Please use the proposal-submission PDF to submit your presentation proposals for the 2011 PRDLA meeting in Los Angeles to Hugh McHarg at hmcharg@usc.edu. Or if you prefer, send your proposal in the body of an e-mail and include all of the information requested in the attached form.
The submission deadline is July 15, 2011. The Program Planning Committee will review all the proposals and notify presenters by August 12.
Descriptions of this year’s theme and focus areas follow below. Please keep in mind that the focus areas are purposefully wide-ranging and that the possible topics listed with each focus area are simply suggestions.
The planning committee looks forward to reviewing your engaging and innovative proposals for this year’s sessions. We are very excited to build upon last year’s outstanding program in Shanghai and create another excellent PRDLA experience for our members.
2011 Theme: Libraries and Discovery in the Pacific Century
The emergence of the Pacific Rim as the political, cultural, and economic center of the world in the 21st century informs a great deal of research and scholarship across many disciplines. The 2011 Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance sessions will explore the roles, processes, systems, and success strategies of libraries as we seek to deliver the greatest benefits to our institutions, our research communities, and our partners—at home and abroad—in the digital environment.
Focus Areas
1.Creation, curation, and preservation of the future past
From selection processes to long-term preservation and provision of access, the challenges of content development and maintenance are many. The opportunities are also encouragingly vast.
Possible presentation topics in this area include: development and application of selection criteria; the roles and responsibilities of the curator; the meaning of curation in the academic research library; content development with a view toward long-term preservation.
2.Supporting discovery through enabling technologies
If we build it, will they find it? No matter how far along we are in integrating digital resources with the broader base of library collections—as well as teaching and research activities on our campuses and beyond—we continue striving to make our digital collections more discoverable. How do we evaluate, select, and implement technologies to deliver the optimum research experience to our user communities?
Possible presentation topics in this area include: integrating digital collections with discovery interfaces, course management systems, and teaching technologies; metadata practices and challenges; using social media, mobile devices, and other new-media communication tools to enhance discovery; next-generation search and the potential of the semantic web for discovering research resources.
3.Collaboration—intra-campus and intercontinental
Just as we must not relegate our digital collections to silos—as a result of technological or other limitations—our processes, procedures, and conceptual approaches to digital collection-building must be similarly open and collaborative. This is particularly important with regard to engaging researchers whose work we may preserve in our digital libraries or institutional repositories.
Possible presentation topics in this area include: international collaborations; working with other academic or cultural-heritage institutions; the necessary collaborative efforts to create successful institutional repositories; the challenges of managing research data; usage data and research analytics for digital libraries; working with other campus units—such as communications, fundraising, and events—to increase the visibility of digital collections.
4. Models, standards, and managing the sustainable digital library
As scholarly interest increases in such diverse digital initiatives as oral histories, cultural memory projects, digital publishing models, and many other multimedia endeavors, the models of success that we share with one another grow ever more important. This focus area provides an opportunity for us to learn from the implementations, practices and policies, and successes and challenges of our PRDLA colleagues.
Possible presentation topics in this area include: the development and application of technology standards and guidelines; best practices in digital librarianship; models for processing and making accessible diverse media and object types; project updates and general success stories.
[PDF of Calling for Presentation Proposals ]
