Off-Campus Library Services (OCLS) Conference

I recently attended the OCLS conference in Cleveland, OH from April 28-30. This conference is offered every two years and focuses on the issues surrounding providing library services and resources to distance education faculty and students. It is a very important conference for many of us over in ELP!

Some notable themes/presentations:

• Discussion on changing the name of the conference from Off-Campus, to something that more accurately reflects what we are doing, such as "online," for example. Location of users is no longer as important as the medium of communication with them.
  
• Embedding library resources and services, as well as librarians, into online course management systems.
• Assessing distance education service delivery- and how to align this to organizational performance.
• Is it a librarian's job to teach writing?
  
• Personal branding- great workshop where we went through a worksheet and tried to create our own personal brands to promote services and reach distant users.
• Seeking library donors among alumni of distance learning programs.
• Library-led online faculty workshops to help with meeting information literacy objectives
  

While I was there, I also presented a poster on a process for embedding library resources into online courses that we created for the Excelsior College Library. You can see a copy of the poster that Anita Norton and I created on the ELP Blog.

Please feel free to ask me any questions. I am happy to share my notes on these sessions!