Professional Development

I apologize in advance for the length of this post. I remember by typing and I didn’t want to forget anything.

Brother Can You Spare a Dime? 2009 ACRL Trends for Academic Libraries

In a smart move, the planners of this session retooled it completely from what they had planned to do a year ago (revealing one of the flaws of ACRL conferences that they are planned WAY too far in advance to get current material) to consider the effects of the global economic collapse.10 days ago, ACRL re-did its Trends document, “Strategic Thinking Guide for Academic Librarians in the New Economy.” They invited the four panelists to respond to this new document. They identified these key drivers:

Changing economics in higher education

Changing student demographics

Changes in information technology

Charles Lowry, ARL Executive Director, didn’t talk about the ACRL document but instead listed out ARL’s own environmental scan document.

• Trends in scholarly communication: budget reductions in acquisitions; new model publications beginning to have effect;faculty are innovators so build relationships with them; bring dissemination back to the academy; re-engineering library services; embed yourself in research practices; library’s role in research, training and education; large funders specify management of content

• Trends in public policy:economy and national security will be dominant; Congress and Administration to revise Bush policies; focus on technology and innovation; enhance search and access capability; focus on copyright and intellectual property; cyber infrastructure developments; difficulty in balancing competing interests; environmental; accountability and assessment. FRPA reauthorization would extend NIH rule to other agencies to counter Conyers’ House Bill 801; USA PATRIOT Act coming up, fighting the national security letter provision to let it sunset. Section 108 of Copyright may see action.
• Trends in teaching, learning and research on our campus: ran out of time to enumerate.

Deb Gilchrist, Pierce College: Deb is known as a strategic thinker. She mentioned a prophetic article from Change magazine in 2003, “Dealing with the future now,” which stressed looking ahead instead of looking at the present. (Reminds me of my favorite hockey saying, “skate to where the puck is going to be.”) Two common choices in dealing with a crisis are 1) muddle through or 2) make a radical transformation to totally reconceive our business (Rahm Emanuel’s don’t waste a good crisis philosophy).She advised looking at the broader picture before designing library services.Content is leaving us as educators; the future is in process based pedagogies, that is, teaching students how to think, and how to reason rather than how to remember facts.

Community college students are more fragile, the average age 29 at Pierce. [Reminds me again of how small the Wake bubble is, compared to the real world.] Their role is to serve as economic bridge, to do this they collaborate with public libraries.She is looking at a creative re-design of structures as they face a 12% cut at her college. They developed institutional outcomes for technology, rather than continuing to work in separate silos. She has taken to hiring to the mission, not the job description [excellent pearl of wisdom] and mainstreaming services, putting the research in front of others. Student success is what it’s all about by stepping up the librarian’s role to work side by side with faculty.

Annie Paprocki, University of Illinois, Reference Librarian

Paprocki asked how can academic librarians think strategically? The time has come for the Big Idea. (Again, don’t waste a good crisis) This economy will touch everyone and everything. The difference in this recession is everyone is in this together. Robert Reich says there is more innovation in times of depression though it might look different. Change in scholarly communications is at the tipping point; this crisis could push us over into the valley of open access.

Jose-Marie Griffiths, Dean, School of Information and Library Science, UNC-CH

Even though people will be working longer and not retiring as soon with the collapse of retirement funds, eventually we will need to replace 50% of academic librarians over the next 10 years. Up until now, library jobs have been increasing, we don’t really know if this recession will behave differently. Think of the effects on the library of institutional change; think on library’s role, what should be centralized or decentralized, (again don’t waste the crisis). Griffiths sees more and more user instruction, helping them to help themselves. Libraries are not the only game in town anymore regarding bibliographic control. See LC’s new publication,On the Record. We are about to see a cyber (I’ve never liked the word cyber) infrastructure revolution, which is included in President Obama’s main infrastructure initiative. There is a network layer, a computation layer (hardware and software), a content layer (in the infrastructure, available to all) and a tools and service layer. It is time to move broadband to deeper penetration, but the last mile is the responsibility of the institution. Technology question: where in the learning workflow can the library insert services?

Confronting the Business Lens for Accountability of General Learning as it Pertains to Information Literacy. Marilee Bresciani, San Diego State

Bresciani invited us to consider the context for accountability of general learning. Specific disciplines (Engineering, Nursing) have their own specific accountability engines, but general learning typically compares institution to institution (rankings), not outcomes. Higher Ed as a whole usually says “you just don’t understand us” and have gotten away with it up until now; but no more.

How do those in the business world evaluate the quality of their product? How could we do that with the quality of student learning and present evidence of it? What is the purpose of information literacy? How does it fit into learning expectations? [Here is where she started to drift as I'm not sure she herself understands what information literacy is.] Is it skills or knowledge?Is the disposition toward finding an answer or a process?

We should organize ourselves around the information (like food in a restaurant). Interaction with the consumer is key. A really good meal is a constant interaction to make sure the quality of the experience is optimized.Likewise, information literacy or the whole library experience.

For lunch, I went to Pike Street Market, the coolest part of town, and met the Pike Street pig.

Conflict and Consensus - Clusters of Opinions on E-books, Aaron Shrimplin, Andrew Revelle, Miami Universit, OH

I’ve often wondered why e-books have faced a much slower adoption rate than e-journals.These two young librarians wondered the same thing. They see a similar transition from print to electronic journals, just slower. Their study was meant to try to understand the motivations, attitudes and perceptions of users.Why do they use e-books, or not?

They used Q methodology to study human subjectivity, a technique not used much in libraries but in other social science disciplines. They conducted 17 in-person interviews, got 200 statements of opinion, and selected 45 of the 200. Later, 74 faculty and students did a Q sort into a forced distribution grid, and came up with 4 factors or points of view:

1)Booklovers - love books, emotional attachment to the book as physical object, like to collect and own them, don’t feel comfortable reading off the screen (predicted)

2)Technophile - love technology, gadget lovers, like e-books because they like all technology, no problem reading off screen, don’t print (predicted)

3)Research focused - academic monographs, like to search, just use parts of books, print the parts they need, no emotional attachment to the book, very practical (not predicted)

4)Interface issues - they print whatever they look at online but worry about it, resent subscription issues, resent learning new interface, but these things can be addressed (not predicted)

In 3 of the 4 factors, users don’t like to read on the screen. The authors don’t really know how new readers like the Kindle are received, because it was not specifically studied. Neither do they know what percentage of their campus fits into each factor. It was a very interesting study, regardless.

Reaching Public Service Excellence: Developing a Mystery Shopping Program To Measure Service Quality, Elizabeth Kocevar-Weidinger, Longwood University, Candice Benjes-Small, Radford University

The presentation was done in Lincoln-Douglas debate style; don’t know why.

What is mystery shopping? An incognito user of service who rates the experience.

How is it better? Intentionality of the shopper, who is trained to know what to look for.

If your students are your shoppers, are they biased either for (or against)? Students were to know what to look for and how to evaluate, also used a variety of shoppers.

Is it “legal” to mystery shop? Yes, but check with HR and IRB first.

How reliable is it? What if someone has an off day? It seems like spying, trying to catch people in bad acts.

Shopping season ran for 2 weeks each semester, results were shared with staff, supervisors, and administration. There were lots of positive responses, also areas for improvement. Results were given in the aggregate only, they did not track by individual.

RESOLVED: The Master’s Degree in Library Science is Not Relevant to the Future of the Academic Library, moderated by Jim Neal, Columbia University. This was the second debate format in a row.

Affirmative:Arnold Hirshon, NELINET, Library schools are not identifying the right people, they teach them the wrong things (too superficial), therefore libraries shouldn’t require MLS for any position.

Negative: Liz Bishoff, MLS program must emphasize education, not training, as well as critical thinking and team building skills. Research, the release of creative energy, is critical for any profession and is best begun in library school.

Rebuttal (Bishoff): Digital library is our future; it’s a matter of time, not either-or, but MLS still prepares best.

Rebuttal (Hirshorn): Research is something that you can’t teach, but you have to do. Apprenticeship and outreach are important.

Maybe it was the end of a long day, but I found this session very disappointing.

I was invited to dinner by my editor and publisher, Toni Tan of Cambria Press. I was one of the first authors to sign on with this new publisher in 2006 and they have grown exponentially since then.Toni picked my brain for over three hours, asking why libraries buy the books they do, what kind of marketing they prefer, hardcover or paperback, choice of jobbers, difference between acquisitions and collection development, what is the future of e-books, how can they get on approval plans, what do librarians think of series, and on and on! It was fun!

So today was a day where I spent a good deal of time with vendors and since Mary Beth and Susan will most likely cover the sessions I went to, I’ll focus my post on what I learned about new products and offerings on the horizon.

The day started with a breakfast sponsored by Serial Solutions where Alison Head of Project Information Literacy presented (I’ll post on that in more detail elsewhere). After she spoke, however, Jane Burke announced a new product from SS called Summon Unified Discovery Service. The idea is to take the simplicity of a single search box a-la-Google and put behind it the metadata from your catalog, IR, journal subscriptions, web information etc. so that it is as easy to use as Google but substantially more effective in getting to research. It’s a fascinating prospect - some big name journal publishers are on board already - and is absolutely worth watching in the future. I stopped by the booth later in the day and got an up close look at it and I have to admit I was impressed.

Next I made the rounds in the Exhibit Hall. Some highlights for me were:

• Alexander Street Press’ brand new American History in Video collection that combines video and transcripts of newsreels, History Channel shows and more. Currently at 300 hours of video and expanding up to 2000 hours eventually, the collection is a really remarkable one. ASP has such quality databases and a wonderful interface that you wish you had a rich uncle who would pay for us to get them all!!
• Next I went to a booth presentation at Oxford University Press on their database Oxford Islamic Studies Online. A great assimilation of scholarship, Quranic studies including two translations of the Qu’ran and a concordance, encyclopedias, and other materials. No other source on Islam that i have seen has been quite as complete and integrated as this one. At the end, our gift for watching the demo was a Dictionary. Seriously - an Oxford American Dictionary. Looks like I’ll be shipping a box back home!
• I stopped by the Greenwood booth to talk to them about their digital reference options and caught a presentation of some of their features (which netted me a coffee mug). What I found out, however, is that by September, Greenwood, ABC-Clio, Libraries Unlimited and Praeger would have their eReference titles on the same platform. So many quality reference books come out of these imprints that I can say with certainty that I will be investigating what we need to do to set up an account so that we can purchase eReference from them as we do from Oxford and GVRL.
• Lunch was a What’s New with Gale session in a beautiful room on the 35th floor of the Sheraton. Several interesting things came to light here
  • A group has been working to assign LC Subject Headings to all the ECCO records. Libraries with ECCO will be able to purchase the new MARC records with the LCSH content.
  • They are creating an ECCO II with content from the 18th Century found and digitized since 2003.
  • They have a new wonderful looking database coming out called Slavery and Antislavery in America. This will contain an enormous amount of data, but most interesting is that it will have our slave narratives and abolitionist papers that we currently have on Microcard (SLA and SLB) included. This has long been an irreplacable resource in a hard-to-use format and its inclusion in this database will bring it to the top of our desiderata list. But the other content included also makes it extremely desirable for us.

There were other vendors and other news to share, but I think that is the highlights of what I found out today! More tomorrow!

Whew! It’s been a great day. As always, detailed notes are in my blog, and you’re getting the conversational perspective. If you want details, here they are:

• Scholarship Breakfast: The Millennial Driven Library Innovation Imperative
• Reconnect, Reflect, Recharge (Peer Evaluation of Teaching)
• Fishing for Information: Using Focus Group Research to Discover Student Perceptions of Library Services and Resources
• Two Contributed Papers on Assessment
• Keynote: Sherman Alexie

This morning started out bright and early with the breakfast for scholarship winners. It was a great talk on Millennials, and focused on how libraries will need to change to meet the needs of incoming users. Richard Sweeney spoke from the perspective of University Librarian, researcher, and father of two Millennials. He clearly uses his research when putting together his presentation. It was informative, and active (even though there were over 100 people in the room. Lynda Kellam from UNCG was there, so it was great fun to catch up with her. Everyone was friendly and it was a great program.

After that, I went to a session on peer evaluation of teaching. I’m really interesting in assessment of instruction, and though peer review is stressful, I wanted to know how that works and how people use it to improve. The librarians at the University of Alberta have worked hard to create a program that minimizes stress for the observer and observed to truly give people feedback on their work. They’ve done their research, and their program looks good, particularly for their institution.

I headed to the convention center where I saw Roz, Mary Beth, and Wanda. It sounds like everyone’s doing interesting things… I’m loving all the blog posts. Though exhibits stress me out, I headed there next to wander through. They’re much smaller than the ones at ALA, and much more manageable. I saw the LITA people, which was fun. The Cyber Zed Shed (just for tech talks) was on the other side, so I sat for a while, charged up my battery, and saw how that type of programming works. I also ran into the organizer of my panel, and we chatted a little about what to expect.

The next session on my agenda was on focus groups, and it was really good! The presenters actually ran through a mock focus group as the majority of their presentation. When they explained their plan, I was not sure what to make of it: I normally hate anything “mock.” But after seeing the whole session, I think that it was great. The mock focus group clearly explained the process in a much more interesting and engaging way than just talking about it. On the way out I ran into Molly Keener who is presenting tomorrow during the same period that Lynn, Roz, and I are up.

I can’t come to Seattle without a vegan hotdog, so I took care of that at lunch, and when I got back into the convention center I ran into Lynn for the first time. Finally, in the afternoon on Friday, I had seen (or text messaged) all the WFU folks here!

I’m trying to catch at least one of every type of presentation here, so luckily, next up there were two papers on assessment. I went in, was scouting for a good seat and possible outlet, and then found Wanda! The papers were very good. The first was on findability of assessment information on websites and the second was on creating comprehensive assessment plans.

Next on the agenda was the Keynote by Sherman Alexie. Having missed the first one, and having heard amazing things about Alexie, I headed straight over and got a good seat near the front. Lauren Ray, organizer of my Roundtable in the morning and fellow Distance Learning Interest Group leader, was there, and we watched together. The talk was amazing: interesting, engaging, funny…I adored it. He clearly knew how to butter the audience up, though. He started up with how “there are thousands of hot near sighted women here!” and talked about his love for librarians.

Now, charging my battery a bit before the Chair’s reception. I think this reception is for people presenting at ACRL and I’m going to meet up with most of my panel people there for last minute file loading on our computers.

Tomorrow is my big day, with my roundtable and panel. I checked out the room where the panel will take place and it’s BIG. More on that tomorrow!

Yesterday was a long day of travel, and introduction to ACRL, and a bit of exploring for me.

I left the Greensboro airport at 6:30 to get into Seattle around 1:00ish. I found a friend from the NCLA Leadership Institute at the Houston airport, so she, her husband, and I all took the bus into the city together. I checked into my favorite Seattle hotel, the Moore, which is an inexpensive (for Seattle!), older, quirky, independent place in a great location. My roommate for this conference is Rebecca (Kranz) Freidman, and it’s been great fun to catch up.

(photo by allaboutgeorge)

After checking in, I dashed off to the First Time Attendees session. I love the idea of these sessions, but didn’t hear about ALA’s until after I was pretty well versed in the conference. It was really useful, explaining what to expect out of this conference compared to others, how to get involved with ACRL, etc. The main differences I’m seeing so far: much smaller than ALA, no meetings (so it’s all about learning, yay!), much more compact, and many more familiar faces.

At this point I was really hungry, so I missed out on the speaker (though I lived vicariously through tweets) and went out to find my first real food of the day. I knew my schedule for the rest of the conference is scheduled for every minute, so I took advantage of the chance to get out and see the city a bit. I’m really glad that I did. The weather and views were just amazing, and it’s supposed to get rainy tomorrow. It looks like that was just about my only chance to see everything. Here’s some of what I did:

Today I’ve attended the scholarship breakfast, a talk on peer evaluation of teaching, and I’ve checked out the exhibits and cyber zed shed. I’ll do a real post on them for Friday’s post!

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.

Had a fabulous tour with Mary Beth and Susan today called “Chocolate, Waterfalls and Wine” - hard to think of any other combination more appealing to me unless it had been called “Shakespeare, Frank Lloyd Wright and ACC Basketball”! We started at Boehm’s Chocolate’s just outside of Seattle. Handmade chocolates, free of preservatives, housed in a lovely Swiss chalet and absolutely delicious. Then on to lunch and Snoqualmie Falls for a quick view of the falls. We finished the day at Chateau St. Michele for a great and informative tour of their winery. Mary beth and Susan will give their takes, but I’ll pass on this fact: Sweeter wines are sweeter because they bring the temperature way down thus making the yeast inactive and stopping it from using up all the sugar in the wine. We tasted, we purchased and we headed back to the Convention Center. Susan will put pictures up soon!!

Lynn gave a great summary of the really good keynote speaker Rushworth kidder, but I’ll share a great story he told. While researching for a book on e.e. cummings, he came across cummings’ handwritten copy of his poem “Buffalo Bill’s” with a reference to an obituary for Buffalo Bill. He hunted down the obit and found in it several of the phrases cummings uses in the poem. No one knew of the obit or had ever connected it to that poem. Those who know me know I love stories of discoveries made while researching in libraries, so you can see why I love this.

I thought another interesting point he made was to say that ethical delimmas can essentially be boiled down to one of four things: Truth vs. Loyalty, Individual vs. Community, Short-term vs. Long-term or Justice vs. Mercy. He also gave a definition of ethics that I liked “obedience to the unenforceable” and made the point that as a society, if we let our ethics erode, law will inevitably try to fill in the void. His speech was really inspirational and once again made me proud to be a librarian! We Rock!

Hello, fellow ZSR-ites. I’m a bit groggy after traveling all day. Got here in time to check into the room with Wanda and then head over to the convention center. First person I see is Jim Williams, Dean of Libraries at Colorado-Boulder, and an old friend of mine (from the 70’s!) from Wayne State.

The conference keynote speaker canceled at the last minute but ACRL had a back-up in line, so we heard a fine speech by Rushworth Kidder who spoke generally about ethics and specifically about the topics in his latest book, The Ethics Recession: Reflections on the Moral Underpinnings of the Current Economic Crisis. He described an ethical dilemma as one being between right and right, rather than right and wrong. He congratulated librarians for standing for ethics, that is, for trying to find the “higher” right. I like that.

Kidder says we, in America, are in an ethics recession, threatening free enterprise and democracy, and need to build a national culture of integrity. Pundits typically frame questions in either the language of economics (bottom line) or politics (power)but we are now moving on to ethics, as crises like Bernie Madoff have set off a moral outrage seething through the country. He described four drivers of dilemmas: truth v loyalty, individual v community, short-term v long term, and justice v mercy (I confess I borrowed this sentence from a twitter feed set up on the Virtual Conference when I got distracted for a minute - not bad for an old woman, eh?) His definition of moral courage (another book of his) is willing endurance in significant danger for the sake of principle. He gives librarians credit for being willing to face the tough issues and act as standard-bearers for our communities. His last point was that law will rush in to fill the void if there is a dearth of ethics; self regulation is ethics, external regulation is law.

After the keynote, everyone rushed down to the Exhibits, where Wanda and I met up with Susan, Roz and Mary Beth, and where it seemed like I ran into everyone I’ve ever known. That’s one of the great things about library conferences!

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!