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The VT Libraries Professional Development Portal offers frequent, timely, and relevant information for assisting faculty and staff in staying up to date with current trends and opportunities. Training events, conferences, webinars, and CFPs will be posted regularly. Use the tabs at the top to view lists of recommended conferences, webinars, publications, and other sites. The Applause tab lists recent contributions made to the profession by VT Libraries faculty and staff.

If you would like to submit a CFP or other related call for participation, please contact me, Rebecca Miller, directly (millerrk at vt dot edu). Expired CFPs and past deadlines are removed as soon as possible in order to keep this resource current. Many thanks!

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Wednesday, September 14, 2011

This Blog is Moving

This blog may be slow or dormant for awhile as it moves to a new location:  http://www.led.lib.vt.edu/blog/.  Thanks for your patience while we make this move!

Since the links in many of the posts still refer back to this blog, this blog will not be killed immediately.  However, please update your RSS readers to the new site so that you can continue to receive professional development updates!

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Call for Proposals: USAIN 2012. Due November 30


The United States Agricultural Information Network (USAIN) Contributed Papers and Posters Committee is now soliciting proposals for contributed papers, posters, and panel discussions for the 13th Biennial USAIN Conference, Minneapolis, MN on April 29-May 2, 2012.
The theme of the conference is, “Soil, Water, Food and Energy: Agriculture in an Era of Global Climate Change.” Please consider submitting a proposal, tied to this theme, in one of the following tracks:

● Technology Track - Technologies at Lightning Speed
● Just in Time, Just in Case: Collection Development, Management, and Preservation
● Collaborative Research and Learning Environments for Physical and Digital Spaces
● Managing and Supporting Data and Publications: Innovative Curation
● Curriculum and Instruction for Twenty-first Century Learning
● Extended Education and Outreach to Nontraditional and Community Customers

For detailed descriptions of the program tracks, please visit http://plant.lib.umn.edu/USAIN2012/program.php.

There will also be a poster session, suitable for sharing preliminary research or short project reports.
To submit a proposal, please use the form: http://abstracts.cce.umn.edu/conferences/submit.aspx?conference=109&type=abstract. The proposal should be a maximum of 350 words, in .DOC format, and will be submitted in the “Upload Attachment” section.

Paper and panel submissions should indicate the program track of choice.  Poster submissions should be so indicated. Proposal deadline is November 30, 2011 Notification of proposal acceptance will occur in January 2012. 

Criteria for proposal review are: relevance to the conference theme; contribution to the knowledge of the field; and appropriateness to presentation format. While preference is given to USAIN members, non-members are welcome to submit a proposal. Upon proposal acceptance, the author/presenter must register for the USAIN 2012 conference.

Presenters will be invited to submit their papers for post-conference publication in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Information (JAFI). Information about the journal, as well as instructions for authors, can be found at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1049-6505.
For more information about proposal submissions, please contact committee chair Elizabeth Berman (elizabeth.berman@uvm.edu802-656-8130).

Call for Full Papers: Reference Reviews

Reference Reviews (an Emerald journal) is seeking articles for publication in
2012. These articles should focus on reference sources (as opposed to reference
processes), and examples include, but are not limited to:

1.      An overview or annotated bibliography of a particular type of reference
source (eg, bibliographies) or resources within a particular subject field
2.      A comparative review of two or more sources in a particular subject
area
3.      A viewpoint article about a range of resources or type of resource
4.      Any other type of article which has as its focus a discussion of
reference sources

Articles which are international in scope are particularly desirable. The word
count is 1000 minimum, 1500 average, but can be significantly longer.

If you're interested in writing one of these articles for publication in 2012,
have questions about a possible topic, or would like further information,
please contact me at blatham@jsu.edu.

More information about the journal can be found here:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=rr

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Call for Proposals: 20th Annual Virginia Library Association Paraprofessional Conference. Due October 3


    The 20th Annual Virginia Library Association Paraprofessional Conference, “Communication 2012 – Paraprofessionals have come a long way, 1992-2012″ will be held on May 20-22, 2012 at the Holiday Inn Koger Center in Richmond. Now is the time to submit YOUR Concurrent Session Proposal Form (Deadline for submissions is October 3, 2011). http://www.vla.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/vlapf_session_proposal12_form.pdf If you have any questions about the conference, please contact Co- Chairs Deloris Thomas (djthom@wm.edu) and/or Susan Carroll (carrollsk@longwood.edu).

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Call for Proposals: Chapters for Information Literacy and Social Justice: Radical Professional Praxis. Due September 15

Information Literacy and Social Justice: Radical Professional Praxis (An Edited
Collection)

Editors:
Shana Higgins and Lua Gregory are instruction and reference librarians at
University of Redlands.

Outline:
In her award winning essay “Information Literacy and Reflective Pedagogical
Praxis,” Heidi L.M. Jacobs draws out the inherent democratizing and social
justice elements of information literacy as defined in the “Alexandria
Proclamation On Information Literacy and Lifelong Learning.”    She suggests
that because of these underlying social justice elements, information literacy
“is not only educational but also inherently political, cultural, and
social” (258).  We propose to extend the discussion of information literacy
and its social justice aspects that James Elmborg, Cushla Kapitzke, Maria T.
Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier, and Maura Smale have begun.  If we
consider the democratizing values implicit in librarianship’s professional
ethics (such as intellectual freedom, social responsibility, diversity,
democracy and privacy, among others) in relation to the sociopolitical context
of information literacy, we will begin to make intentional connections between
professional advocacy and curriculum and pedagogy.  We hope this book will
encourage a renewal of professional discourse about libraries in their social
context, through a re-activation of the “neutrality debate,” as well as
through an investigation of what it means for a global citizen to be
information literate in late capitalism.

Objective of book:
This edited collection, to be published by Library Juice Press in Fall 2012,
poses the following questions: What are the limits of standards and outcomes,
such as ACRL’s "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher
Education," in fitting information literacy instruction to the complex contexts
of information in the real world?  Would the teaching of social justice and the
democratizing values of the library profession strengthen critical information
literacy in the classroom?  And how do we balance the need to teach search
skills and critical information literacy in our instructional efforts?

Target audience:
The target audience for this book includes instruction librarians, library
instruction program coordinators, faculty and instructors interested in
information literacy, and all librarians interested in the political, economic,
social, and cultural contexts of the production, dissemination, suppression,
and consumption of information.

Possible topics:
We encourage proposals on the intersections of information literacy instruction
with the democratizing values of the library profession.

•         Possible topics may include information literacy aspects of media
coverage of war and embedded journalism, renewal of the Patriot Act,
market-based censorship, for-profit libraries (Library Systems & Services), EPA
library closures and access to environmental information, immigrants and
library access, Wikileaks and government censorship, corporate censorship,
anti-communism and anti-socialism in the media, classification of government
documents, international and comparative studies on censorship, First Amendment
protection to whistleblowers and the press, British Petroleum and oil spill
research, global warming censorship, and library database mergers.

•         Examples of information literacy sessions focusing on the above
topics and/or framed by democratizing and social justice values of the library
profession. Examples can also be aimed at specific disciplines.

•         Discussions of theories/theorists (e.g. Noam Chomsky, Edward S.
Herman, C. Wright Mills, Paulo Friere, Peter McClaren, etc.) and their
usefulness in illuminating sociopolitical contexts of information within the
classroom.

•         Discussions on the “neutrality debate” in light of the
sociopolitical and cultural context of information.

Submission Guidelines:
Please submit abstracts and proposals of up to 500 words to
ilandsocialjustice@gmail.com by September 15, 2011.  Notifications will be sent
by November 1 and manuscripts from 1,500-7,000 words will be due by March 1,
2012.