RLG Conference, Day #1

I spent time this spring blogging about things in my personal life and now it's time to turn my attention to the stuff I'm paid to do.  I have to say, I love blogging.  I write best in 500 word chunks so blog writing is great.  I have accomplished something in 20 minutes.

I'm at the Research Library Group meeting this week. RLG, if you remember, was a separate entity for years until almost 5 years ago, it merged with OCLC (I've written an article about the history of bibliographic utilities for the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science if you want to read more.)  It's turned into OCLC Research and they do a lot of research that research libraries care about.  At all of these types of things, you have to pick and choose what you listen to...I actually hate that about conferences.  I want to hear everything if MPOW is paying me to attend.  So I made choices to hear about the special collections activities in research libraries yesterday.  Jackie Dooley did the library world a great service by putting together a survey which looked at library special collections activities. She asked "what are your greatest challenges" and it was interesting to hear that space, born digital materials, and digitization were the biggest challenges facing special collections units.  Since we're grappling with the born digital issues in our library, I can empathize with those that answered that acquiring, processing, accessing, preserving born digital materials is a challenge. I also was surprised to learn that all but 38% of the respondents loan their original rare books.
The study concluded several things, one of which was to " design and implement collaborative projects to decrease backlogs of cartographic and audio visual materials." I recommend that we pay close attention to their findings which should be released very soon.

I learn so much by talking with my colleagues.  Several of us had dinner last night. We discussed issues big and small. Since all of us are AUL's or AD's, we venture into the clouds with our discussions and then also down to the ground (are you happy with the service you're getting from vendor X?)  There is a woman here who worked in acquisitions with me at Illinois before we were librarians.  We both went to library school, got our MLS's, and became librarians.  Now we meet at conferences and catch up on how are lives are going.  We were both pregnant 25 years ago so it's fun to talk about our daughters because we shared that experience.  My advice to anyone -- never burn your bridges. 

Today is day 2...some of the sessions are available via webcat.  A search on rlg meeting 2010 should get you to the agenda.