Conference Location: Columbus, OH
Conference Date: October 22, 2004
Deadline: ASAP
The OhioLINK User Services Committee is hosting a one-day summit on reference and user services in the OhioLINK environment on October 22, 2004. We have twelve 50 minute sessions planned, scheduled in four concurrent tracks. While most of the sessions already have presenters, we would like to invite participation from the OhioLINK community at large for the following sessions. If you are interested in presenting, please contact Wade Lee at wade.lee@utoledo.edu. The sessions that have openings for presenters are:
Designing Library Web Sites
A solo presentation or panel discussion on web design principles for library web sites. This is part of a three-session track on designing electronic resources (OPAC design and Weblog/RSS Feed design are the other sessions). If your library is in the midst of a web site redesign, or if you've recently redesigned your web space, you may be the ideal speaker to demonstrate the principles and practices that make a library site visually appealing, usable, and accessible.
Information Commons: Smaller libraries
As part of the Management Track, we will be having a panel discussion on the implementation and management of Information Commons in the library. We already have participants from larger schools interested in the panel, but would like to expand the perspective to include smaller institutions that have an Information Commons.
Aggregators / Federated Searching in OhioLINK Libraries
This session could focus on either of these topics or both: Aggregators, like the OhioLINK Electronic Journal Finder (http://www.ohiolink.edu/resources/ejournals.php) and Serials Solution that pull together the electronic text content from diverse vendors, subscriptions, and databases. Federated Search Systems, on the other hand, allow users to search across multiple databases (regardless of the native interface of the individual databases) with a single search form and compile the results into a single list. OhioLINK currently has federated searching with their Subject Cluster Searching (http://mds.ohiolink.edu/mds/select) and has issued an RFP for a new system.
If you would be able to speak to the capabilities, advantages/disadvantages, and commercially available options (as well as the OhioLINK-developed resources) in either of these areas, please let us know. We are pleased that such a wealth of experience and information exists within our own OhioLINK community, and hope that you will consider presenting at the summit. If you would like to present on a different topic related to user services for OhioLINK libraries, a call for Posters for the summit's poster session will be going out in early August.
For information, contact Wade Lee at wade.lee@utoledo.edu
