LSA booth feedback

[Jeff Good]

Hello everyone,

> What I've heard both elsewhere is that we might need to think
> more about what the OLAC presence is for: to provide a "clinic" on how to
> create OLAC data providers (maybe that's the office hours thang) ? or to
> promote OLAC's services ?

If I may speak for Heidi in addition to myself, this year we didn't have a
particularly clear conception of what the booth was for--other than
"publicity". Most of our efforts were spent on logistics. One of the most
important--and pleasant--discoveries for me, at least, was that it wasn't
all that hard to raise money. Basically, we just asked and people were
happy to provide. I think this means we're in a good position to think
harder about the booth instead of focusing on having a booth in the first
place.

In my own view, the role of the booth, taking a long term perspective,
should be to promote the OLAC Mission, which means that in
addition to promotoing OLAC-specific things, it should also provide a
place for anyone in the OLAC community to talk about their work in a
broader OLAC context. This could mean an archive talking about how it
archives its collection, or a service provider talking about the tools
they have for working with OLAC metadata, etc.

That being said, we might want to pick some good themes to focus on on
a year-by-year basis. For the 2006 booth, it sounds like a good theme for
might be "How to become a data provider" with office hours from
people like Gary to go into the details of the tool support and people
like Heidi talking about how to catalog your materials in a way which will
facilitate becoming a data provider.

If we plan this far enough ahead, I bet we could manage to post our
"office hours" in the LSA Handbook--after all, the LSA did just convene a
"conversation" on its role in archiving and this role seems like a
no-brainer.

If we do try to focus the booth in some way, we might want to think about
how to coordinate this with another organized session, like this year's
tutorial. Maybe a tutorial focusing more on metadata issues: from
organizing your resources in a metadata-friendly way, to creating
metadata, to putting in a BP format, to disseminating it, to what service
providers will do with it would work well.

Jeff