This is my first tournament season living in Lawrence, KS, and I’m getting the vibe that everything else grinds to a halt here in March, to make way for March Madness and Spring Break.  All my work meetings and appointments for the coming weeks seem to take these two things into consideration.  And today all the cute little old ladies at the library were wearing their knitted Jayhawk sweater vests.  Sounds good to me!

Meanwhile, back in Iowa, things are going full speed ahead.  In less than two weeks I’m headed to Iowa City to give a keynote talk with my co-presenter Angela Murillo at the University of Iowa for the B Sides conference, Unpacking the “Library”: Exploring Works in Progress Across the Field of LIS.  I’m also going to sit on a fun panel on information literacy and instruction with Megan Conley and Katie L.D. Hassman.

B Sides is a project that Angela and I started last year as a labor of love as a vehicle for “unauthorized” voices in library and information science to be heard and recognized.  We were listening to Public Enemy one day, and got a few ants in our pants about restrictive academic publication models, and the rest is history.  Although B Sides started as an online journal, it’s now evolved into a conference and then some.

For our keynote, “Remixing the Library,” Angela and I have some pretty killer visuals that we’re excited to unveil.  I’ll embed those for you here once we’ve had a chance to put on the finishing touches.  Many thanks to the B Sides editors Julia Skinner and Katie L.D. Hassman, and everyone else who’s making this fantastic event happen!