The full conference program for the 2011 AMICAL Conference at LAU has now been posted on the AMICAL Conference web site.

Taking place 16-17 May 2011 at the American University of Paris. Are you a new instruction librarian? Do you have limited access to professional development opportunities? Would you benefit from information literacy training? AMICAL and the American University of Paris (AUP) are pleased to announce an information literacy workshop led by Library Director Susan Barnes Whyte (ACRL IIL Immersion faculty member), and Reference and Instruction Librarian Jean Caspers, of Linfield College. The two day workshop will take place on the AUP campus, on the 16th (full-day) and 17th (morning) of May 2011. Susan and Jean will cover topics such as assessing instruction methods, developing active learning activities, building an IL curriculum, evaluating instruction session content, and cultivating relationships with faculty.

The Lebanese American University is proud to host the 8th annual AMICAL Meeting and Conference, to be held 27 - 30 April 2011, at both the Beirut and Byblos LAU campuses. AMICAL members are invited to attend, learn, participate, and share with colleagues at this year's conference, which promises engaging presentations and a highly interactive format. Under the theme of “e-Content: Collecting, Managing, Promoting, Teaching,” AMICAL members and invited guests will be exploring ways that the library and information services need to evolve, and perhaps revolutionize, the way they bring scholarly content to the academic communities they serve. A major sub-theme of the conference will be IT - library collaboration, the focus of a major joint workshop with the AAICU group of presidents and chief academic officers. Save the date, and join us in Lebanon!

The American University in Cairo is hosting a conference on “Fostering Academic Integrity,” December 4-6, 2010. The conference "will address a number of timely topics, foremost among which are means of preventing violations of academic integrity; intellectual property rights; research ethics; business ethics, academic integrity and culture; as well as academic integrity for pre-K—12 schools." Participants from American University - Central Asia and American University of Paris are being sponsored through the AMICAL Small Grant program. For more information, visit the conference site.

Thanks in part to support from the American University of Armenia and AUA Library Director, Bella Avakian, Yerevan was recentlynamed World Book Capital 2012 by UNESCO. In her letter on behalf of AUA supporting Yerevan's bid, Bella notes that "2012...marks the 500th anniversary of first Armenian printed work by the first Armenian publisher, Hakob Meghapart." According to UNESCO, the award is an "acknowledgement of the best programme dedicated to books and reading."

AMICAL2010 Conference attendees, and others interested, can share and follow links and comments related to conference sessions via Delicious.com (tag: amical2010) and Twitter (hash-tag: #amical2010). For Google Wave users, a wave has also been started.

For AMICAL members: A new E-resources section of AMICALwiki has been created to organize and share information about each of the database offers available through AMICAL membership. You can find there general product information, information about current trials, reviews of each e-resource, and pricing available to AMICAL members. Not all resources have information posted on this site yet, and prices for some are still being negotiated, but information will be added as it becomes available. AMICALwiki requires login - contact AMICAL if you need an account set up.

The 2010 AMICAL Conference, Digital Assets & the Cloud: Building Digital Collections through Library, IT & Faculty Collaboration, is being hosted by Central European University in Budapest, 9-12 June. The following workshops are still open to AMICAL members for enrollment: Technical services workflow & logistical issues for today's changing library collections Matt Goldner (Product and Technology Advocate, OCLC) Susan L. Perry (Senior Advisor for Liberal Arts Colleges, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) An Introduction to Repositories Thorny Staples (Director, Community Strategy and Alliances and Fedora Project, DuraSpace) Overview of ethnographic methods and their application to libraries Dr. Nancy Fried Foster (Director of Anthropological Research, River Campus Libraries at University of Rochester) Overcoming Obstacles in your Electronic Theses and Dissertations Project Rebecca Sandlin (Deputy CIO, Bowdoin College) Ethan Benatan (Director, Computer User Services, Reed College) A workshop registration form has been sent to all registered attendees from AMICAL institutions. See the conference web site for the full conference program. For full descriptions of the workshops, see below: PRECONFERENCE WEDNESDAY 9 JUNE 10:00-12:30 / 13:45-15:45 Workshop: Follow-up workshop for AMICAL ethnographic study pilot group Facilitator: Dr. Nancy Fried Foster (Director of Anthropological Research, River Campus Libraries at University of Rochester) This workshop is open to those already participating in the AMICAL ethnographic study pilot group and is not open for enrollment. A related workshop, open to all other AMICAL members, is being proposed 16:00-17:00 (see below). 10:30-12:30 Roundtable discussion: Technical services workflow & logistical issues for today's changing library collections Facilitators: Matt Goldner (Product and Technology Advocate, OCLC) Susan L. Perry (Senior Advisor for Liberal Arts Colleges, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) In this workshop participants will work together to look at current practices and workflows, where they are spending time and effort, and where they can gain efficiencies with new practices. Examples from studies on technical services workflows will be presented into the brainstorming session. 13:45-15:45 Workshop: An Introduction to Repositories Facilitator: Thorny Staples (Director, Community Strategy and Alliances and Fedora Project, DuraSpace) Repositories like ePrints, DSpace and Fedora are designed to manage content for the long term while making it as accessible as possible. They provide a very different way of managing information than using relational databases. This workshop will introduce the concepts needed to understand how to use repositories, including the design of information objects and formal relations among them; descriptive, administrative and preservation metadata; policy establishment and enforcement; and different ways of exposing information for access, including the Open Archives Initiative, faceted-browsing systems and RDF. Examples of how to apply these concepts will include creating collections of digitized texts and cultural heritage images, as well as the implications for scholarly use of these collections. 16:00-17:00 Workshop: Overview of ethnographic methods and their application to libraries Facilitator: Dr. Nancy Fried Foster (Director of Anthropological Research, River Campus Libraries at University of Rochester) Dr. Nancy Fried Foster will introduce the use of ethnographic methods in the library by asking the question, “Why do students want to be in the library if they are not using the books?” Her talk will cover several ethnographic research methods and how they were used in building a group study space in the University of Rochester’s main library and in assessing the use and value of the University’s science library. CONFERENCE THURSDAY 10 JUNE 16:00-17:30 Workshop: Overcoming Obstacles in your Electronic Theses and Dissertations Project Facilitators: Rebecca Sandlin (Deputy CIO, Bowdoin College) Ethan Benatan (Director, Computer User Services, Reed College) Our goal in this session is to help participants develop specific approaches to identifying and solving challenges that are likely to arise during the course of their ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) project. We will first collaborate with the group to identify issues of interest, and then facilitate sharing of experiences and approaches. Interested participants will be able to develop and get group feedback on specific proposals that they plan to implement at their home institutions.

For interested AMICAL members, trial access has been set up for the following e-resources (links go to entry/search pages): Project MUSE ACLS Humanities E-Book ACM Digital Library Europa World Plus Oxford Reference Online Oxford English Dictionary Online Credo Reference Wilson Art Full Text / Art Abstracts / Art Index Trial periods run from end of April through June, depending on the database.

The 7th annual AMICAL Meeting and Conference will be held at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, under the theme "Creating and Managing Digital Assets: Librarians, Information Technologists and Faculty Working Together." AMICAL members, save these dates and join us in numbers! Wed 9 June - Pre-Conference Thu-Fri-Sat 10-11-12 June - Main Conference Sun 13 June - Post-Conference event (tourism)