Professional Development

Hello everyone. Greetings from sunny and warm Philadelphia. Much of my conference time is/will be spent doing association business; that doesn’t make for interesting reading, so I’ll try to keep it brief.

Yesterday, I met with the GODORT Steering Committee. This meeting takes place at the start of the conference and the chairs of the various committees and task forces meet with the roundtable officers to share information about what they are planning to do at the upcoming conference. We also talk about some issues that are of interest to the organization as a whole, such as virtual membership and the new push to open ALA-run listservs to all ALA members, not just those members of individual organizations.

This morning I met with my other committee, the ACRL Bylaws Committee. We approved proposals from two sections who want to amend their bylaws and forwarded those proposals on to the ACRL Board.

This afternoon I spent some time in the Exhibit Hall and saw a friendly face, Bill Kane, at the Alibris booth.

I was able to go to part of the GODORT update and did hear two good presentations that might be of general interest. The first was by David Oldenkamp from Indiana University. He talked about a search engine he had created: Intergovernmental Organization Search Engine. Google now has a set of tools that allows one to create a customized search engine, called Google Co-op. Other sites that allow one to create customized search engines include Eurekster Swiki. Other search engines that folks might be interested in include one for ALA-RUSA Best Reference Websites and one David called the ’search engine for the library world’: LISZEN.

Marilyn Parr then provided an update on several projects at the Library of Congress. If you haven’t taken a look at LC’s American Memory Project, I highly recommend it. And, I wouldn’t be a good government information librarian if I didn’t point out A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation especially. Also take a look at this video, which gives a vision for the World Digital Library that is in development.

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.

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.

After I finished my blog yesterday, I headed to Jaleo for a nice lunch with our LexisNexis sales representative. I was able to ask a few more questions about our new Hearings subscription and get some leads on having training done for both the Congressional database and the new interface for the Academic database.

On my way to my next meeting, I caught up with Debbie and we had a nice chat catching up on the news.

My last meeting of the day was of the GODORT’s Federal Documents Task Force, or FDTF. I am the Cataloging/FDTF liaison, so I attend both meetings as a committee/task force member and report to each group on the activities of the other. At FDTF we had the usual reports from various groups, including GPO. We talked about our upcoming preconference for ALA Annual in Anaheim focusing on elections, voting and political science resources. We also agreed to pilot a project for virtual members by reviving an agency liaison program that has floundered in recent years.

I caught the shuttle back to the convention center (as I now have blisters on blisters) and took the long Metro ride back to Alexandria, arriving at the Braddock Road station at 7:15.

I was back at the station this morning at 9:45 to make it in to my 10:30 GODORT Cataloging meeting. About half of the meeting was devoted to the ‘usual business,’ including an update from GPO on their cataloging practices and continued improvements in their ALEPH Catalog of Government Publications ILS. We talked about needed improvements to the UN classification system and endorsed a letter for the GODORT Chair to send to the UN requesting those changes. We also heard a report from the RDA (Resource and Descriptive Access) group, specifically about the current chapter they are working on (chapter 3) that has to do with the “carrier” of the information. For the non-catalogers of us in the group: RDA is the/will be the successor to AACR2.

This will probably be my last blog entry until I return to work on Wednesday. Alas, I turned my ThinkPad on in the Cataloging meeting this morning, expecting to take notes electronically, and received a “Fan Error” message and then a blank screen. I’ve tried several more times, but that is as far as my computer will boot. So, Tim, I’ll be seeing you on Wednesday morning :-). Because I had a relatively free afternoon, I stood in line and am now typing this entry in the Internet Cafe, but tomorrow I’m in meetings from 8am - 6pm and won’t have time to stop.

See everyone on Wednesday!

This morning I met with the ACRL Bylaws Committee. The ACRL Board is interested in making several changes in the organization, including the way dues increases are handled and the way some of the subunits are organized. As the Bylaws Committee, we are not charged with supporting or opposing any changes, just advising the board on whether certain changes can be done with or without changes to the Bylaws. Bylaws changes, of course, require approval by membership, through a vote with proscribed notice beforehand etc. We had done much of our work between Midwinter and Annual, discussing the various implications of certain changes and making recommendations to the Board. As is often the case, we also worked on various miscellaneous changes to the Bylaws where wording and other small details need to be corrected. We reviewed our work and sent our Chair off to the Board Meeting this afternoon to represent the Committee’s advice on various proposed changes.

Hi All,

As I’m posting when and where I can get free wifi, these posts might be a bit out of order. At the moment I am sitting in a hallway at the Washington Convention Center, next to an outlet, with a few minutes to blog.

Yesterday afternoon I attended the first of two Steering Committee meetings of GODORT. Traditionally, the first steering committee meeting is used by the GODORT officers, taskforce and committee chairs to make announcements and make sure everything is in order for the upcoming conference. While some of this did take place, the organization tried something new and allowed more time for discussion of various topics of interest to the membership. I won’t bore you with all the ins and outs of the organizational discussions, but one of the topics we talked about, and will continue to talk about throughout the conference, is the issue of virtual members. ALA is supporting the idea of virtual members in order to expand participation to those who can’t commit to attending one or more conferences in a year. Each division, roundtable, and subunit now has to determine if virtual members will work for them and, if so, how the logistics of virtual members will work.

After a long day, I met my cousin, Barbara, at her office on 18th street. We then enjoyed a fine meal of lamb biryani and butter chicken from one of our favorites: the Bombay Curry Company.

Hi Everyone. I drove up to Alexandria yesterday and had the pleasure of riding Metro’s yellow line from start to finish this morning to arrive at the Washington Convention Center. I’ve checked in and am getting my bearings using various maps.

I’m afraid my conference blog won’t live up to recent topics (will we ever best the South Course?) as most of my conference will be spent at committee meetings rather than attending programs. But if you are interested in getting more involved in the inner workings of ALA, perhaps this will give you a taste of what it’s all about.

In this first post I thought I would define some acronyms so that later on I’ll be able to use them at will!

I’ll be involved in:

• GODORT — the Government Documents Round Table
• FDTF — the Federal Documents Task Force of GODORT
• ACRL Bylaws — Association of College and Research Libraries Bylaws Committee

I’m also on the GODORT Cataloging Committee (no acronym!).

That’s all for now. More as the meetings pick up!

What a mixture we were today at the Baltimore Convention Center! ACRL and Mary Kay and teens and tweens cheerleaders, oh my!

I started the day with breakfast with our LexisNexis sales representative. It was nice to catch up with Dawn; although, we both agreed that we might have closed a few restaurants in our time, but this was the first time we waited in line for a restaurant to open!

Most of my day was devoted to my Round-table Subcommittee uties. Round-tables are a way to provide a semi-formal networking opportunity for people who are interested in a similar topic. Prior to the last ALA annual conference, the committee received over one hundred round-table proposals. We read through the proposals; at ALA annual we selected the top 100, sorted them in to tracks and sent our selections to the Baltimore Conference Committee. Today, fifty groups met from 8-9am and from noon-1pm. The Committee was in attendance to provide directional assistance and make sure the conversations were proceeding at a good pace. Both sessions seemed to be successes with a vast majority of tables involved in lively discussion!

Because of the round-table timing, I missed a few sessions that I would have liked to have attended. If I can find the webcasts/powerpoint slides online, I will post the information in this space.

I’m looking forward to the All-Conference Reception tonight at the National Aquarium. Although the forecast calls for rain, I’m hoping to see the Edgar Allan Poe grave-site and Fort McHenry on my way out of town tomorrow morning. I’m stopping by Alexandria for lunch with my cousins and then on down I95/I85 to Winston-Sam!