Professional Development

Carolyn and I presented a poster session titled “Utilizing ILL Deflection to Improve Workflow” on Thursday, October 18. Many fellow librarians stopped by and inquired about the new OCLC ILL deflection feature.

As an ILL lender, we receive requests for all types of materials. Popular movies and TV series, such as 24 and Sex and the City are among the most requested titles. Due to the high demand in house, these requests are routinely canceled.

I approached Carolyn after I learned the details for the ILL deflection at the ILLiad conference this March. I wanted to deflect some selected titles, so the ILL staff doesn’t have to spend time to say “no” to requests, such as “Yellow Rolls-Royce”, which only four libraries show holding in WorldCat.

I wasn’t familiar with the web Connextion for Cataloging and I didn’t understand some of the fields in the MARC record. Carolyn was very helpful, and together we came up with a procedure to deflect titles we will not loan through ILL.

With ILL deflection, we are able to deflect those titles, so we will no longer receive those requests. They will automatically move down to the next lender. This lowers the turnaround time and borrowers can deliver materials to their patrons faster. We, on the other hand can spend more time on other requests, which improves our workflow.

The ILL department works closely with the Cataloging department, because ILL staff is probably one of the heaviest users of the catalog. We often bring questionable cataloging records to the Cataloging staff for updates. So, it is particularly rewarding to collaborate with Carolyn on this presentation. We had fun putting it together.

As a current LIS student taking Library Administration and Management, I thought it would be beneficial to attend the afternoon session Managing Multiple Generations in the Workplace. Lynn Unsworth, of Capital Associated Industries, Inc. (based in Raleigh, NC) lead the workshop “Four Generations Working Together”, which identified the varying characteristics among the diverse pool of professionals in today’s work environment.

Unsworth highlighted the following work styles and values of each generation:

Traditionalists (born between 1925-1942)

• Loyalty
• Dedication, hard work
• Respectful of rules and authority
• Conservative
• value tradition

Baby Boomers (born between 1943-1960)

• Work is a priority
• Optimistic
• Competitive
• Value meaning
• Strong professional networks

Generation X (born between 1961-1981)

• Self-Reliance
• Desire flexibility
• Skpticism
• Technology
• Informal
• Value balance of work and life

Generation Y (born between 1982-2002)

• Fast paced (multitasking/multimedia)
• Tenacity/Directness
• Entrepreneurial
• Global diversity
• Technologically savvy
• Value fun

In order to merge these varying characteristics, values, and work ethics to create a productive and positive work environment, Unsworth proposed taking “The M.E.E.T. Approach.” The MEET Approach will help with the multigeneralional workforce but improving teamwork, productivity, and customer satisfaction through communications, conflict resolution, and problem solving.

M-Make time to discuss (Do you have a minute? Can we talk for a few minutes in private?)

E-Explore difference (This is important because…The way I look at this is…)
E-Encourage respect (I’ve had a similar experience…I really appreciate the way you…)

T-Take responsibility (How about we agree to…I’ll try to…I’m glad we talked.)

Finally, since much of this session brought my class readings to light, the two most important statements I took away from this session were

• the way others perceive us is often different from the way we perceive ourselves
• Organizations must turn diversity into a strength and become fluid and flexible to meet marketplace demands

This year’s President’s Endowment Dinner was held at the Lake Hickory Country Club and sponsored by Solinet and Webfeat. All funds raised from the dinner admission goes to the NCLA Endowment fund in efforts to fund future NCLA events and conferences. As a guest at the Webfeat table I was able to discuss the functionality and capabilities of the federated search engine among fellow library professionals. We also had an opportunity to discuss opportunities for improvement for current functionality and possible upgrade features for future versions of Webfeat.

The evening’s main event was a musical cabaret by EbzB Productions entitled WAR BONDS: The Songs and Letters of World War II. The two-hour production incorporated popular tunes from the late 1930s to mid 1940s, including Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, I’ll Be Seeing You, and As Time Goes By. In between musical numbers (and an appearance from Marlene Dietrich), the performers read actual letters from U. S. servicemen, women, Churchill, and Roosevelt. The letters, along with the deeper meanings of the song lyrics, highlighted the intensity of society and the world at that time. As a student of History, I was greatly appreciative for the opportunity to experience this event.

WAR BONDS has recently finished taping their production to air on UNC-TV and a scaled-down version will be included in a forthcoming documentary by Ken Burns entitled THE WAR. The UNC-TV version is set to air this coming December (but word at the conference said it may be in January 2008).

I spent the day Thursday, October 18th, at NCLA in Hickory, NC. I attended a couple of sessions, walked through the exhibit hall and looked at some of the different poster sessions, stopped by the conference store to say hello to Carolyn and Steve, and saw a lot of people that I haven’t seen in a long time. On top of that I was apart of a presentation by the Master Trainers of North Carolina at the end of the day, so it was a full day!

One session I attended was titled Telling Our Story Using New Technology. The session was held by the State Library, specifically by Michelle Czaikowski, a friend from my Master Trainer days. She discussed Web 2.0 technologies, the pros and cons, and even built her presentation using a couple of technologies: empressr and del.icio.us.

What I continue to realize is that because there is so much to Web 2.0 there is never enough time to talk about it all. Really, you could talk for days on everything that there is out there. It also continues to amaze me how much there is still to come and how many things are out there that you may have never heard of. So many doors opening…

In the afternoon I ran into some of my ZSR co-workers. Carolyn and Cristina had a terrific poster session entitled Utilizing ILL Deflection to Improve Workflow. People were swarming around their poster, it was almost impossible to get a picture of them!

Clifford, the Big Red Dog, also made an appearance at NCLA, which led to some great photo opportunities.

At the very end of the day, as I mentioned above, I got the privilege to present along with my Master Trainer class on what we have to offer the rest of the libraries in the state of North Carolina. This was a great session, and I hope that the rest of the state knows we are here and more than willing to help with any training needs anyone might have.

You can see some of the pictures of the day at my Flickr site.

And now, back to work!

Is Library 1.0 Ready for Web 2.0: Library 2.0 ca 2007
Technology and Trends Roundtable
Robert H. McDonald, UC San Diego, Director Strategic Data Alliances Supercomputer Center

Met another Twitter friend! He’s the presenter. This is fun!

• Hired by Supercomputer Center because a large part of that is working with cultural heritage centers like libraries to see how they can work together.
• Web 2.0: What, Why, How
  • Showed a O’Reilly and Web 2.0 video
  • Web 2.0 = the network is the platform
  • Look at the fringe, that’s where the future is (apple, voip, snowboarding, etc. came from people invested in fringe hobbies.)
  • Recommended conferences for libraries: Code4Lib, Access Canada, ER&L, Cross discipline conferences (O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conferences, BloggerCon) Some of these post video or audio of events.
    • This is where new ideas come from.
    • Niche groups form to deal with these problems and disband when problem is solved.
  • Moving from web site to web service. Unstructured information to structured information.
  • Push methodology/web 2.0
  • Social Software is “many to many”
    • Demoed Twitter, Dopplr, discussed last.fm’s acquisition by CBS, and del.icio.us’s acquisition by Yahoo!
    • LibraryThing is a social books site, but offers a service to libraries, too.
  • Mashups, APIs, and web services
  • Network as glue: How fast is your connection? Do your services cross commercial interests?
• Library 1.0: How to get to 2.0
  • Physical space vs. virtual place, push vs. pull, ubiquitous vs. non-ubiquitous
  • Must put what users want at their fingertips.
    • Save the time of the user and librarian.
    • Showed this.
  • Disconnects with 2.0
    • Personalization-we’re worried about privacy, but our users are expecting customized services like recommendations or next gen library finders
    • Socialization-tagging, blogging, IMing
    • Integration-Open Source Software (LAMP, AJAX, RUBY)
    • Technology Support-Public Computing Platform, Wireless 802.11x, 700mhz and 900 mhz Wireless Spectrum
  • OPAC/Chinese: we’ve taken bad models and exported them.
• Moving to Web 2.0
  • 2.0 inspiration, 2.0 management, 2.0 integration
  • You have to be ready to experiment, and if the experiment doesn’t work out, you have to be able to walk away
  • Web 3.0: Eric Schmidt video
  • Infrastructure is changing, and how we tie things together is changing
  • What kind of bandwidth you have
• Final thoughts:
  • Must read Small Pieces Loosely Joined (I second this!!!)
  • Think about mashups and remixing of web services (next gen catalog, worldcat local, endeca, pines)

Great session! A lot of fun!!

• Poet Mark Smith-Soto spoke and read poetry.
• Various NCLA folks talked about the state of NCLA.
• Attendance at this conference is over 1000.
• A number of awards were announced.

GladysAnn Wells, director and state librarian of the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records

• Full text will be included in conference edition of (I think) Tar Heel Libraries.
• Ask who hears your stories.
• The experiences people have had will shape how they hear your stories.
• In the beginning we used technology to do faster what we were already doing.  Didn’t change way we did things.
• Just in time model: leasing what we need
  • Painful realization: we cannot preserve or guarantee content if we don’t own it
• Just for you model: can’t be all things to all people, downside of just renting
  • But our communities don’t always know what they need
• Just because model: bought material based on professional judgment before need was clear, just because that’s what we’re supposed to do
• Just why time period is now.
  • People keep asking why we need libraries.
  • We need to be helpful part of vibrant virtual communities yet earn our respected, physical place at the table
  • We need to be listening to the stories of people who don’t like libraries.
• Telling our story, and how we tell it is important.
• Libraries need host systems more than host systems need libraries.
• Important to inspire others to advocate for us.
• Study your context and host system.
• Study your policy makers and resource allocators.
• Build your connections before you need them.  “Think of your connections as a savings account.”
• Find partners to share the load and give your story broader appeal.
• We have to be flexible.

Trust, the Glue of Effective Libraries
Community and Junior College Libraries
Crystal Baird (Associate Dean, Library and Planning Services, Davidson County Community College)

I’m attending this session because a lot of Library 2.0 is about trust: libraries trusting their users (to leave comments in the catalog, to tag, to write on a graffiti wall, etc) and users trusting libraries (to be transparent).  Hopefully this will be relevant!

• Discussed what is trust and trusting and untrusting environments
• Recommended The Speed of Trust and Truth, Trust, and the Bottom Line
• The angle of this presentation is about trust between coworkers… users are brought in as “how would they feel if they come into an environment where staff are untrusting of each other?”
• Leadership behaviors that foster trust: transparency, honesty/integrity, competence and follow through
• Leadership behaviors the erode trust: indirectness/inability to say no, little white lies, taking credit for someone else’s work

So, not really exactly what I was expecting it to be, but still an interesting session!

Using Technology to Enhance Instruction
College and University Section - Bibliographic Instruction Group
Angela Whitehurst (ECU), Lisa Williams (UNC-W), and Angela Bardeen (UNC-Ch)

Angela Bardeen on Facebook

• Discussed “Friends Wheel” where you can see the physical network of your friends
  • 
• Letting students advertise for you
• Shows you who is in what group, can contact president of subject-area clubs through facebook (since they use it more than email)
• Join groups and get notices of when meetings are, etc.
• Can solicit feedback through facebook
• Facebook is number one place to share photos online, by adding library photos you share pictures and fit in with Facebook culture
• Using Facebook to create events and advertise that way
• Using Facebook paid advertising
• Discussed new Facebook application
  • Librarians are trying to create search applications, but they tend to not fit into the culture of facebook. You might be the only one using them.
  • Some are promoting directly on the library home page
  • Might want to consider which fit in to the culture of Facebook
  • One person is developing an application that has a map of the library and students can say “when I’m in the library you can find me in…” and pick a spot on the map. This fits the culture and advertises the library.
• DO: try to think like Facebook, try new things, weigh pros and cons
• DON’T: waste a lot of time, take offense, or “poke” the kids

Angela Whitehurst on Creating Online Tutorials with Camtasia

• Introduced screencasting
• Software: Camtasia, Captivate, Qarbon Viewlet Builder, Robodemo, BB Flashback, Wink
• Started with the questions they got most often at the reference desk
• Stored on “How Do I?” page, but will have an online tutorials page
• Reasons: multimedia appeal for undergrads, 24 hour instruction for distance ed students, method to answer reference questions
• This is similar to the project we’re working on for the toolkit
• Planning: plan first, create in scenes/segments, narration, proofreading and editing, production
• They’re keeping their tutorials on YouTube. I would add that it’s important to think of online video culture when creating video… how do you make the tutorial look and sound like what students are used to seeing?
• Issues to consider: formats, file size (for distance students who might not have broadband), where to upload, adding toc affects screen size

Lisa Williams on Hot Potatoes

• Software to create exercises
• Multiple-choice, short answer, jumble sentence, fill in blank, etc
• Free for not for profits, but have to make pages available to everyone
• Demo-ed crossword puzzle software
• The Masher allows integration of other files

Yesterday I went to the “Yes, You Can Be a Leader!” program.  The program was designed to share information about the NCLA Leadership Institute.  The presentation was really short.  The idea for the program was to create an environment for past participants to meet potential participants and tell them about their experience.  I had a nice chat with Kathy Winslow of NC Wesleyan.  She was a participant in the first Institute and said that it was an incredibly helpful experience.  I also met one of my twitter buddies… in real life!

How Do We Get From Here to There: Coping with Future Changes in Technology and Service Delivery
NC Public Library Trustee Association
Rob McGee, RMG Consultants, Inc.

• Three important questions
  • What are some new technologies for libraries?
  • What new technologies should my library implement?
  • Should my library partner with other libraries to share new technologies?
• New technologies come from outside the library, not from our vendors
• Some technologies will change the scope and jobs we do
• Web search companies have huge financial resources, and they have the resources to test legal issues around digitization
  • We’re seeing preservation of digital materials being passed to corporations
• Introduced XML, Ajax, web services, blogs, rss, web2.0 (he says “web two dot oh”), and open source.
• Listed more “outside” technologies: Enterprise resource planning, enterprise-wide human resources systems, enterprise-wide financial systems, building access and security systems, smart cards, d-commerce, electronic transactions, wifi, rfid, automated material handling, data warehousing and mining, business intelligence, authentication and authorization, digital asset management, content management, elearning, learning management systems, enterprise calendaring, scheduling, reservation systems, handheld computing and communication devices
• Specific devices: new handheld computing/communication devices, smart phones, iPods and other MP3 devices, ebook readers with ebooks, and web tablets
• Games: xbox360, wii, ddr, second life and other virtual reality environments
• Specifics: One Laptop Per Child program, Microsoft Office Communications Server and Office Communicator (extensions to office suite)
• From inside the library industry: RFI, self service stations, automated materials handling, institutional repositories, museum and archive systems, electronic resource management, enterprise PC scheduling, print management, photocopy and print payment
• Discovery and Delivery: aquabrowser, rooms, encore, endeca, primo, visualizer
• Open-source software for libraries: index data/masterkey keystone, equinox/evergreen, liblime/koha, care affiliates inc.
• Software as a service (SaaS): enriched catalog data, federated searching, ERM, ILS, Acquisitions, Worldcat Local
• User Devices in the Library: PCs, peripherals for staff (wireless headsets, etc), PDAs, smart phones, adaptive workstations, laptops for both staff and public, web tablets for customer use in areas where PCs or laptops aren’t appropriate, public faxes, photocopiers, ebook devices, portable circulation devices, gaming stations, RFID enabled devices, MP3 flash devices
• The talk then turned to focus on RFID tags, and the various systems that RFID can integrate with (circulation, automatic return and sorting, security gates, smart shelves, etc)
  • My comments: RFID seems risky from a privacy standpoint and very expensive. The only way I can personally make sense of it is to have an in-house database matching book RFID tag number with catalog info and patron ID with contact information. That way someone with a scanner would not have access to book or patron information, just random numbers. Definitely something I need to know more about.
• Argued for a change in organizational model and staffing patters to meet new goals of library. Stated our models are based on old services.
• Argued we need to re-cast what we’re here to do.
• How to get from where we are to where we need to be: team based learning process about technology, IT needs assessment, assess available and oncoming technology, define IT goals/objectives/strategies/performance measures, within framework of library strategic plan.
• Prioritize: technologies, technology-based services, technology implementation projects
• Develop IT budgets for 1 year, 3 year, and 5 year blocks
  • Technology changes really rapidly, so can’t make a permanent budget for 3 or 5 years out. Must be able to adapt to new technologies.
• Q from public library trustee: Library seems to him to be about books and physical places and reading. How do we maintain that and adapt? A: Can do both, also can help people learn about other services.
• Q&A: Couldn’t hear the question, but in answer section recommended keeping an eye on iPhone, wireless devices, etc.
• Q&A: Still couldn’t hear the question, but he answered that it’s important to have a committee of folks to evaluate all new technologies to see if they’re useful for your library and your community.