Staff from the Center for Digital Inclusion will present at two sessions during the upcoming American Library Association Conference in Chicago.

The first session, “Gigabit Libraries” is at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, June 29 in McCormick Place Convention Center.

Jon Gant, Director for the Center for Digital Inclusion, will lead a discussion on a new Gigabit Library Initiative funded by IMLS. The purpose of the project is to help libraries develop applications and services that will meet the needs of the public, leveraging ultra-high-speed Internet service. In particular, the project focuses on socially-inclusive library experiences that meet critical human development needs, particularly for underserved populations.

The second session, “Out of the Library and into the Community: Academic Libraries and Community Engagement” is at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, July 1 in McCormick Place Convention Center.

Martin Wolske, Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Digital Inclusion, will speak on his community engagement work in Urbana-Champaign and East St. Louis. The panel will explore the ways academic librarians and LIS faculty can work with social justice issues as conversations about democracy, information access, and information distribution within communities to gain momentum. Attendees will learn how the speakers shape and bring to the forefront these issues via their teaching, scholarship and work in local communities. Areas addressed include: community informatics, information literacy-focused service learning, and community outreach.

To learn more about the American Library Association conference, visit http://ala13.ala.org/.

Image courtesy of: http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org/files/field/image/chicago_current.jpg