The 2009 National Program Committee (NPC) hopes to bring attendees at MLA '09 in Hawaii a fresh and timely update on what's hot and/or cool in our libraries. A special session, the "Speed UpDating Open Forum," will be held to get quick flashes of new ideas or useful tips and tricks on emerging topics of interest to MLA members.

The agenda for this event is a little different than others. Meeting participants will set the agenda and there will be no editorial evaluation in the selection process. Therefor the NPC will select the FIRST 12 submissions received.

This open forum will be Tuesday May 18 at 7:30am


Interested? Participants only have 5 minutes to speak and should be willing to share their stories without visuals. The only technology that will be used will be a stopwatch to keep everyone on time.



To ensure that these ideas are fresh, the NPC will have an open submission period beginning January 25, 2009. Send your topic or idea submissions to the NPC. The NPC will accept ideas until the first 12 have been received. Reminders will be sent via FOCUS. The participants will be named in the April MLA News.



What a great idea! I kind of think it is similar an oral "swap and shop" where each person quickly explains what they have done that is neat or that has worked for them. The best thing that participation is really easy (no Power Point slides, long speeches, etc.) and it looks to be interesting as well as fun.



So if you are going to MLA '09 and you or your library has done something neat, definitely submit your idea to the NPC and talk about it at the forum. Chances are you will be talking about it with your friends during the meeting, so why not spend 5 minutes talking about it so more people can hear about it too.

Labels: Annual Meeting, ContinuingEducation, Hawaii, MLA