Update on Library Camp NYC

I'm amazed at how quickly people have been registering for Library Camp NYC. It was only a month ago that we opened up registration and at this moment, there are 111 people who have said they'll come and 23 who may attend. I'm also fascinated by the variety of institutions that attendees are affiliated with:

• academic libraries
• public libraries
• school libraries
  
• medical libraries
• law libraries
• corporate libraries
  
• museum libraries
  
• vendors
• newspapers and magazines
  
• library consortia
• state libraries
• library schools
• scholarly societies
• research institute libraries
• government agency libraries
• Library of Congress
  

The list of topics that people want to hear about or lead discussions about is also compelling. It will be very interesting to see how the final program gets set during the first hour of the event. Based on great advice from John Blyberg, who will count Library Camp NYC as his third library unconference, we're thinking that it may make sense to set up easels around the room at 9 am with time slots and room numbers written on them and then just ask people to write down the topics they want in a first-come, first-served fashion. By 10 am, we would hope to have the program finalized, entered into the event wiki, and be off and running. Now if we could just find a facilitator (any volunteers...perhaps someone who has been to unconferences before?)

I should note that when I say "we" in this post, I'm referring to Steven Kaye, who was the person who first decided that the New York area should host a library camp and worked tirelessly to find a home for it, and Rachel Watstein, a librarian with invaluable experience managing events who joined in the search for place to hold the meeting. I stepped in to volunteer Baruch College as a venue after Steven and Rachel had been searching for a while. John Blyberg and Jay Datema have also been a source of ideas and inspiration to us as we've been setting things up.

If you want to get the latest news about Library Camp NYC, you can get the feed in your aggregator or in your email inbox. Thanks are due to Meredith Farkas, by the way, for telling me about the feed2js service that allowed me to convert the RSS feed into java script that could be placed on a news page in the Library Camp NYC wiki.

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