Professional Development

Some highlights of the other presentations I attended, Day 1.

Beyond Proof of Concept: Social Software

Zoe Stewart-Marshall (Cornell) and Mason Hall (FSU) discussed the use of social software in their respective libraries.

Stewart-Marshall described the limitations to using wikis to document Technical Services workflows at Cornell. While initially hopeful, they realized that their organically grown wiki needed more “care and feeding” in order to make it useful. They should have instituted an organizational plan for the wiki and provided training for its use. There were also some “trust” issues which had to be worked through in order to make the wiki possible.

One of their success stories, however, is the use of Mantis, an open-source tracking system which they use as a bugtracking system. They have developed a webform for selectors to provide all the relevant information to technical services personnel regarding the acquisition and cataloging on electronic resources. The webform standardizes information and doesn’t allow things to fall through the cracks, and this webform is then dumped into Mantis which allows all the interested parties to track the electronic resource’s process through various technical services processes.

Hall discussed the implementation of AOL AIM at FSU for communication purposes. Their implementation has striking similarities with ours, except that they instituted a naming convention whereby they use their university usernames as their screennames to allow for consistency with email addresses.

University of Pretoria Beats to a Different Drum: UPSpace in Rhythm with Research
Elsabe Olivier, University of Pretoria

Olivier described her South African university’s use of DSpace to create an institutional repository, one of the first major repositories in South Africa.

They have an interesting component to their repository. They are archiving not only the scholarly output of one of their major scholars, Jonathan Jansen, but also all of his television/radio interviews, columns in the popular press, university lectures, and so forth. He truly exemplifies the idea of a public intellectual, and UPSpace is collecting his public presence in all its forms. I’ve never heard of using a university repository to do this kind of archiving work, and it is truly fascinating. It also requires very unique copyright negotiations to make it happen, and these negotiations are the responsibility of library personnel on behalf of the university.
https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/

There are also the standard components to their repository–a digital repository of the university’s scholarly output. Also, there are research collections which are housed in the repository.

One of the most important aspects of Olivier’s talk was her discussion of how the university repository became the library’s responsibility, and how this important work has increased the library’s central role in the university’s intellectual life.

The WorldCat Institution Registry: Making the Case

Scott Shultz, OCLC and Celeste Feather, Ohio State.

The description of the “birth” of this new OCLC service reminded me of a line from the movie Field of Dreams: “if you build it, they will come.”

That is, OCLC is building a system whereby libraries can load the data which they share with their “supplier partners” on a regular basis in a standard database maintained by OCLC. For example, you can load billing addresses, local contacts, IP ranges, etc. into the OCLC database and then refer your supplier partners to this site (or send them the URL). That way, if something changes locally with your library, you can edit the information in one central location rather than having to contact all your supplier partners on an individual basis.

The key here is that it’s unclear when or how supplier partners will start using this registry, but the hope is that if enough libraries begin to use the registry, that the supplier partners will start to see its benefits and thereby start using the system too. (This is the “if you build it, they will come” part.)
Celeste Feather described how Ohio State helped in the development of the Institution Registry and how they think they will use it.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore: Delivery of Library Resources through Learning Management Systems.

Cindi Trainor from Claremont Colleges

Trainor described her colleges’ use of Sakai, an open source LMS. The library was chosen as the unit to implement the system because the library is not directly tied to any one of the seven colleges which form Claremont Colleges. Their status as an “independent” unit allowed them to work with everyone and get beyond turf wars.

There wasn’t too much to take from this session which would be applicable to us because we’re a Blackboard campus–except the general idea that we need to do a better job of helping professors learn how to get our licensed content or library designed learning objects into their course pages.