Timberline Acquisitions Institute May 16-19, 2009. This is a small extremely focused conference that deals with issues and best practices in library acquisitions. I gave a talk with two other librarians on new models of funding electronic resources. Our model of a central fund for all of the e-resources generated a lot of buzz and many questions of how we were able to get the individual libraries within Hopkins to work together.

One of the more interesting sessions was on the issues, challenges, and new horizons of streaming video presented by three people from Brigham Young University. The library and their Library Systems/IT created a streaming service called BYugle. Currently it is locked down for only the BYU campus but they hope to be able to open it up to their remote campuses (one each in Idaho and Hawaii) and for at home use. The system had a lot of nice features including easy incoporation into their course management system.

Two session dealt with inter-institutional collaborations. One a collection development collaboration between University of Oregon, Oregon State, and peripherally Scripps and Stanford's marine institutes. UO and OSU marine libraries are both quite small and have limited budgets so they don't want to duplicate their collections. They have done studies to determine how best to move the material between the two libraries as quickly as possible. The other between Oregon Institue for Technology and the National Park Service. This is a digital collections project for the Crater Lake Digital Research Collection. They are creating both a scientific and a cultural heritage collection on the research that has and is being done at Crater Lake. Currently they have over 150 items in their Conent DM repository and hope to have over 400 by summer 2010.

In addition to the size of this conference, what makes it unique is the location at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. You get to spend a lot of time with the other librarians there discussing acquisitions because, well, there really is no where else to go in the evening. However, there is almost always still plenty of snow on the mountain so skiing, snowboarding, and showshoeing are available. We actually went snowshoeing one day during lunch.

The Lodge is beautiful, a historic landmark, but rustic - no WIFI in the rooms. The WIFI worked on the ground level and in the conference room. It was also really hard to control the temperature in my room, one day it was 90 the next it was 55 . By the way, they did get 4" of new snow while we were there. Here's a link to some pictures I took while there.