Travel Reports

I spent the week of August 16-22 at the biennial churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Minneapolis, MN. The ELCA archives is in the midst of an oral history project in preparation for the church’s 25th anniversary in 2012 and decided to collect shorter stories during the assembly. They asked me to help out for the week, so I joined them at Minneapolis Convention Center.

We conducted over 50 interviews over the week, all on video and generally between 10 and 15 minutes in length. I interviewed people ranging in age from their teens to 90 years old.

From June 26-29, 2009 I attended the ResNet Symposium conference that was held at St. Cloud State University this year. There were fewer participants in this year’s than in past years, but there were still plenty of informative sessions to attend and plenty of colleagues from other institutions to talk with.

Last Thursday and Friday I attended the IAICU Technology Conference hosted by Morningside College. IAICU (Iowa Association of Independent Colleges & Universities) is the consortium through which we obtain many benefits such as special pricing on SPSS and our Microsoft Campus Agreement.

The theme of the conference was “Collaborate and Share Information” and there was plenty of both throughout the two days.

Last Thursday I traveled to Dubuque with Ryan to the annual IPAL meeting. Ryan has ably described Bob Molyneux’s presentation. We were treated to a “state of the State Library” presentation by Librarian Mary Wegner (proud parent of a Luther student) and, as usual at IPAL, I enjoyed several conversations with colleagues from around the state.

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.

I attended the Datatel Users Group conference on April 5-8. Following is a summary of the highlights from the conference:

1) IT trends and futures – Datatel is developing a new web-based user interface that will be called “User Interface 4.0”. Luther has joined the first client trial to test new functionality and provide early feedback to Datatel. We’ll be installing this within the next few weeks and hope to allow some end users to help us with the testing.

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.

A couple weeks ago, I attended the annual meeting of the Music Library Association, which was held in Chicago. This was my first time going to MLA, and I’m happy to report that it exceeded all of the excellent hype I have heard about it over the last 15 years.

On Tuesday, Lynette, Bob, Adam, and I traveled to Minneapolis for GusDay 2009 on the Augsburg Campus. I participated in four different classes, each of which I learned quite a bit from. The first session was about the restructuring of Carleton College’s IT department. Many of the positive changes that they have made in the last year are already implemented at Luther College, and, from the perspective of a new employee, it was good to see that we are somewhat ahead of the curve in regards to our organizational setup. The second class I attended was on modular Macintosh imaging.

EDUCAUSE. How to summarize the events of Wed-Fri? It’s not an easy task to condense three days of sessions, discussions, and additional vendor conversations into something short enough to be read, but helpful enough to be worthwhile. I’ll hit some of the highlights here and you can certainly chat with me next week (or whenever) for more information. By the way, for those interested, EDUCAUSE 2009 will be held Nov 3-6 in Denver, Colorado.

General Sessions: The most interesting of the three general sessions was the one held this morning on “Why IT Matters” (...to college presidents).