Erin Dorney

Upstate NY is having its first library unconference! Nope, that wasn’t a typo. What is an unconference, you might ask? It’s sort of like an unbirthday!

“An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants (generally day-by-day during the course of the event) rather than by one or more organizers in advance of the event.” – Wikipedia

Okay, so maybe it’s not really like an unbirthday… But more information on Library Camp @ Syracuse, including a nifty FAQ for the newbies, can be found on the wiki. The down and dirty is that it’s taking place in Syracuse, NY on March 4th and 5th and costs US $40 for one day and US $75 for both days (with discounts for students!). I’ll be there as an iSchool student volunteer facilitating sessions and taking notes for the wiki!

There will be some very cool breakout sessions on March 4th including 2.0 show and tell, metadata, public 2.0, social networking, open source, funding, assessment, customer service, balancing the old and the new and I can’t resist a shameless plug for the session I will be facilitating with Jen Sullivan and Scott Nicholson on next generation catalogs (content to be added ASAP)!

The breakout sessions on March 5th focuses more on Collection Development.

What should you do? Visit the wiki, register for the unconference, contribute some content, share with your colleagues and visit Syracuse in March (come on, who doesn’t love the snow?!)!