Professional Development

How Do We Get From Here to There: Coping with Future Changes in Technology and Service Delivery
NC Public Library Trustee Association
Rob McGee, RMG Consultants, Inc.

• Three important questions
  • What are some new technologies for libraries?
  • What new technologies should my library implement?
  • Should my library partner with other libraries to share new technologies?
• New technologies come from outside the library, not from our vendors
• Some technologies will change the scope and jobs we do
• Web search companies have huge financial resources, and they have the resources to test legal issues around digitization
  • We’re seeing preservation of digital materials being passed to corporations
• Introduced XML, Ajax, web services, blogs, rss, web2.0 (he says “web two dot oh”), and open source.
• Listed more “outside” technologies: Enterprise resource planning, enterprise-wide human resources systems, enterprise-wide financial systems, building access and security systems, smart cards, d-commerce, electronic transactions, wifi, rfid, automated material handling, data warehousing and mining, business intelligence, authentication and authorization, digital asset management, content management, elearning, learning management systems, enterprise calendaring, scheduling, reservation systems, handheld computing and communication devices
• Specific devices: new handheld computing/communication devices, smart phones, iPods and other MP3 devices, ebook readers with ebooks, and web tablets
• Games: xbox360, wii, ddr, second life and other virtual reality environments
• Specifics: One Laptop Per Child program, Microsoft Office Communications Server and Office Communicator (extensions to office suite)
• From inside the library industry: RFI, self service stations, automated materials handling, institutional repositories, museum and archive systems, electronic resource management, enterprise PC scheduling, print management, photocopy and print payment
• Discovery and Delivery: aquabrowser, rooms, encore, endeca, primo, visualizer
• Open-source software for libraries: index data/masterkey keystone, equinox/evergreen, liblime/koha, care affiliates inc.
• Software as a service (SaaS): enriched catalog data, federated searching, ERM, ILS, Acquisitions, Worldcat Local
• User Devices in the Library: PCs, peripherals for staff (wireless headsets, etc), PDAs, smart phones, adaptive workstations, laptops for both staff and public, web tablets for customer use in areas where PCs or laptops aren’t appropriate, public faxes, photocopiers, ebook devices, portable circulation devices, gaming stations, RFID enabled devices, MP3 flash devices
• The talk then turned to focus on RFID tags, and the various systems that RFID can integrate with (circulation, automatic return and sorting, security gates, smart shelves, etc)
  • My comments: RFID seems risky from a privacy standpoint and very expensive. The only way I can personally make sense of it is to have an in-house database matching book RFID tag number with catalog info and patron ID with contact information. That way someone with a scanner would not have access to book or patron information, just random numbers. Definitely something I need to know more about.
• Argued for a change in organizational model and staffing patters to meet new goals of library. Stated our models are based on old services.
• Argued we need to re-cast what we’re here to do.
• How to get from where we are to where we need to be: team based learning process about technology, IT needs assessment, assess available and oncoming technology, define IT goals/objectives/strategies/performance measures, within framework of library strategic plan.
• Prioritize: technologies, technology-based services, technology implementation projects
• Develop IT budgets for 1 year, 3 year, and 5 year blocks
  • Technology changes really rapidly, so can’t make a permanent budget for 3 or 5 years out. Must be able to adapt to new technologies.
• Q from public library trustee: Library seems to him to be about books and physical places and reading. How do we maintain that and adapt? A: Can do both, also can help people learn about other services.
• Q&A: Couldn’t hear the question, but in answer section recommended keeping an eye on iPhone, wireless devices, etc.
• Q&A: Still couldn’t hear the question, but he answered that it’s important to have a committee of folks to evaluate all new technologies to see if they’re useful for your library and your community.

The first session of the morning was a plenary council session dealing with the authenticity of online versions, particularly in the area of legal information. Mike Wash from GPO first addressed the group. He reviewed GPO’s mission, emphasizing the ideas of providing access to authentic information immediately, along with the capability of preserving the information. GPO is currently providing some authentication signatures manually and is working toward an automated process.

Mary Alice Baish presented an overview of a recent AALL (American Association of Law Libraries) State-by-State Report on Authentication of State Online Legal Resources. Key findings:

• States are discontinuing print official resources and substituting online official resources.
• Ten states & DC have designated as official one or more of their online primary legal resources.
• Eight states have “official traits,” but evidence as the the actual status of the resources is conflicting.
• States have not been sufficiently deliberate in their policies ad practices.
• No state’s online primary legal resources are authenticated or afford ready authentication by standard methods.
• Since AALL’s 2003 report, nine states have proveded for permanent public access for one or more of their online primary legal resources.

Conclusions from the report include:

• Online legal resources are increasingly the sole official published source.
• Official status requires authentication procedures (encryption, digital signatures, PKI, “chain of custody” informati0n).
• The goal is that online legal resources will be as trustworthy as print.

Sally Holterhoff then gave a brief overview of the AALL National Summit on Authentication of Online Legal Resources that brought together various stakeholders to discuss the issues and brainstorm on ways to move forward.

Frank Wagner, Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court, addressed the group in his capacity as a representative of the Association of Reporters of Official Judicial Decisions (ARJD). Mr. Wagner reported that his group believes that there should only be one official version of judicial decisions and that, for now, that should be the print publication. When the paradigm does shift, the electronic version should be both authenticated and permanently available for public access.

The final speaker at this session was Peter Lefevre, Law Revision Counsel, U.S. House of Representatives. His group is a non-partisan office that reports to the Speaker of the House and is in charge of reviewing slip laws and Statues at Large publications and compiling the appropriate sections of law into the US Code. His office is concerned about authentication because they rely on the electronic version of the slip laws from GPO for their review. Mr. Lefevre made the point that even small errors can be significant: Supreme Court decisions have been based on the placement of punctuation in laws. His group deals with a lot of information. For example, an average session of Congress generates between 5,000 to 7,500 pages of laws that must be reviewed. Since 1975 they have used the GPO electronic database as their source of information. At the moment they are producing print a virtual versions of the Code. The online version differs from the print in that the formatting in the print is closer to the original laws; the print also goes through more checks than the electronic version. As a result, the electronic version of the Code carries a disclaimer that users should double-check the print version.

The second morning session I attended was an update from Library Technical Services. Director Laurie Hall reviewed approximately 40 - 50 projects that are underway, in addition to their day-to-day operations in acquisitions, shipping list preparation, cataloging, etc. Although this was an informative session for me, both for our library and for my position as GODORT Cataloging Committee Chair, I don’t know that anyone not involved in documents processing would have any interest in this information.

Since the afternoon sessions are devoted to a program concerning Regional depositories and Council working sessions, I am off to explore.

Heather and I are sitting in the main conference room of the Hickory Convention Center, getting ready to listen to the kick-off session. Here are my notes:

• First time since 1953 to meet west of US-77!
• Theme: “Telling our story”
• Several awards, names, involved people, were named.
• North Carolina Poet Laureate Katherine Stripling Byer
  • Read a poem about her library
• David Holt grammy winner
  • Played music
  • Told stories
  • Pointed out it’s important for the library to collect others’ stories as well as our own
  • Collecting strong images about ourselves can be powerful outreach
  • Strong images, something that happens: these types of stories move people

• Fun and entertaining opening to the conference!

Most of the sessions I attended today dealt with depository administration, not a topic to appeal to a broad audience, so I will try to hit some of the highlights.

I attended a session entitled “Offering Services: 24/7,” which turned out to have a different focus that I supposed from the title. Following a recommendation from the Spring Depository Library Council, GPO staff have been working on developing a registry of government information librarians who have special areas of expertise and who are willing to be avaible to assist in research. The session mainly focused on a discussion of whether this registry would be available only to other librarians, or would be open to the public.

The next session was on the redesign of the FDLP desktop. GPO is working toward a more web 2.0 approach, with more interoperatibility, rss feeds, etc. We were given a good overview of the new pages and it looks like a much more useable site. At the moment site access is limited to depository coordinators; however, after the Biennial Survey is completed the site will be open for others to register. Many of the news and other information features are accessible without registration, so you may take a look if you are interested.

After lunch I attended a session on the new Public Access Assessment program being developed by GPO. GPO is legally required to review depository library services to make sure each depository is meeting its requirements to provide free public access to materials it receives through the FDLP. Some of you might remember a time when we actually had inspectors come to our depository libraries and check out our collections, cataloging, signage, use-policies, librarian’s reference knowledge, etc. As staffing shortages limited the GPO’s inspector program, libraries were then required to complete self-studies, covering many of the same service components. Now, GPO will use a library’s responses to the Biennial Survey and an overview of the Library’s webpages to determine if any follow-up is necessary for questionable or unclear policies. Following a brief description of the new program, Council and the audience discussed several scenarios that might cause barriers to access and what steps might be taken to overcome those barriers. As has always been the case, we were reminded that GPO likes to see comparable and accommodating policies and services applied to the documents collection, not necessarily the exact same policy as is applied to the general collection. In general, ZSR is doing very well in providing open and accommodating access and service for our documents collection; however, this is something that we must keep in mind whenever we review or create policies and procedures that create any limits on access.

My last session of the day was a Q&A session with the Library Services and Content Management (LSCM) staff of GPO. Really technical stuff here, so I’ll spare the non-depository librarian audience. More tomorrow!

The morning began with remarks by the new Public Printer, Robert C. Tapella. In fact, Mr. Tapella is so new to his position, that this was his first public appearance since being confirmed. Mr. Tapella said that his vision as Public Printer is to keep the best aspects of the FDLP in place, while adding new features and improving service. Ric Davis, Director, Library Services & Content Management, Acting Superintendent of Documents, GPO, then gave the traditional GPO update. Some key points from Ric’s update include the fact that a working group has been established to deal with the distribution backlog; several GPO/library partnerships have been renewed, or are in the process of being renewed; and the establishment of shared regionals is moving forward. Some other announcements: the Biennial Survey is online (due Oct. 31); the “Final Draft” of the FDLP Guidelines has been posted; several enhancements have been or are being made to the ILS.

I had a nice lunch with Marion Parker from PCL and Beth Rowe from UNC-CH. Marion is currently a member of the DLC, so it is fun to hear about some of the inner workings of the conference.

After lunch, James Mauldin from GPO gave an update on GPO’s transition from PURLs (persistent URLs) to Handles. I’m sure a member of the Tech Team could give a much better explanation of what a handle is than I can. GPO has performed a small beta test of converting PURLs to Handles. Mr. Mauldin assured the audience that the problems that currently exist with the PURLs will be resolved before they are converted to Handles. Also, the conversion should be seemless to the end user; we shouldn’t have to modify any of the 856 fields in our cataloging records because the PURLs that currently reside there will point to a proxy server that will resolve the links.

Mr. Tapella then announced the Depository Library of the Year: the St. Charles City-County Library. Check out one of their excellent services: UncleSam for Kids.

The last session of the day was devoted to a discussion of the necessity for updating the Guidelines for the Federal Depository Library Program, since there is a newly revised Handbook.

Hello All. I had a great trip to DC and arrived to find a nice fall weekend. I was able to take in the Edward Hopper and J.M.W. Turner exhibits at the National Gallery before moving on to my official purpose for being here the first part of the week: the fall Depository Library Council (DLC)/ Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) Conference. The conference is being held Monday, October 15 - Wednesday, October 17 at the Doubletree in Crystal City/Arlington, VS. The hotel is located near one of my favorite spots, Petagon City, but I will hold off on the shopping until the conference is over.

Today the conference went until noon but you could see that many people had already headed for the airport. However, there was still a good deal of information conveyed to those of us who stuck it out (also door prizes at the final general session, must be present to win - no, I didn’t….)

Things started out early with several people presenting their projects via a poster session. Subjects ranged from adventures in digitization to turning technophobes into technophiles. As you might expect, the booths with the most action were the ones that were giving away candy!

There was only one set of concurrent sessions today, so I split my time between two of them. The first one reported on a locally developed Workflow Management System, designed to ingest metadata and digital objects into Fedora, Rutgers’ digital object repository. The speaker was Mary Beth Weber who leads the metadata work group for this IMLS grant-funded project that is charged with building a NJ statewide repository. The system will soon be open source (by 2008) and was of interest to me because it is the type of system that would be useful in Digital Forsyth. As we are doing through an Access database developed by Erik and Kevin, this system tracks the life of a digital objects from their birth (at scanning) to their ingestion into a digital management system. Whether it may have some future value to us, I can’t tell at this point, but we will keep an eye on how it progresses.

I caught the second half of a session by David Lindahl and Nancy Fried Foster from University of Rochester. She reported on user-centered research conducted at their institution. Some of the results have recently been published in an ACRL monograph titled: Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. Since I didn’t arrive until after her portion, I’m glad I’ll be able to see the results that are reported in the book. Lindahl talked about a grant-funded project to build The Extensible Catalog, an open source system that will be used as the front end to a library’s ILS (user interface).

The final closing session was given by Jeremy Frumkin from Oregon State University who talked about “In Our Cages with Golden Bars”. The overall theme was how we can think differently about how we pursue what we do with technology in libraries. We are often limited by our own traditions, expertise and experiences. He suggests that librarians can step outside (of their golden bar cages) without throwing away the things that libraries have always done. He used the same themes that we had heard throughout the weekend (all probably at every library conference any of us have attended in the past year): what has to be done to meet our next generation of users, still providing traditional services but remixing them in a way that will insure that libraries remain sticky (from www.2020systems.com: “A term used to describe a web site on which visitors stay at for longer than normal. This is often due to the variety of content and features offered to the visitor which prevents them from needing to go elsewhere for more information”). He talking specifically about a project his library is working on: LibraryFind. It’s a metasearch tool, one that they have prominently displayed from their website. He also presented two other main themes: He believes that our business model has to change to one where libraries and vendors work together to find a mutual advantage that works for both while giving users what they want/need. He also believes that we (as in libraries as a group) need to find a way to brand our services/product so that users can find consistency from one library to the next. He likened this to the fact that pre-automation, a library patron could learn to use the card catalog at one library and be assured that this knowledge was transferable at any other library that he might visit. That certainly isn’t the case today and it leaves users without a sense of the collective identity of “library.” The presentation combined some popular user-centered themes and future thinking along with a dab of practical applications. It was a good solid end to the conference.

I’m sitting in the Denver airport now, waiting to head home in about an hour. It’s been a packed 3 days that, overall, have been well worth coping with air travel these days (We’ll see if I still think that tomorrow morning).

The day’s general session was much more in line with my expectations. David King, Digital Branch and Services Manager at Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library in Kansas gave an engaging talk about “Change, Library 2.0, and Emerging Trends”. He identified what he considers the major transformations that have taken place in libraries since the advent of the web: commenting (old way: letter from a patron; new: blog replies from patrons), friending (old: no good parallel; new: facebook, myspace), content (old: printed pathfinders; new:staff and patron generated) , tagging (old: catalogers; new: user generated) and mashups (a new concept). He talked about why we should let go of the past and should jump on the bandwagon with these technologies. He doesn’t think that fear of learning new technology should be a reason to ignore these trends - sometimes we have to do something scary to remain relevant. Being relevant is essential to libraries’ futures; as we all know, if we aren’t our users will turn elsewhere. One of the many examples King cited during the talk had to do with a project conducted by the National Library of New Zealand where they asked conference participants to complete the sentence “In 2017 libraries will be……” and then posted the 200 responses on Flickr.

The conference provided lunch for everyone and this was a good opportunity to network with those sitting together. I ran into Andy Morton who is still at University of Richmond. He was with Nancy Woodall who I had never met but who I’ve talked with over the years when we’ve been doing various technology projects. They were also an Endeavor site and it was interesting to hear what their reaction has been to the migration to ExLibris. I also met a couple librarians from East Carolina who talked about their first gaming event (they had Giz come out and present to them on our gaming experience). They said that they had over 200 kids show up!

Just a brief note about Denver this weekend. It turns out that it is one of the busiest event weekends in their history. There was a Columbus Day Parade (83 protesters were arrested), the Colorado Rockies played (and won) against the Phillies to win an NCLS spot in the playoffs, Octoberfest, Denver Arts Weeks, the largest Susan B. Komen race (today), a Genesis concert….Well, you get the picture. This translated to an expected weekend downtown crowd of over 80,000 people. So it was a no-brainer to head to the 16th St. Mall (2 blocks away) to people watch after the day’s sessions ended.

There are sessions through noon today, so I’m off to see poster sessions, another concurrent session and a closing general session. Then off to the airport and home by midnight!

The 2007 LITA National Forum began with a keynote speech on global warming. What does this have to do with libraries and emerging technologies? As conference planning chair Mary LaMarca explained to a packed room, LITA has a tradition of opening its annual forum with a keynote by a local speaker. Jeffrey Kiehl is a senior scientist in the Climate Change Research section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. He spoke for an hour and a half about the history of climate change science, how the climate has changed (global warming) and how it will continue to change, how humans are involved in the whole issue and, what scientists can do to communicate what’s happening more effectively to the public. It was a talk full of facts and charts but Kiehl, who has an MA in psychology, focused the end of his speech on why people interact (or not) with the environment and why the public is reluctant to accept the fact of global warming. This is a hot topic (so to speak) in public discourse today, so was timely, if not exactly what I would have chosen to kick off a technology conference to get participants in the right frame of mind for the theme of the weekend.

Two sets of concurrent sessions took place for the rest of the afternoon. It’s hard to decide what’s going to be the most valuable session to attend when you have to select from six, not knowing much more than the titles and the speakers’ names. I planned to try to find sessions that might have the most applicability to our library, so started out at a SRO presentation about WorldCat Local. I managed to find an empty spot on the floor, settled in and after about 10 minutes was saying “this sounds so familiar”! It was almost like I knew what the speaker (Jennifer Ward from University of Washington Libraries) was going to say before she clicked to the next slide. I was having such deja vu, I started digging into my userdata files and found my notes from sessions I attended at ALA in June. Sure enough, I had sat through this before! I guess I didn’t even think about the fact that some presenters may apply to present on a topic to several conferences (and for LITA you have to apply 10 months prior to the conference - for 2008, proposals are due in Dec.). But Jennifer did update her talk to report on the progress of the beta project between OCLC and UWL). Patrons are becoming more comfortable with having Local Worlcat as their primary discovery tool. You can take a look at WorldCat: University of Washington. They have made changes as a result of extensive usability studies and the catalog now includes articles along with books and has the ability to display a proper citation of the item, export it to Endnote or Refworks. It links to local holdings and availability information. There are choices offered to “get it” (ILL), “save it” (bookmark it in your browser), “add to it” (write a review), and “share it” (link it to one or several social networking sites). This collaborative effort by these two partners is impressive.

I slipped out of this session and went down a couple doors to hear the end of a presentation by two of our colleagues from UNCG’s Jackson Library. Scott Rice and Amy Harris talked about the game they created to help teach information literacy. It’s called “The Information Literacy Game” and they’ve made it available for others to use and adapt to local needs. One question that gets asked often came up in this presentation also: have they done formal assessment to see if learning is occurring? To date, their belief that the game is useful comes from anecdotal feedback from students and library faculty. That appears to be fairly typical as it is difficult and time consuming to conduct a quantitative in-depth study along with everything else a librarian has to accomplish day-to-day.

For the second round of sessions, I decided to go to for one that was more a “high level” view of emerging technologies (plus I saw Andrew Pace heading in the room and figured he might be looking for future column topics). The session was titled “Library 2023: Provoked Discussion on the Future of Libraries.” It turned out to be more of an open discussion than a presentation. The moderator was Gregg Silvis from University of Delaware Library. He posed a number of questions in relation to his assumption for 2023: There are 100,000,000 digitized full text books freely available…

What would it mean?

• To be a research library, or for that matter, a library at all?
• For scholarship?
• For the general populace?
• For cataloging?
• For Kinko’s?

The session became an idea exchange forum. For the most part, what I heard were concepts we have been discussing over the past year in relation to our strategic planning: library as place, students who want things online and now, ownership vs. access, copyright, etc. I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t hear anything revolutionary that I could bring back and implement, but it was reassuring to leave the session thinking that we have been doing what needs to be done to head ZSR Library the right direction.

The afternoon sessions were followed by a sponsor reception. Free food, cash bar. What happened to vendors underwriting a librarian’s happy hour? Don’t they know we are on tight budgets? Really, it was a good chance to meet some of the folks attending LITA and I was happy to see one familiar face. I met up with Cindy Saylor, who is from the UNC Pembroke Library. I first became acquainted with Cindy way back when Roz Tedford went through the Master Trainer program and Cindy was one of her fellow master trainers. Since then Cindy went on to be Systems Librarian there and then was promoted to Assistant Dean of Systems and Public Services last year. We had a chance to catch up and then went on to view The Hollywood Librarian. I had heard somewhat harsh reviews on it from folks from ZSR who attended the UNCG screening last week, but thought I should form my own opinion. It was well done and did a mostly good job of illustrating why the typical portrayal of librarians in film short changes the profession. I did think they could have found more than one young librarian to interview (although the eyebrow ring was a nice touch). But it sort of lost me when they politicized the film through the detailed focus on the Salinas Libraries funding issue. I thought the film was about 1/2 hour too long (we were sitting in straightback conference room chairs, NOT theater stadium seating), and the desired point could have been made more succinctly. However, I was glad to have been given the chance to view this film that everyone in the profession has been talking about.

I’m in Denver to attend the 10th Annual LITA National Forum. It is “annual event for those whose work involves new and leading edge technologies in the library and information technology field.” I arrived early yesterday afternoon thanks to an early flight and a 2 hour time difference. This was a bonus as it gave me a nice chunk of time to explore the city and enjoy the beautiful Colorado weather.

The conference starts this afternoon (pre-conferences took place yesterday and take place again this morning). I was fortunate to receive a Career Enrichment Program Scholarship from the NC State Library that is helping fund my trip. Contrary to the common belief that these scholarships target new young librarians who haven’t attended conferences previously, they are also available to us seasoned librarians who would like to expand our attendance to a conference that we don’t normally have the funding to include in our annual travel budget.

In my case, I’ve only attended LITA one time previously, back when it took place in Raleigh either in 1999 or 2000. So it’s been a long time and I’m excited to have 3 days where I can focus on learning what other libraries are doing with emerging technologies. I expect to hear about Library 2.0, social software, the new OPAC and all the other hot topics in the field these days. There’s even a screening of the Hollywood Librarian this evening.