There will be a lot of open source at ALA Midwinter this year, but I thought I’d share this announcement with you all since it just arrived in my mailbox.

“Can You Open This For Me? Using and Understanding Open Source Tools.”
Sponsored by the RUSA MARS Hot Topics in Electronic Reference Discussion Group

Saturday, January 24, 10:30am - 12:00pm
Korbel Ballroom 3B
Colorado Convention Center

See a lot of free things online and not sure if they would work for your library? Our panel of speakers will introduce you to some of today’s hottest open source tools and offer practical advice on how to implement them at your library.

Presenters:
Marsha Schnirring, Instructional Services Librarian at Occidental College, will discuss Zotero.
Ian Chan, Web Development Librarian at CSU San Marcos, will compare research guides made with Moodle, Drupal, and Library a la Carte.

I’ll be speaking in another session about Koha at the same exact time so I won’t be able to attend, feel free to share your notes with me after the event!

If you’d rather hear about Koha and Serials you can come to the ALA ALCTS Continuing Resources Section College and Research Libraries Interest Group’s session.

E-Journals All Around: in the Catalog, the Knowledgebase, and the Web

Time: Saturday Jan. 24th, 10:30am-12:00pm
Location: Sheraton Hotel, Gold
Program:

1. Peter McCracken (Co-founder & Director of Research, Serials Solutions): A KBART Update - Improving Patrons’ Access to Electronic Resources.
The presentation will address the current status of the Knowledge Bases And Related Tools (KBART) project, with particular attention to how it will benefit publishers, librarians, and ultimately (and most importantly), library users. We will discuss what KBART has done in the past year, what effect we believe the initiative will have in the e-resources supply chain, what will be coming next, and what challenges remain.

2. Beth R. Bernhardt (Electronic Resources Librarian, University of North Carolina Greensboro): Dealing with Free E-Journals: Are they worth the effort?
The number of “free” electronic journals available on the internet continues to increase. This presentation will focus on answering questions such as how can we find these journals, should we make an effort to provide access for our patrons, and what is the potential cost for maintaining them?

3. Nicole C. Engard (Open Source Evangelist, LibLime): Serials Management in KOHA’s open source library software.
The presentation will help you understand what open source is all about and show you how the Koha Open Source Automation system can not only handle your serials in the library catalog, but provide better services to our patrons.

4. Brief Business Meeting: New members are welcome!

More on events at ALA soon!!

Technorati Tags: alamw09

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 7:22 am by Nicole C. Engard and is filed under Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.