Conference, CFP, and Webinar

See educational opportunities, such as CFP, workshops, events, webinars, etc.? Please email Braegan Abernethy (bcabernethy[at]gmail[dot]com) or Emilee Mathews (mathewse[at]indiana[dot]edu) to get them posted here.

For ongoing opportunities and deadlines, please visit the new Educational Opportunities Calendar.

2012 Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum

The 2012 Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum is seeking proposals for presentations, panel discussions, workshops, research updates, and hands-on, problem-solving sessions. The Forum is a working meeting where DLF members come together to discover better methods of working through sharing and collaboration. Participation is open to all those interested in contributing to and playing an active part in the successful future of digital libraries, museums and archives services and collections.
Managing the digital content lifecycle is a complex challenge, requiring creative and collaborative approaches. In that spirit, and to maximize the Forum’s benefit and better facilitate the community’s work, the Forum’s schedule will provide many opportunities to actively engage and network.
For the 2012 DLF Forum, the Program Planning Committee is requesting proposals within the broad framework of digital collections and their effect on libraries, museums and archives services, infrastructure, resources, and organizational priorities. Proposals should strive to contribute to the following topics:

• Digital technology design
• Management and assessment
• Data
• Collaboration

We welcome proposals on these and other areas from current community members and non-members who are interested in joining the DLF community. For more detailed examples, please see the 2011 DLF Forum schedule: http://www.diglib.org/forums/2011forum/schedule/.

Session genres include:
Presentations and Panels: Traditional lecture format with question-and-answer sessions. Speakers are requested to use only half of the allocated time for the presentation, including how they wish to engage the DLF community in their work. The second half of the session should focus on conversations about next steps, engagement with the community, and clarification of points raised during the presentation.
Workshops: In-depth, hands-on training about a tool, technique, workflow, etc. You can recommend a topic or trainer, or you can volunteer to share your own expertise.
Research Updates: An opportunity for those working in digital collections research to present their preliminary findings for community feedback and discussion.

Working Sessions: Creative problem solvers, including project managers, developers, and/or administrators, gather to address a specific problem. This does not have to be a computational problem. The approach can be applied to workflow issues, metadata transformations, or other complex problems that would benefit from a collective, dynamic solution approach.
Community Showcase: A modified poster session. Presenters will have the opportunity to interact with Forum participants to discuss their current research projects, and/or demonstrate tools or services they have developed or are using in their digital library environment. Demos must include a poster element.
Proposal Submission Guidelines and Evaluation Procedures
Complete proposals should be submitted using the online submission form(http://www.diglib.org/forums/2012forum/2012-dlf-forum-proposal-submission-form/) by 11:59 PM on July 1, 2012. Proposals must include a title, session leader, session genre, proposal description (maximum 300 words), and proposal abstract (maximum 100 words).
After an initial review by the Program Planning Committee, all proposals will be posted on the DLF website for community polling. The community vote will be taken into consideration, and the Program Planning Committee will make the final decisions. Those submitting complete proposals will be notified of their status by August 10, 2012. Presenters will be guaranteed a registration place.

Archives and Activism

Call for Papers

“The rebellion of the archivist against his normal role is not, as so many scholars fear, the politicizing of a neutral craft, but the humanizing of an inevitably political craft.”
— Howard Zinn “Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest,” Vol. II, No. 2 (1977) of Midwestern Archivist.

The boundaries between “archivist” and “activist” have become increasingly porous, rendering ready distinctions between archivists (traditionally restricted to the preservation of records, maintaining accountability, and making critical information available to the communities they serve) and activists (who, with greater frequency, look to archives or adopt elements of archival practice as a means of documenting their struggles) virtually unsustainable. In the past year, archivists and citizen activists collaborated to document the Occupy Wall Street movement, and archivists committed to open government worked with the New York City Council to advocate for keeping the Municipal Archives as an independent city agency. While the apparent convergence of archival and activist worlds may appear a timely and relevant topic, these distinct communities often deliberate their roles separately with little dialogue.

The Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York and the New School Archives and Special Collections are sponsoring a symposium to bring together a diverse group of archivists, activists, students, and theorists with the aim of facilitating discussion of their respective concerns.  Among its proposed topics, the symposium will address potential roles that archivists may engage in as activists, as well as how archivists can assume a greater role in documenting and contributing toward social and political change.

Possible areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

-Archivists documenting the work of activists and activist movements
-Activists confronting traditional archival practice
-Possible models for an emergent “activist archives”
-Methodologies for more comprehensively documenting activism
-Archivist and activist collaborations -Community-led archives and repositories operating outside of the archivalestablishment
-Archives as sites of knowledge (re)production and in(ter)vention -Relational paradigms for mapping the interplay of power, justice, and archives
-Critical pedagogy in the reference encounter
-Interrogating preconceptions and misunderstandings that obscure common goals

Date: Friday, October 12, 2012

Location: Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, The New School

All individual presentations will be 20 minutes long (10 page paper).
Submissions must include a title, name of author and institutional affiliation (if applicable), abstract (250 words max), and indication of technological requirements.
Individual papers or entire panel proposals accepted.

Deadline for Proposals: Proposals should be emailed to admin@nycarchivists.org by August 1, 2012.

Embedded Librarians: What, Why, & How

Embedded librarianship is a great way to reach distance and remote patrons and bring services and resources to them wherever they are.  But the term embedded librarian does not mean just one thing: it is an umbrella term that includes a number of service models and levels of activity.  What, exactly, are the service models, and how can a library choose and implement the best model to fit their needs?  This session will examine best practices for embedded librarianship by looking at several successful models and considering goals, design, and assessment of an embedded librarian program.

Presenter:
Laura Saunders received her PhD from Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science in May 2010.  She was a reference librarian and branch manager of the Career Resource Library for Simmons College, where she provided reference and instruction services, as well as participated in collection development, Web page maintenance, and marketing of library services.  While completing her PhD, she worked as an adjunct faculty member.  Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at Simmons College, teaching in the areas of reference, evaluation of information services, information literacy, and academic libraries. Her first book, Information Literacy as a Student Learning Outcome:  The Perspective of Institutional Accreditation comes out in June 2011. Her research interests include information literacy, assessment, accreditation, reference services, and the place of libraries in higher education.  She has had articles published in The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Library & Information Science Research, College & Research Libraries, and portal: Libraries and the Academy.