Professional Development Sessions—TBD

A sample of the 2009 sessions is below.

Opening Session—“The Writings of a Kentucky Author: The Congress of Wonders”
Ed McClanahan

A screening of “The Congress of Wonders,” a prize-winning short (24 minutes) dramatic film based on an Ed McClanahan short story, directed by Academy Award/Emmy winner Paul Wagner, and filmed in 1994 at Spindletop Farm, barely more than a stone’s throw from the Marriott Griffin Gate. “The Congress of Wonders” won three major awards, including Best of Show, in the seven-state Indianapolis Film Festival in 1995. Discussion will follow the screening.

Community Engagement Success Stories
Amy Shaw, KETC and Laura Hunter, UEN

Community organizations like libraries, schools, museums, and public broadcasters have a unique opportunity to build partnerships around a common effort. How can non-profit service, education, media and cultural organizations leverage their unique abilities to bring about community change? Learn about two case studies of community engagement that have drawn national attention and accolades with measurable results: the mortgage crisis project in St. Louis, Missouri and Water Wise Utah.

Leaders from these two projects will share their lessons learned and present models for building critical local partnerships. As budgets get tighter, the need to work together becomes stronger. Learn how your community and organization can benefit from engagement success stories.

Media Librarians and IT: Collaborating for our Future
Jane B. Hutchison

Most media librarians and IT staff work alongside each other, yet never seem to intersect. As the industry moves from videos, DVDs, Blu-Rays to streaming, the lines begin to intersect and collaboration occurs, making the possibilities of tomorrow a reality. Jane will discuss the collaborative efforts in New Jersey, combining New Jersey’s statewide infrastructure network (NJEDge.Net) with New Jersey’s statewide library consortium (VALE). Through an IMLS federal grant, seed funding provided the means to stimulate a comprehensive organization that results in a true collaborative project.

Jane will discuss these efforts and obstacles, and the opportunities New Jersey offers us. By providing streaming services on a statewide level, access is as simple as having an Internet connection without huge investments at the home institution. Media cataloguers are working to ensure that titles are available through their respective OPACs and can be streamed through a single authentication system. A tool to annotate and segment the videos is being developed by NJVID. Much work has been accomplished behind the scenes, developing a toolkit that includes deposit agreements, metadata deposit forms, related rights guidance, a rights decision tree, sample release forms for participants, NJVID codec and settings spec sheet and a preservation fact sheet. All the programs and tools used are open source for others to use. This project makes the future possibilities a reality.

Stimulus Dollars: How to Maximize Impact Through Collaboration
Bob Steingreaber, Coordinator of Instructional Resources, Great Prairie AEA, Ottumwa, IA
Jeannie Campbell, Asst. Director of Education, Iowa Public Television, Des Moines, IA
Jon Wibbels, Director of Media and Technology, Northwest AEA, Sioux City, IA

Many regional and state educational agencies will be in line to receive federal stimulus dollars starting fall of 2009.

Engage with the presenters as they share some of the plans taking shape in Iowa to spend these dollars wisely in order to deliver the biggest, most sustainable educational impact. Through collaborative efforts among Iowa’s Area Education Agencies, libraries, Department of Education and Iowa Public Television, coordinated strategies are emerging to make the best use of badly needed funds to support new educational mandates such as 21st Century Skills and online professional development. Additionally, working smarter will be demonstrated with examples of the integration of electronic communication tools and collaborative management tools for staff.

The presenters encourage session attendees to share their plans as well!

10,000,000 Additional Students May Be Waiting To View Your Media. Interested?
Bill Stark, Project Director, The Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP), and DCMP Board Members

Meeting students’ learning needs is the primary goal of all educational media: you can’t serve an audience if you don’t meet their needs. Providing captioning (for students with a hearing loss) and description (for students with a vision loss) is a great way to meet the needs of 10 million deaf and/or blind students. These options also can aid viewers with learning disabilities, those learning English, and young children learning to read or speak.

For over 50 years, the DCMP has been an advocate for media accessibility, helping provide equal accessibility both in the classroom and beyond. Let the DCMP give you an overview of today’s landscape, show you how accessibility can help shape it, and then answer your questions, so you can provide more students access to your collections.