A couple of weeks ago I had a V-8 moment and realized I should be blogging about the fine art of Distance Librarianship. Last week (May 5-7) I was at the 11th Off Campus Library Services Conference in Carefree AZ and realized there’s plenty going on to keep an endeavor like this going, so here I am with my initial posts.
I really enjoyed the conference this year – my 4th in a row (it’s held every other year). Initially I thought the site (Carefree Conference Resort) was going to be too isolated, but quickly realized this was a good thing as it kept us all captive and talking to each other 🙂 I co-presented two papers with colleagues here in Alberta (Kay Johnson at Athabasca and Grant Kayler at the U of Alberta), and the turnout for each was disappointing, but the few folks who came to hear us talk seemed to get some good information. I guess “collaboration” isn’t the big theme this year 🙁
If you’re a distance librarian and you’ve never attended this conference you really should give it a try. The next one will be held in 2006 somewhere east of the Mississippi. The PowerPoints from nearly all the presentations are now online at http://ocls.cmich.edu/oclsc/oclscfp.htm. The conference proceedings were distributed to all attendees, but will likely also be published in the near future by Haworth Press.
Carefree is just north of Scottsdale, and man was it HOT! In the upper 90’s each day (or 38-ish if you prefer), but of course it’s a dry heat 😉 What made that worse for me was that it was snowing when we left Calgary for the airport on Wednesday AM, and it was snowing again when we landed on Sunday afternoon. Sigh.