Oct 18-19, Library 2.013 Conference
Since 2011, SLIS has been organizing an annual online conference that goes on for two full days (24/7) in October. This year, the conference is called Library 2.013 (it’s Library 2.011 and Library 2.012 in the previous two years). It is scheduled for October 18-19, 2013. Since it is to be held entirely online around the clock, the conference presentations are in multiple languages and time zones. Participating in the conference is completely free, and its goal is to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing among information professionals worldwide.
This year’s conference has eight themes (strands):
Digital Services, Preservation, and Access
Emerging Technologies and Trends
Learning Commons (for school libraries and/or academic libraries)
Management of Libraries and Information Centers in the 21st Century
User Centered Services and Models
Library and Information Professionals – Evolving Roles and Opportunities
Doctoral Student Research
Library and Information Center “Tours”
A total of 146 presentations will be delivered during the conference, covering a wide range of topics. I browsed the abstracts of these presentations and found some quite interesting ones - Librarians without borders: the International Librarians Network (ILN) experience, Build Curriculum for any Mobile Device – Build Once, Learn Anywhere, Army libraries from Kansas to Korea and all points in between, and Reducing suicide risks of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender library users in the library, especially adolescent and young adult patrons.
All of the conference presentations will be recorded and archived, and freely accessible to anyone. I think this is also a networking and professional development opportunity for librarians, and for students too. There’s much to learn from these presentations. I have discovered several presentations that I could potentially use in my classes. For example, “Using Gimlet to Impact Reference Communication in Your Library” might have useful information for my Reference and Information Service class.
Finally, my colleague Van and I are also presenting at this conference – we will be talking about the findings from our grant project on how to prepare public librarians for consumer health information service. Looking forward to it!