Yesterday, the University of Scranton campus welcomed the Pennsylvania Library Association‘s College & Research Division for its annual conference. Academic librarians from all over the state (even as far away as Pittsburgh) came to the DeNaples Center to learn from their peers and discuss new ideas.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Information Commons in the Wild: Lessons from the Field.” Dr. Scott Bennett, Yale Librarian Emeritus and a Library Space Planning consultant, served as the keynote speaker and led conference participants in discussing the philosophy and purpose behind the information commons design model.
In the afternoon, a panel of librarians (Don Smith, Katherine Furlong, Sally Kalin, and Anu Vedantham) shared experiences with creating information commons at their respective institutions (the University of Louisiana at Monroe, Lafayette College, Penn State, and the University of Pennsylvania). We’ve posted a few photos of Scott and the panel on our Flickr page.
Many thanks to our speakers and all of the librarians who survived I-81 traffic jams to participate! And special thanks to our own Bonnie Oldham, PALA-CRD’s chair elect, for all of her work coordinating the event.