Professional Development

The second session I attended this morning was a demonstration of Primo by ExLibris. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is a new resource discovery and delivery product that is coming to the market. Its competition includes AquaBrowser and Grokker. Its purpose is to provide an interface that incorporates the varied information users want to see and provide a way for them to participate through comments and reviews.

Two development partners also gave presentations on their experiences and progress in the partnership. One is University of Minnesota Libraries which is an Aleph site, and the second was Vanderbilt, which is a Unicorn site. Both are satisfied with the development so far, however, the product is not in production yet. ExLibris is starting to program a pipe for Voyager.

I won’t bore you all with the product details, but you can be sure we’ll be taking a closer look at it and other products as well as open source possibilities to improve the way our patrons find, access and use our resources.

I got off to an earlier business start today with an 8 am meeting to listen to the LITA’s Top Technology Trends Committee meeting. At each ALA conference, several technology experts gather to predict the most important technology trends in the current library environment. Four of the current experts (Clifford Lynch, Marshall Breeding, Karen Schneider and Andrew Pace) were on hand to discuss their opinions on which technologies are the ones to watch; the committee chair read several for those who were unable to attend. Their predictions are also posted on the LITA blog. It was a lively discussion with some expected overlap on the really “hot” trends and some individual votes for others.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the big trends include the next generation ILS (presentation to users vs. back end functionality), mass digitization issues (how to present and manage the content of millions of digitized objects), mobile technology, social networking, shareable web, vendor consolidation and open source.

Some other interesting trends were: the roles of libraries in data (or digital) curation, object reuse repositories, the potential value in such interactive environments as Second Life, the rise and value of personal catalogs and ubiquitous networking (a future without software locally loaded on computers, everything becomes web-based).

There was lively discussion on open source ILS vs. vendor supplied. Most agreed that open source is not less costly over time. If you save $$ up front, you will spend them later in cost of development and maintenance. It’s a matter of deciding how you want to allocate your available resources.

Another interesting exchange concerned the observation that libraries are jumping on the bandwagon to reach out to where their customers go on the web (think Facebook, Flickr, My Space). Clifford Lynch cautioned that libraries should think clearly about what they hope to achieve by establishing presences in these environments. An example that was tossed out: if your patrons all hang out in a bar, do you really want to set up a library kiosk there? Another panelist talked about students who found it creepy when their professors turned up in My Space! In other words, have a goal for what you want to accomplish in your web outreach efforts and some indication that your users will be glad to see you there.

After the breakfast I attended my WSS instruction committee meeting. It looks good.  I was successful in arguing that we don’t need a blog or wiki for internal communication.  We’re going to focus our energy this semester on rewriting the Information Literacy Standards with a WSS focus for WSS librarians and faculty.  My role in this will be to facilitate collaboration through a wiki platform. We have several other projects going on, but this will be the main one.

After that I attended a Readex Focus Group.  They’re doing some really interesting stuff, and thinking very creatively about how information, technology, and communication are changing.  Someone from UNC-Ch was there, too.

I haven’t eaten yet… so that’s next on the agenda!

Today I attended my first breakfast with Alexander Street Press, and it was amazing.

First: I love ASP.  I think they offer a lot of interesting and innovative products in interesting and emerging fields, so I feel they are future minded.  This became more evident as they discussed the evolution of a new architecture for some of their databases using Web 2.0 and community into their databases.  This architecture allows for more immediate updating, handles external searches, has cross-search abilities, allows peer and student interaction through playlists, feature releases, OpenURLs, permanent URLs, tag clouds, folksonomy, and RSS.  They’re also doing some really innovative things, allowing collaboration across different media databases.  For example, you can pull together text, a score of music, and a recording of music into one place. If you stumble across one of their pages from an internet search, it has a real “Amazon.com” feel to it.  These databases can be an endpoint of a search (after using a search engine) as well as a starting point (from a library website).

Second: Angela Davis was the amazing speaker.  She started her talk explaining the importance of the library to her as a child, but that the libraries in her community were segregated.  She then talked about her use of a library as a scholar.  She remembers spending lots of time hunting down journals and making photocopies, but now, like a lot of us, primarily uses databases.  She misses the tangibility of books and paper, but also sees value in the ease of finding information today.  She continued on to talk about legacies and the importance of realizing that for every “leader” there is a community doing a lot of work to make change happen.  I talk more about that over at the COSWL Cause.  She considers her life work to be what she is doing around prison issues and emphasized the importance of educational opportunities for those in prison. She also posed an interesting question: how do you imagine a self-abolishing academic field? (For example, the field “critical prison studies” focuses on problems with prisons; if they are successful there won’t be prisons, so there can’t then be a “critical prison studies.”)  Overall, her talk emphasized the importance of community work towards change and the need to be critical of people’s current stances regardless of the stances they’ve made in the past.

In my experience, Saturday is almost always the busiest day of any ALA Conference. The cab driver on the way in from the airport asked why librarians had their conferences over the weekend because most other professional groups start on Monday. Good question. In any case, I found myself with three things I wanted/needed to attend in the Saturday 10:30-12:30 time slot. My committee obligation won out, so I attended the ACRL/University Libraries Section/Communication Committee and conducted the normal business on the ULS website, newsletter and brochure. That got out a little early, so I dashed over to the MARS program on “The Next Evolution in OPAC’s and Search Engines” just in time to hear the presentation on EBSCO’s implementation of Grokker, but not in time to hear what I really wanted to hear about Endeca and Aquabrowser. I saw the back of Susan’s head at the program but had to duck out in time to meet my lunch partners – three public librarians from Phoenix who did the 3 Day Walk with me last November. On the advice of the hotel concierge, we went to Wild Ginger, a lovely Asian fusion kind of restaurant, sort of along the lines of Xia in Winston (which if you haven’t gone to yet, you need to). After lunch they were all going shopping (where is your work ethic? I teased) but I went back to a Google presentation from 1:30-3:30. I love Google; can’t help it. The staff are all so fresh and idealistic, ya gotta love ‘em. A lot of things I already knew about Google Scholar and Google Book Search and Google Earth, but I learned some new things too, especially Google Co-op, which I had never heard of and is kind of a conservative wiki-type enhancement to Googling. UT-Austin was just announced yesterday as the latest Google Book Search partner, mostly to add the strength of their Hispanic collections. I made lots of notes to ask various people about on my return. At 3:30 I needed to attend a meeting on SOLINET business and that ran late until almost 6:00 so I had to miss the SPARC program on scholarly communications that I wanted to attend. Bill and I had a dinner date at 7:00 pm with his new boss’s boss, in the midst of which I heard from my brother that he couldn’t find or reach our mother who was visiting in Florida (looooong story I won’t bore you with on the blog) but finally when we got back to the hotel he had talked to her and all was well. That was the end of a long day.

Endeavor customers were invited to attend this meeting last evening with the EndUser Board and ExLibris Management. The late hour of the meeting may have affected the attendance because only about 20 of us showed up (in addition to the meeting participants). It was scheduled to go for an hour and a half. An hour and 10 minutes into the meeting, introductions were finally completed. We heard from each ExLibris person about their role in the new organization. As you might expect, it was all very upbeat and positive. Of the 20 minutes left to cover the actual agenda, 18 were devoted to sharing information about the forthcoming 2007 EndUser Conference plans (75 sessions planned and since Voyager is the only product left, it will be interested to see what those sessions are about), and an overview of the plans to move both Voyager and Aleph forward. There will be a Voyager 7.0 upgrade. They are still sticking with the WebVoyage for the short term…..

Finally, at 8:28, “product issues” came up on the agenda. I finally had a chance to ask about continued support and the upgrade future for EnCompass  (was supposed to be Curator by now) and Meridian. I was able to get confirmation that sites that have not been upgraded to Curator won’t be. This is something we have been trying mightily to find out about since we are in the middle of Digital Forsyth and have a new EnCompass server that we were planning to do a fresh install of Curator on instead of migrating the old version. Meridian will have one more upgrade to 2.0, but nobody was talking about what it entails. They focused on the need for us “legacy” customers to start communications with ExLibris to map out migration plans.

We’ll have alot to discuss on how to move forward once we all get back to campus….

As it turns out, the ACRL Board is looking at the whole structure of the division and has asked the Bylaws Committee to do a complete review of the division’s Bylaws. We will be meeting virtually this spring and aim to have a draft for review by the first of May.

The EPA staffers tried to be reassuring by saying that they have only closed three regional libraries based on low circulation and gate-count figures. The materials from these collections have been used for a large digitization project and to fill in the physical collections at other regional libraries. The staffers in these regions still have access to librarians in other regions and the public has access to the digital collection. Here’s a blog post at FGI that gives several other views of the meeting.
Judy Russell, Superintendent of Documents, reported preliminary results of a web harvesting project. GPO has worked with two vendors to scrape material from the EPA website.. Major issues to be considered include wether the material is “in scope” for the depository program and what should be cataloged are major issues. The FDTP also discussed the state of our website (which was lost during the move from a Sunsite server at UC Berkeley to the ALA server). We also talked about the possibilities of a GODORT pre-conference on elections material for ALA Anaheim.

After a day of committee meetings, it was time for me to play a little. Not being a coffee drinker, the Starbucks on every corner is no draw for me. However, the Nordstrom mother ship is a block away from my hotel. If the Seattle economy has needed a little boost, I certainly helped today, although I did restrain myself to two pairs of shoes. (I’ve been know to buy many more during a spree at Nordstrom’s!)

My first session of the day was a panel presentation titled “Not your Dad’s Interface: Next Generation OPACs and Search Engines.” Our old friends from NCSU were there to talk about their Endeca project. King County Public Library System presented on their implementation of AquaBrowser. AquaBrowser is a stand-alone product that supposedly is ILS independent (this library has III). Try a search of their catalog and see the visual map that appears. The next speaker, Jody Fagen from James Madison University, presented on a usability study she conducted on students’ use of EBSCOhost’s Visual search interface that is powered by Grokker. The final speaker talked about her library’s (Binghampton University) current implementation of Grokker to search their Aleph system. It certainly appears that these applications are the wave of the public OPAC interface future. Remember, I mentioned ExLibris’s new product, Primo, that is another entry into this market. Patrons’ response to these libraries’ new faceted searchability has been very positive.

After lunch, it was time for my first committee meeting. We were scheduled to meet today and again tomorrow afternoon. Our group was so productive, we finished both meetings’ agendas today. The purpose of my committee is to produce Info Tech Tips and Tricks . Until this year, the committee was larger and also dealt with producing Primo, a database of online library instruction efforts. It was divided into two separate groups, and my group is charged with annually picking 4 new technologies that have importance or potential in library instruction and writing about them. We are working on standardizing the effort, publicizing it so they might actually be used, and producing it in an effective format. In addition, our group was given a few other existing documents to update, so I’ve been charged with updating Tips for Developing Effective Web-Based Library Instruction.

We even finished early, leaving me time to dart across town several blocks to catch the discussion group on digital gaming in library instruction. It turned out to be a session where people verbalized concerns and then broke into groups to discuss them. I stuck it out for awhile, but I went looking for some answers and I think what I learned is that the library community is just starting to explore gaming as a potential instruction tool. Other disciplines are much further along and we should turn to them rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

Now, I’m off to a EndUser meeting where old Endeavor sites (that’s us) will have a chance to hear the top ExLibris management. I was all gung ho until I looked at the meeting location information and the location has the hotel but the room number is “TBA”. Ah, I hope it’s not a rerun of Endeavor efficiency…..

I ended up making two separate trips to the library because the building is so big, I couldn’t do it justice in just one visit. It is very impressive simply because of its massiveness. The interior design theme was carried out throughout, but to me it was a very stark futuristic industrial look. The furniture didn’t say ” sink down in me and stay awhile”, but maybe that’s on purpose! Every level (and there are 10 public levels) had plenty of patrons. The computer bank on the 4th floor was extensive and more than half of the computers were in use by noon. One of the most curious things was the “spiral walk” that you could follow from floor to floor to access the stacks. I had taken the escalators to the top floor to find out that they went just one way. The only way out was down the spiral path or by elevator. I took a load of pictures, will just put a few here and if you are interested in seeing more click on one of the images to go to my flickr account where the rest reside.

The exterior of the Seattle Public Library A view of the second floor “living room” The 4th floor is called the “Mixing Chamber” This is one of the public reading areas

My last meeting of the day was the Women’s Studies Section general membership meeting. This is really a chance to share what’s going on at different institutions, in the WSS committees, and the work that is going on towards the annual program. This year’s annual program will be about technologies in instruction and next year’s program will be the 25th anniversary of the section.

One thing that repeatedly strikes me at WSS meetings is that they are so open to new members and happy to get new people involved. Some parts of ALA seem nearly impossible to get involved with, but this isn’t the case with WSS. I’m not sure how many of the sections are like that, though, since this is the only one I’m involved with.

Tomorrow we have our committee meetings. This is where I’ll meet with the instruction committee and make a few arguments about why a blog and a wiki might not be right for us.