Call for Papers for Spring Meeting

Spelunking or Serendipity : Discovery in the Catalog

Friday, April 25, 2008
The Leadership Center
Aurora, NE

Call for Papers Form

The theme reflects the uncertainty regarding the present and future direction of the library catalog in the midst of Google and mass digitization projects. Long regarded as the source for information from the world’s experts, the library catalog was once the near-exclusive source for users. The rise of Google and its objective of “organizing the world’s knowledge” have led to the conditioning of user expectations by the Web. Now is the time for libraries to enrich and share content for the millions of items in their collection.

Leading the day’s presentations will be keynote speaker Jeffrey Beall, Metadata Librarian at the Auraria Library, University of Colorado Health Sciences, Denver. His topic of “Metadata: Principles and Promise” will discuss the use of rich metadata to aggregate resources, and how structured retrieval displays will again be recognized for the value they add to information retrieval.

Jeffrey Beall is an author and a well-known authority on metadata, and the editor of The Journal of Library Metadata.

Topics for this meeting might include discussions of how your library has changed its approach in searching the catalog; innovative ways in which you are presenting materials in your catalog, or how your library is meeting the challenges of Web 2.0. The length of each breakout session will be 50 minutes; please allow 5-10 minutes for questions.

Please return the form by March 1, 2008 to:
Sheryl Williams
Chair, TSRT
McGoogan Library of Medicine
swilliam@unmc.edu