Professional Development

I volunteered to help with the Inspiration, Innovation, Celebration: an entrepreneurial conference for librarians held at UNC-G. As it was, they had a plethora of volunteer, so I was able to simply attend. However, by the time my dentist was through with my on Thursday, I was only able to attend 1 1/2 sessions.
I hear the conclusion of the session- Horses and Hoops: New Approaches to Oral History in a Digital Environment” given by Doug Boyd from the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky. Mary Beth wrote about this session, which showed an innovative oral history software tool- OHMS- which allows keyword searching. some day, this kind of thing may filter down to us mortals- hopefully after further improvements to voice recognition software. This session was fascinating.
The closing keynote was from Stephen Bell, Associate University Librarian from Temple University in Philadelphia. Bell is considered a rock star of sorts in certain corners of the library world. He was a dynamic speaker and had a lot to say. Bell started by telling us about his Dad, a car mechanic who”could fix anything”. Bell’s Dad devised a way to keep his boisterous kids from accidentally opening the rear door of his 1958 Cadillac by removing the door handle and installing sharp pins (ouch!) in it’s place. I guess this device worked-and I guess it was innovative………you decide.
the next part of Bell’s lecture was video of him asking librarians if they knew any ‘library entrepreneurs’. No one did. They had heard of Bill Gates though, whom most of the video-ees named as an ‘entrepreneur’.
Bell next got to the pith of his presentation and named 7 characteristics of successful entrepreneurs:
1. Opportunistic- example- Israel recycles 70% of it’s waste water
2. Creative Genius- example- intermittent windshield wipers
3. Customer Focus- example given was Zappos shoes
4. Persistence- example- the guy who invented hyperlinking
5. Connect the Dots- ie. spot trends
6. Passion- example- The Blended Librarian community
7. Risk Taking- I can’t remember the example Bell gave-but it might have been his Dad’s back seat child-proofing device

Bell next mentioned a number of ‘design thinkers’. among those mentioned:

Dan Heaton- mountain unicycling
Deep Dive videos- IDEO corporation
Chip and Dan Heath- Made to Stick: Why some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Daniel Pink- A Whole New Mind-Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
Seth Godin- This is broken
To Improve what you Do- Study People- ACRLog, May 15, 2006

Finally, Bell listed 10 tips for “Library Entrepreneurs:

1. Listen/Observe- keep your antennae up
2. Accept hard work
3. Something is better than nothing
4. Break some rules
5. Ask open questions
6. Balance risk and evolution
7. Develop sticky ideas
8. Take time for getting ideas- Google Wave!
9. Keeping up with new ideas outside of librarianship
10. Use the ‘zoom out’ lens look at the big picture
11? (He said there were 10, but…) Know your core values

Bell is intriguing because he is interested in the future of libraries and where we’re goon. I was glad to realize that ZSR is already THERE on many of the points Bell mentioned.

Craig Fansler

As a perk to volunteering during the Inspiration, Innovation, Celebration conference held at UNCG last week, I was able to attend some conference sessions.

• Clemson Connect: Reaching All Incoming Students (Anne Grant and Suzanne Schilf)

Clemson Connect is a program designed to ease the transition from home life to college life for all incoming Clemson students. It includes 4 components that address group work and faculty relationship dynamics (One Clemson: Yours, Mine, & Ours) , an online tutorial of resources and technology available (iClemson), reading comprehension skills (Summer Reading project), and a library workshop (LIB100). Clemson Connect is a one credit, required course that is pass/fail.

Anne and Suzanne discussed the library workshop component, LIB100, and its ties with the larger campus for support, funding, and progress. Before LIB100, the library worked exclusively with the ENG103 and CU101 courses to develop a one-hour bibliographic instruction session. They began with 15 instructors teaching 8 classes each and reached roughly 1943 students in total. As the need for a more solid LIB100 grew, a group of Reference librarians volunteered to develop the program as it is now. Originally the group emerged with 10 outcomes, 43 objectives, and a pre and post workshop assignment/assessment. They collaborated with the Computing and IT department, Undergraduate Studies, multi-cultural programs, and satellite libraries on campus for advertising and program support. In Fall 2008, the 50-minute LIB100 included 19 instructors, teaching 199 workshops, and reaching 3, 681 students in comparison to bibliographic instruction sessions of before.

After a bit of renovation and editing of the 43 objectives, the Spring 2009 version of LIB100 included 10 outcomes, 13 objectives, 5 instructors, 20 workshops, and a new interactive component to aid in the pre and post workshop assessment. As the Reference librarians continue to adapt and evolve the information/resources covered and the overall workshop itself, they learned some valuable lessons for future revisions:

1. a pre and post testing/assessment/assignment does NOT work outside of the workshop. As it is a pass/fail, required course and students required to complete the post assignment through Blackboard many students forgot and ended up with a fall on their transcript (which could not be removed).
2. as the workshop is designed for 50 minutes, the amount of information covered (and deemed important by the librarians) was overwhelming–try to get a student’s perspective on what’s significant for academic research.
3. it is important to maintain relationships and contact with the ENG103 and CU101 courses, as these were the major supporters and collaborators of the original BI sessions.

• Competition for Library Services (Larry Nash White)

Larry Nash White, from East Carolina University, discussed the future of libraries in a world of instant, on-demand information services.

Is there competition? Yes–as seen through a decrease in library statistics, nation-wide library branch closings, and the surge of retail book outlets. We’re in a networked world with access to the internet, email, blogs, and social networks at the “speed of transmission.” Not only are we able to access this networked world through hand-held devices, but we’re an increasingly flattened world with the globalization of goods, services, and communications. Therefore, libraries are increasingly facing tangible and intangible competitors.

Tangible Competitors:

1. Amazon.com
2. Barnes and Noble/Borders/Books-a-Million
3. LSSI (Library Systems & Services, LLC.)
4. independent bookstores

Intangible Competitors:

1. Community literacy programs
2. daycare
3. wifi access hotspots
4. changing demographics of families
5. entertainment (tv, PSP, Wii)

So with all this competition for library patrons and access to information, how can libraries compete? We need to stop being comfortable–let’s step out of our comfort zones and traditional methods of service and see what is really attracting people to this service providers. We need to do something–don’t let mistakes or fear of failure keep us from trying new services, resources, or programs. We need to be proactive towards technology, resources, trends, and what people are using and how they are using it. Finally, we’re librarians–let’s use our research and resources to our advantage.

Although it was easy to feel overwhelmed or fearful of the future of libraries, the overall message was that although libraries have comeptitors in the information and entertainment services, they are not necessarily a threat. These competitors present an opportunity for collaboration and cooperation which can positively impact the public’s perception of libraries and the profession as a whole.

OK, by now you’re probably getting tired or bored with NASIG, so for my last post I’ll try to give you the short version.

First, evidence that Chris and Steve really were there …

Saturday’s opening session was by Dr. Carol Tenopir of the Univ. of Tennessee School of Information Sciences, who discussed her research on calculating return on investment for library expenditures with respect to research/grant funding.Her research is based on surveys of university faculty, asking, for example, how important citations are to obtaining funding, and what percentage of their citations do they find via online library resources.It was an interesting methodology.

Next I went to a session where three librarians talked about their respective experiences with implementing various Pay-Per-View (PPV) products.This was a very interesting and helpful session.The only products that received favorable reviews from the panelists were Science Direct (at Trinity) and EBL (at U.Texas).Common problems with PPV products included the inability to block PPV access to content subscribed to elsewhere, cumbersome user registration, and a “shopping cart” interface that tended to scare away users.I was glad to hear the U.Texas librarian describe their EBL pilot launch as “extraordinarily successful.”

My final Saturday session was a panel discussion with 3 librarians and 2 publisher reps about the process of license negotiation-top concerns/risks, difficult points to negotiate, whether the licensing process is improving (all agreed it is not), and whether licenses are doing what they were intended to do.There was discussion about how to improve some of the inefficiencies in the process (including a new standard, ONIX-PL), and whether it might be feasible to abandon license agreements and rely instead on copyright law.Another very good discussion, and I’m glad I had the background of the preconference to give me some context.

The first two Sunday sessions were kind of disappointing; I won’t bore you with the details.The final plenary session was about identifying trustworthy content online.Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef talked about how we judge credibility of print resources (title page, publisher blurb, cover art, trust of the library, etc.); think about how you can tell at a glance whether an article is from a popular magazine or a scholarly journal.He then pointed out that the relatively quick evaluation we can do with print resources doesn’t work well in the online world.He batted around some ideas for making it easier to judge the credibility of online resources, including CrossMark, which is being developed by CrossRef.Another one is Hon Code which, if I understood correctly, is a registry of websites, with a Firefox plugin that displays an icon when a user visits a registered site.

Overall an excellent conference.I’m afraid I’ve come away with more ideas than I know what to do with at this point.But that’s good, right?

Inspiration, Innovation, Celebration, an entrepreneurial conference for librarians planned by several librarians from UNC-G and Mary Beth, Mary Scanlon and myself from WFU. Mary Scanlon introduced the concept of using google docs to store the many discussion ideas, program proposals and other detailed planning documents. She graciously served as the groups official note keeper throughout the planning process. A debt of gratitude also goes to Kevin Gilbertson for designing the conference webpage and to Mary Beth for working so closely with Kevin transferring the planning groups ideas and suggestions. Together they were instrumental in showcasing the conference to the world. Please take a look if you haven’t already. http://blog.zsr.wfu.edu/iic/ Mary Beth was also a key designer for the layout of the conference program.Craig Fansler also had a hand in designing the covers. Join me in thanking them for a job well done.The conference captured the attention of about seventy eight attendees, representing 15 different states and even one attendee from the UK. Each was eager to hear and share their own entrepreneurial story. It was clear in the planning stages of the conference that everyone had a different take on just what the concept of entrepreneurism meant within libraries. As imagined the celebration brought together a rainbow of themes and concepts.

Joyce Ogburn, opening keynoter brought together risk and entreprenership. Ogburn compared risk to water. Either you like it or you don’t. For certain you must learn to swim to survive, you can only tread for so long. Jump in the waters just fine. A few of her strategies for dealing with risk included:

Fast track decisions

Be ready for opportunities

Reinvent and reinvigorate

Experiment, shift and adapt

Assume more risk, but manage it

Partner with others

Plan in shorter time frame

I really enjoyed meeting and hearing WFU’s own Jon Obermeyer, our featured luncheon keynoter. I am not sure which I enjoyed more his stories concerning the Institute for Regenerative Medicine and how they can reproduce a bladder in about 6 weeks or his recommended six topic area approach used to describe concisely the viability of a new product or service. His ease and style of delivery both caught my attention and lead me to conclude that he would be an excellent presenter for us here at ZSR and on the WFU campus. Copies of presenter speeches and handouts will be placed on the conference website. When they are, you’ll want to check his out.

I was assigned the task of monitoring Cone A during the conference. I had the joy of hearing some very interesting sessions. One of which was Jennifer Calvo from NCSU libraries.This entrepreneur shared how NCSU launched the Learning Commons After Dark programming. With an average 10:00 p.m. gate count of 700 students, they asked the question,how can we keep this relevant and fresh? Their solution involved using innovative services, dynamic programming and actively engaged staff. They created a series of events, each was to expose the library’s collections, raise awareness of the late hours and foster and further develop the learning commons student community. Some of the events shared included playing a series of older board games, guitar hero, gaming night competitions and a night of making sock animals. Calvo’s shift begins at 9:00 p.m. and ends at 3:00 a.m.

My next session featured Kem Ellis, Director of the High Point Public Library and Mark Livingston, President Transformational Library Partners. This dynamic duo was instrumental in planning the 2008 North Carolina Library Associations’ Leadership Institute. There session entitled “Developing Entrepreneurial, Customer-Focused leaders” was a recap of the founding principles they applied to creating the week long event. They designed the institute using these three beliefs and practices.

Beliefs:

Authentic leadership starts with passion and purpose.

Libraries offer significant value and can make a measurable difference in the communities they serve.

The ultimate test of leadership is earning and keeping the loyalty of employees and customers.

Practices:

Think and act “Outside in.”

Strengthen relationships and loyalty.

Focus on the total Library experience.

Lead with purpose and authenticity.

On Thursday the final day of the conference, I did not feel well and left the conference early. However before leaving I was able to hear Anita Norton share Johns Hopkins University’s story of entrepreneurism. For a fee (not disclosed to the audience) Johns Hopkins provides the library resources needed by the faculty and students at Excelsior College. Together they integrate both library services and resources into their online courses.Librarians from John Hopkins join forces with instructors and course developers to create the structure and content of the classes offered. They have collaborated on 63% of the courses developed.

Planning this conference was a wonderful experience, one I truly enjoyed. I would love to see us do it again and this time have Wake serve as host!

It is now Saturday evening, the NASIG conference has finished its second full day, I have taken 12 full pages of handwritten notes, and I write small.I am struggling with how to condense all that into a blog post or two.I could just transcribe my notes straight across, but I doubt many of you would be that interested.If you are, we can talk next week.Anyway, here’s Friday … the short version.

Friday started with a “Vision” (=plenary) session, with speaker Peter Morville, author of the book Ambient Findability.His presentation dealt largely with website design and designingbetter search interfaces.It was a good presentation, and there are now a few books I want to look up (including Ambient Findability).In a world where the haystacks are becoming bigger and more numerous, he addressed some ways to create bigger needles.We need to figure out how to capture our “about-ness” and our uniqueness.He spoke some about faceted navigation as a promising trend, as well as the requisite sample websites doing cool things (e.g. Songza and Everyzing).

I attended a session where people from two different universities discussed their implementation of the CUFTS open-source electronic resource management system (ERMS).I was hoping to be impressed, but came away instead with the impression that this product isn’t quite ready for prime time.What the session did do was give me some food for thought about ERMS functionality.

Friday afternoon I went to a session about cost data for electronic resources.The presenter first spoke about a new NISO standard (currently in draft form) called CORE (= Cost of Resource Exchange), which seeks to standardize the elements and format of cost data in ILS and ERM systems and facilitate their communication between automation systems.She then explained the method she has used at her own library to extract cost data from their ILS and move it into their ERMS.

My final session Friday was presented by a librarian from U.Tennessee-Chattanooga and a representative of the non-profit organization that makes the Gold Rush suite of e-resource management tools (link resolver, A-Z list, etc.).They talked about the U.Tenn.-Chattanooga library’s recent migration from their previous vendor to Gold Rush.I took two pages of notes on this one.They talked about the selection and implementation process, and discussed lessons learned, like the importance of live product trials (not just demos), and making the vendor work for the sale.

Whew! Six pages down!In the evening was an optional event at the nearby Biltmore House.We were bussed over, had a nice dinner on site, then went on a tour of the house.Then to bed to rest up for another day of conferencing (stay tuned).

I thought I’d jump in and do my post before all of the “good” sessions got reported on by others. BUt in truth, they were ALL good.

In the keynote by Joyce Ogburn, she talked about some of the entrepreneurial initiatives that they’d done at her institution, the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. The coolest was the Western Sound Scape where they are capturing and cataloging western sounds from nature. We could to that! Couldn’t we? The “Eastern Sound Scape.” I’ll go out to the mountains of Western North Carolina with a backpack and a microphone any day…well maybe not TODAY, but any sunny day!

My first session on Wednesday was with Gillian McCombs and Rob Walker from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and a presentation entitled “Carpe Digital, or Reinventing a 1980s AV Center as an Entrepreneurial Digital Services Center.” The two presenters discussed how they took a center that had been entrenched in classroom support, (delivering materials to campus classrooms, providing overhead projectors, DVD players, and slide projectors), and being the videographers, filming campus events for their archive, to a center located in the library that provides digitization assistance and a video and film production lab to users. Getting there was a hard road and took lots of convincing as at the outset, they had no interest from the faculty or students for such a center in 2001. But, with vision and determination, and a great deal of hutzpah from the two presenters, they looked forward 7 years to what will be needed, and worked to make it happen. They got very little additional funding, but creatively worked through all of the obstacles a little at a time.

The second session on Wednesday was the one that I presented on the WTL 5K. It was sparsely attended, with just a handful of people I didn’t know in the audience. (Mary S., Patty, Ellen, Heather, Lynn and Bill were there and they were, literally, half the audience.) It was fun to relive the good times. At the end of the presentation I was approached by the rep from EBSCO who suggested that he might be able to get a donation for our 5k this fall, and that at the very least he will run in it. He lives in Charlotte. I also got a high five from the director of High Point Public Library who said he might be interested in running an event like this. I said I’d be happy to help, just so long as he picks a different weekend than ours.

The final presentation of Wednesday was given by Camilla Baker and Michelle DeLoach at Augusta State University who gave a presentation on “Study Space for Students with Young Children.” They took an innovative approach to providing services to students who had no choice but to bring their children along when they needed to study, and created a study room for them. The school is a commuter school that has a large population of students who have small children and they were worried about retention of these students if they didn’t find some way to meet the need. They retrofited two small computer labs that had a connecting door and turned one into the study lounge, and one into the play area. They fitted the study lounge up with traditional furnishings, (desk, table, chairs, whiteboard, 3 computers) and put in bean bags, a book shelf with kids materials, a DVD player and DVDs and an assortment of games for the kids in the adjoining room. The parents need to sign in at the circulation desk to get the passcode to enter. They’ve had good response from some parents who admit that but for this study room they would have had to drop out of school.

The afterhours reception that was held at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery on UNCG was quite the elegant affair. We took great pains to have just the right food and drink and kept the galleries open to allow for quiet contemplation and viewing by all of the conference attendees. Unfortunately, the thunder and lightning and rain stole our thunder. Ask Lynn about her harrowing trip down Spring Garden and the floating trash can that almost took her out. This will be known as the Conference that survived the great Greensboro Flood of ‘09.

Thursday morning’s presentation I attended “Meeting an Unmet Need: Extending the Learning Commons Concept Through On-Campus Partnerships and Branding”. La Loria Konata, from Georgia State University discussed all of the ways that they have marketed the library, and the Learning Commons to campus. She discussed the training that was provided to staff; the creation of new programs called “Write Right” (a writing center) and “Cite it Right” (Zotero and End Note training). “Reference-to-go” is a program that they created to put librarians in the Student Center the week before exams to make them more available for consultation. She also said that when they started to make study rooms bookable, they contemplated calling it “Get a Room!” but decided against it since it’s a little too salacious. They’ve also undergone a big change to their website and embedded some home cooked video meant to get the word out about different services. They call their finals study break “Chillax” , serve pizza and show “Family Guy” episodes on a smart board in their computer lab. They had so much going on to engage the students and get them excited about library services, and the students are responding.

The final session I attended was called “Horses and Hoops: New Approaches to Oral History in a Digital Environment.” Doug Boyd from the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky gave a great talk about how he leveraged opportunity to expand the size, endowment and presence of their oral history project on campus. The most exciting part of the presentation was his demonstration of the OHMS (I think it stands for Oral History Metadata Software) software which is being developed by them that allows for people to search for key words or phrases within the text of a transcribed document, read that portion of the document and then, with a click listen to the chunk of the digital recording. He demonstrated the methodology to us. It was really well done. When I asked him when we might get our hands on this software, he grinned and said something about patents and testing, etc. So I’m thinking this won’t be an open source product.

It was a really good conference. A great deal of variety, and a good number of ideas that can be brought back to each institution for ultimate implementation.

Congratulations to the ZSR-UNCG team who organized “Inspiration, Innovation, Celebration: an entrepreneurial conference for librarians,” held June 3-4 at the Elliott University Center at UNCG. Wanda, Mary Beth and Mary Scanlon worked hard for over a year and the results paid off! I’m sure they will blog about specific programs. I will give an overview because my job at the end of the conference was to give a few remarks tying it all together.

From the beginning of conference planning, people wondered about the difference between innovation and entrepreneurship. Was money the distinguishing characteristic? In the end after two days of conferencing, I came to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter. What mattered most was encouraging and celebrating creativity and innovation in all forms. And from the number of times ZSR was mentioned throughout the conference, it was apparent that we have achieved some success there.

The three keynote speakers were excellent. Joyce Ogburn from Utah started the conference off by discussing themes of risk management and knowledge management. We met Jon Obermeyer at lunch, who actually works for the WFU Institute for Regenerative Medicine and is thus a resource we can use here. The final keynote speaker was Steven Bell, who is familiar to many of you for his work on the blended librarian.

There were 20 contributed papers that fell into four distinct themes: 1) outreach (both to internal and external audiences), 2) the green movement in libraries (including our own Mary Scanlon and my own Bill Kane), 3) innovative fundraising (with Mary Beth Lock filling in for the virtual Erik Mitchell and Susan Smith) talking about our 5K), and 4) innovation through renovation.

I thought the quality of the programming was very good. Attendance was not quite up to expectations largely due to the global economic collapse and lack of travel funds that no one saw coming a year ago. There is a rumor that we might hold a second conference here at WFU in two years or so. We’ll see…

My last posting was a week and a half ago - hard to believe! I remembered that this trip is one that will keep you busy from breakfast to bedtime. Erik and I have worked out a daily routine that allows us to get our work produced and posted, but sometimes it has taken a bit of ingenuity to get the job done.

We get up at 4:00 am each morning to process the video and images taken the previous day. Erik is already used to that routine from his dissertation work, but it took me a couple of days to adapt. The benefit of this approach is that there is usually a better Internet connection since everyone else in the hotel is asleep (particularly in the hotels with wireless only connectivity). It is also a nice slow traffic time on Facebook so the videos upload more quickly (Often at night, they just won’t go). When the sun rises, we leave the video processing and head out for our daily workout.

As Erik said, running is about our only option, but you’ll see from a picture of this morning, we work with what the place has to offer:

During the day, we are kept busy trying to document the day through video and images while we participate with whatever is taking place. We also try to monitor Twitter posts, which have been embraced by a small number of students. But we want to have some each day to show how the day is progressing.

Typically, class activities go until at least 8 or 9 pm. We still have hours of work, but have been too tired to do much more than recharge our equipment before falling into bed exhausted. However, the rhythm we have developed has worked well and allowed us to keep up with our work, stay as healthy as is possible with a diet majoring in fried, and fully experience the content of the class.

The past couple of days have been a perfect example of the range of experiences that are taking place. We are in the Mississippi Delta, a land of contrasts: vast flat farming fields, a rich history of blues and a high level of poverty. When we arrived on Wednesday, we attended a seminar on the Delta in Clarksdale at Ground Zero. This is a blues club owned by Morgan Freeman. It was a wonderful setting to hear Bill Luckett, a local businessman and partner of Freeman, talk to us. We returned that evening for an night of live blues music and dancing. The students (and grownups) had a fabulous time. Erik and I were particularly gratified when the students chose to leave their “signature” on the wall and used our class hashtag as the main identifier!

(footnote: Erik got out on the dance floor!)

But yesterday was a 180 degree turn around in atmosphere and emotions. It was Parchman Farm day, when we traveled to the Mississippi State Penitentary. It is a sobering and reflective type of experience and moved the students deeply. There has been much processing of reactions and you’ll be able to see reflections that we caught immediately after leaving Parchman. This year we visited the death chamber, as well as going into Unit 26 where the men live dormitory style. Sonny and “Country” addressed our group and it was predictable that the students were apprehensive and a bit frightened at that experience.

Today, we’ve been on the road since 7 and will tour the Delta. The day will be a long one, with Po’ Monkey’s as the highlight of the day! So, we expect to see the students’ moods to swing back to ones of enthusiasm.

This post comes to you from Asheville, NC, where I am attending the 24th annual conference of the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG).Steve and Chris are on the conference planning committee, but I came on the scene late enough that I get to attend the conference as a participant.The conference begins in earnest on Friday, but I attended two pre-conference workshops yesterday and today.

Wednesday’s pre-conference was called “Navigating your way through the E-journal rapids.”It was a workshop taught by a “panel of experts”:2 librarians, and representatives from a subscription agent, a university press, an e-journal platform provider, and SerialsSolutions.For those unfamiliar with NASIG, one of the organization’s hallmarks is that although the majority of members are librarians, representatives from other parts of the serials supply chain also participate as members on an equal footing.NASIG also has a non-commercial stance, so the presenters from commercial companies give their perspective without trying to sell their product.

I thought the presenters did a good job of talking about the aspects of journal management that are unique to the online environment.An initial overview talked about the new complexity-more players, more pricing models, new workflows.Also covered were the many different types of publishers and the new roles of subscription agents, platform hosting companies, etc.A couple of gems:I learned the phrase “There is no ‘one’ anything,” and the subscription agent pointed out that with all the new workflows and entities involved, it still often takes as long to start up an e-journal subscription as a print subscription.

Today’s preconference was a half-day workshop on licensing.The primary focus was on understanding license language, learning key terminology, and recognizing and mitigating potential problem elements.Again, the publisher perspective was valuable.For example, one publisher employee in the class pointed out that if they monitor excessive downloading from a specific IP address, they need to be able to shut it down immediately.I also learned that some publishers may want to prohibit electronic course packs, not because they want to limit access to their materials, but because they want users to link into the publisher’s web site; usage stats can be a major selling point for a publisher.

We were given a copy of an actual license agreement and asked to identify 16 key elements (site definition, perpetual access, indemnification clause, etc.).Later, we evaluated the license and identified some problem areas.Then we worked in groups to come up with alternate language to mitigate the problems.Participants also received a flash drive with some sample licenses, boilerplate language, and other resources.The plan is to create a wiki so that we can continue to share model license language.I was impressed with the practicality of this workshop, and am looking forward to the rest of the conference.

The Social Stratification course descended into the delta yesterday morning to spend a few days. We started the day with some interesting discussion with our hosts from the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University and found our way to the B.B. King Museum.

After a lunch of Po Boys at the Pea Soup we headed to the Shack Up Inn outside of Clarksdale. We spent the afternoon and evening at Ground Zero Blues Club. While at the club we heard from two presenters (Bill Luckett and Emily Broad) about the Delta.

The evening was our first ‘music night’ of the trip and proved to be enjoyable for everyone.

As the trip has progressed Susan and I have commented on the shifting role of technology in the course. The discussions on the bus and during presentations have been energetic and seem to have served the need to encourage reflective thinking in the course. As a result, there have yet to be any technology-centered assignments. As such, while the students have been very engaged in the course, their use of technology has served different purposes including documenting, networking/communicating, observing, and reminding. For example students have used twitter to document experiences and share unique facts and have on occasion used the Facebook wall to comment on an event.

The role of videographer has pretty much fallen to Susan and myself and while I know that we would love for some students to take on that role, the technical issues we have encountered just recording and posting videos while on the road make the point that videography is not as low barrier a technology as we thought in the beginning! We have managed to get into a rhythm though & have lots of short videos posted that show different parts of the course.

The exercise on this trip has mainly been running and this morning was one of our best ones yet. Susan and I ran the pancake flat side road south from the Shack Up Inn this morning & got a good Delta sweat going.

Six days to go. . . ..