Professional Development

Since I reported in yesterday, I finished up my “hosting” jobs of introducing session speakers in concurrent sessions. I introduced Robin Hastings (Missouri River Regional Library) who spoke on “Collaborating in the Cloud.” She discussed how libraries can leverage their social networking presence using various free sites like Google Docs and Flickr. It was a talk geared to those just entering into the social networking realm and gave a good introductory overview. The final session of the day I introduced Michel Nguessan (Governors State University) , who presented his research on “Academic Libraries’ Strategic Planning in the 21st Century: The Role of Information Technology.” He analyzed strategic plans from 100 libraries and confirmed many of the typical goals that you would expect to find in strategic plans.

The final activity of Saturday afternoon was the poster session and it was nice to unwind from a busy day by chatting with folks about their projects (Erik above is hearing about the SDCU Research Cloud. Then Erik and I hike several miles uphill to visit University of Utah to find that it is closed for fall break. So we weren’t able to visit their Marriott Library, although it looked like a substantial operation. Then we jumped on the local light rail for a quick return to the city.

This morning I started early by attending a conference committee planning breakfast (I will continue on the committee one more year). There was one more round of concurrent sessions, but I didn’t have an introduction assignment so was able to pick a session that looked interesting. I went to a session by Andrew Nagy and Scott Garrison: “Next-Gen Catalog is Half the Solution: Making eResources Truly Accessible.” There was a discussion about Vufind as Scott implemented it at his institution (Western Michigan) and then he talked about their beta testing experience with Serial Solution’s Summon product, which Andrew is helping to develop. Summon looked very slick, but it’s not open source ($$). VuFind appeared to operate similarly to what we have seen with our implementation. It was interesting to see VuFind’s experimental browse function.

I’m sure both Lauren and Erik are reporting on the final keynote address by Liz Lawley. Recording her talk was my last official assignment, and was the most challenging as she is a very short woman who could barely see over the podium. So she moved around the stage, which made some recording adjustments necessary. But it turned out well and her presentation was most interesting as she told about her Picture the Impossible project. Be sure and look at Lauren’s in-depth notes.

Overall, this was a very successful conference (both from the view of being an attendee and from the view of being part of the planning). The Twitter feed was active, take a look at what attendees had to say!

David Weinberger Delivering Saturday’s Keynote Address

I learned very quickly yesterday that being a member of a conference planning committee means you are kept busy all day long and into the evening. I had volunteered to record all three keynote addresses, so I worked with Jason Griffrey, who handled the audio portion, to get my equipment all set up and going for Joan Lippincott’s opening keynote. Our new HDD camcorder worked beautifully (thank goodness). As a committee member, we each were assigned to do speaker introductions for the concurrent presentations. My first speaker was Heather Leary, from Utah State University who talked about their 9 year NSF funded project to develop “simple Internet-based tools to help school librarians and teachers better design and share classroom activities that use high-quality online learning resources, especially those housed in a digital libraries.” The site is called Instructional Architect.

I also helped organize two “lightning talk” sessions and I served as the wrangler (aka moderator, don’t ask me where the wrangler designation came from, probably having to get people on and off the stage in five minutes requires wrangling talents). The first of these was yesterday afternoon and the second took place this morning. Today, Erik gave one of the talks, and he presented about our entry into the Amazon cloud.

First thing this morning, I set up to record David Weinberger’s keynote on “Knowledge in the Age of Abundance.” He is a very good speaker offering up lots of ideas to make you think differently. It was fun to be able to chat briefly with him before his talk. The main idea he threw out today that caught my attention because it isn’t often a popular one when put in the context of student instruction was the idea of “good enough is good enough.” Good enough has different realities depending on what you are talking about. What’s “good enough” for advising a student on researching a term paper isn’t the same as “good enough” for a medical student studying brain surgery, of course. Often though, we take the position is that we always have to find the perfect resource for that undergraduate, when really, they just need enough “good enough” resources for their assignment. It is interesting to think how to adapt that idea but still do the right thing for our students.

This afternoon, I am introducing two more speakers so will report on those tomorrow. Thus far, the conference has been well run and well received. There are several vendors here who have supported this conference. The one that caught my attention is Boopsie.com. Their business is mobilizing your data and they offer subscription services to completely offer a library’s web services on a mobile devise. Since the theme of this conference is “Open and Mobile” we’ve been hearing about many great project to build a mobile presence, this vendor offers a way to do that (at a cost).

This year I am a member of the LITA National Forum Planning Committee which is taking place this weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah. Lauren (who is presenting later today) and I traveled yesterday from Raleigh (go for those cheap airline fares). We were surprised when Steve Kelley showed up on our flight. He was heading out for a NASIG Executive Board meeting in Palm Springs! So we parted ways in Dallas.

Once we arrived and got settled in, Lauren and I spent the rest of the afternoon doing a little exploration. We visited the Salt Lake Mormon Temple and the Salt Lake City Public Library. Then we found the best vegetarian restaurant in town (Sage’s Cafe) and had an excellent dinner to finish off the day.

The conference starts in earnest at 1 pm today (there were two preconferences yesterday and this morning), so Lauren spent the morning polishing her presentation while I figured out the new Canon camcorder we just got for ZSR. I’m using it here to record the 3 keynote speakers. See what skill sets you can build if you go on the South Trip as their technology support?

I also will be moderating the sessions called “Lightning Talks” where attendees who want to share new technology focused projects can talk about them for 5 minutes each. I get to introduce them and work the stop watch to keep things moving. They have been very popular sessions the past few conferences since the official presentation proposals have to be submitted months ahead and technology initiatives are so time sensitive!

So look for reports on all of our activities out here in Salt Lake City, there’s plenty of interesting reports to come.

This month, I was asked to select the journal article for our reading group. Since I’ve been in the midst of researching embedded librarianship, I chose a very current article about the topic, by one of the big names on topic, David Shumaker. The article Who Let the Librarians Out? Embedded Librarianship and the Library Manager gives a good introduction on the subject and then talks about ideas and considerations for initiating and sustaining an embedded library service. Mary Scanlon, David Stewart, Sarah Jeong, Charles Bombeld and Megan Mulder joined in the discussion. David talked about their services over at CCCL where the three reference librarians are serving in clinical librarian roles for three departments. Megan told about her embedded experience in Miriam Jacobson’s seminar class, Renaissance Poetry and Materiality. Mary talked about her recent embedded time with the Cherokee summer program, CCAT. We discussed the possibilities for embeddedness in a business center and how it could scale and be sustainable with limited human resources. I explained about the South embedded model. We also discussed ways to integrate virtual embedment in our current environment. Everyone agreed it’s a fascinating subject; one that warrants more thorough investigation as to how a workable model for ZSR embedment services at WFU might be possible on a program level.

The meeting for my second ALA committee (LLAMA BES/LIFE=Library Leadership, Administration & Management Association, Building & Equipment Section/Library Interiors, Furnishings and Equipment Committee, whew!) took place this morning. The sole purpose of this committee is to generate programs for ALA Annual. Program planning takes about 18 months from conception to execution and has to go through much vetting. Since my first experience with this committee at midwinter, there has been no activity on my part as one or two committee members will take on a proposal and shepherd it through the process. I was glad this morning to finally get a chance to volunteer to assist one of the in-process programs being developed. That will be the best way to learn how things work in this bureaucratic organization, and make myself useful in the process.

I finally had to give in and take a taxi to ensure that I arrived at McCormick Place in time to see Roz’s panel juried paper presentation on Reviews of Web Guide Software for Libraries. It was an intimate presentation due to lack of marketing by ALA, but was very informative, as you would expect!

Next stop (luckily, still in McCormick Place) was BIGWIG’s Social Software Showcase, where we broke into small groups and heard lightening round discussions of a variety of social software applications and technologies including cloud computing, Google Wave, mobile, drupel, mashups and facebook pages. The presentations are available on the BigWig site and tweets about the sessions can be found through the hashtag #sss09.

After a shuttle bus ride back to the same hotel where my first meeting was this morning, I’m heading into an interest group session on Scholarly Communication. So more later!

As Lynn mentioned, I had an early start to the day by joining in on Bill’s Alibris morning run. It was a beautiful Chicago day and it was nice to be outside and running through Grant Park and along Lake Michigan. After I earned my t-shirt and trophy (which looks amazingly like the ones for quiz bowl!), I ran straight to Lynn’s award breakfast and took a few pictures to document the occasion. It made me very proud to be part of the ZSR team and to have our dean recognized for all that she did to right-size all of our salaries and guide us through to our new library faculty status. This video clip shows Lynn receiving her award:

After a little clean-up effort (read shower and change of attire), I headed down to McCormick to Lauren P’s book signing. I ran into Roz in the exhibit hall and had to admire her focus on working the hall. I still find myself wandering aimlessly up and down the endless aisles….

The bulk of my afternoon was spent attending the semi-annual Top Technology Trends program. This program marked the 10th anniversary of the Top Trends. Trends identified this time around included mobile devices, cloud computing, green computing, rapid trending and tough economic times. The audience was invited to tweet about their reactions throughout the program, the hashtags are #ttt09 and #toptech. The program affirmed in my mind that we are thinking about the right things in regards to our technology planning over the next few years.

We had a pleasant dinner at the Italian Village with some of the ZSR folks and Roz’s sister. But it’s an early evening for me tonight, so I’ll be ready for my last day of committee meetings and sessions.

Here is Lynn receiving the Sirsi-Dynix ALA-APA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Promoting Salaries and Status for Library Workers. Her award was presented by Linda Dobbs.

Congratulations, Lynn!

I started out bright and early this morning filling in for Wanda at a (free) Serials Solution breakfast where they announced the commercial release of their latest product “Summon,” a web-scale discovery service. This, finally, is the answer that libraries need: it “allows the researcher to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content.” It’s “not federated searching, and goes past next gen catalogs. “And, the speaker proclaimed, history will look back on this day as the day libraries took back leadership of discovery of content. OK, I admit, I actually broke out into laughter at this announcement, and that got the rest of my breakfast table chuckling along with me. I quickly got control of myself and listened to three beta partners report on their experiences, issues and hope for this new tool that is going to do away with silos (sorry, Lynn, that’s what they said). David Seamans (who did some consulting work for us back in the day) is now at Dartmouth and he talked about their beta process. You can take a look at the product on the Dartmouth web site. The other two beta sites were Oklahoma State University (a Voyager site) and Western Michigan (also a Voyager site). The consensus was that there is still plenty that needs to be done but that it is speedy. It’s built on the same architecture as VuFind (Solr and AJAX) and one of its main architects is Andrew Nagy of VuFind fame. The most interesting speaker (for us) was Scott Garrison from Western Michigan who talked at length about their VuFind project and might be a good contact for Erik and his group, as they are preparing to go production on it next month.

Following this, I caught the shuttle bus down to McCormick Place to get my missing badge holder. While there, I ran into Debbie Nolan, and my old mentor from PLCMC, Pat Ryckman. I visited the exhibits and got all the pertinent info to get a trophy and t-shirt at tomorrow morning’s Alibris 5K (plus get to Lynn’s presentation on time). I also ran into Carloyn McCallum at the ALA Bookstore (None of my book on display, either they are sold out or too out-of-date, or both!).

I attended a session sponsored by ACRL on “Designing Effective Research Surveys.” Regina McBride, from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, gave a well organized program that would have been very helpful to anyone new to doing survey research, but after 45 minutes when we went into group work without enough worksheets to go around, I left. I did get information on freely available sample calculators that can help you determine if your sample size is enough: http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm and http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html

This afternoon I spent in back-to-back committee meetings for the LITA National Forum Planning Committee. I am on this year’s committee as well as next year’s. This year, the conference is in Salt Lake City Oct. 1-4, and next year it will be in Atlanta. This year’s conference is shaping up nicely and has over 30 concurrent sessions, poster sessions, 2 preconferences and three keynote speakers. One of the interesting things that is done to involve higher participation is 2 sessions of “lightening talks.” This is an opportunity for people to talk (for 5 minutes!) about new technology projects that they are working on, perhaps ones that weren’t in existence when proposals were due several months ago. I volunteered, with Karen Schneider, to be the “wranglers” for this, meaning we will put out a call for proposals, set it up and oversee them. When talk turned to recording the keynote speakers, somehow I found myself volunteering to help record them, since I have such recent experience (and we have the equipment). I’ll be working with another committee member on that, but I hope that my co-producer from the South trip (aka Erik) will be willing to help us

Tonight, Proquest is having a reception at the Art Institute, one of my favorite art museums. I hope to catch up with some of the ZSR Library folks there, as well as meet some new colleagues.

Evening View of the Chicago River
Since I don’t have committee meetings until tomorrow, I flew to Chicago this morning and arrived mid-afternoon. I’m staying in a hotel (Wanda is my roommate) on North Michigan Ave. just north of the Chicago River. It’s located in the area known as the Magnificent Mile. I’m told that McCormick Place, the Convention Center, is an hour walk away, so I was glad to discover that there was satellite registration at a hotel just across the River. With that accomplished, I headed down Michigan Ave. to eat a late lunch, then meet Lauren P. and Kaeley, who had conducted their pre-conference this afternoon. We met to attend the LITA Happy Hour, an annual get-together of the group. Then we had a dinner outdoors beside the Chicago River. The picture above is the view we had. I had a little chance to take some photos, since my work doesn’t gear up until tomorrow. It’s great to be back in Chicago, it’s one of my favorite cities!

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.