Croatia

I got an email yesterday that the paper I submitted to the Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) conference was accepted! I’m more excited about this than I usually am about getting a paper accepted to a conference because this one is in Croatia.

The first part of LIDA 2005 will be held in Dubrovnik and for the second part, the conference will move to island Mljet, less than a two-hour ride from Dubrovnik on a fast catamaran.

You’ve got to love any conference that involves a fast catamaran and an island in the Adriatic. I’m hoping that Yvonne can come with me, so we can make a vacation out of this after the conference is over.

Note to self: bring a power converter. (When I said this out loud just now, Yvonne’s response was, “What, to Toshi Station?”)

Part of tenure review is demonstrating that one’s work has achieved both national and international impact, and this definitely moves me ahead on the international impact front. Plus I’ll have a chance to meet a bunch of Europeans doing LIS work, and Europeans tend to be in somewhat short supply at conferences in the US in this field. There’s a lot of digital library work going on in Europe these days, but with a different set of issues from what’s going on in the US: standardization is major over there from what I’ve read, and of course cross-language issues would have to be important. But not so much digital reference work going on in Europe, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to make a compelling case for why human intermediation is important for DLs to provide as a service.

Scott went to LIDA in 2003 and he said that one of the most valuable things about that conference was the ability to spend some quality time with senior faculty members. After all, what else is there to do on islands in the Adriatic except sit on the beach, drink beer, and chat? So I’m hoping to spend some quality time with some senior faculty from other schools, convince them that I’m a genius or something, and get some good external reviews for my tenure portfolio. Not to be too mercenary about this or anything.

Plus, as Yvonne & I have been joking about (only half-joking, really), if this whole tenure thing doesn’t work out, I can get a job in a European LIS school and we can move to some civilized nation, as we’ve been threatening to do for the last 4 years.