End of an era?

About a year ago, the continuing education committee decided to clean this blog up and make it active again, especially so that it could be useful during conference. Daniel Cornwall, in particular, has done an amazing job of providing regular, thoughtful and informative posts. The blog is almost perfect except for two things: Daniel is doing almost all of the work, and according to our statistics, very few people are actually reading it.

Since everyone is busy and we hate to spend time on things that aren't being used, we've decided to stop maintaining this blog at this time. It will still be up. Anyone who has signed up for an account to post is welcome to do so, and I'm happy to sign up any AkLA folk who would like to post. If it becomes active, great! If not, then I'm still pleased with the role it has played and what we have learned from doing it. Thank you to everyone who has been involved with creating and maintaining the blog!

Questions? Concerns? Comments? Need another project now that we're not doing this one? Please contact Freya Anderson at libkitty (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Do you agree with WebJunction on education needs?

Recently the OCLC-powered, non-profit library education community site WebJunction published a survey about perceived training needs. The survey garnered about 2,000 responses worldwide. Among other things, librarians and other library workers were asked the open ended question “What skill or knowledge would you like to add to your expertise to help you in your work?” Some of the replies included:

• Keeping up with new technology
• Keeping up with library trends, including Library 2.0
• Web design and development
• Basic computer skills
• Computer programming
• Networking, esp, wireless
• Time management (including email management)
• Cataloging
• Office applications, especially Excel
• Open source applications
• Computer troubleshooting
• “Web 2.0″, social tools
• Personnel management
• Customer service/ dealing with difficult patrons
• Spanish Language (learning it)
• Grants (finding, writing) and other fundraising skills
• Marketing (especially marketing/outreach materials)
• Budgeting & financial planning

How does the above match up to your own experience? Since no one likes to admit deficits, I'll get the ball rolling.

My number one need is communications, especially in the context of marketing. I've learned some things over the decade-plus out of library school, but I'm still not master of the elevator speech that will instantly communicate my library's value to my funders and people I meet at parties.

I can also use instruction in budgeting and grants. Thanks to my institution, I feel like I'm getting some good feel for budgeting.

Finally one of my major needs isn't on WebJunction's list at all. It could be because it's not something that can be taught in a classroom. And that is a deep knowledge of my library's collection and electronic resources. I have worked for my current library for nearly ten years and I am still running across material that is new to me. Hopefully this says more about the richness of the State Library's collection than it does about my curiosity.

So that's me, what about you? I don't mean to do an actual survey because there are other venues for that, but I would like to start a conversation about what your important needs are and how you see yourself meeting them.

Reference Renaissance: You Bought It, Now Sell It

The fourth session I attended at 2008 Reference Renaissance was called, "You Bought It, Now Sell It!: Merchandising Reference Services" with presenters:

• Karen Long, Farmington Public Library
• Bernadine Goldman, Los Alamos County Public Library System
• Lizzie Eastwood, Los Alamos County Public Library System

Karen spoke on her library's efforts to market their reference services. Not just chat reference, but reference by any venue the library does. The first step was designing a logo. They settled on a puzzle piece with the words "just ask!" which you can view at Farmington PL's web site at http://www.infoway.org/. The next step was to put the logo all over their library (including large versions plastered to the ref desk), web site and brochures. They also have some of their employees wear "just ask" pins. They also use mp3 "cordmen" earbud holders to promote the IM part of the "just ask" service. Karen emphasized that it was important to do demonstrations of chat reference for your staff. They have to understand the product and its potential before they can promote it to others.

In addition to the "in the library" measures above, Karen talked about the importance of getting the message out into the community. She does this in part by radio spots and attending rotary club meetings.

After Karen was done, it was time for Bernadine and Lizzie to talk about their promotion of reference collections. Bernadine had the goal of "To make sure that all users of the reference collection are aware of all the resources available, and are introduced to them all in one place." The idea was to show patrons and other staff all the tangible AND electronic resources the library had to offer on given topics in the reference collection. Bernadine led the reference department to do this in three main ways:

1. Rearrange the physical collection into broad subjects without abandoning Dewey entirely.
2. Integrate electronic resources into the physical collection through the use of lists and brochures
3. Create displays of reference materials in the low shelving areas of reference.

For the rearrangement of the physical reference collection, Bernadine came in over a weekend and created several sub-collections in reference including: Aging, Health, Weapons, Environment, Culture, and Jobs. She then brought all the books together on these topics regardless of Dewey classification. For example the Health section includes Public Health items from the 300s as well as medical books from the 610s.

The next step was to comb through their databases and the list of RUSA Best Free Reference Websites list and classify them into the same keywords as the reference books. These lists of "resources by keywords" were then posted by their corresponding section in the physical collection.

Finally, books and resource lists were put on display using low shelving in the reference area. Another promotional tool used with highlighting the availability of 10 free photocopies from books in the reference collection. This seemed to give patrons permission to use the "don't check out" collection.

No formal assessment has been done to judge the effectiveness of these measures, but comments from patrons has been positive. They received one comment that the library has "doubled the value of the collection."

At my library, we're busy trying to highlight our circulating collection, something we really hadn't focused on for the past few years. We're creating more display space and trying to push interesting looking books through our RSS feeds. So we're going to complete that process before moving on to reference.

But these seem like intriguing ideas for promoting reference. What do you think?

-----------------------

Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you’ve got a different take on the session you’d like to share.

Reference Renaissance: "Okay This is Just Too Weird"

"Okay This is Just Too Weird": Identifying Outreach Opportunities in Facebook by David Bietila and Elizabeth Edwards of George Washington University (GWU) was the third session that I attended at the 2008 Reference Renaissance.

This was a fun session to be in. And as someone who dabbles in social networking sites both personally and professionally, quite interesting. The session had a definite effect on my planned future friending behavior.

David and Elizabeth switched repeatedly during the presentation, so I'm not going to separate out their contributions like I've done with other speakers.

They did a study with the help of an anthropology student shortly after the GWU libraries had just completed a "friend a librarian" publicity campaign. About half of GWU librarians had Facebook profiles and students were aware that librarians were avaiable to be friended. But no students had friended any of the GWU librarians by the end of the publicity campaign. This study looked for the reasons for this result, among other purposes.

The study consisted of a survey, plus some ethnographic observations and interviews. Librarian profiles were also studied. While presenting survey results, David and Elizabeth compared their findings to a literature review they did. I omitted the references to the Facebook literature because 1) I trust you're keeping up with it and 2) this will be included in the proceedings and I'm not a transcript service.

How GWU students used Facebook

David and Elizabeth reported:

• Majority of GWU students use Facebook more than once a day.
• Strong majority of students use Facebook to maintain existing relationships. That is, they "friend" people they've met in real life and don't mine Facebook for new "friends."
• Students use Facebook for academic purposes including - communicating about assignments (68%); arrange study groups (61%); and communicate about academic interests (47%).

Despite using Facebook for academic purposes, most students also use Facebook for "study breaks" and self-report that Facebook negatively affects their studies.

For contacting the library, students prefer to e-mail or IM to using Facebook. In response to a question from me, Elizabeth thought this result might change now that Facebook has integrated chat.

What GWU Students Think About Librarians on Facebook

According to surveys and interview data:

• 32% of students said they were NOT interested in seeing librarian profiles.
• 60% of students wanted to see study suggestions on librarian FB profiles
• 55.7% of students were interested in tips on accessing library resources
• 26% of students were interested in personal information about librarians at their school

In general, students felt varying degrees of discomfort about librarians friending them without being asked. In interviews, none of the students cared for the ideas. But they were ok with the concept of adding librarians as Facebook friends IF there was some sort of face-to-face or IM/e-mail encounter first.

There is more to the study than is in my notes. Be sure to check the conference site (see below) for presentation slides when they come out. There were some interesting comparisons between librarians, parents and faculties in terms of how much students want to see them on Facebook.

David and Elizabeth concluded by saying that their library still saw value in having a Facebook presence for the library. Based on the student study, they offered some recommendations, which they cautioned should be taken with a grain of salt:

1. Create a fan page for the library for patrons to link to. This seems more comfortable to students than directly friending librarians. They offered the Gelman Library fan page as an example. A stroll through their 87 fans shows some current GWU students and several alumni, so this approach seems to workfor them.
2. In librarian profiles, keep a personal/professional balance. No personal is viewed as too cold, too much personal is seen as odd. It's important to include a picture and the librarian's subject expertise. Having one of Facebook's book recommendation applications is a good idea since it ties into the traditional library brand.
3. Let others friend you. Try to make connections in RL to encourage students/patrons to friend you.
4. Put a few, library-related applications onto your fan page. Gelman offers a meebo chat ref app and an Open WorldCat search.

Elizabeth and David said the grain of salt was necessary because your patron base might be different and these recommendations might get out of date in the next year or two as Facebook and other social networking sites change.

In the course of building their Facebook fan page, they found a few preexisting groups for the Gelman Library. These proved useful recruiting grounds for their study, but surprised them. I looked for my library, but found no groups or fan pages. How about you?

What I took home from this presentation was 1) I will not friend my patrons unless I've had some prior interaction with them and even then will probably wait for them to friend me; 2) might seek permission to create a library fan page before someone beats us to the punch; and 3) update my govdocs related groups and fan pages in the next few weeks.

=========================

Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you’ve got a different take on the session you’d like to share.

Reference Renaissance: Staff Training in 21st Century

Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you've got a different take on the session you'd like to share.

--------

The second session I attended at RR 2008, was Staff Training in the 21st Century and featured presentations by:

• Beth Jones (via DimDim) - Jefferson County Public Library
• Leslie M. Hass - Loyola University Chicago
• Flora Shrode - Merrill-Cazier Library

This session featured one public librarian and two academic librarians sharing how they train staff. Overall, I didn't find much to take home from this presentation, but that probably reflects my library's staffing situation. Since you might benefit from their remarks, here are my impressions of what people said:

Beth Jones came to us virtually via DimDim, a free web conferencing service that allows you to see the presenter via webcam with audio while she shares her slides. During her presentation, the panel moderator texted questions to Ms. Jones. The approach worked well enough that I hope to see it employed more often at more conferences. It will give people who have expertise but who lack travel funds the opportunity to present at regional and national conferences.

The Jefferson County Public Library has over 250 staff members scattered over a number of locations. So Ms. Jones has focused on creating online courses for them. She stress it was important to have standardized courses and make good use of "visual property." She primarily uses Adobe Presenter and Adobe Captivate to create her online courses which all include audio. She creates the courses with input from subject matter experts.

Ms Jones cited several challenges in creating and using in-house developed online classes, including:

• Finding staff time to take courses
• How to use audio without disrupting others (creates need for headphones)
• System errors and problems using attachments (Internet filtering often blocks retrieving files linked from courses)
• Finding enough development time and expertise to create new classes

Ms. Jones also offered some "new frontiers" for training in her system, including:

• Create classes for products staff do not have on their computers, like Overdrive Media Console
• Mini (5 min) database courses - For these, Ms. Jones might make use of tips from Greg Notess' talk on quick screencasts I'll write about later. And don't forget about vendor-generated tutorials like EBSCOhost's excellent videos.
• Create a staff wiki to support database searching - My library has a staff wiki we find useful for a number of projects and manuals.
• Create simulations
• Including branching (decision-making) in online class modules
• Incorporate game theory into online class modules.
• Add video (i.e. not just powerpoint and screenshots) to online classes.
• Make better use of shared resources - Ms. Jones pointed to training resources from Colorado's CLiC consortium at http://www.clicweb.org/continuing_education/index.php as an example of what she was talking about.

Leslie Hass of Loyola spoke about her experience in hiring and training the first employees of a new Information Commons that would include working with staff from the Library and the University Information Technology Department. They use a staff wiki for policies and procedures. All staff were given a three day orientation - day 1 - Information Commons 101, day 2 - Library 101, day 3 - Information Technology 101 to enable them to know what the university's expectations of them were.

Staff currently employed by the Information Commons current have IM access as a backup if they need additional information on policies or procedures while serving at their stations. I'm not sure I'd call that training, but I can see an argument being made that it is ongoing one-on-one training.

Ms. Hass noted that since the Information Commons was built as an addition to the library, library usage has increased. A happy result.

Flora Shrode of the Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University shared the several ways they train student assistants:

• A staff blog for searching and service hints
• A significant amount of face-to-face training
• Camtasia videos on frustrating tasks - I don't remember being given an example - does anyone else out there?
• Online computer training through Lynda.com

I said at the beginning of the entry that I didn't have many take-homes about training staff. And that's true. I run a department of 11 people and so don't need techniques for training large numbers of people. I was personally hoping for more on topics to teach and resources for teaching those topics.

But a number of the hints and approaches above may well come in handy for creating educational opportunities for our patrons, especially for the 2/3 of state agency employees who live outside Juneau. So I think my time was well spent.

Reference Renaissance: Reference in the Age of Wikipedia

Hi All,

I recently attended the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver. I started blogging about this conference on my personal blog, but thought the information should be put here as well. So over the next week or so, I'll be blogging here about my experiences as well. I was fortunate enough to hang out with two Alaskans at the conference, so I hope they'll be chiming in from time to time since we saw different stuff.

Here goes ...

Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I'm looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

----------------

The first session I attended at Reference Renaissance was the Keynote, Reference in the Age of Wikipedia, Or Not, offered by David Lewis, self described renaissance scholar and Dean of the University Library, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. I started out being impressed with Dean Lewis because his very first powerpoint slide stated that his presentation could be used by anyone under a Creative Commons attribution/non-commercial license 3.0. Not only is that a nice thing to do, but it showed his belief in the words he spoke to us.

Dean Lewis began by suggesting that the term renaissance wasn't really the proper term to describe our common vision for reference. The original Renaissance involved the rediscovery of Classical resources and techniques. He pointed out that we are not reviving classical models for reference, but are in fact reacting to the last of three major revolutions.

These three revolutions were:

• The invention of moveable type printing in the 15th Century
• The industrialization of printing in the 19th Century
• The continuing internet/web revolution of the late 20th Century

Each of these revolutions expanded the availability of information by orders of magnitude and created new ways of organizing information. They also led to the destruction of some trades and the rise of others.

For example, the invention of movable type printing destroyed the pre-existing scribal culture within 50 years of Gutenberg's invention. Dean Lewis also argued that the printing press led directly to the alphabetical arrangement of knowledge as found in encyclopedias and dictionaries.

The industrialization of printing in the 19th Century led to mass literacy through the large quantities of textbooks, newspapers and dime store novels that industrial printing made possible. The modern library and the Dewey Decimal System date from this era.

In our own era, the internet has made amateur content of all types easy to create and share. I share Dean Lewis' view in this and have over 3,000 photos on Flickr to prove it!

The next part of Dean Lewis' talk drew heavily on two books - Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solutions by Clayton Christensen. (Details on these and other books I heard about at RR 2008 can be found on my WorldCat list.) Dean Lewis talked about sustaining innovations (making productions better) vs disruptive innovations (creating new markets by targeting non-customers). He suggested that libraries are facing disruptive innovation and offered the phone service Cha-Cha as an example.

Dean Lewis then turned to the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. Mr. Shirky posits that we are in a "cooperation revolution" characterized by mass amateurization and where authority as institutional guarantee has been replaced by probabilities supported by process. Dean Lewis offered Wikipedia as an example of this new kind of authority.

For Wikipedia and like social tools to work and attract collaborators, Dean Lewis suggested three elements that must be present:

• A plausible promise
• An effective tool
• An acceptable bargain

He showed how Wikipedia fulfilled each of the above criteria, but I did not get that down in my notes. You'll have to wait for the conference proceedings to become available.

After showing us a Wired video featuring Chris Anderson explaining why $0.00 is the future of business, Dean Lwis quoted someone who said "When everything can be copied, the only things sold will be that which cannot be copied." What can't be copied? He offered us: trust, immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability.

Dean Lewis closed with four questions and a challenge. The questions were:

1. What happens when information skills become a mass amateur activity?
2. Can we survive with one foot in proprietary resources and one foot in the open web?
3. What is the role of the institution in a Network World?
4. Do we support users as information users or as information creators?

Dean Lewis gave what he himself said were tentative efforts at answers, but that it was more important for the rest of us to consider the questions. I agree. I think question 4 is particularly important for libraries. He concluded by challenging libraries to create the tools and communities for open scholarship.

Overall it was a great start to the conference. I had a few quibbles. The main one was about whether the cost of information would ever truly reach zero. Google and Yahoo were given as examples of companies that "gave away everything to users but made billions." Free to users, maybe, but Google and Yahoo charge companies for advertising and use the revenue to run the search engines. If the future of business is really $0.00, then people would stop buying and ad revenue would dry up, taking the search engines with them. I probably need to examine the premise more closer before making such a bold statement, but that's my initial take.

I actually believe in the "gift economy" as a valuable supplement to economic activity and as a venue for human creativity. This blog and the others I contribute to are testimony to that. But I can't buy Wired's argument that the gift economy will replace our current economic structure.

In the coming entries, I will blog about the 1/6 of the conference I attended and once I'm done with session blogging, offer some thoughts about the conference as a whole. As I'm writing this, one great day is behind me and I'm looking forward to another great day of good ideas that will either be thought-provoking or find implementation in my community. I am very glad I made it here to Denver.

ALA Presentation Materials Available Online

If you couldn't make it to ALA or wanted to relive fun sessions, then check out ALA's page for 2008 Annual Conference program materials at http://presentations.ala.org/index.php?title=Main_Page.

Some materials are already up, and more will be up in the next week or two. I can't wait to see Joe Janes'/OCLC bloggers LITA talk on "Isn't It Great to be in the Library, Whereever that is."

June/July Online Training for Small Engine Repair

Now that Alaska has the Small Engine (snow machines, ATVs, etc) Repair Reference Center, would you like to know it better? EBSCO, the database vendor, recently sent out this training notice (Alaska Times supplied by Daniel):

-----------------

Dear EBSCO customer,

Did you know that EBSCO Publishing offers online, one-hour training sessions on our Small Engine Repair Reference Center each month, free to EBSCO customers? We know that training reinforces product knowledge and stimulates interest, helping you to get the most from your EBSCO databases.

Small Engine Repair Reference Center training is available as follows:

• Monday, June 16, 2008 from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern Time (11-Noon, Alaska Time)
• Thursday, July 24, 2008 from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern Time (11-Noon, Alaska Time)
• Monday, August 4, 2008 from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m., Eastern Time (10am-11am, Alaska Time)

TO REGISTER, go here (http://training.ebsco.com/training_request.asp), select the desired class from the "Which service?"drop-down list, and complete the form.

Please visit EBSCO's Support Site (http://support.ebsco.com) to learn about all of EBSCO's products, search among thousands of FAQs, or download Flash tutorials, Help Sheets or User Guides.

Sincerely,

Marcie Brown
Technical Communications Manager
EBSCO Publishing
10 Estes Street
Ipswich, MA 01938

-----------------

If you attend one of these free online trainings, would you leave a comment about your experience? Or blog about it if you are one of the 33 AkLA members with blogging rights on this blog?

The Small Engine Repair Reference Center is one of the Digital Pipeline databases.

Looking to Lead? Check out PLN

If you're looking for leadership tips or library trends, check out the offerings at the PALINET Leadership Network, PLN. According to their website, the purpose of PLN is "designed to help library leaders (and those who will become leaders) communicate, coordinate, find resources and share information."

According to their website, some recent features have included:

Positioning the library for 2020 - the May 2008 PLN Challenge follows up on the April topic	Leader's Digest--weekly items on leadership from outside the library field
Wikis and libraries and Transparency and MediaWiki - what you need to know	PLN highlights--posts about PLN
Directors, leaders and work-life balance - now including public and academic library perspectives

--------------------

It looks interesting and the PLN Director, Walt Crawford, will be familiar to attendees of the 2003 AkLA Conference in Juneau. Walt gave our keynote address back then.

If you do check out the site, or if you're already a PLN member, please let us know what you think about the site by leaving a comment.

CE Tip: Webcasts from OCLC

Wonder what keeps OCLC people up at night? Want to spend some time learning about ideas to link physical libraries with the online world? Check out OCLC PARcasts at http://www.oclc.org/programsandresearch/parcasts/. These podcasts/webcasts will soon be available in iTunes.

CE Tip From BlogJunction

The folks from OCLC WebJunction recently highlighted their webinar archive in a post at http://blog.webjunctionworks.org/index.php/2008/05/08/weekly-tips-traverse-the-webinar-archives/. One of the categories of webinars they highlighted was for small and rural libraries. Archived webinars can be viewed at any time. Check to see if your computer and internet connection can handle WebJunction webinars by visiting http://webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent?id=13377.

Wiki options

AkLA's Continuing Education committee is looking at Web 2.0 tools for use with next year's conference. As part of this, we're researching wiki options, and decided to post the results here, so that anyone else who is interested in implementing a wiki can take advantage of our efforts.

Robyn Russell, of Rasmuson Library at UAF, suggested starting our comparison with WikiMatrix. Using their wizard, I came up with 13 wikis, to which I added MediaWiki, which AkLA already is planning on implementing for other uses. I narrowed this down by removing those which lacked features important to me, like the ability to export to PDF, to use CSS, and more, and ended up with.

	BrainKeeper,	PBwiki,	SamePage,	Socialtext,	MediaWiki

Of these, my top two are PBwiki, because I'm the most familiar with it and I know it's easy, and MediaWiki, because AkLA has access already and because I'm somewhat familiar with it and know that it's fairly easy and has some really useful features.

Copyright for classes

In the Copyright Q&A session at conference, one topic that we discussed was that of using materials for classes, over a period of time. This might involve multiple copies for classroom use or course reserves (paper or electronic). We discussed how the traditional interpretation of this practice was that it was fine for a single class, but not allowable over time, that is, each semester or even each year. Now, I've just read a discussion on the Copyright Advisory Network (CAN) forum which seems to imply that our interpretation may have been too restrictive. It might be valuable for academic and school librarians to take a look at this discussion. And, if you have something more to add or ask, I encourage anyone who's interested to register (it's quick and easy - more to discourage spam than anything else) and comment. While you're at it, check out some of the other resources at the site, and please let me know if you have any suggestions for improvement (either email me or mention it in the comments to this post).

Blogging conference

As I was attending sessions at the wonderful AkLA conference last weekend in Fairbanks, watching people with laptops interspersed with those with notebooks, I thought, "wouldn't it be great to share all of this information more widely by blogging the conference, as I've seen with ALA, Internet Librarian, and more? We should do this next year!" Then, upon returning to Juneau, it finally dawned on me that the conference didn't need to be ongoing to do this, and we could blog the conference now! We even have this sleeping but functional blog to use! So, I'll work on getting some posts together for the sessions I attended, and I encourage others who attended the conference to add posts and comments as well. Conference is such a whirlwind, that I imagine 10 people attending the same session would probably have 15 different things to share from it!

If you haven't yet posted on the AkLA blog, please contact Elise Tomlinson at the UAS Egan Library so she can register you. Her email is elise dot tomlinson at uas dot alaska dot edu, where all the spaces are removed and punctuation words are turned into actual punctuation. It might help her if you mention the AkLA blog in the subject line.