Another virtual conference, this one from ACRL opens its “doors” on Thursday, March 10th. After last week’s intensive blogging of the NFAIS conference, which was not virtual, three weeks dropping in and out of the Online Social Networks, which was , and anticipating next week’s Computers in Libraries non-virtual conference in Washington DC, I think I’ll pass on the ACRL one.

It does sound interesting, however. Speakers include Cliff Lynch (who’s also doing the opening keynote for CIL) and Michael Keller (the very forward-thinking University Librarian at Stanford) in a free webcast on Thursday. It’s moderated by OCLC’s Lynn Silipigni Connaway, who gave a paper at last week’s NFAIS conference. Very intertwined, these conferences. Lynch and Keller intend to touch upon Googlization, digital repositories, distance education and privacy. Other topics to be addressed by speakers include AACR3, staff development, virtual reference, disruptive technologies, and instructional technology.

In addition to webcasts, the ACRL conference will have text-based threaded discussions, blogs (some will be audio blogs), live meeting (chat) rooms, and online speaker materials (which I gather will be the full papers, but might be PowerPoints, I suppose).

I’m hoping to at least hear what’s going on from some of the bloggers.