Call for papers - LIR Annual Seminar

This year’s annual LIR seminar will take place on Thursday, March 25^th at Liberty Hall, Dublin. The title of the seminar is 'Access all areas: Mobile technology and freesources in libraries'.

The seminar will analyse the benefits of mobile technologies in a library context, as well as showcasing developments and experiments in the area. In addition, the seminar will consider how the current climate has allowed libraries to assess ways of minimising the impact of reduced budgets and encouraged libraries to evaluate ‘freesources’ as well as examining the changing relationship with publishers.

Speakers confirmed for the day include Nicky Whitsed (Director of Library Services, Open University), and Fiona McGoldrick and Rita Pinhasi (IRIS).

This is an excellent opportunity to showcase innovative and interesting developments in your organisation. We would like to invite proposals for snapshots, to give attendees a chance to see how your organisation is embracing the concept of mobile technologies and/or changes in e-resource provision. Snapshots presentations will be between 12 – 18 minutes. Examples of welcome topics include:

Mobile technologies
- Practical experiences to date with mobile technologies (especially backed up by any available evidence/usage stats)
- Submissions on the topic of access control (IP address, Athens, Shibboleth)
- Exploiting mobile technologies to enhance service delivery
- Interactive multimedia to support learning & teaching
- How the advent of mobile technology is changing perceptions of us as information professionals

'Freesources'
- Clusters of useful freesources: by subject, crossdisciplinary, or reference
- Decisions in collection management on reducing costs (while protecting access to meaningful content)
- Strategies for reducing the impact of e-resource cancellations
- Free resources for research … quality, referencing, acceptable standards for academic work

The themes are broad, and we will consider other proposals not mentioned above.

Proposals for snapshot presentations should be forwarded to Ronán Kennedy (ronan.kennedy@nuigalway.ie) by Friday, February 26^th 2010.