Conferences and Workshops Attended

I consider conferences an important part of my learning experience because they allow me to meet the people who make things happen in the field and to see how things happen through their collaborative efforts. A conference marks a chunk of time that individuals can carve out of their busy schedules and provides a single place where they can present and discuss ideas and practices relevant to their field of knowledge and profession.

I would not have been able to attend these conferences without the support of organizations who have given financial support to pay for my travel, hotel, meals, registration, and other expenses. To my benefactors, I say thank you for the opportunities that you have opened for me. I hope to give back so these opportunities will be open to other people too.

For several of the conferences I have listed below, I have created individual pages where I put down my notes about my attendance. These help me put together resources that I can go back to later. I hope these pages will be helpful to others too.

2009

Open Source Bridge, June 17-19, 2009, Portland, OR

code4lib Northwest 2009, June 4, 2009, Portland, OR

WebVisions 2009, May 20-22, 2009, Portland, OR

See 2009 presentations.

Load Profile Training (Innovative Interfaces, Inc.), Feb. 2-4, 2009, Emeryville, CA

2008

An Exploration of Academic Research Libraries in Cambridge, Cambridge, MA, Oct. 20-21, 2008.

See A Peek at the Harvard and MIT Libraries, a short article that I wrote about this event for the newsletter of the Library Staff Assoc of the University of Oregon Libraries. See photos.

Northwest Innovative User's Group 2008, Oct. 16-17, 2008, Portland, OR

OSCON 2008, July 21-25, 2008, Portland, OR

Annual Conference of the American Library Association (ALA 2008)

See my notes

code4lib 2008, February 25-28, 2008, Portland, OR

I have attended the first code4lib conference in 2006 and I have since followed the growth of this group. I have decided that this would be the community to connect with to grow meaningfully in terms of my knowledge and skills in information organization, library systems and research.

2006

Annual Conference of the American Library Association (ALA 2006), June 22-28, 2006, New Orleans, LA

My second ALA annual. New Orleans was in its first year of post-Katrina devastation but it was still something to see this southern city. See some of my blog posts of this event.

Oregon Library Association Annual Conference (OLA 2006), April 5-7, 2006, Salem, OR

I have not participated in my own state's library association while a MLIS student so when a call for a vice-chair of the exhibits committee for this conference was sent out, I volunteered. It was a naive move since some measure of employment stability was expected of conference committee chairs and vice-chairs to insure some continuity in the planning of subsequent annual conferences. But the conference planning chair and the exhibits committee chair graciously allowed me to become a member of the exhibits committee. It turned out to be a fruitful involvement as I worked with the exhibits committee in communicating to vendors, getting them registered, and assigning them to booths. It was hard getting involved at this level with no formal job affiliation with a library as most of the conference committee members had. But I was glad to give my time to committee meetings and to pay my own registration because I was learning a lot about how library conferences, particularly the vendor exhibits, are planned.

code4lib 2006, Feb. 15-17, 2006, Corvallis, OR

I have learned about this conference from an iSchool listserv posting and I thought it was neat to have this meeting of library technologists not very far away in Corvallis. As I was also very interested in the topics that they wanted to address, I didn't mind spending some of my limited income as an independent cataloger to attend this conference. [My notes about this conference].

2005

Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIST 2005), Oct. 29 - Nov. 2, 2005, Charlotte, NC

The ASIS&T conference immediately followed the ICKM conference, in the same venue, and I thought I might as well make the most of the money I spent on airfare to attend one of the premier conferences in LIS. See my blog posts for ASIST 2005. I probably contributed more than 200 photos for both the ICKM and ASIS&T conferences.

2nd International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM 2005), Oct. 27-28, 2005, Charlotte, NC

I chose to attend this conference because it gave me the opportunity to do an oral presentation based on my tutorial on constructing personal gateways to the Internet. I also liked the international makeup of the participants, particularly the Asian connections of this conference. I wish to get involved in developing viable public digital information systems in Asia in the future and it looked like the conference offered opportunities to start building professional relationships. See my blog posts for ICKM as well as a photo set I uploaded to Flickr.

Annual Meeting of the ASIS&T Pacific Northwest Chapter (ASIST-PNW 2005), May 14, 2005, Seattle, WA

I have responded to the call for presentations for this annual meeting and I was lucky to have had my proposal accepted. See my presentation on Linnaeus, Mendeleev, Dewey, and Ranganathan. I have also entered a paper on the same topic to this chapter's student paper competition and have won the award.

ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005), April 2-7, 2005, Portland, OR

I consider this experience significant enough to create a separate page for my notes about my attendance at this conference.

Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research, (CRA-W) Grad Cohort Workshop, Feb. 25-26, 2005, San Francisco, CA

I became aware of this opportunity through a posting made by then Dean Eisenberg on the iSchool's listserv. I applied immediately and asked Dean Eisenberg to endorse my application as required and which he gladly did. The workshop was intended largely for graduate women students in the computing sciences but I figured library and information science should be right around there. The lessons I've learned and the connections I have made at this workshop are invaluable resources for me to connect to when I go to a PhD program later.

2004

Annual Conference of the American Library Association (ALA 2004), June 25-30, 2004, Orlando, FL

This was my first ALA annual conference and I do have substantial Notes of it.

Spectrum Leadership Institute, June 23-25, 2004 Orlando, FL

This leadership institute was a significant component of my Spectrum Scholarship from the American Library Association. The scholarship paid for my airfare to get to Orlando, FL as well as accomodations at a dorm and free meals at a dining hall of the University of Central Florida.

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2004), June 7-11, 2004, Tucson, AZ

I attended this conference as a student volunteer which provided numerous benefits through work study grants administered by the JCDL 2004 organizing committee.

National Conference of the Public Library Association (PLA 2004), Feb. 24-28, 2004, Seattle, WA

I was very fortunate to have received a grant to attend this conference. Please see my notes and report of my attendance.

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