Professional Development

“Technology Central in Birmingham”

Greetings from the Deep South. Erik and I are traveling for 16 days with the 2009 iteration of Drs. Hattery and Smith’s “Social Stratification in the Deep South” experiential summer course. This year there are 19 students, 13 from Colgate University (where Hattery and Smith taught this past year), 5 from Wake Forest and 1 from NC State. Our role on this trip is to deliver the technology that makes the course interactive to our virtual audience and to document the course activities through video, still images, and audio. As you probably know already, our “course shell” is a facebook page, coupled with a twitter feed and flickr. We have been kept busy, particularly with our “just in time” learning on video editing. Barry, we miss you!

We have been in Alabama since Sunday and the course focus has been on Civil Rights issues and history. This morning, after we spend the morning at the South Poverty Law Center, we will get back on the bus for a 7 hour ride to New Iberia, LA. We will spend the next four days there in our service project, helping with the reconstruction of a diner damaged by Katrina and subsequent storms.

Thus far, we are totally impressed with the student engagement with the coursework. The students are sharp and enjoy initiating discussions on the wide range of issues that have been introduced in the first few days. On the first day, a spirited discussion was interrupted by a lunch stop. After we started back on the road, the students asked to resume the interchange and continue exploring the topic. As Lynn can attest to from last trip, usually, post-lunch riding was a prime time for an afternoon nap!

We invite you to keep an eye on our facebook page and see the activities that take place as the trip evolves.

Poster Sessions

Saturday’s ACRL was chock-full of opportunities for learning and networking. I don’t think any of us have mentioned that the “gate count” for the conference was 2841 face-to-face attendees and a minimum of 332 virtual attendees for a new record. So, the Convention Center was bustling all day long. As Lynn intimated in her post, Saturday seemed to have the most concurrent sessions of contributed papers, panel sessions, wrokshops, and Cyber Zed Shed presentations going from 8 am until the close at 5 pm. With round table discussions and poster session nestled in between, so that there was always something to attend! It was hard to decide which to choose.

I was very impressed with how they handled the poster sessions for this conference. At many conferences, they seem to stick poster sessions in a back corner (I remember one ALA were people were stationed right next to the restrooms). But as you can see from the picture above, ACRL 2009 poster sessions had the most beautiful space in the conference. And the space was adjacent to the exhibit area. They held 2 rounds of poster sessions on Friday and 3 on Saturday. These were scheduled to be competition free, meaning that everyone came in to visit vendor booths, talk to poster presenters and have their conference-provided morning/afternoon snacks. It worked out very well and gave a good level of energy to the activities taking place. Some of the poster topics that caught my attention were: Library Secrets: Packaging Tips and Tricks into Bite Size Pieces for the Hard to Pin-Down Student, LEAP to New Heights,-How your Organization can Inspire your Employees to take the Next Jump in their Careers, Rewarding Scholarship through the Library Research Reward for Undergraduates, and Exploring Effective Typography: Extending our Outreach Through Successful Signage.

I attended an interesting session first thing yesterday morning on “Using READ Scale (Reference Effort Assessment Data): Capturing Qualitative Statistics for meaningful Reference Assessment.” READ is a 6 point scale tool developed to provide more meaningful reference transaction statistical information. With this tool, every question asked is not a simple hash mark on the tally page. Instead, questions are weighted on a scale from 1 to 6 so that the emphasis is placed on recording the skills, knowledge, techniques and tools utilized by the librarian during a reference transaction. “Where is the restroom?” may be a 1, where an hour spent helping a student discover primary resources to support a research paper might be a 5. Fourteen institutions participated in a study to research the viability of the tool and 3 of the participants reported on their experiences. All were very positive about the usefulness of the tool for a variety of reasons - helping with staffing, providing statistics for advocacy reasons, and providing a much more realistic picture of what is really happening with reference transactions these days - there may be less of them from walk up patrons, but they are becoming more in-depth in the form of individual research sessions that more often come in via virtual methods. It was an interesting concept that I’d like to see us explore.

Learning objects are a hot topic (Lauren’s Toolkit project is a prime example), so I enjoyed a presentation by former colleagues of Mary Beth’s from Wayne State. They instructed the audience on what learning objects are: an online resource or set of resources that has been developed to achieve a specific learning outcome and that has been developed in such a way that it is portable and can be reused in other learning environments. It needs to be topically focused and narrow in scope, it need to stand alone out of any contextual framework (like a specific vendor interface) and should include a “check for understanding.” They did a very capable job of introducing the audience to the value of these in supporting point of need instruction.

After a quick visit to the Seattle Public Library at lunchtime, my afternoon was filled with attending ZSR presentations. I wanted to attend everyone’s, and it was really wonderful to see how well all three presentations by Lauren P., Lynn and Roz were received by their audiences. I was the self appointed photographer (see below and my Flickr site.)

Lauren

Lynn

Roz

We finished up the day with a nice dinner out and an all-conference reception at the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum. The exhibits were very cool (remember Invasion of the Body Snatchers? How about the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman?). But, the real attraction can be seen in the picture below, where you can see us taking advantage of the huge assortment of desserts offered to all of the guests!

Overall, I thought this particular conference was very valuable with plenty of content that will provide us with much to think about. Too bad that today is the let-down day. I’m writing this sitting at the airport waiting for my flight that hopefully will get me back to Greensboro by 11:30 tonight. This is when I wish some of the stuff in the Science Fiction Museum was real: a transportation machine that would zip me back to W-S in the snap of a finger!

Today was a busy one, full of educational sessions, vendor meetings, and poster sessions. My day started with a breakfast session about “Leveraging the Institutional Repository to support the institution’s strategic mission.” An interesting resource that was mentioned during the presentation was ROAR: Registry of Open Asccess Repositories that monitors the growth of eprint archives (current total is 1295). Some have languished, some have thrived. The presentation content was not new, but reinforced the things we have learned thus far about how to improve the chances for a successful IR. The presenter was Richard Clement, Dean of Libraries, from Utah State. He talked about the importance for the mandate for an IR to come from the top down. If the Provost deems it to be a priority, it is much more likely that the deans will agree. It is helpful to bring in an outside expert to help make your case.

I met with my ALA Editions editor to talk about the “next generation” of my web-based instruction book. So much has changed since the last edition, it is time for a major update and perhaps time for other organizational changes, including placing some of the content on an accompanying web site. One thing for sure, it will be a busy summer since I’ve committed to getting the draft done by September.

Wanda and I attended a Counting Opinions users meeting over lunch. We’ve been beta testers for the a good part of the past year (have you seen the survey that is available from our main site home page?). The company has the product ready to offer to other institutions and wanted last minute feedback from the beta testing libraries.

I attended the afternoon round of poster sessions. It was a lively area, with lots of people attending. Topics were wide ranging: from writing grants, to information literacy, library partnerships, research commons and “exploring effective typography” (Mary Beth and Craig, I was thinking of you all during this one!).

The last session I made it to was a debate: “Resolved: the Master’s Degree in library science is Not Relevant to the Future of Academic Libraries. Arnold Hirshon took the affirmative (they are NOT relevant) and made 10 minutes of good point at a rapid clip. His reasons included that library school curriculum is devoid of content unique to libraries, that they lack good predictive admittance criteria and they are teaching the wrong things . The negative side was addressed by Liz Bishoff, and to be honest, her points were less than compelling. I almost felt sorry for her because she sounded like she didn’t really believe what she was saying……It seemed to be a slam-dunk for the Affirmative side.

After that, I let Roz talk me into supporting the Deacs by watching the WFU-Maryland game for the ACC tournament. She had done her research and we found a nearby sports bar with enough big screens that they let us turn on the game. Too bad the outcome of this activity was as disappointing as the library education debate

Touring Boehm’s Candy Factory

Roz, Mary Beth and Lynn have already covered the important highlights of day one at ACRL in Seattle.My pictures from yesterday show the day (in reverse): a fun, informative tour of outlying areas surrounding Seattle, including (in addition to chocolate, wine and waterfalls) floating bridges, a view of Bill Gates’ lakefront (Lake Washington) massive home, the spectacle of the Olympic and Cascades mountain ranges, the original Microsoft campus, University of Washington, and the Sleepless in Seattle houseboat.

The tour folks did get us back in plenty of time for the opening keynote address by Rushworth Kidder. Since he was a last minute replacement for the originally scheduled speaker, I had no expectation level going in. I turned out to be pleasantly surprised as his address (as detailed by the others already) was thoughtful and thought provoking. The one image that stayed with me was his description of his definition of moral courage which he described as being comprised of three components - in the framework of our favorite “and” illustrative tool - the Venn diagram. He defined moral courage as the intersection of willing endurance in spite of significant danger with principle as the overriding purpose.

By the end of the talk, I was picturing my day graphically, as two Venn Diagrams (pictured below!). Does this mean I am hopelessly an information literacy instructor through and through?

Components of the Perfect Conference Tour

Components of Moral Courage

I ended my day with a lovely dinner at a local restaurant, Oceanaire, as a guest of ProQuest/Serials Solution. I enjoyed having a chance to chat with Jane Burke, Marty Kahn (ProQuest CEO), Jim Rettig and colleagues from several institutions. I met an old ZSR Library staff member, Michael LaCroix, now director at Creighton University. He was the first Acquisitions librarian in the 70’s, and says to say “hi” to Wanda, Sharon and Renate, who he says will remember him.

Today was a long travel day to arrive in Seattle for tomorrow’s start of ACRL 2009. Mary Beth and I caught a 6:25 am flight from Greensboro and arrived at our hotel around 1 pm (western time) after 7 hours of flight time and a stop in Houston. Roz flew on a different airline and showed up mid afternoon. Since the conference doesn’t start until tomorrow afternoon, Roz and I took advantage of the beautiful, if cold, afternoon to ride to the top of the Space Needle and visit Pike Place. We ended up at the Convention Center to pick up our conference materials so we can plan out the next few days (which we are doing as I type). The conference is being touted as being their greenest one ever. The conference bags are made from recyled material and the opening reception tomorrow night will use bamboo plates and compostable silverware. Tomorrow morning all three of us will taking advantage of a social networking opportunity as we join up with other conference attendees to go on a tour. Tune in tomorrow to hear about the “Chocolate, Wine and Waterfall” tour!

A Cold Denver Night Scene

Sunday was a day full of meetings, presentations and networking for me that ran from 7:30 am to 11:00 pm (way past my usual bedtime!). Neither of my committees met, so I had the flexibility to pick and choose how to structure my day. The day was cold with snow flurries, which added a wintery dimension moving from location to location.

Last ALA, Lauren P. introduced me to the Alexander Street Press customer appreciation breakfast. Not only do they provide a good substantial meal, they also bring in an excellent speaker. It’s a popular function and this time there were about 550 attendees. The speaker was Pulitzer prize winner Art Spiegelman, a comic artist best known for his graphic novel Maus. In his talk, he was very passionate in advocating for the medium of comics as one that gives a full texture of experience. I am a unabashed daily comics reader, but have never really studied the art of comics. After listening to Mr Spiegelman talk about his art, I think I have found a new interest to dig into.

At ALA, there are always competing events, and LITA’s “Top Technology Trends” meeting began during the breakfast time slot. But Lauren and I were able to arrive in time to hear the final hour, which was when the panelists share their pick for the current top trends. I’m sure Lauren will give us a full report on the meeting, so I’ll leave the details for her! The technologies they used to chronicle the meeting was the most advanced to date, including a live blog.

Afterward, I met with my ALA Editions editor for preliminary discussion on perhaps doing a 3rd edition of my book (seems promising). I ran into our former colleague Emily Stambaugh and had an early lunch while we caught up on what we’ve been up to since she went west (4 years ago, how time flies). She’s now at the California Digital Library managing their shared print program.

For my afternoon session, I chose a discussion event: “Teaching 2.0: What are the Pedagogical Implications of Social Technologies?” It must be a hot topic, as over 200 people showed up to a room sized for about half that many. Each table discussed how 2.0 technologies inform our teaching in the framework of David Wiley’s changes in the world that compare then/now: analog-print/digital; closed/open; tethered/mobile; isolated/connected; generic/personal; consumption/participation. We concentrated on four “teaching 2.0″ qualities: openess, connectivity, personalization and participation. After talking and sharing, I came away with a good feeling about what we are doing with our IL program at ZSR. We seem to be ahead of the curve compared to other programs because of our instructors’ enthusiasm for exploring ways to incorporate active learning and participatory pedagogy with the 2.0 technologies.

I wrapped my day up with a series of social/networking events, a departure from my usual “one evening function” approach. I attended a reunion of Harvard Leadership Institute alumni which was hosted by ACRL. Then I headed out in the COLD night air (single digit) to meet Bill for dinner and good conversation. My final destination (again through the cold) was to an Elsevier reception where Lauren C. introduced me to many of her friends and colleagues from her ALA work and Emory days.

This morning I’ll wrap up my conference with one last meeting, then head off to the airport for the long trip home. All-in-all, I vote this a successful conference experience.

Lawrence Argent’s “I See What You Mean,” at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver.

This year I am on two committees and both met today. The first one started at 8 am, which wasn’t a problem since the 2 hours time difference had me wide awake by 4 am (MST). This was my new committee, LLAMA’s BES LIFE (Library Interiors, Furnishings and Equipment). The group of people on the committee seem very knowledgeable about renovations and repurposing of space. A few of the members are architects. (One of the other new members is a new colleague from UNCG, Mike Crumpton, who is working with our folks on the Entrepreneurial Conference. He had color flyers that he distributed). The major goal of this group is planning programming on LIFE topics for ALA Annual. There are three programs set for this summer in Chicago. But it isn’t simply a matter of deciding what program to do. The committee chair must present the program proposals to other ALA Conference Planning groups for approval a year in advance. So, we spent most of the morning brainstorming for ideas of programs to develop for ALA Annual in 2010. These will need to be formulated by this June for initial program proposal. I found it to be very fascinating to learn about the very formal process involved in putting together programs for ALA conferences.

After this initial meeting, I headed for the exhibits, where I looked up Bill at the Alibris booth. He and I concurred that it seems that attendance is down this time around. Then I ran into Elisabeth Leonard, and we caught up over coffee.

The early afternoon session I chose to attend was an Elsevier sponsored symposium on “New Gen Librarians: Who are They & What Do They Want?” The panelists were two fairly “new” librarians, a second-year library school student and Gary Strong, UCLA University Librarian. After each talked about their “story” for 5-10 minutes each, the audience held group discussions to come up with questions to pose to the panel. The questions covered such things as today’s library school curriculum and whether it prepares new librarians for the job market, the issues in management style for different generations of professionals, and how current practitioners can effectively recruit new librarians into our profession. Wanda also attended and asked a good question about how administrators can participate in the education process so that new graduates bring the skills that we need to the job. It was an interesting discussion that demonstrated to me that new and seasoned librarians aren’t actually on opposite ends of the spectrum in regard to their expectations and goals.

My second committee meeting was in the late afternoon. This is the LITA National Forum 2009 Planning Committee. With the conference scheduled for this fall, there is already a great deal accomplished and even more to be done.The committee has been making good progress through virtual means, but it was very helpful to have a face-to-face meeting to go over details and organize assignments for all the things that remain to be decided. The conference will be in Salt Lake City.

Today has been a long one, full of travel, a symposium, a happy hour and a lovely dinner. It’s time for ALA Midwinter once again. This time it’s being held in Denver, one of my favorite cities to visit. The day started with an early flight, designed to get me here in time to attend a symposium in the afternoon. It didn’t get off to a good start when I checked in my baggage (a $15 charge now), only to find out it was ONE LB. overweight. I either could pay a $50 surcharge OR remove a pound of stuff from the bag. So I removed one running shoe and had to carry it in my backpack all day. Is this what travel has come to?… Then the flight was delayed due to a fog delay in Atlanta, so I had to rush to catch my connection to Denver. But the flights were smooth, and even with the delay, I arrived at my downtown hotel by noon. By coincidence, I am in the same hotel that I stayed in at LITA 2007. It’s not the “conference hotel” but it’s convenient to the convention center and some sessions are being held here.

While I’m talking about coincidences…..When I arrived at PTI this morning, I discovered that Lauren C. was traveling on the same flights as I was. Lauren was kind enough to include me (and Sarah J.) in a dinner this evening with our Elsevier reps. As we headed out at the end of dinner, we discovered we are staying at the same hotel (keep in mind there are 14 different hotels you could be assigned to). As we arrived at the hotel, we discovered we are both on the 4th floor (there are 17 or 18 floors). As we got off the elevator, we discovered that we are two doors away from each other…….Small ALA world!

My main event for this first day was the OCLC Symposium that was held this afternoon. It was titled “From Linking to Thinking: How we’ll Live When Information Surrounds Us.” There were two dynamic speakers: David Weinberger (author of Everything is Miscellaneous) and Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks (which runs Twine.com) and Semantic Web pioneer. Themes included the evolution of the web to one of inconnections that result in an abundance of digitized data, the nature of metadata, the democratization of the Web, the move toward “good enough” data, the future (Web 3.0 (Semantic Web) and 4.0 (Intelligent Web)). It was a fascinating discussion which garnered spirited discussion between the speakers and the audience on the value of libraries and librarians in light of both Weinberger’s and Spivack’s vision that their preferred future will be one where everything will be digitized, freely available and will be easily accessible to everyone through technologies that will remove today’s search barriers through automated solutions. It was one of the most engaging sessions I’ve attended at ALA and was timely as they also discussed many of the technologies cited in the just released 2009 Horizon Report.

Following the symposium, I put on my social face and attended the LITA Happy Hour, followed by the dinner I mentioned earlier.

Tomorrow will start early with a meeting of my new committee assignment (to LLAMA’s BES Interiors, Furnishings and Equipment Committee. I can’t wait as yet I have no idea about what this committee’s charge is as it relates to any deliverables.

Last summer, ZSR Library staff started up a Journal Reading group and today was the final gathering of the fall semester. The idea was modeled along the lines of a book club, but with professional journal articles instead of books. Each month, a preselected article (chosen by a staff member) is read and then discussed and analyzed by all who attend the session. The group is open to all ZSR Library staff (librarian, exempt and non-exempt), and we hope to extend the invitation to the other WFU Libraries.

Each month, one of the group picks out the article for the next meeting. Everyone who attends that session reads the article and then spends an hour discussing the information and ideas presented in the article. Subjects covered during the first several months include:

• The Information Age and the Printing Press
• Academic Librarianship and the Digital Revolution
• Librarians and the Faculty in Discussion
• Why Professor Johnny Can’t Read: Understanding the Next Generation’s Texts
• Critical Thinking and Library Anxiety
• Library digitization Projects, Issues and Guidelines

There is a loyal group of “regulars” who make it a priority to attend each month to discuss issues important to our profession. As we head toward the new world of library faculty status, we know it is important to be conversant in the important issues of today’s academic library and higher education. This forum provides an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas and become acquainted with trends and areas outside one’s area of expertise.

We would love to have a higher level of participation, beyond the core of 5-8 staff who now attend. This semeter, the session was scheduled on Thursdays at 11:00 to have it held at a time where there were no class conflicts. We would love to receive feedback from others on staff about when might be a time that more staff would be able to regularly attend. We would also love feedback from those who don’t attend on how we can adapt the program so that more of the staff might find it a “must do” in their monthly schedule. Send your comments to Susan, Erik or Giz and we will work to adjust the program to make it more vital to a larger number of our staff. We know all of us have intriguing interests in our profession that would be documented in the literature, and believe that sharing and discussing these ideas would benefit us all.

LITA goes until noon on Sunday, and since the only return direct flight to Greensboro after the close of the conference isn’t until 7:25 pm this evening (sigh), I’ll spend the time before the shuttle comes to take me to the airport to wrap up.

This morning began at a breakfast of this year’s and next year’s LITA National Forum Planning Committee. There were lively discussions about what worked this time around and what could be done better or differently next year in Salt Lake City. Everyone agreed that this has been a successful Forum, but there are always new ideas generated and feedback received from attendees that can be considered to make the next conference even better.

Poster sessions were presented this morning during the breakfast hour. Most of the topics were about projects that are familiar topics at ZSR, so it was interesting to see how other institutions had approached things like viral marketing, open source applications (see Erik’s post), Google Analytics and using del.icio.us as bookmarks to create virtual reference.

There was one final round of concurrent sessions, so I attended “Illogical Students: don’t Blame ‘Em, Game ‘Em,” where librarian Marsh Spiegelman and mathematics professor Richard Glass from Nassau Community College shared their combined effort to incorporate information literacy into math/computer science courses. They were doing some interesting things with blogs, wikis and Second Life. Some of their ideas are shared in their wiki.

R. David Lankes, from the Information Institute of Syracuse and professor at the School of Information Studies, gave the final keynote presentation. His topic was “Obligation of Leadership.” He talked about the mentors in his life and what they taught him that applies to our profession:

• We can’t wait for leaders.
• We can’t wait for change.
• We must serve society through stewardship.

He was an inspiring speaker and was passionate as he urged the audience that “We can do better.”

Lankes believes:

• Knowledge is created through conversation.
• Libraries are in the Knowledge Business.
• Therefore, libraries are in the conversation business.

He sees librarianship as a noble profession, one where our power is not in the size of our collections, or forged by the items we catalog, but in our impact on the communities and societies we serve. And this power happens through our facilitation of the conversations taking place by our patrons and our communities.

It was a good send off after 3 days of interesting programs!