CoLAB Session: Living the Future Conference April 2008

This was definitely an experimental session. The theme of the conference, Transforming Libraries through Collaboration, drew over 150 from throughout the country, both academic library professionals and Tucson fans of Peter Senge, the keynote speaker.

The goal of this CoLAB session was to help conference attendees quickly connect with each other by learning about the assets they each possessed. It was facilitated after the keynote during the first day of the session and ran for a couple of hours.

The result was a conference unlike any other. The energy was high throughout and attendees enjoyed the "open-access" environment that permitted very open discussions without the usual inhibitions of conferences where it's a lot of work to connect with those you don't know. The CoLAB session somehow gave folks "permission" to connect and reduced the distance between "strangers."

Future CoLAB Planning Sessions in the works

The University of Arizona Libraries - Science and Engineering Librarians are planning to present a CoLAB session for BIO5 faculty researchers this fall. Librarians have applied for human subjects approval to measure the success of CoLAB's networking process in terms of its effectiveness in eliminating barriers to collaborative thinking and future project ideas. This will provide the first true research results by measuring pre- and post attitudes towards collaborative potential among science faculty who may discover interdisciplinary connections with each other. I'll let you know what happens!

About BIO5: Launched with funds from a voter-approved tax in 2001, BIO5 is designed to fuel economic development by pursuing state-of-the-art biological research, by creating new products and processes, by encouraging productive research interactions between faculty and industrial scientists, by training a bioindustry workforce and enhancing science literacy

CoLAB: University of Arizona Bio5 2008

The University of Arizona Libraries staff and Bess de Farber facilitated a session to connect 17 researchers to each other's assets during a 3 hour CoLAB session. The positive results were presented at the 2008 ALA conference poster session that demonstrated a possible new role for academic libraries: organizing information about a specific group's assets (articles, research, networks, etc.)

CoLAB Planning in the Glades

The Glades CoLAB held in Belle Glade, FL was pretty special. It brought participating organizations together that traditionally work in the Glades and those that wanted to extend their services to Glades residents through potential partnerships. CoLAB was so well received because it focused on the assets of organizations rather than gaps. Unfortunately, the Glades communities have been known for what they don't have like a movie theatre. But during our sessions together we mostly focused on what the Glades has to offer, and by combining these assets, determining how goals can be accomplished in new ways.