Thanks to Zach Coble, a Google Doc was created during our Library as Publisher Maker session during ACRL 2013. And thanks to all of you who participated in our lively discussion, we put those thoughts to paper in this Google Doc.  It was refreshing to have the bones of a document to take back to work built with the wisdom of the group. After the session, I was lucky enough to make some edits and talk through some additional issues with J Whyte Appleby. The doc is still in progress and I encourage interested parties in contributing their thoughts. Thanks again to all who participated. I am looking forward to road testing these talking points in the months to come.

There was so much interest in the Let’s Make a MOOC session that it ran for almost 4 hours on Friday. Here is a storify of what unfolded. Please keep the work alive and help bring this one-week MOOC to completion! #ilmooc

If you are interested in building the course out in Canvas, set up an account as a Teacher and you can locate the course IL MOOC or leave your email address in a comment and we’ll send you an invitation. Many hands are needed!

Following up from the One Hour session…

The idea was to take the hour, make something tangible, and learn a new skill quickly.

We decided to make an ebook on the topic of DH and Libraries, pulling content from Miriam Posner’s bibliography on the topic. There were a few hang-ups along the way (downloading Calibre, iPad users had to pair with those who had laptops, some formatting and wonky file saving issues) but triumphing over all, we succeeded.

Our process:

1. Find HTML/Text version of the content
2. Copy
3. Paste to word processor (Word and GDocs were used)
4. Format for content headings, hyperlinks
5. Save as .htm
6. Import to Calibre
7. Edit metadata
8. Export as EPUB

I went around and collected the .htm files from most groups, and then did the extra step of meshing them all into one .htm file (copy/paste/reformat), for the purpose of spitting out one EPUB file of ALL the collected works. The final product is below:

•  DH and Libraries EPUB
• DH and Libraries MOBI
• DH and Libraries PDF
• DH and Libraries RTF

 Challenges:

• Copyright – we decided that our use is transformative and are claiming fair use or relying on Creative Commons licenses of the original works. Several of the works, published in the most traditional journals, we simply skipped over so as not to deal with it right away.
• Workflow – the reformatting of the documents is what ends up taking the most time. Also, several people experimented with hand coding the HTML, and for some reason it didn’t translate when saved as .htm. Automating some of the simpler tasks might be a future project for someone to take on.
• Tools – Calibre may not be best tool for this. It has a bunch of features that we didn’t take the time to work through that would probably make the ebooks work better. A continuation of this session might explore other tools using the same content and process.
• Formatting – after fiddling around with the text for a while I still can’t seem to get the formatting right when moving from .doc to .htm to .epub. Something changes in translation that overlaps and makes the formatting look dumb.

Opportunities:

• In less than an hour, 15-20 people experimented with modifying content to meet different  information needs. Win.
• Reusing openly licensed data(text) is good for the (open)environment.
• The product is an expanded accessible version of the source content.
• This is a small step and example of the direction of “library publishing” that was also discussed at THATCamp ACRL.
• We only got through about 5 articles on the bibliography! More to do! Here’s the .htm file and the Word doc so you can continue to add more!

Thanks to all who attended and participated in THATCamp ACRL. We had a great time, and hope you did too.

Please feel free to continue to use this space as long as necessary to post notes, reflect on our sessions, and/or reference the work we did.

Last minute housekeeping stuff:

• Please take a second to fill out this survey about your experience at THATCamp.
• Consider submitting your follow-up posts, session notes or projects to the THATCamp Bibliography.

Thanks again! See you in 2015!

Thanks to all who participated in our discussion and practice for the digital storytelling session.

Notes: docs.google.com/document/d/18r4qRoqHVk7X0XNI9xm8mt0IcQ7oYRJjtFTh51iEJg/edit

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/jomcleay/digitalstorytelling-13216936

docs.google.com/document/d/1tVYpXycqE8DGMmdpwqswZdsM7U8hW7W0yNnRfQ83Vuo/edit

Thanks all for attending! Add to the doc if something’s missing, or if there are ideas that should’ve been discussed.

Notes from the discussion of the function (or lack thereof) of the Socractic method in web-based reference and education can be found by clicking here.

Thank you to everyone who participated!

tinyurl.com/clyzuef

I started a google doc for DH101: Getting Started in Digital Humanities. It’s open for editing at

docs.google.com/document/d/1f8noiuNmQ_ejzo0aRu_u7JGevdSCKWAn8CuZGzN9Y4A/edit?usp=sharing

Session attendees please add your notes for everyone to access.

Thanks!

I’m interested in developing online spaces for (mostly undergrad) students to access throughout university careers. Many libraries have subject research guides online, but I’m thinking of a more interactive space which students can access as needed to supplement research instruction, learn about and discuss digital tools in their disciplines, plus [your activity idea here].

Has anyone developed these types of communities (library-based or based on majors, interdisciplinary programs)? What platforms are best for hosting these types of communities? What is the role of the community builders (librarians, subject faculty): facilitator, guide on side, info provider, discussion leader, respond to questions?

How can students be encouraged to participate? Would they participate?

I’d welcome any responses to these questions here on the blog even if we don’t have this as a session today.

I’m interested in discussing ideas for providing alternative service learning assignments/components in the classroom.

While many excellent guides to data sets for the sciences and social sciences already exist, I’d like to develop a list of likely sources for arts and humanities folks. (Or maybe this also already exists, in which case we’ll have a short session!) What are the social science data sets humanists should really know about? What museums provide downloadable data or APIs through which you can query their collections? I’m interested in resources like the Million Song Dataset or Public Art Archive or Australia’s Cultural Dataset Consortium — how can I find more? I see this as a concrete session that will produce a shared resource for use in subject guides, teaching, blogging, more. (Plus, as a librarian I find making annotated lists of things inherently satisfying.)

This session did happen at THATCamp ACRL 2013, and our shared Google Doc is here. We’d love this to be a living document, and should note that folks interested in this topic should also consider adding their finds to the DataBib site.

I have a social science, environmental studies background, and I’ve used and taught GIS. Recently, I’ve been interested in more user friendly mapping tools such as Google Earth. I’m curious if/how Geospatial tools fit into DH. My school is just starting a big DH initiative.

In this session I would like to create a list of resources libraries can use to quickly and inexpensively build digital projects. There are so many tools out there and more are being created all the time but it is sometimes hard to know where to start.

The goal is to create a toolbox, targeted at libraries, which will live online and be updated by the community. There is already Bamboo Dirt (dirt.projectbamboo.org/) which is a great resource so it is worth considering how this project might relate to that one.

These are some thoughts that have been spinning through my head since I did half of my MLIS online, and my work in libraries and as an online writing coach since then has made then spin faster.

Think about a typical reference desk, f2f transaction. Now think about a chat reference transaction. Think about a typical conversation on a social media platform, and about a typical conversation in an online classroom’s discussion board.

All of these seem like good places for the Socratic method, a time-honored tool of philosophy and education, to be used, and in some of them people work very hard to employ it. They definitely not equally successful, though. Why do responses become monosyllabic or angry or simplistic so quickly in online environments? How much of this is due to the environment, and how much is maybe just due to human nature? What could we do to make our conversations more Socratic?

P.S. Apologies for anything weird in here. I’ve never posted to WordPress from my phone before…I hope there weren’t any crazy spelling errors! I’ll try to double-check this on my laptop when I have internet tomorrow.

Motivated by a recent mock keynote debate, “A Matter of Scale,” presented by Matt Jockers and Julia Flanders as part of the Boston Area Days of Digital Humanities Conference, and the imperative that librarians involved with many things “digital” learn not only how to build tools, in this case for textual analysis, but leverage existing tools to support teaching and research endeavors rooted in the text.  Coming from the tool-building perspective and tradition, I seldom have time to explore existing tools for textual analysis.  This is partly because at IU we are so vested in textual markup following the TEI Guidelines for which few external tools exist that act on the markup (thus our focus on building). But as is the case with many academic libraries attempting to balance scale of digital production, we are not always in the position to build boutique interfaces, tools and functions for hand-crafted markup.  Further, often early research inquiries can be better defined if not answered by initially playing and experimenting with raw data sets before embarking on markup.  Finally, after many years of leading e-text initiatives and championing the TEI, I would love to sit around with folks and compare and contrast, not just the possibilities, but also the outcomes of real research inquiries that formed the basis for many of the TEI collections I am offering up to the community for experimentation.  In other words, what can we ascertain without/beyond the markup and can those very queries yield answers regardless of the markup?

The other motivator for this session is two-fold.  At IU we’ve always exposed the TEI/XML, but at the most atomic level.  I am exploring workflows moving forward in which we batch not only the TEI but other versions of the data, primarily plain text, for easier harvesting and re-purposing.  One reason for doing this – there are many good ones – is that we want to demonstrate to our faculty partners the possibilities of sharing data in this way.  The content can and should be analyzed, parsed, and remixed outside of the context of it’s collection site for broader impact and exposure.  I am hoping, with your help, to figure out how to best push versions of this data into the flow, around a more formal call, initially, to the digital humanities community-at-large so I can track the various morphings and instantiations of this data to share back with the IU community, especially my faculty partners.

I recently blogged about this very concern on Day of DH 2013.  So this is the first step of a multi-step process that I would like to see culminate in a greater unleashing of XML and plain text data (later summer / early Fall?).  And would love your input and contributions.

This session is by no means limited to the following e-text data sets I will provide (data access details forthcoming):

• Indiana Magazine of History (one the nation’s oldest scholarly historical journal, 1905-2011; TEI P4)
• Victorian Women Writers Project  (1830-1929; TEI P5)
• Indiana Authors and Their Books ( 1850-1929; TEI Lite P4)
• Brevier Legislative Reports (transcripts from Indiana Legislature, 1858-1887; TEI P5)
• Wright American Fiction (undergoing web site migration, 1851-1875; TEI P5)

Serve up or use your own e-text data sets of interest.

Nor is it limited by the following tools I have identified for starters:

Enthralled by the surge of digital production in the area of storytelling? Believe it can be used to teach or communicate concepts relevant to digital humanities and librarianship? Hesitant to get started on your own?

Inspired by the brilliant MOOC, ds106, and energized by the potential power of group dynamics, I’m proposing a talk/make session. Let’s talk about how digital storytelling can be leveraged by humanists and information scientists, look at a couple of the VERY many tools at our disposal on the open Web and then storyboard an idea to leave with and implement after THATCamp!

I cannot speak for other participants, but I am somewhat intimidated by all the tools, technologies, and projects that fall under digital humanities. The question I have is: how do I get involved? What technologies do I need to know? How do I convince stakeholders in my library that DH has value? I am sure that other newbies to DH have similar questions.

Ideally, participants would be a mix of newbies (such as myself) and people with more experience in DH. I have no set agenda in mind except as a come-and-go-as-you-please seminar/discussion format. If anyone has any suggestions to make the most out of this proposal, please e-mail me at barobinson2@fsu.edu.

This is a talk session for those who are thinking about how to bring a maker space into an academic library. If you’ve been following the library and maker space movement, then you know that people usually don’t think about libraries when they think about maker spaces. And they especially don’t think about creative, collaborative, maker spaces when they think about academic libraries.

But as universities and colleges become more and more about the experience they offer and not just the degree one can attain, the learner’s experience in the library becomes a great opportunity to attract and retain students. Today’s students need the opportunity to move beyond what library information commons offer – computers, group study spaces, whiteboards – to tools to be producers – taking their knowledge and theory into application and prototyping.

Maker spaces tend to be STEM centric. (Another great opportunity for libraries!) In this session I’d like to facilitate a discussion on the idea of creating a ‘maker space’ in an academic library that incorporates the Digital Humanities. What would the guiding principles be? What would the space look like? What equipment would be needed? What software? What furniture? Supplies? What else? How should it be supported? Advertised? Assessed? And more.

If this topic interests you I hope you’ll come and contribute. I hope it will be a great opportunity to come away with a plan of action or at least a better vision for how it could be done.

Kate Ganski, Library Instruction Coordinator, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee

Notes were compiled from our TALK on Google Docs titled: DH and Makerspace Mashup. Please continue to add ideas here and let us know what projects and conversations develope back at your home institutions.

Let’s keep the conversation going on Twitter: #DHMakerspace

Seems like everytime I check my education news feed there is at least one article talking about MOOCs. Advocates hailing the disruptive impact of MOOCs to bring higher education to the masses. Proponents tempering the MOOC frenzy with reminiscences of early technological fads. No matter what side is argued the fact remains that MOOCs are a new player in this old game of higher education and almost every university is crafting a plan to incorporate them into their programs.

Inspired by Hybrid Pedagogy’s week long MOOC MOOC let’s bring our collective knowledge of delivering information literacy instruction together to crowdsource a week long information literacy MOOC. Let’s design the instruction blocks, learning activities, and assessment challenges using open educational resources (OERs), free and open access readings, cloud based productivity tools, and open badges.

We’ll need many hands to make this a success. We may not finish but we’ll be off to a great start to making a great course.

Facilitators:
Kate Ganski, Library Instruction Coordinator, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee
Kristin Woodward, Instructional Design Librarian, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee

This is a talk session, co-proposed by Alana Kumbier, Kelly McElroy, and Lydia Willoughby.

 We’re interested in identifying ways in which academic librarians can support projects to diversify DH. Some of our framing questions include:

• How do we connect our skills and knowledges with projects that originate within the academy as well as in our communities?

• How do we help students, faculty and staff discover projects & resources that represent diverse experiences, histories, and modes of cultural production? What can we do to connect our patrons with online digital collections of radical, queer, POC, alternative press materials (contemporary & historic)?

• How can we help eliminate barriers to access for people who want to create DH projects?

• How can we design adaptive and accessible systems that foster community use of technology for users with diverse digital literacies?

• How can we help ensure that DH projects are accessible, aware of multiple ontologies, accountable to communities being documented, and open to participation?

• What great resources, projects, or collectives do we know about that we’d like to share with others?

• What ways can we collaborate with partners and key community stakeholders to promote, market and fund our DH projects?

• Do we want to form a working group, identify a project we could work on together?

Our proposal is motivated by (and builds upon) calls to create DH projects that draw on a set of critical theoretical and activist genealogies that include:

• Queer theory & activism

• Critical race theory and anti-racist theory & activism

• Indigenous studies & activism

• Feminist theory & activism

• Disability studies & activism, and

• Postcolonial studies

These calls have been articulated by a number of groups, in different contexts. Online, we can see evidence of this work in sites created by the #transformDH Collective, from NITLE discussion of Women’s Studies, Gender Studies & DH, by #DHPoco (a Postcolonial Digital Humanities project), THATCamp Feminisms West and THATCamp Feminisms East, and the Diversity in DH discussion at THATCamp SoCal 2011.

Wanted: a group of individuals interested in digital humanities and libraries to serve as acquisitions editors for one hour.

The project: dh+lib wants to host a series of posts that will move forward the conversation surrounding digital humanities and libraries, but we need your help picking a theme. What questions have gone unanswered that need to be? Is there a topic that could be more fully developed? What would make your job easier (at least the part that’s related to DH)? Who could contribute to this series?

It doesn’t necessarily have to be blog posts – are there resources that would make your job easier, or more interesting, but don’t yet exist?

Come tell us what ideas you would like to see discussed, and help shape the future path of dh+lib.

I am a complete novice in this realm but I want to learn. I am hoping there are some more like-minded attendees who will enjoy a truly exploratory session. And I also hope someone out there will propose a session on the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

Come Play with Ngram Viewer
A “talk and play” session proposed by Judith Arnold, Wayne State University (Detroit)

One of my colleagues showed me this tool and I was immediately taken with it. I am proposing a Play and Talk session (45 to 60 minutes) where we play with this tool for 20 minutes or so and then spend the rest of the time discussing how different disciplines (or even ourselves in library science) might use this tool. Google Ngram Viewer (books.google.com/ngrams/) visualizes word frequency in the corpus of Google Books. You can chart the occurrence of words over time and even in advanced features determine how the word is used (through part of speech tags), so I can imagine that linguists, for example,  would be interested.  I experimented with words for an upcoming instruction session on literary studies to see what Ngram Viewer could show me about the prominence of different authors over time and I generated some interesting graphs, which I will bring with me. So bring your iPad or laptop and join me in some exploration, fun, and idea exchanges.

This is a make session co-proposed by Thea Atwood & Caro Pinto (Hampshire College)

We want build off of the Thursday session called: Library Publishing & Undergraduate Education. The session plans to offer best practices, but let’s get together and hammer out what they look like and how they connect to undergraduate education.

How do we teach altmetrics to undergraduates across disciplines?

Do we all need institutional repositories to showcase our unique work?

How do we get faculty excited about open access?

How do we incentive collaboration on scholarly communication within the faculty?

How do we make our collections budgets stretch to support open access scholarship on our campuses?

Co-proposed with Melanie Schlosser, Digital Publishing Librarian, Ohio State University, and Stewart Varner, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Emory University.

Libraries are becoming increasingly involved in publishing in new and interesting ways (see, for example, the Amherst College Press and the Library Publishing Coalition). As more libraries get involved in publishing or look to increase their efforts in this area, we are faced with many new questions. For example, how do you balance the need for mission-driven publishing using traditional outputs (e.g. journals and monographs) with an interest in experimental publishing? Will library publishing efforts be most successful by focusing untapping niche markets or other areas? Many university publishers are starting short form ebook series (see Princeton Shorts, UNC Press Shorts, and Stanford Briefs) and other such experiments in content size – what is the “right size” for academic scholarship?

Come join us to discuss these questions and more. Are you doing library publishing at your institution? Tell us what’s worked well and what are the current challenges you’re facing.

I’m a big fan of talking. I like to talk, to share ideas, to chit-chat, shoot the breeze. This being my third THATCamp, I’m done with all that. I’ve yacked about DH and Libraries, twice. I’m ready to be a maker, a doer, a hands-on digital humanities guru. What’s holding me back, you might ask? Well, I haven’t gone back to the basics and become the self-taught coding hacking machine of a DH-er that I once thought I’d be. But, I know what I’m good at, and I’m ready to give that to the DH community.

I propose that we take one hour-long session, pick a project from DHCommons (an amazing little site that lists DH Projects AND the work that they need done to help them along) and just freaking do it. Need data entry and looking for librarian collaborators? Great! I’ve got 5 people sitting around with laptops who are excited about DH work and ready to do something! Need Beta Testers to break your site? Cool! Let’s all access it from smart phones simultaneously! Have a pile of “reference” questions that need answered? You got it! Our powers united creates Captain DHBrarian! Want to create a bibliography of THATCamp? Been there. Done that (still needs work!)

Simply, lets find something DHish that needs to be done, organize our efforts and quickly accomplish it. A range of skills and proficiencies can participate in this session, and there’d be only one rule: Lets do this thing.

In brief

Everyone who goes to a THATCamp proposes a session. Do not prepare a paper or presentation. Plan instead to have a conversation, to get some work done, or to have fun.

How do I propose a session?

Once you register for your THATCamp and are approved, you will receive a user account on the THATCamp website. You should receive your login information by email. Before the THATCamp, you should log in to the THATCamp site, click on Posts –> Add New, then write and publish your session proposal. Your session proposal will appear on the front page of this site, and we’ll all be able to read and comment on it beforehand. (If you haven’t worked with WordPress before, see codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts for help.) The morning of the event, all THATCamp participants will vote on those proposals (and probably come up with several new ones), and then all together will work out how best to put those sessions into a schedule.

Remember that you will be expected to facilitate the sessions you propose, so that if you propose a hacking session, you should have the germ of a project to work on; if you propose a workshop, you should be prepared to teach it or find a teacher; if you propose a discussion of the Digital Public Library of America, you should be prepared to summarize what that is, begin the discussion, keep the discussion going, and end the discussion.

When do I propose a session?

You can propose a session as early as you like, but most people publish their session proposals to the THATCamp site during the week before the THATCamp begins. It’s a good idea to check the THATCamp site frequently in the week beforehand (perhaps by subscribing to its RSS feed with an RSS reader such as Google Reader) to see and comment on everyone’s session proposals. You can also come up with a last-minute idea and propose it to the THATCamp participants during the scheduling session, which is the first session of the THATCamp.

Why are sessions proposed this way?

Proposing sessions just before a THATCamp and building a schedule during the first session of a THATCamp ensures that sessions are honest and informal, that session topics are current, and that unconference participants will collaborate on a shared task. An unconference, in Tom Scheinfeldt’s words, is fun, productive, and collegial, and at THATCamp, therefore, “[W]e’re not here to listen and be listened to. We’re here to work, to participate actively.[…] We’re here to get stuff done.” Listen further:

Everyone should feel equally free to participate and everyone should let everyone else feel equally free to participate. You are not students and professors, management and staff here at THATCamp. At most conferences, the game we play is one in which I, the speaker, try desperately to prove to you how smart I am, and you, the audience member, tries desperately in the question and answer period to show how stupid I am by comparison. Not here. At THATCamp we’re here to be supportive of one another as we all struggle with the challenges and opportunities of incorporating technology in our work, departments, disciplines, and humanist missions.

See the About page for more information on the philosophy of unconferences.

What do I propose?

There are roughly four things people do in THATCamp sessions: Talk, Make, Teach, and Play. Sometimes one session contains elements of all these, but it’s also a fair taxonomy for THATCamp sessions.

• In a Talk session proposal, you offer to lead a group discussion on a topic or question of interest to you.
• In a Make session proposal, you offer to lead a small group in a hands-on collaborative working session with the aim of producing a draft document or piece of software.
• In a Teach session, you offer to teach a skill, either a “hard” skill or a “soft” skill.
• In a Play session, anything goes — you suggest literally playing a game, or you suggest some quality group playtime with one or more technologies, or what you will.

Also, you should feel free to pick up and continue themes or discussions that have been proposed at other THATCamps. There are ongoing discussions about the role of libraries in digital humanities, Less yacking/more hacking, Project Management, and more.

Talk session examples

• Jeffrey McClurken, Archiving Social Media Conversations of Significant Events, THATCamp Prime 2009
• Sherman Dorn, The Ill-formed Question, THATCamp Prime 2009
• Eli Pousson, How do we share our knowledge of historic places?, THATCamp Columbus 2010
• Frédéric Clavert and Véronique Ginouvès, Les archives orales et le web (Oral testimonies and the web), THATCamp Paris 2010
• Zach Whalen, ARGS, Archives, and Digital Scholarship, THATCamp 2010
• Aditi Shrikumar, Text Mining and the Digital Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
• Jon Voss, Toward Linked Data in the Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “how to transform something like CommentPress into a viable mode of open peer review,” THATCamp Southern California 2010

Make session examples

• David Uspal, Hackfest: HTML5, THATCamp Philly 2011
• Wayne Graham, Mostly Hack Zotero hacking session, THATCamp Prime 2010
• Stéfan Sinclair, One Day, One Toolet, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
• Ben Brumfield, Hackfest, THATCamp Austin 2009
• Julie Meloni, Project develop self-paced open access digital humanities curriculum…, THATCamp Prime 2010
• Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, One Week, One Book: Hacking the Academy, THATCamp Prime 2010

Teach session examples

• Kirrily Roberts, FreeBase workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
• Bethany Nowviskie and Bill Turkel, Hacking Wearables and E-Textiles Workshop, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
• Aditi Muralidharan, Visualization workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
• Amanda French, Advanced Omeka, THATCamp Kansas 2012
• Note that some (even most) THATCamp organizers prefer to arrange workshop sessions ahead of time (see THATCamp New England’s workshop series,THATCamp Virginia’s workshops series, and THATCamp Southeast’s workshop series), but you can still volunteer to teach something at the last minute, or even put in a plea for someone else to teach something you’ve always wanted to learn (though if no teacher volunteers, it’s best to nix the session). That’s what’s great about THATCamp.
• Anne Flannery, Omeka and Scripto Workshop, THATCamp MLA 2013 (plea to learn about Scripto rather than offer to teach it; see also comments)

Play session examples

• David Staley, An installation, THATCamp Prime 2009
• Mark Sample, Zen Scavenger Hunt, THATCamp Prime 2010
• Zen Scavenger Hunt Results, THATCamp Virginia 2012
• Marta Rivera Monclova, Digital Tools for Research, THATCamp Caribbean 2012
• Donelle McKinley, Share Your Favourite Tools, THATCamp Wellington 2012
• Anastasia Salter, THATCamp Games Invasion, THATCamp Games 2012

Registration for THATCamp ACRL 2013 is now open! Click here, fill out the webform, and you should receive an email when your registration is approved.

A quick note about the purpose of registration – typically most THATCamp’s put a cap on registrations, so that the conversation and event space do not get overwhelmed. Since we are hosting THATCamp as part of the ACRL conference, we have an alternate goal in asking attendees to “register” here. As our THATCamp will be open to any and all conference participants, the purpose of registration is to get a sense of how many of you are committing (to some degree) that you really, really are planning to show up and participate. Also, registering will give you access to this WordPress site, where you will propose sessions, and interact with other Campers before and after the event.

So, come one, come all! But, if you want to get fully into the THATCampery, please take the time to register, fill out a profile, and propose a session. We want to make this a valuable experience for you, by you!

Image from THATCamp Penn, by Weigle Information Commons on Flickr.

We are quickly nearing conference time, and are very excited to have THATCamp be a part of ACRL this year. In case you haven’t checked the schedule yet, THATCamp ACRL will be held on Friday, April 12 from 8am-5pm.

Since we’ll be unconferencing at the same time as much conferencing is going on, we’ll be using a modified schedule: typically, THATCamp’s begin with a planning session to organize the day’s breakout sessions. As we expect many folks will be coming and going throughout the day, we plan to have two mini-camps. We’ll meet in the morning, plan and schedule morning sessions, then reconvene after lunch and do the same.

Here’s the basic idea:

• Show up on day of the event. Volunteers will coordinate check-ins at the door, hopefully there will be t-shirts, name tags, goodie bags, info sheets, whatever the coordinating committee can put together.
• 8:30-9:30 – Planning the Morning Sessions
  • Organizer hooks up laptop to the screen so all can see and then sessions are grouped, combined, separated, scheduled and organized in about an hour by all attendees using a shared Google spreadsheet updated live on screen. (Often there will be “tracks” that come out of the planning, grouping sessions around areas like technical, discussions, projects).
• 9:30-10:30 – Morning Session # 1
  • People break out into groups based on which session they want to attend. In this case, since we’ll only have one large room, we’ll grab chairs and tables and floor space, spread out and go. Whomever proposed the session is the unofficial leader. So, if John Jackson proposes a discussion on text mining in Religious Studies, he will introduce the topic, manage discussion themes/questions, start to discuss, take notes or request a note taker (in a shared Google doc), etc. etc., and generally follow through on whatever the session produces.
• 10:30-11:00 – Break
• 11:00-12:00 Morning Session # 2
  • (Same format as session # 1) People break out into groups based on which session they want to attend. Whomever proposed the session is the unofficial leader. So, if John proposed a Omeka hack session, he will introduce the topic, show the tool(s), start to hack, take notes or request a note taker (in a shared Google doc), etc. etc., and generally follow through on whatever the session produces.
• 12:00-1:30 Lunch
• 1:30-2:30 Planning the Afternoon Sessions
  • Organizer hooks up laptop to the screen so all can see and then sessions are grouped, combined, separated, scheduled and organized in about an hour by all attendees using a shared Google spreadsheet updated live onscreen.
• 2:30-3:30 Afternoon Session # 1
  • Same as above. Break-out groups. Session proposer leads. Talk, discuss, hack, share, do, make.
• 3:30 – 4:00 Break
• 4:00 – 5:00 Afternoon Session # 2 
  • Here we have some leeway. We could do another break-out session, or we could come back together as one whole group, and have each “Session facilitator” describe their session, what came out of it, etc. in 5 minutes or less. Sort of like mix of wrap-up, Plenary, Dork-shorts, etc. A good way to wind down and see what THATCamp ACRL is/was.

That’s the plan for the time being. But, since we’re trying to put the “Un-” in the unconference, who know’s what could happen!

Registrations will open in late February. Start to think up your proposals for sessions now! 

We’re happy to announce that there will be a THATCamp unconference as part of the programming at ACRL2013! The details will be published here as we work them out. Meanwhile, read more about the THATCamp movement and browse other THATCamps at thatcamp.org.

We especially encourage you to click through Miriam Posner’s comprehensive reading list of articles relating to Digital Humanities and Libraries. Hopefully some of the topics she highlights there will inspire the conversations we’ll have at ACRL2013.

Also, we are very thankful to Microsoft Research for providing support and funding for our THATCamp.

– Brought to you by The ACRL Innovations Committee