Professional Development

This year, I chaired the ACRL-Science & Technology Section(STS) Research Forum at the ALA Annual Conference. Our guest commentator, Patricia Kreitz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and who currently serves on the Editorial Board of Science & Technology Libraries, provided insightful commentary on the two selected papers:

“Library-based Bioinformatics Support: Who and How? An Exploration of Librarian and Scientist Perspectives,” by Michele R. Tennant, Health Science Center Libraries and UF Genetics Institute, University of Florida. As the use of bioinformatics databases becomes prevalent in biological research, libraries are stepping into the role of bioinformatics support providers.

Where are Bioinformatics Support Specialists employed?

• 45% in university or college health sciences library
• 25% in university or college sciences library
• 5% in university or college “main” library
• 5% corporate library

Summary:

• A number of bioinformatics support specialists reside in libraries; models of employment and activities vary
• Researchers, Bioinformatics Support Specialists, and directors believe that a degree in science and laboratory experience are important for Bioinformatics Support Specialists
• All groups surveyed indicated that bioinformatics support can appropriately be provided through the library

“Subject and Bibliographic Access to Sci-tech Electronic Theses and Dissertations via Digital Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs): Perspectives from US and UK Science Librarians,” by Sophie Bogdanski, West Virginia University Libraries; Susan Copeland, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland; Anne Christie, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Over 90% of US institutions provide electronic access to some portion of their theses and dissertations collection. In the survey, one US librarian expressed frustration at not being able to do a topical search for ETDs across institutions and also about not being able to search the IR and OPAC together. The survey results indicate the on-going development of ETD programs in the US And UK.

I also attended the Scholarship Committee meeting of the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA). The Scholarship Committee awards $1,000 scholarship to a student who is currently enrolled in a graduate program in Library Science. I also attended the ACRL-SPARC Forum on Open Access (already reported upon by Lynn). Overall, this program was great, and I thought that Kevin Smith’s presentation on “Campus Open Access Policies: Legal Considerations” was very informative.

On Monday morning, I attended Susan’s award ceremony, which was one of the highlights of ALA Annual. In the afternoon, I went to the Exhibits and volunteered at the Welcome Desk for the ALA Ambassadors Program, which provides orientation for first-time conference attendees. Although I was busy with STS Council meetings and committee meetings, I was able to attend the ExLibris reception and saw Disney’s fireworks with Susan, Carolyn, Lauren P., and Elizabeth N. Overall, ALA Annual was productive, informative, and enjoyable this year, and the weather was great (always a plus!).

Today was my last day of the conference, although it continues until Wednesday for some of the higher echelon of ALA Division and committee folks. It has been my most action packed ALA conference to date and it’s been worth it (but I’m ready to head home!).

My first meeting of the day started at 8 am. I have been assigned to a new committee for the next 1 1/2 years - the LITA National Forum 2009 Planning Committee. This was our first chance to meet each other and start the planning process. Unfortunately, it conflicted with the Lexis-Nexis breakfast where I was receiving the award (for the second time). So, I rushed in to the committee meeting, introduced myself, sat in for 10 minutes, then had to leave. I hated being unable to fully participate, but what are you going to do?

I enjoyed the Lexis-Nexis breakfast thoroughly, and even more after I had finished my remarks upon receiving the award. There was a very big crowd there and it was a bit intimidating to have to stand at the podium and talk for even a few minutes. But, it helped that I knew that several of my ZSR colleagues had come to the breakfast to support me (I know it wasn’t the free food that pulled them in). Thanks to Sarah, Cristina, Carolyn, Lauren, Lynn and (non-too former colleague) Mary Horton, for coming and providing me moral support! I also really enjoyed Dana Milbank’s talk about Homo Politicus and the Potomac Man. It was fun to be sitting right next to him at the podium and be able to watch him move through his notes as he spoke. He sounded as though he was talking completely from memory but had nicely structured content to present. I liked the fact I was presented with a copy of his book too!

It was back to the exhibit hall mid-day and I was able to catch Lauren P.’s third poster session of the conference. This time she repeated presenting the poster she created about her student assistant training tools. She had lots of interest and visitors while I was there.

I attended the ACRL President’s Program in the afternoon (already reported upon by Lynn).  I attended even though I was feeling a bit worn out, thinking that, if it wasn’t  interesting, I could slip out. Instead, I was totally engaged listening (on the floor, since it was packed) to Dan Ariely talk about how irrational most people’s reasoning and decision-making is. He gave many intriguing examples of irrational reasoning, but one concept that caught my attention was his observation that we work in two different worlds: a social one and a financial one. He maintains that when these two mix, things get ugly. His example was of a friend who has a flat tire. As a friend, you are willing to help him change it. What happens when, instead, he offers you a few dollars to help him out, instead of calling on you as a friend to do it for nothing? Suddenly it’s become a financial transaction, replacing the former social relationship. And, as a financial transaction, $2.00 isn’t worth the trouble. It colors how you think of each other, and it’s hard, if not impossible, to return to the social relationship afterward. It something I’ve observed happening many times through my life, but had never really considered why things got sticky! I so enjoyed his talk that I did something I’ve never done before. When I walked out of the presentation, I headed right for the table that had his book for sale, and bought a copy. I hope it’s as good as I think it will be.

I ended my conference day by visiting Sarah at the ALA Welcome Desk at the Membership Pavilion. As a part of the  Ambassador program, Sarah volunteered to staff the desk this afternoon. You can see there are many ways to participate at the ALA Conference.

Library 2.0 Publication Podcast Interview

This morning I had a new conference experience. Most of you know that Erik, Caroline and I recently authored a chapter in the new ACRL book “Library 2.0: Initiatives in Academic Libraries.” The publisher invited authors who planned to attend ALA Midwinter to be interviewed about our projects on a podcast. It will be linked from the ACRL site and from the project wiki. I was joined by Dawn Lawson from NYU, who used Facebook for outreach to East Asian Studies students. It was an enjoyable experience, although I’m sure either Erik or Caroline would have been better spoken. The interview was conducted by David Free (coincidentally the editor of C&RL News where Lynn’s and my South article will soon appear!). Kathryn Deiss, ACRL’s Content Strategist joined us and hosted the interview in her hotel room.

This afternoon was my one committee obligation. As you may recall, I’m on the Instructional Technologies Committee which is charged with writing 2-3 “Tips and Trends” articles each year. I volunteered to partner up with another committee member to write about the use of Facebook in Library Instruction. But unlike others in our library, my committee is fairly one dimensional, meaning we get all our business conducted in one two hour session. It was interesting to learn that our chair’s plan to have a mid year conference call to supplement the face-to-face meeting today was turned down by ACRL powers because there are strict procedures for asking for extra meetings and adhering to a strict notification procedure 10 days prior to holding such a meeting. Geez…..

I just finished up my day with a lovely visit with our regional representative from ExLibris, John Straw. I wanted to start the conversations we must soon have about Meridian’s future, EnCompass for Digital Collections’ future, and Voyager’s overall viability in the ExLibris product line. I did find out there is discussion of porting Voyager to Linux and saw a very quick demo of the new WebVoyage interface for 7.0. We talked about lining up times to preview DigiTool and Verde. I did nab 2 pens and one mint life saver. Let’s just say that the schwag Giz is so fond of was scarce in the exhibit hall today!

Finally, here’s my people siting report: I literally ran into Debbie Nolan in the exhibit hall. She had larengitis so I had plenty of opportunity to fill her in on all the activities at ZSR. She sends her greetings to all of you. I also made a visit to the Alibris booth to say hi and check up on my new duathlon partner Billy O’Banks (AKA Bill Kane). He reported he has been in a tapering training mode in his travels the past week, but will back to the training grindstone this coming week. Lastly, Mary H. and I plan to meet up with Lauren for dinner, and she is picking out the restaurant. Seemed only fair since Mary and I will eat anything.

Hello everyone. Greetings from sunny and warm Philadelphia. Much of my conference time is/will be spent doing association business; that doesn’t make for interesting reading, so I’ll try to keep it brief.

Yesterday, I met with the GODORT Steering Committee. This meeting takes place at the start of the conference and the chairs of the various committees and task forces meet with the roundtable officers to share information about what they are planning to do at the upcoming conference. We also talk about some issues that are of interest to the organization as a whole, such as virtual membership and the new push to open ALA-run listservs to all ALA members, not just those members of individual organizations.

This morning I met with my other committee, the ACRL Bylaws Committee. We approved proposals from two sections who want to amend their bylaws and forwarded those proposals on to the ACRL Board.

This afternoon I spent some time in the Exhibit Hall and saw a friendly face, Bill Kane, at the Alibris booth.

I was able to go to part of the GODORT update and did hear two good presentations that might be of general interest. The first was by David Oldenkamp from Indiana University. He talked about a search engine he had created: Intergovernmental Organization Search Engine. Google now has a set of tools that allows one to create a customized search engine, called Google Co-op. Other sites that allow one to create customized search engines include Eurekster Swiki. Other search engines that folks might be interested in include one for ALA-RUSA Best Reference Websites and one David called the ’search engine for the library world’: LISZEN.

Marilyn Parr then provided an update on several projects at the Library of Congress. If you haven’t taken a look at LC’s American Memory Project, I highly recommend it. And, I wouldn’t be a good government information librarian if I didn’t point out A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation especially. Also take a look at this video, which gives a vision for the World Digital Library that is in development.

Not a lot to report here (again, unless you want the inner workings of a committee group). We have a bunch of new, enthusiastic members (YAY!), and are planning on going forward on our Information Literacy Standards project. We want to rewrite the standards for people in Women and Gender Studies. We must be onto something, because a few months after we came up with the idea, we found out that ACRL is planning on working on a project like this for all the represented subject areas. It’s a daunting process, so in the next 3-6 months we’re only going to work on a literature review. And, just so you can know that I’m involved, we’re going to set up a Moodle account for communication and a wiki for document drafts.

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.

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.

John Waters: I am by no means a prude and loved his interviews in “This Film is Not Yet Rated” but I thought his luncheon speech at ACRL was inappropriately irrelevant. We should attract students to the library by appearing in the nude? And that was one of the mild suggestions!

“Perceptions of Campus-Level Advocacy and Influence Strategies among Senior Administrators in College and University Libraries” sounded like a good research project but yielded inconclusive results. The premise that peer influence strategies are differentiated by size and type of library institutions (expressed in Carnegie classifications) was largely unsubstantiated. There was a helpful review of the dimensions of influence and strategies for influencing peers on campus.

General thoughts: In my view, ACRL is a very worthwhile experience for academic librarians. The presentations are generally of higher quality than you will find at ALA. An additional benefit is the fact that no committee meetings are allowed so you have 3 days of uninterrupted, high-quality presentations focused on academic and research library issues. There is a notable public service slant to the themes, so if you are a public services librarian you will find more posters, panels, presentations and discussions on information literacy and reference and emerging technologies than you can absorb! This conference put out its call for papers well over a year ago - and that sometimes backfired, as two of the presentations I attended had abstracts submitted 18 months ago that never actually materialized. Still, I would recommend ACRL strongly to all ZSR public service librarians.

Tomorrow: University Libraries Group

Lynn

The second pair of presentations I attended was on the theme of designing learning spaces in libraries. I was reminded that I wrote a paper on this topic ages ago (late 90’s) when we were building the Undergraduate Library at Wayne. Many of the principles are the same, but the importance of technology is even greater than it was back then.

“Designing Self-Service Learning Environments” by Wendy Starkweather of UNLV emphasized the following timeless principles:

• Self-service (for convenience, speed, choice and control)
• Flexibility (perhaps the single most key component in modern design)
• Stimulating spaces (the wow factor)
• Foster both community and contemplation (need both quiet and non-quiet spaces)
• Provide healthful, ergonomic environment (but what they really want is soft seating)
• Service policies that support design principles (give them what they want)

Starkweather reminded us that the life cycle of buildings is much longer than the life cycle of policies or technologies so designing an adaptable structure and infrastructure is key. Being a classics major, I loved the way she summed up the presentation, which she “borrowed” from another university: tuum est, meaning “it is yours.”

“Effective Practices for Technology-Enhanced Spatial Transformations” was a panel presentation by three librarians from the University of Southern California. Projects were described at the Von KleinSmid Applied Social Sciences Library, the Science and Engineering Library, and the Leavey Undergraduate Library. Themes were similar to the previous presentation: the need for flexible space, growing importance of multimedia, the library as a community gathering space for the campus, the need for both quiet, individual spaces and non-quiet group spaces. The Leavey Library designed a podcasting studio that might bear further investigation. One line I loved from one of the speakers was when she introduced herself with the title of Team Leader - “which now sounds so 90’s!”

Lynn

WOW!

I value conferences for several things. One of them is re-invigoration — getting me out of the day-to-day, reminding me of the higher ideals of librarian-ship and why I wanted to become a librarian. I wish I had a tape of Michael Eric Dyson’s opening keynote, because it was a great, thought-provoking, and definitely uplifting piece of stage-craft. I’m glad that Lynn has already covered the speech, since there is so much to say. So, I’ll just add a few more observations. I’m in perfect agreement that we do a lot of “singing to the choir,” which is ok; but, “the choir gotta sing better” to the audience. I’m also very happy to be a “liberator of the mind,” rather than a “hand-maid of history” — something I’ve also been called as a librarian. I think I might lobby for “liberator of the mind” as a job title the next time we re-do our position descriptions!