We are now a little more than a month away from our second AHRC-funded Community Libraries network colloquium! It will take place in Chicago on May 30 – June 1, 2014 and will center on the theme “Digital Approaches to Library History.” Also,be sure to check out the newly updated conference program. We are delighted that you have agreed to take part in what is shaping up to be a great conference, and we are very much looking forward to welcoming you to our bustling city at a gorgeous time of year!

Before you arrive, please be sure to familiarize yourselves with the information below:

Paper Formats

• This AHRC-funded research network is intended primarily to facilitate discussion and interdisciplinary exchange. To further these aims, we ask that you prepare less formal contributions of working presentations and papers (rather than fully polished conference-style papers) around which wider discussion can evolve.
• The program is divided between presentations of well-developed best practice DH sites and new works-in-progress.
• For presentations of best practice sites, we ask that presenters plan a 45 minute presentation with a 30 minute discussion to follow. We encourage presenters to think about the types of questions/ideas they might like the group to discuss.
• For presentations of works-in-progress, typical contributions should be around 15-20 minutes in length and aim to stimulate discussion by scoping out research problems or presenting preliminary findings.
• We would be very happy to pre-circulate a longer or more formal version of your paper to the rest of the participants to facilitate further discussion; please let me know if you wish to take up this option.
• AV facilities will be available, and Powerpoint slides can be sent to our Social Media Assistant Aaron Brunmeier ahead of the conference by email at abrunme@luc.edu.

Zotero

• As you may already know, one important and collaborative aspect of the Network is our group Zotero account, which we aim to use to compile a comprehensive and eventually open access list of scholarship on library history and print culture in the Atlantic world.
• For further details, including information on how to take part, please see this blog post. If you have any further queries, Aaron can be reached by email at abrunme@luc.edu.

Practicalities

• For those who have requested overnight accommodation, rooms have been booked at Loyola University Chicago’s Baumhart Hall on the Water Tower Campus in the city’s Gold Coast neighborhood for the nights of Friday, May 30 and Saturday, May 31. (Click on the link for more information about the Water Tower campus). If you have any special accommodations needs, please let us know as soon as possible.
• These two nights will already have been paid for by the project team, but if you’d like to stay for additional nights on a self-funding basis, please contact Judy Sunvold in Loyola Conference Services at jsunvol@luc.edu. Similarly, if the project is not providing accommodation for you, participants will be able to reserve rooms on a first-come-first-serve, self-funding basis from the same email address.
• The Friday part of the colloquium will be held at the Newberry Library, which is located on 60 W. Walton Street, a 5-10 minute walk around the corner from the accommodations. For maps and further information, see the Newberry’s website.
• The Saturday part of the colloquium will be held in the Klarchek Information Commons on Loyola’s Lake Shore Campus. To get from Baumhart Hall to the Loyola Campus, you will need to take the CTA Red Line from the Chicago and State stop to the Loyola stop. Or, you can take the 147 bus to the Kenmore and Sheridan Stop. There will be folks from the Conference leading people back and forth on Saturday and Sunday.
• Useful pdf maps of Loyola’s Water Tower and Lake Shore campuses can be found here.
• Conference participants and attendees are free to explore the city for dinner on their own on Friday evening. On Saturday evening, we will be having dinner together up on the Lake Shore campus at the Waterfront Café.
• If you have any dietary requirements, please let our assistant Aaron Brunmeier know as soon as possible, and at the latest by Friday, May 16th. He can be reached by email at abrunme@luc.edu.

Do let one of us know if you have any further questions or queries. We’re very much looking forward to welcoming you to Chicago and hearing about your work!

The Chicago conference is only a few months away, but there’s still so much to say about our first conference that took place in Liverpool back in January. We had PhD students, historians, and librarians from Brazil and Mexico to the US and the UK who presented their new ideas and shared in the process of developing a vibrant community of library history scholars. Paper topics ranged from transatlantic book trading networks and the community of readers sustained by these commercial webs to investigations of seditious books and libraries during the Age of Revolutions. For a summary of the Liverpool conference, see Aaron Brunnmeier’s review for the Junto. For a digital walk down memory lane, check out our Storify narrative, which threads together all the great live tweeting done at the conference. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to the Chicago colloquium, “Digital Approaches to Library History.”

We are pleased to announce that the provisional conference programs for Liverpool and Chicago are now available on the website. Please note that these programs are subject to change in the upcoming weeks, and once we complete the London program, we will be sure to put it up on the website as well.

Furthermore, we are delighted to announce that Rebecca Bowd (University of Leeds) and Christy Ford (University of Oxford) have been awarded Bibliographical Society Studentships to support their participation in our first network event, ‘Libraries in the Atlantic World’. The Bibliographical Society offers a number of subventions to organizers of conferences so that they can help defray the cost of conference attendance for postgraduate students (www.bibsoc.org.uk).