IPAL / ILA-ACRL Spring 2009

On Thursday and Friday of last week I attended two conferences geared toward academic librarians in Iowa. The first was the Iowa Private Academic Libraries (IPAL) annual meeting. Our guest for the day was Bob Molyneux, from Equinox, the company behind the Evergreen open source library system. Bob’s vision of the future of library systems is based on open APIs and standards compliance, which would allow libraries to build their own system modularly, potentially integrating features from a number of different vendors or open source systems.

On Friday, the Iowa chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ILA/ACRL) held its Spring conference. Our keynote speaker was Steven Bell, from Temple University, and Rebecca (Luther-only) accurately captured the excitement and inspiration he provided on “design thinking” and considering the user experience in the library. Looking at some of the projects we have underway, with the LIS website and with service points in Preus Library, I think we are making a start in this direction.

Notable sessions I attended included a talk on integrating access to library services in other environments by librarians from Grinnell, and a session on usability testing that helped validate the process we have implemented locally.

One effect of conferences like this is we are reminded of the distinctive and worthwhile projects in LIS. It can be easy to see our work as commonplace as we toil away in our (windowless) offices, but it is likely to be new, interesting and noteworthy to SOMEONE, either on-campus or elsewhere. Until next year, hopefully we can use this blog as a venue for sharing our work, and in the meantime keep the list of potential presentations for ILA/ACRL 2010 growing!