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."

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.)