SarahGlassmeyer(dot)com in perpetual beta

June is here and that means that it’s librarian conference season.  (Mothers, lock up your daughters and unsorted books…the librarians are coming to town!)  For me, it also means that it’s unconference season, because I am coordinating an unconference at every conference that I’m attending.  This post is an omnibus publicity post for all of them – hopefully I will see you at at least one of them!

Special Libraries Association Annual Meeting – New Orleans, June 12 – 16 2010

I’m coordinating two different types of unconferences during SLA.  The first is for the Legal Division.  This year, in lieu of the traditional round table discussions, Legal Division will be hosting an unconference on Wednesday, June 16 from 10:00 – 11:30 am in room 209 of the convention center.   There is no overarching theme to the unconference, but we will be generally sticking to the topics of the roundtables: Tax, Corporate Law and Emerging Tech.  As with all unconferences, the direction those conversations take will depend largely on the attendees.  The coordinating wiki for this unconference is here.  Feel free to add topic ideas.

I’m also coordinating two general unconference sessions for SLA.  Right now they are just known as “Unconference Session 4″ which will take place Monday, June 14 from 4 to 6pm in room 204 of the convention center and “Unconference Session 6″, which will take place Tuesday, June 15 from 10:00 – 11:30 am.  If you have burning topic ideas, please let me know either via comment here or email.

Computer Assisted Legal Instruction 2oth Annual Conference for Law School Computing, Camden, NJ, June 23 – 26, 2010

The theme for CALIcon this year is “Reboot Legal Education.” I keep reading this as “Robots in Legal Education” and have generally been making a nuisance of myself kidding the good folks at CALI about this fact.   When Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute asked my Lawberry Camp partner Jason Eiseman and I to coconvene an unconference before CALIcon around the idea of librarian/free law partnerships, I was happy to because (a) I’m always happy to help out the Free Law movement (b) I think the librarian/legal info provider conversation needs to happen more but mainly (c) I FINALLY HAD A LEGITIMATE EXCUSE TO USE THE ROBOTS JOKE.

So, I present to you CALIcon Unconference 2010: Robots in Legal Information! Although this is being coordinated by Jason and I (with a big assist from Tom Bruce and local arrangements John Joergensen), this is not a “Lawberry Camp”.  This is actually much more of a hackathon in that the conversation is going to be more guided and goal oriented.   The goal is to get librarians, IT professionals and legal information providers in a room and figure out how we can use each other work together more effectively.

Robots in Legal Information will happen on Wednesday, June 23, 2010 from  12:30pm – 4:00pm (feel free to wander in late or leave early if need be) at the Rutgers-Camden School of Law

American Association of Law Libraries Annual Meeting, Denver Co, July 10 – 13 2010

There will be a Lawberry Camp happening again at AALL.  It will be an all day (or most of the day) thing on Saturday, July 10.  The planning site will be updated closer to the conference with sign-ups, location info, etc.

Chicago Area Law Libraries, Chicago, ILL sometime late summer

As you can see, unconference details get fuzzier the farther out in time they go…but I have been asked and will happily coordinate a law library unconference in the Chicagoland area.  I have no idea where or when, but sometime post-AALL and pre-1L Legal Research.  This is going to be a good opportunity for those of us going to AALL/SLA/CALIcon to share what we’ve learned at those conferences as well as for firm librarians to update us academics on what we should have taught our students before they had them all summer.  Etc.