Professional Development

I’m really not going to go into super detail for this session since we talk about a lot of these technologies at Wake all the time. If you want more details, feel free to contact me. I’d be happy to chat about the presentation! Now, onto live blogging:

• Covered blogs, RSS, podcasting, wikis, flickr, social networking, youtube, second life, mobile social software (like Twitter!)
• …but you know all about that.
• SpringShare (vendor product) makes LibGuide (for subject guides) and LibMarks (social bookmarking, like del.icio.us) for about $900 each per year.

More live blogging…

• MPS Technologies provides electronic resources in the publishing market.
• Librarians said they wanted a portal with all stats in one place, that’s self-generating.
• This is Scholarly Stats.
• First thing they did in development was to send out an email to a list in the US and UK asking folks to help develop project.
• Questions included: “How many of you are collecting usage data as frequently as you’d like?” “How easy is it comparing usage across multiple platforms?” “How often would you like to collect usage data?”
• Several said “every month” in academia. Want to follow peaks and valleys in usage to understand marketing, find out the bang for buck for each database, etc.
• Explained basic development process…reported some findings:
• Stats are playing a big roll in subscription decisions, next most in justifying expenses. Much lower was “reporting” and “other” (which includes promoting, marketing, training, administrative, strategic planning, curiosity, etc).
• Wanted to combine vendor stats, other data gathered from web logs, consortia reports, etc, fun code/subject, cost, etc.
• Found biggest challenge from lack of standards, takes too much time, COUNTER standards help but there are some drawbacks.
• Most useful statistics are: number of full-text downloads (not necessarily views), number of searches, number of sessions, COUNTER statistics, number of turnaways, others.
• Tools that are out there now: ERMS (Innovative, ExLibris, Serials Solution), Thomson Scientific, ScholarlyStats, Project COUNTER, SUSHI, UKSG Usage Factor
• On the ScholarlyStats site, they generate monthly reports available on your portal: Full text use on month-by-month and on a calendar year. Number of searches and sessions from all databases. Number of turnaways by database (for concurrent usage databases, not because of a technology issue on their end). Searches and Sessions for entire system.
• Reports come in excel file and csv format. In the future, maybe xml, too.
• On the ScholarlyStats site, they generate monthly dashboards reports available on your portal: most used titles by platform, least used titles by platform, etc.
• Going forward, will allow you to save up to five years of data. (Not retrospective.)
• There is no standard for consortia reporting by institution. EBSCO, ProQuest do a good job of it, but a lot of databases done. Since not all do, ScholarlyStats can’t.
• How does this differ from Serials Solution’s option: SS gathers from federated search engine, but not from independent search interfaces.
• Breaks out the same journal from various resources so you can see which is getting most usage.
• Can generate a cost per use or search with this data.
• Federated search searches each database, when you pick an item and go to it, that’s when it gets counted in the statistics.
• Rank and list from most to least use, percentage of that use compared to the rest of what you’ve asked to collect, etc (long tail OR 80/20 rule thinking)
• Can get a discount through SOLINET.

This is a vendor demo of the Ares Automating Reserves system (Same folks who bring us Illiad).

• Works with LDAP.
• Instructor Side
• Can post system alerts as well as custom user alerts on front page.
• Pages are in HTML, so it’s customizable. Same (or similar) Illiad style sheets can be applied to this.
• Instructors can: create a new class, look at previous classes taught, look at upcoming classes, and set proxy users.
• Does allow for extra level of security (password a specific class, students only type it the very first time they register for classes within Ares).
• Doesn’t default to email subscription, but you can get emails sent to students when they subscribe.
• Can hold pdfs, free text, images as well as MP3s and videos.
• Incorporates a way to “clone” class to carry documents forward to future sections of the class.
• One-to-one document to class ratio. Each class that uses a document has its own copy. If a class gets deleted, the other files still stay.
• A little electronic learning function built in: professor can have “chat” hours on the Ares system, and if students have questions they can chat with them on the site during those times. Chats can be saved as a reserve item and kept as part of the class.
• Can look at usage by numbers, but also you can look up who is looking at items by name. Up to reserve staff to decide how to set this up.
• Reserve staff can set up privileges for faculty to upload their own items, or can remove that option. Can also have it set up for faculty uploads to be reviewed by library staff before going up.
• Item information form looks a lot like ILL form (not surprising), I wonder if this could be automated.
• There is a question on the upload form: “Have you obtained Copyright permission for this item?” with a checkbox. Can change wording as much as you want.
• Student Side
• See same login and alerts.
• Can create a hotlist of items they’ll look at a lot.
• Can search classes by department, instructors, and course numbers.
• Students can get RSS feed for reserve items. Erik, sound familiar?
• Library Side
• Looks like Illiad.
• This is where you set up system alert.
• Can search entire system by title, author, class info, etc. in case you need to find a missing document.
• Item processing: awaiting processing lists all the items to be scanned, etc.,awaiting review is for library staff after faculty have uploaded.
• Creates pull slips for students/staff who will find materials in the stacks.
• Scanner interface is the same as Illiad.
• Let them know what reports you’d like generated, and they will work up a SQL query.
• Web administration suite has all webpage and server information and lists documents and lets you chose what types of documents you accept.
• Has a dead-link checker and inform you of dead links in your system as well as generating email announcement to let you know.
• Ares directly supported by Atlas.
• Copyright
• Click title and goes to Copyright Clearance Center. (it’s an anonymous lookup until you click on “special order from CCC.”)
• Then you get: pages, ISSN, students it’s good for, prices, and terms. If you agree, click “submit” and you’re done.
• Can also do an “alternative copyright provider” transaction to settle another way other than CCC.
• Trying to give tools to libraries to handle copyright however they already handle copyright.
• Can get “reserve history” to see how often an item is used by class, instructor, in general, etc. (to help you determine when something is past fair use).
• Can cancel request and generate an email to instructor giving reason for cancellation.
• Blackboard
• Can add Ares to course tools.
• Ares in Blackboard: The only time you go into Ares is if an instructor is trying to add an ereserve. Looks like Ares, but can be customized to look like Blackboard.
• Students can view documents through Blackboard, and will come up in another tab (or however you’ve set it up).
• Authentication through Blackboard for one login.

Live blogging again. As you might imagine, I’m particularly interested in this as a recent MLIS grad…

The Future of Library Education
José-Marie Griffiths, Dean of SILS at UNC-Ch

• Future is bright due to explosion in information availability and technology.
• Discussed that online does not replace physical use of information, in fact, most use both physical and online (with the exception of college students).
• More types of data: text, data sets, images, scans, and they need to be pulled together for most usefulness.
• Librarian’s skills of organizing, synthesizing, indexing, etc, become very critical.
• “We are going to have to change the way we’re doing things” as individuals, institutions, collaborators, in order to achieve what we need to be doing to stay current and relevant and best use our skills.
• Recommends thinking about “possible futures” and what we can do that would be useful in the most different situations: all will need more info seeking skills, will be collaborating quickly and remotely, and “knowledge literacy” will be the new currency.
• “Knowledge literacy” seemed to be the people who know the right information at the right time.
• Roles of Knowledge Professional: knowledge of users we serve, knowledge of recorded knowledge domains.
• From collection development to “knowledge prospector,” finding nuggets that contribute to collection domain on the web (validating collections of digital materials, relationship of digital materials to validated non-digital materials).
• Classifiers, catalogers, indexers to metadata developers and “guidebook publishers” that provide tools that contain intellectual content, structural, procedural information.
• Information retrieval to knowledge navigators, knowing about different finding tools, identify more useful, relevant materials quickly, and pioneering new knowledge frontiers.
• Reference to information analysts/knowledge interpreters, helping users extract and interpret information, and close to users for context and analysis understanding.
• She described residency rounds in a hospital where a librarian went with students, listening to conversation. Librarian left session, did searches on the topics of conversation, and brought back relevant materials. What would this look like in a classroom? This, to me, would be more intense and time consuming than the “traditional” embedded librarian role, but still an interesting prospect.
• Working on a “Future of Library Workforce” study to determine the nature of the anticipated librarian shortage.
• Talked about the UNC School of Information and Library Science.
• UNC has a BS in LIS as well as the MLS and PhD. There’s a lot of overlap.
• Several specializations through certificates and dual programs.
• UNC investigating a significant growth plan.
• When they build, they’ll also build in Second Life so that folks can see how it’ll look.

Update: Somehow some really weird spam got added to this post. I just deleted it and am emailing Kevin. (In the case that you saw it and were wondering why there were spam links in the post.)

I’m live blogging this event, and jotting down the interesting notes (from my perspective) here:

• Cal Shepard gave a SOLINET update.
• She talked about the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, probably my all-time favorite reference source. (I say that not just because of topic, but also authority and guiding principles.) SOLINET had matching grants for libraries supporting the open access mission of this resource.
• She mentioned Aluka, a site of scholarly material on Africa. It incorporates social technology to connect scholars from around the world.
• Open WorldCat is an effort to incorporate social networking technology to better integrate libraries into the workflow of web researchers.
• Worldcat local allows people to find resources physically near them based on IP address.
• Discussed customized profiles in Open WorldCat, general social networking activities within Worldcat.
• This reminded me of Washington’s library catalog run with Open WorldCat. You can play with it on their homepage.
• Open WorldCat has a tool to generate citations by format (ALA, MLA, etc).
• SOLINET just came out of a strategic planning process (they do theirs every three years). They’re working on collections & access, library workforce, alliances & partnerships, and organizational stewardship issues.
• For the next year: hiring a consultant in assessment, offerings in digital services and new technologies, hurricane prep and recovery, and streamlining.
• She also discussed SOLINET classes, services, and preservation efforts. I just tried to hit some highlights here.