Professional Development

Good news for someone who checked out of her hotel and decided to drive into town this morning: street parking is available at 7:30 am on a Sunday and is free all day. My commute went from over an hour to 15 minutes this morning. A much more relaxed way to get an early start.

I decided to branch out from my usual comfort zone presentation and attended a session titled: “Why does my building project need an interior designer?” sponsored by LAMA. It was a panel discussion that included an architect, interior designer (not to be confused with an interior decorator), and two librarians - Donna Morris from the Oklahoma City Library system and Sarah Michalak, University Librarian and Associate Provost at UNC Chapel Hill.

Since our Environmental Scan effort and the Blue Sky group’s building recommendation, “Library as Place” has caught my attention. Renovation and building is an area that I don’t know a lot about, but that I find very intriguing. The session was a lively discussion of what interior design professionals can bring to a major project, from helping with the initial “building project document”, to analyzing client needs and goals, formulating conceptual design and design development, acting as the client’s agent for contract administration, the list went on and on.

The point that was really hammered is that it is very important to have someone who is a professional designer in on the project from the very beginning and that not all architectual firms have a design department. For a big project, you want this type of expertise as early as when the preliminary schematics are created, including preliminary furniture placement proposals for the purpose of planning lighting, electricity and other space use needs (was there a designer when the atrium and Wilson Wing were built?).

Now, back to my comfort zone, I’m heading to a session on Sakai collaborative open source software!

Change, serendipity…that’s what ALA is all about. Choosing from the dozens of programs available, I finally decided to go hear Khaled Hosseini, author of the The Kite Runner (required reading for all Americans) and the new A Thousand Splendid Suns at the Convention Center.After standing in line for about 10 minutes, word spread through the line that Hosseini had canceled and Patricia Cornwell was taking his place. Aargh, so half the line evaporated to go onto their second choice. For me, that meant that I could get to my ACRL/ULS/Communications Committee meeting on time, instead of late. On the way, I ran into my colleague, Jeff Trzeciak, who used to work with me at Wayne and is now the University Librarian at McMaster University in Canada, and also served as our Digital Forsyth consultant a couple of years ago. The Committee meeting itself was pretty dry, as the outgoing members (like me) were anxious to pass off business to the enthusiastic new members. Ironically, they talked about discontinuing their traditional newsletter in favor of a blog (sound familiar to GAZ followers?)

In the afternoon, I attended Janice Simmons-Welburn’s ACRL/ULS President’s Program on “Leadership or Management: Which is it?” Janice is a colleague from ULG as Dean of Libraries at Marquette University. Panelists included Dr. Julie Todaro from Austin Community College, Karen Williams from the University of Minnesota and Adam Benitez, an absolutely charming recent library school graduate who was President of the Library Support Staff Association. This was an interesting topic to me, as a graduate of a Education Leadership and Policy Studies program who wants to believe I have grown up from being a manager into a leader. Julie Todaro, who is also ACRL President-Elect gave a very useful discussion of how both sets of skills are needed in an organization, though not necessarily in the same person.

My last session of the day was “The Google Five Libraries: Two Years, Six Months and Seven Days in the Life of the Google Library Project. (I got there early so I got a seat by an outlet, just ahead of the view in Susan’s blog picture) I am one of those librarians who believe the world changed on December 14, 2004 when Google announced its original library project. I received a message at 12:51 am from one of my former colleagues Wayne State, then living in California, who read it on the New York Times website. The fact that my alma mater, The University of Michigan, was one of the five libraries and the only one with the goal of digitizing the entire library collection of 7 million volumes filled me with great pride. I remembered a three margarita lunch I had had in the summer of 2003 with the collection development officer at UM, who said he wished he could tell me about a project Google was talking about but if he did, he would have to kill me!

The goal of the Google Book Search project is to make it as easy to search content of books as it is to search web pages. The content may currently be divided into three categories:

• Out-of-copyright books - full text available
• Publisher partner books - up to 20% of the book viewable as a preview to purchase
• In-copyright books - only a “snippet” of text available

The participants talked about the progress of the original five libraries (Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, New York Public Library) in their mass digitization efforts. Though none would say exactly how many volumes had been digitized, responses ranged from the “thousands” at Oxford University to just short of 2.5 million at Michigan. All participants said Google had been an ultra-cooperative partner, gaining new respect for bibliographic complexities and being sensitive to preservation issues. As the information inside digitized books becomes discoverable to the world through Google, all libraries are fielding more reference and interlibrary loan requests for them (even though they were theoretically available through the library catalog for decades).

To end the night, I went with the Alibris crowd (from left, Renee, Shelley, Jack, Mary Lou, and Bill) to the Spectrum Scholarship bash to see Mark Russell and the Capital Steps. They were hilarious, as usual, especially if you were a “radical, militant librarian” as was most of the crowd. I had seen virtually the same show, with a few names changed in 1980 when I came to Washington for the Medical Library Association conference. Still funny. On the way home, Bill left his cell phone in the cab but the cabbie kindly answered it when he called and brought it back to our hotel 30 minutes later. Whew!

The majority of the afternoon was spent in my committee meeting. The Instructional Technologies Committee produced two “Tips and Trends” pieces since ALA Midwinter: one on YouTube and one on Whiteboards. We designed a new “template” for doing these pieces - coming up with the section designations was one of my assignments. Designating specific discussion points for each technology discussed was done in in effort to standardize the presentation both for type of information to be conveyed and to insure consistency. I would give you a link to see our efforts, but they just were approved by the IS Executive Board so have not been officially posted to the site. Look for them soon on InfoTech Tips and Trends. I also updated “Tips for Developing Effective Web-Based Library Instruction” but it too just was officially approved and is not yet live! The ACRL web site has not yet adopted a policy of “radical trust” from its section authors :-); everything has to be reviewed by the executive board and approved before posting…..

I planned to hoof it one more time to another hotel to see the session on the Google Five Libraries. But the walk took long enough that I was a bit late and there wasn’t even any floor space to squeeze in to. It must be some hot topic as you can see from the SRO overflow.

Standing Room Only at the Google Five

I tried to sit outside in the hall and listen but it was just not very conducive to maintaining my attention span, so I gave up and plodded (my feet were wearing out) back to the Convention Center to do my alternate plan: the exhibits. I was sidetracked by two hanging art works in the center’s halls that spoke to me (they were saying “why in the world are you in this place on a beautiful Saturday afternoon??? When you could be either kayaking or biking!!!). The public art in the new (2004) convention center is very impressive. I did a little research on it and found that  it is a $4 million dollar art collection with 137 pieces that include suspended sculptures, oil paintings and photographs created by 93 artists from the Washington, DC area as well as from around the world.

Sculptures

The exhibit hall seemed bigger than ever, especially with the overhead view of the entire hall. I do much better if I have a mission at the hall, some vendor I need to talk with, or a new product to test out. But nobody from ZSR had tasked me and I ended up wandering up and down aisles for the 20 minutes that remained before they closed down.

Exhibit Hall

A nice unexpected bonus of my meanderings was that I met up with an old friend, colleague and mentor, Pat Ryckman. Pat encouraged me when I was a volunteer for her at PLCMC during my library school days, gave me my first big professional break in the Carolina Room there, and then set me on my current course when she turned me on to technology by appointing me the supervisor for the Virtual Library there. The rest is history. Pat’s been a great friend and it was wonderful to have a chance to catch up with her today. That’s one of the little perks of attending ALA, you often get to reconnect with people who’ve been important in your professional life.

Saturday General Session

I tried to be a trooper and attend the 5:30 General Session where Bill Bradley was scheduled to speak. I had hit the wall, so to speak, it’s been a tiring day. I lasted through 45 minutes of awards and speeches, all to worthy recipients. But, at 6:15, when the keynote was scheduled to start and some other speaker, who was NOT Bradley got up and started talking, I only lasted 15 more minutes and then I realized my feet were standing up and walking out the door. There was nothing I could do to stop them. They kept on keeping on til they got me on the Metro, through the Crystal City alleyways and back to my room. (I think I heard Bradley finally being introduced as I headed down the escalator…..).

I’ll bet Lauren and Sarah’s youth kept them going much longer today than I was able to do. But it was a very productive day and after a good night’s rest, I’ll be ready to enjoy another conference filled day.

I had a very early start this morning. I delivered Ron to my sister’s place in Springfield, got to hug my granddaughter (who is coincidentally up north to meet relatives this weekend), rushed back, caught the yellow-line Metro and was only 10 minutes late for my first session: Leading Technology-Driven Change: Theory & Practice. You can see from this picture what happens when you show up late to a popular session:

View from the Floor

The speakers talked about their individual approaches to using leadership to guide change. They were: Joyce Ogburn from University of Utah, Felton Thomas, Jr. from Las Vegas-Clark Co. Libraries and Kathryn Deiss, Content Strategist from ACRL. I’m just going to list a few jewels (IMHO) from their talks, which were all quite informative and inspiring.

Ogburn:

• Universities are “untidy organizations” that operate on “delayed confounded feedback.”
• A quote from Patricia Battin: “Past strengths will become our liabilities.”
• Effective leadership’s challenge is to enhance your mission rather than the mission being defined by the technology.

Thomas:

• He quoted our old friend David Seaman on our profession not exactly being agents of change: “We’re moving the profession one funeral at a time.”
• On leaders carrying the burden of change: “It’s like going hunting and carrying the dog.”
• He is a big proponent of scenario building and did this for their “Model Efficiencies & Emerging Technologies (MEET)” project to maximize service efficiencies via RFID self-checkout and automated materials handling.

Deiss:

• Change is about 2 things: managing the action and managing the emotions that come with the action.
• From David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous: We all have a need to categorize (not just librarians!). The old model is “everything has its place.” With the explosion of technology, this has become “everything has every place.” The goal needs to be how to deal with this change and imagine new ways to structure ourselves and our services to reflect this new reality.
• On “choice overload”: in the presence of too many choices, most people will choose nothing, like a deer in the headlights. People are stunned by the extraordinary possibilities of too many choices. A leader’s role is to get people to focus on what they need to see rather than being paralyzed by seeing too many things.

I could go on, as I thought there was much offered in this session to think about, so if this topic interests you, let’s get together when I return and talk about it more in depth! (Sticking to my goal of not having my readers’ eyes glaze over from too much text).

Session Two

Erik steered me to this one which was several long blocks away at another hotel. And do you know that when deciphering the street names in program map without reading glasses, H Street looks just like M Street? Anyway, I finally made it (on time). The session was given by OCLC about their new WorldCat Local project, their new “discovery to delivery” service. OCLC is working with several libraries (U of Washington, Peninsula library system, State of Illinois, Ohio State University) to test a version of OpenWorldCat that is customizable by libraries and integrates with their ILS to reflect holdings, availability and includes keyword searching of library holdings, databases with OpenURL link resolution for fulltext access, access to local collections (currently CONTENT dm, but soon, Dspace). This was an exciting presentation to see as it’s what Erik’s been envisioning for some time. Their initial pilot partner, University of Washington, has it up and running (since 4/30). What I like is that it is attempting to provide a service that users have been asking for, one without silos, that gets them to their materials no matter where those are. It looks promising so far.

After this session, I had to hoof it to a third location many blocks away, so I consulted my map again (this time with my glasses on) and found I could stroll past the White House on the way. My White House experience changed my negative attitude toward the spread out nature of this conference, because I wandered into an adventure when I got there. It turns out a group was holding a protest. It was complete with cordoned off streets, mounted police, bullhorns, snipers on the White House roof and a batch of well behaved protesters against torture from the organization Tassc International. I lived in this area for my first 30 years and this was my first D.C. protest experience. Well worth the side trip!

Protest at the White House

OK, I’ll stop here and will report on the afternoon’s activities later. I’ve exceeded my self-imposed word length blog posting limit……

Okay, is it saying something when a shy person says the best part of her day was spent in the exhibit hall?

Today I had my first interest group meeting as a co-chair. We had had some drama setting up the meeting of the Distance Learning Interest Group, thought we had fixed the issue, then today found there was no room for us. Our attendance really suffered, but it was still a productive meeting. We have big plans, so let’s hope we’re listed in the program and have a room next conference! I blogged the session for LITA, so you can read about it there.

After that, I grabbed my vegan friendly lunch of french fries & headed for the exhibit hall. I typically feel pretty uncomfortable there, but I am helping staff the Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship booth there.

Lots of people came by with questions or seemed interested, so I think my time was well spent. It was also relaxing: in between visitors there was time to check email, post a few pictures, and spend a few hours without my bag on my shoulder. I’ll be there a bunch over the coming days, so if ZSR folks are around, feel free to stop by. Really, there’s about a 50% chance I’ll be there! It’s booth 745.

Now I’m off to the WSS general membership meeting. This is where you find out the scoop on what’s going on in the area of Women and Gender Studies librarianship. I’ve been having really good talks with the WGS department at WFU, so it’ll be useful to see if folks at other places are doing some of the things we’re thinking about. I don’t have anything scheduled after that, so I’m planning on a walk past some famous monuments, a bite to eat, and the crazy commute home.

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.

This is where we really got down to the nitty-gritty of LITA Interest Groups. IGs are to LITA what committees are to ACRL. The difference is that you can just show up to an interest group and participate. To join a committee on ACRL you need to go through an appointment process.

This was much more technical, with discussions of IG renewals, program planning, and general policies. I won’t go on about that here, but if you’re dying to know about the inner workings of LITA programming, I’d be happy to chat!

I am the incoming co-chair for the LITA Distance Learning Interest Group. I know, I know… you’re asking, “why would you be involved with Distance Learning when we don’t do it at WFU?” Really, the DLIG focuses on using technology to reach students on and off campus and how to use technology in education, so it’s a perfect fit.

Since I’m coming into this role, I attended the Joint Committee and Interest Groups Chairs Meeting for the first time. It’s a little intimidating to be surrounded by so many LITA leaders! It’s neat, though, to see the faces behind the names of the people you see writing or mentioned in blogs and articles.

Facts that may be of interest to folks at ZSR:

• LITA’s grown by about 5% in the last year, primarily in students. This makes me wonder: what does this mean about our pool of potential employees in the future? What percentage of students are joining LITA?
• There was a discussion of a web based conference program proposal. Interesting discussion on how other divisions are doing technology programming too, sometimes at conflicting times with LITA. We see this blurring of lines in many of areas of the field, and LITA is struggling with this issue, too.
• LITA is moving to a new CMS; the entire ALA site will be converted, too. Followed by typical discussion of the flaws with the ALA website.
• LITA blogs the LITA sessions, a lot like how we blog our professional development opportunities in-house. They’ve added video and audio, too!

Well, the ALA adventure began badly when our direct flight from Greensboro was CANCELED and Bill and I (along with Sarah) were re-routed through Charlotte (nothing like flying southwest to go northeast) before arriving several hours late. That meant Bill had to scramble to set up the Alibris booth at the convention center and I missed my afternoon program.

Things looked up, however, when I ran into Debbie Nolan at registration. She is busy with her library at Towson and sends her love to everyone. I had a chance to catch her up on all the gossip regarding the dress code, the new reporting relationship, etc. It was good to see her!

My one official function on Friday was to meet my E.J. Josey Spectrum Scholar mentee, Alma Ramos-McDermott, who is a library school student at Simmons College in Boston. She was a school teacher in Brooklyn for 21 years before meeting her husband (they are both runners and met at a race) and moving to Boston, where she enrolled in library school and was named a Spectrum scholar. We were matched in a mentor-mentee relationship and met for the first time at this reception. Alma would like to be an elementary school media specialist but the market for those jobs is tough in Boston (and elsewhere) due to tight funding. I invited her to visit Wake Forest if she wanted to see what it was like in an academic library.

For dinner, Bill and I met my old friend Toni Garvey. You will remember that Toni was the 2004 LJ Librarian of the Year and also the friend who convinced me to walk the 3-Day for breast cancer last November in Phoenix. Toni and I went to high school together and both became librarians so we get to meet up at ALA twice a year.

That’s it for now. Saturday is always the busiest day at ALA so I’ll report back later. (Susan, aren’t you proud of me for the photo and links? So it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks…) Lynn