Last Thursday to Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd annual STEM librarians conference in Denton. The conference almost doubled in size from last year and UNT did a great job of hosting.
Discovery Park Library Service Desk. We met in a computer classroom behind this area
Librarians from all around Texas (but mainly the DFW area) presented on all different subjects even though the theme for the conference was e-books. In addition, there were roundtable groups and panel discussions with various vendors.
The pre-conference on Thursday was on gaming and education. We spent the afternoon playing educational games from this list and heard an interesting talk about from an educational psychologist on gaming and learning. For a bit more fun, another librarian talked about her library’s role in a game of Humans vs. Zombies on her their campus. She even has a research guide on how to survive a zombie attack where she has also posted her presentation.
Friday was a mix of discussions, lightening talks and regular presentations. Some of the talks were more technical talks geared towards librarians, but some of them talked about resources that we should make available to our patrons such as a guide for K-12 STEM resources, databases on toxicology, hazardous chemicals, environmental health, and toxic releases, and a video journal which I will talk about more next week. We also talked about open-access publishing and data management/curation which are issues that concern both STEM researchers and librarians.
The Saturday post-conference session was focused on e-books. I cobbled together a presentation based on my two posts on downloading library e-books. A talk about how one library did an analysis of their e-book purchasing in proportion to their collection development budget really appealed to the analytical side of me but would probably bore most of the readers of this blog.
Overall, a very enjoyable two days of conferencing. It was a small but focused conference which made the introvert side of me very happy, and I was able to make some new contacts and renew some old contacts which will be very helpful when it comes to my 4th year review next fall. But most importantly, I learned a lot of things that will help me be a better science librarian and serve you better.
