ALA Marginalia

Last year, as part of the ALA 2007 Annual Conference wiki, we set up a section for conference presentations, podcasts, and other conference content for use by registrants afterwards, and for extending the content of the conference to others. Meanwhile, the ALA Website Advisory Committee took up the challenge of finding ways to ensure that conference materials are more widely available, particularly as sessions are no longer audio-taped.

The upshot is a new the ALA Conference Materials Archive, on a wiki at http://presentations.ala.org/. The wiki already includes links to last year’s materials, along with links to similar material from some of ALA’s units. The goal is for all collateral conference material to be linked in some way from this wiki.

So, if you are a speaker at the ALA 2008 Annual Conference in Anaheim, here is the place for you to upload your handouts, or to publish links to your material, if it is resident on another site. Posting materials prior to conference ensures immediate access by attendees — waiting until after the conference means missing a valuable opportunity to share their knowledge and insights. And if you are interested in “going green,” then placing your handouts here will help! Once you add your materials to the wiki, please note this during your presentation (add “view or download more information at http://presentations.ala.org/” to your last .ppt slide, for example).

The wiki is pre-loaded with program titles (taken from the final AC 2008 program book listings) and is organized by day/time. Full instructions on using the wiki, including the attribution license, and a suggested convention for organizing materials and links, appears on the wiki.

Now, if you will not be with us in Anaheim (still time to change your mind!) or if you have one of those inevitable conflicts, know that there is now a place to find the conference material, this year and into the future.

Please know that you can always contact the ALA Library (library@ala.org) for assistance with locating more about a particular program.

Karen Muller & Valerie Hawkins

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 3:49 pm and is filed under ALA 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.