attending two days of pre-conference meetings for the participants in ACRL’s “Assessment in Action” (AiA) project. This is the second year of the grant funded project meant to build capacity for doing assessment projects in academic libraries, allowing libraries to better tell their stories and... more ›
It was good to visit my home state of Illinois for ALA Midwinter 2015 in Chicago. I was able to get together with a few cousins with whom I was close growing up in Decatur, three hours south. And who doesn’t like 18 inches of snow? Somehow the weather didn’t actually interfere too much with... more ›