ACRL and EDUCAUSE Midwest

Over the past few weeks I’ve attended the ACRL National Convention in Seattle, and the EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference in Chicago.

At ACRL I attended sessions on a variety of themes, ranging from providing visibility to on-campus collections to the impact of social networks. As some of my Luther colleagues have already mentioned, there was a lot of discussion about library guides, pathfinders, etc., with much talk focused specifically on LibGuides, a subscription service that allows easy creation of guides, customization and sharing with other user groups.

The most exciting or inspiring session I attended was a contributed paper session on assessment reporting. The presenter proposed methods of identifying key statistics that will be meaningful to stakeholders, and then sharing them with the public in clear forms. (Yes, I was shocked to find assessment so inspiring!)

The EDUCAUSE Midwest conference was divided into several tracks — with one devoted to collaborations between libraries and IT, and other on instructional design being most attractive to me. I also presented a poster session on the web usability testing project I have been running this year. I received ample questions from folks interested in starting such a project, and connected with a couple of experts in the usability field, whose knowledge I hope to tap into down the road.

Another theme that was evident at both conferences was the issue of digital repositories – an excellent example of a project requiring close collaboration of IT and library staff. As we are carefully considering dipping our toes into the DR world at Luther, it was great to hear of the experiences of our peers, and learn of the many ways DR’s are being used – institutional repository, digital archive, multimedia repository, etc.

Of great interest to me was the use of Twitter at both conferences. There has been some discussion on local email lists on the utility of Twitter in the classroom, so it was fun to observe it being used by other information professionals. Both conferences had defined hashtags that Twitter members (also known as “Tweeps”) could use to identify their comments. While I’ve had an account for a while, this was my first in-depth experience with creating content and interacting on a significant scale with others. I have found that it does take some practice to be disciplined and thoughtful in 140 characters or less! At both conferences, my virtual conversations eventually allowed me to connect face-to-face with a number of new colleagues. If you’d like to follow what was being tweeted at each conference, you can visit the appropriate hashtag below!
ACRL:
#acrl2009

EDUCAUSE Midwest:
#mwrc09

And finally, a link to my personal feed – if you are interested in my commentary:
http://www.twitter.com/gjerdery