Program proposals will be evaluated on the following four points:
1. Relevance to the Virtual Exchange’s themes and audience
ALCTS Virtual Exchange Working Group Members welcome proposals with demonstrated relevance to the forum themes and audience. The forum’s overarching theme, Embracing the Past, Building the Future, will drive presentation content as will each day’s themes:
- Theme for Day 1: New Roles, New Workflows
- Theme for Day 2: Creative Problem Solving
- Theme for Day 3: Creating Connections with User Communities
- Theme for Day 4: Building Skills to Prepare for the Future
The audience will be a combination of both ALCTS members and non-members. Attendees will work and have a backgrounds in acquisitions, collection development and management, cataloging and metadata, and preservation. Audience members’ experience in these areas will vary greatly as will members’ leadership capacity.
2. Opportunities for Learning
ALCTS Virtual Exchange Working Group Members will be looking for proposals with clearly defined learning objectives or explanations of what attendees can expect to learn from the session. Objectives should use active verbs, be concrete, and state what the program participants should know or be able to do by the end of the session. Objectives should be achievable in the given program length and virtual environment.
For example, learning objectives may begin with the phrase “At the end of the program, participants will be able to …” Below is an example learning outcome:
Attendees will gain an understanding of how authority record data support copyright determination. They will gain an awareness of the gap between legal definitions and cataloging practice, the methods we use in identifying author death dates, and the impact their work can have in the identification of public domain works.
3. Opportunities for Audience Interaction
Audience interaction and engagement are valuable aspects of the Virtual Exchange. Proposed presentation topics should be appropriate for the virtual environment and presenters should expect some level or aspect of audience interaction as part of the session. Presenters will have the chance to work with ALCTS Virtual Exchange Working Group Members and LearningTimes technical support to plan audience interactivity in the session.
- Gather input via a pre-event question or survey
- Use in-session polling, or provide a question for the audience to respond to in chat box
- Offer pre-event video to provide background information so attendees can skip right to the heart of the topic (Could be combined with polling or surveying)
- Similarly, offer pre-reading(s) to help feed questions or polls
- Real world case study can be a good stimulus for discussion or Q&A
- Pre-event exercises could be developed and delivered
- Offer a post-event question with follow-up from the presenter
4. Diversity & Inclusion
ALCTS Virtual Exchange Working Group Members encourage proposals that address diversity and inclusion in collections and technical services. Presentation topics could address how libraries are incorporating the ideas of diversity and inclusion in their collections and technical services practices. Presentation topics could also relate to how libraries are recruiting and retaining librarians from underrepresented communities in the areas of collections and technical services.
The ALCTS Virtual Exchange Working Group strongly encourages proposals from people who belong to communities that are underrepresented in librarianship and in the conversation about librarianship.
Examples:
- Creating inclusive metadata
- Building diverse library collections in the digital age
- Leadership opportunities among underrepresented communities in technical services and collections areas
The call for proposals for the ALCTS Exchange is now closed. Proposal submitters will be notified by early February 2017.