2010 Best Practices Exchange: proposals due tomorrow

The Polly Rosenbaum Archives and History Building, the new home of the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, 21 October 2008. If you attend this year's Best Practices Exchange, you'll probably get to see this superb facility.

The 2010 Best Practices Exchange (BPE) will take place in Phoenix, Arizona, Wednesday, 29 September through Friday, 1 October 2010. The deadline for submitting presentation proposals is tomorrow, 30 June 2010.

This year, each BPE session will focus on one of the following topics:

• New Ways of Working
• New Tools
• New Media
• Policy and Administration
• Other Topics

The BPE is not a conventional conference, and that's one of the reasons it's so wonderful. It attracts about 80-100 attendees, which means that people tend to get to know each other quickly. Presentations lean toward the informal and the collaborative, reporting on projects in progress is encouraged, and audience members are strongly encouraged to ask many questions and offer their own perspectives. Everyone is encouraged to discuss failures and problems as well as successes, and I've always found this aspect of the BPE to be particularly valuable. It's deeply comforting to realize that other people have made similar mistakes, and it's really helpful to know who to call or e-mail when problems akin to those discussed at the BPE rear their ugly heads.

The BPE tends to attract a lot of state government electronic records archivists and digital librarians, but it's open to just about everyone interested in preserving digital materials:

• Local, state, and federal government and university archivists and librarians
• Educators and researchers in the fields of library science, information science, technology, archives, and records management
• Product developers working to create systems for managing and preserving digital assets

Owing to the generous support of the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, there's no registration fee for this year's BPE. This year's call for proposals also includes a handy-dandy proposal submission form, so you don't even have to go to the trouble of sending anyone an e-mail. If you have a project you would like to discuss, by all means take a few minutes to pull together a couple of paragraphs and complete that form. You won't regret doing so.