Academic library folks and other library friends- please join ARLD (MLA's Academic and Research Libraries Division) for a happy hour/social gathering of library folk during the Library Technology (LibTech) Conference (http://libtechconf.org/). Your current ARLD Chair and several other ARLD Board members will be in attendance! The happy hour will take place at A La Salsa (http://www.salsaalasalsa.com/alasalsa/index.html), in the Midtown Global Market. If you like margaritas, monographs, matriculation, and/or metadata, this is the happy hour for you! This location is conveniently located right next to the Sheraton Midtown, one of the conference hotels (so, conference attendees staying at the hotel can easily catch their shuttle back to the hotel at the end of the day and then join us.) There is also a parking ramp and a metered parking lot on either side (ramp on one side, lot on the other) of the Midtown Global Market. It is a relatively central location for an affordable cab/Uber/Lyft ride from various Twin Cities Locations, as well as a central transit hub (http://www.metrotransit.org/).
Libraries as organic 3rd spaces: Meeting the community where it’s at with civic technology
Local governments like Hennepin County are increasingly seeing the value of civic technology and open data to bring communities together to solve problems and create breakthrough solutions to public service challenges. As established third spaces, libraries bring together individuals from across our many and diverse communities every day, creating a comfortable, familiar place to “meet the community where it’s at,” during hackathons, codeathons, open data and service design jams. During this session we’ll discuss civic technology and how open data forms the foundation for the burgeoning civic tech movement, how local governments are seizing the opportunity civic tech presents to create genuine connections to community and co-produce solutions to sticky public sector challenges, how libraries serve as community third spaces and what it means from an operational standpoint for a library to serve as the locus of community creativity experiences.