The 2010 AMICAL Conference, Digital Assets & the Cloud: Building Digital Collections through Library, IT & Faculty Collaboration, is being hosted by Central European University in Budapest, 9-12 June. The following workshops are still open to AMICAL members for enrollment:
- Technical services workflow & logistical issues for today’s changing library collections
Matt Goldner (Product and Technology Advocate, OCLC)
Susan L. Perry (Senior Advisor for Liberal Arts Colleges, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) - An Introduction to Repositories
Thorny Staples (Director, Community Strategy and Alliances and Fedora Project, DuraSpace) - Overview of ethnographic methods and their application to libraries
Dr. Nancy Fried Foster (Director of Anthropological Research, River Campus Libraries at University of Rochester) - Overcoming Obstacles in your Electronic Theses and Dissertations Project
Rebecca Sandlin (Deputy CIO, Bowdoin College)
Ethan Benatan (Director, Computer User Services, Reed College)
A workshop registration form has been sent to all registered attendees from AMICAL institutions. See the conference web site for the full conference program.
For full descriptions of the workshops, see below:
PRECONFERENCE
WEDNESDAY 9 JUNE
10:00-12:30 / 13:45-15:45
Workshop: Follow-up workshop for AMICAL ethnographic study pilot group
Facilitator: Dr. Nancy Fried Foster (Director of Anthropological Research, River Campus Libraries at University of Rochester)
This workshop is open to those already participating in the AMICAL ethnographic study pilot group and is not open for enrollment. A related workshop, open to all other AMICAL members, is being proposed 16:00-17:00 (see below).
10:30-12:30
Roundtable discussion: Technical services workflow & logistical issues for today’s changing library collections
Facilitators:
Matt Goldner (Product and Technology Advocate, OCLC)
Susan L. Perry (Senior Advisor for Liberal Arts Colleges, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation)
In this workshop participants will work together to look at current practices and workflows, where they are spending time and effort, and where they can gain efficiencies with new practices. Examples from studies on technical services workflows will be presented into the brainstorming session.
13:45-15:45
Workshop: An Introduction to Repositories
Facilitator: Thorny Staples (Director, Community Strategy and Alliances and Fedora Project, DuraSpace)
Repositories like ePrints, DSpace and Fedora are designed to manage content for the long term while making it as accessible as possible. They provide a very different way of managing information than using relational databases. This workshop will introduce the concepts needed to understand how to use repositories, including the design of information objects and formal relations among them; descriptive, administrative and preservation metadata; policy establishment and enforcement; and different ways of exposing information for access, including the Open Archives Initiative, faceted-browsing systems and RDF. Examples of how to apply these concepts will include creating collections of digitized texts and cultural heritage images, as well as the implications for scholarly use of these collections.
16:00-17:00
Workshop: Overview of ethnographic methods and their application to libraries
Facilitator: Dr. Nancy Fried Foster (Director of Anthropological Research, River Campus Libraries at University of Rochester)
Dr. Nancy Fried Foster will introduce the use of ethnographic methods in the library by asking the question, “Why do students want to be in the library if they are not using the books?” Her talk will cover several ethnographic research methods and how they were used in building a group study space in the University of Rochester’s main library and in assessing the use and value of the University’s science library.
CONFERENCE
THURSDAY 10 JUNE
16:00-17:30
Workshop: Overcoming Obstacles in your Electronic Theses and Dissertations Project
Facilitators:
Rebecca Sandlin (Deputy CIO, Bowdoin College)
Ethan Benatan (Director, Computer User Services, Reed College)
Our goal in this session is to help participants develop specific approaches to identifying and solving challenges that are likely to arise during the course of their ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) project. We will first collaborate with the group to identify issues of interest, and then facilitate sharing of experiences and approaches. Interested participants will be able to develop and get group feedback on specific proposals that they plan to implement at their home institutions.