Professional Development

A couple of presentations touched on themes that are broader than libraries, namely the role of journalism and the press.

David Silber is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. His presentation, “Digital Media, Learning, and Libraries: Web 2.0, Learning 2.0, and Libraries 2.0″ was well-attended and much appreciated by those in the audience. His point was that libraries are natural partners in his philosophy of AEIOU, which stands for Already Existing Information, Optimally Uploaded. He predicted that traditional newspapers would (and should) be supplanted by blogs and tried to convince all of us (as has our very own Susan) that we should blog with enthusiasm - and lots of pictures! He dismissed the 2.0 terminology as marketing hype, but the qualities of collective intelligence and active participation by the user are what it’s all about. He is every instruction librarian’s dream, requiring all of his classes to physically come into the library and combine that experience with the latest in media technology.

Nina Totenberg was the closing keynote speaker, but much as I respect her, her talk was disappointing. She spoke generally of the importance of journalism in a free society but it wasn’t until the question and answer session that she really engaged the audience with specific examples from her coverage of the Supreme Court and 30 years of watchdog journalism exposing government malfeasance.

Lynn

The second pair of presentations I attended was on the theme of designing learning spaces in libraries. I was reminded that I wrote a paper on this topic ages ago (late 90’s) when we were building the Undergraduate Library at Wayne. Many of the principles are the same, but the importance of technology is even greater than it was back then.

“Designing Self-Service Learning Environments” by Wendy Starkweather of UNLV emphasized the following timeless principles:

• Self-service (for convenience, speed, choice and control)
• Flexibility (perhaps the single most key component in modern design)
• Stimulating spaces (the wow factor)
• Foster both community and contemplation (need both quiet and non-quiet spaces)
• Provide healthful, ergonomic environment (but what they really want is soft seating)
• Service policies that support design principles (give them what they want)

Starkweather reminded us that the life cycle of buildings is much longer than the life cycle of policies or technologies so designing an adaptable structure and infrastructure is key. Being a classics major, I loved the way she summed up the presentation, which she “borrowed” from another university: tuum est, meaning “it is yours.”

“Effective Practices for Technology-Enhanced Spatial Transformations” was a panel presentation by three librarians from the University of Southern California. Projects were described at the Von KleinSmid Applied Social Sciences Library, the Science and Engineering Library, and the Leavey Undergraduate Library. Themes were similar to the previous presentation: the need for flexible space, growing importance of multimedia, the library as a community gathering space for the campus, the need for both quiet, individual spaces and non-quiet group spaces. The Leavey Library designed a podcasting studio that might bear further investigation. One line I loved from one of the speakers was when she introduced herself with the title of Team Leader - “which now sounds so 90’s!”

Lynn

Back to blogging, after catching up on email. I will try to group some of the presentations I attended:

I tried to attend as many presentations on gaming in libraries as I could, since that has become a specialty of ours at ZSR and Giz and I are scheduled to present at the 2nd Gaming in Libraries Symposium in Chicago this summer. Our gaming experience has been largely a marketing strategy to try to attract students to the library, but other libraries have gone the next step and are trying to incorporate the gaming experience into library instruction.

The first presentation was by a team from the University of Cincinnati Libraries. They called their inhouse team of librarians a learning community because they knew they would be learning as they went about their project. When they submitted their paper over a year ago, they thought they would have a viable, tested product focusing on using a video game to teach plagiarism and report on its success. In fact, they discovered they were in a bit over their heads with the complexity of the gaming software and after the head of the Faculty Technology Resource Center who offered to do the programming for them left, they had to go back and reassess. Next, they looked at trying to incorporate existing games and found that Second Life was not suitable at all for their project but that two games called Montage-a-Google and Guess-the-Google had modest success when used in library instruction.

The second presentation was an excellent comprehensive approach to all aspects of gaming in libraries, called “Gaming for the Ages: A Wholistic View from Collections to Services” by David Ward and Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They covered topics like Gaming in Society, Gaming in Education, Gaming in Libraries, a Five Year Plan for Gaming at UIUC, and Future Directions. One difference I noted in their environment was that they had a number of faculty at UIUC who were doing active research on learning through gaming. They are taking the view that in 10 years gaming will be a major avenue for learning. At the UIUC Undergraduate Library, they have begun a gaming collection of both hardware and software. They have not tried to write any gaming software, but have tried simple games like the “ESP Game” and “Tapper” in their library instruction. Here is a challenge for Erik to think about: “wouldn’t it be great if the OPAC were a fun game?”

Lynn