Professional Development

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!

ACRL is a busy conference and I’m just now catching my breath and taking a moment to blog!

Yesterday morning, I had some free time so I went exploring. I walked the short block to the Inner Harbor, where I first went to the visitors’ center. Then I went to the 27th floor of Baltimore’s World Trade Center, the Top of the World, for a 360 degree view of the city.

Next I walked Historic Charles Street, taking in the Baltimore Basilica (the first Cathedral in America), the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the Peabody Institute and Library, the Walters Art Museum, Washington Monument and, finally, Beadazzled (bead heaven)! As I returned to my hotel and the convention center, I took a side route to take in the 220 year old Lexington Market.

Check out some of my photos on Flickr.

I’ll probably be posting some more sight-seeing info as I go to several receptions tomorrow and try to make it to Fort McHenry on my way out of town.

Here we are in the land of MoreBalts, as Bill likes to call it. The city is crowded, congested, and undergoing massive construction projects, from what I can see along E. Pratt Ave.

Opening Session - Michael Eric Dyson

When I attended the Wake Forest convocation with Leonard Pitts last fall, I thought it was the best speech I had ever heard. Well, that has now been topped by Michael Eric Dyson’s opening address at ACRL. He said he was a native of Detroit, but he sounded for all the world like a southern Baptist preacher to me. He is a professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania but loved to lapse into rap lyrics. His main message was the importance of the work that librarians do, acknowledging that he was preaching to the choir, but observing that the “choir gotta sing better.” He ranted against the Bush administration, Bill Cosby, and anyone who stands in the way of dissent, ideas, and an open view of learning. His philosophy is that you need to “meet people where they be, to take them where they need to be.” Hence, his embrace of the hip-hop genre, which he views as a “quest for self-determination in an environment that denies their legitimacy.” He describes librarians as “arbiters of enlightenment for the future of human civilization.” We don’t see that in Library School catalogs very often! He spoke without a note, barely drawing a breath, quoting long passages of Tennyson and Tupac Shakur from memory, all in the style and cadence of Martin Luther King. I loved it.

I’ve arrived safely in Baltimore in anticipation of the ACRL Conference. I enjoyed my day by driving to the big city, rather than going the stressful route of flying. Most of the trip was second nature since I come as far as Alexandria, VA to visit my cousins a couple of times a year. I just had to navigate around DC and make it up I-95 to Baltimore. I didn’t realize it, but the conference doesn’t officially start until 4:30 tomorrow (pre-conferences in the am), so after a meal and a good night’s rest I hope to do some sight-seeing in the morning.

ALA Midwinter was very busy, but productive.  I’m Co-Chair of the ACRL Science & Technology Section (STS) Research Committee, and we met on Saturday to go over poster proposals for the upcoming poster session at ALA Annual in Washington, DC.  The topic of the poster session is very interesting: institutional repositories of non-textual information (i.e., maps, images, etc.). 

On Sunday morning, the RUSA-CODES Liaison with Users Committee met, and we went over the results of two surveys on the nature of liaison work in academic and public libraries.  On Sunday afternoon, I attended the ACRL STS Program Planning Committee, where we discussed the logistics of the upcoming poster session at ALA Annual.   

On Monday morning, I went to ACRL-STS Council, which includes the Executive Board and the co-chairs of all of the committees and discussion groups.  We discussed the ACRL Environmental Scan and upcoming events at ALA Annual and ACRL National. 

Other highlights of my trip to Seattle included going to a comedy club, the Space Needle, Pike Place Market, and various Seattle coffeehouses.  Overall, it was a great trip.

Yesterday was a busy day for me and I didn’t have time to blog. I started in the morning meeting with the Cataloging Committee of GODORT. There were several issues to discuss, including GPO’s new abridged record cataloging policy, changes to CONSER cataloging, and GPO’s imminent testing of Z39.50 with their ALEPH catalog, the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP). At lunch-time I took a quick tour through the exhibits, but didn’t see anything that really caught my eye. After lunch I sat in on the GITCO (Government Information Technology Committee) meeting. I have previously served on GITCO and like to keep up on the issues they are talking about. I was particularly interested in the GPO update on the implementation of the FDSys, or Future Digital System. This is the content management system that GPO is developing to ingest, catalog, store, archive and make accessible federal goverment e-publications. They are planning on release 1B going live in May. This release will test the fundamental intake process or, “ingest functionality.” After this, I typed up the minutes for the Cataloging Committee and sent them off to the Committee Chair and the GODORT Secretary so that they would be available for this morning’s GODORT Business Meeting. Then I read 115 proposals for roundtables at ACRL in Baltimore. After all this, it was time for a little relaxation. I took the monorail to the Seattle Center complex. This complex is home of the Space Needle and also the Pacific Science Museum, where the Ex Libris reception was held. Susan and I had planned to meet there and then go to dinner. As you read in Susan’s post, we had a great meal at the Pink Door.

This morning, I was up bright and early for my 8am meeting with the Roundtables Subcommittee for 13th Biennial ACRL Conference in Baltimore. We were able to go through the proposals, pick the 100 that we have space for, and sort them in to one of two roundtable session times in less than the four hours alotted. I was able to enjoy an nice lunch with a friend and former colleague at Mercer, Beth Hammond. I enjoyed catching up on the Mercer and Hammond family news. I came back to the hotel where I had planned to meet Debbie Nolan. We had a nice chat about what we had been doing since we’d last seen each other. Debbie is extremely busy but loves her new job. She says “hello” to everyone at ZSR.

I finally had some time this afternoon to explore a bit of Seattle. I walked down to the famous Pike Place Market and was pleasently surprised to learn that this several-blocks long market houses not only seafood stands, but also fresh fruit and vegetables, great flowers (tulips, tulips, tulips!), and arts and crafts stands. Who should I run in to while there but Sarah Jeong and Emily Stambaugh! There are other shops in the area so I was able to spend a little bit more money to help the Seattle economy.

I will have to turn my mind to getting some dinner and packing to go home tomorrow morning. My flight leaves SeaTac airport at 8am PST, so I will have to catch the shuttle tomorrow morning around 5:30. Yuck! But, I keep telling myself that’s really 8:30 EST, so it’s not all that bad. Mind over matter! See you all on Wednesday.

Sunday morning started bright and early with the Alibris User Group breakfast at 8:00 am.  I serve on the Alibris Collection Development Award panel and the winners were announced at the breakfast.  When I read the finalists’ applications this year, I promised myself I would never complain about our acquisitions budget again because these were libraries that had NO budgets.  They were trying to meet the needs of their clients in any way they could.  This year there were three winners: YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, for books for sexual assault survivors; the Bahia Street project, providing books to girls on the streets of Brazil; and Granby Public Library, to replace books destroyed when an irate citizen literally bulldozed the library along with 12 other public buildings.  I am not making this stuff up. In the small group sessions at the breakfast, I told about our plans to incorporate the Alibris Donate-a-Book feature in the “South” course that ZSR will participate in with Drs. Smith and Hattery this summer.  The public library system in Hancock County, Mississippi will list the books they lost in Hurricane Katrina and the 20-25 Wake Forest students in the class will solicit their families, friends and colleagues to donate these books from the Alibris website.  I hope it works out.

Next, I attended the ACRL Presidential Candidates forum.  EBSCO promised light refreshments but instead it was a lovely full-blown lunch!  I came to support Erica Linke, Associate Dean at Carnegie Mellon, and one of our University Libraries Group (ULG) colleagues.  I lost some of my appetite for the ALA and ACRL bureaucracy years ago, but I do admire those who continue to make slow progress year after year, committee by committee.  They do good work for all of us and I feel we all owe them our support.

Although I didn’t originally intend to, I went to the ALA President’s Program, “Learn to FISH” about the world-famous Pike Place Fish Market and their unique customer/employee experience.  Bill and I had walked through the Pike Place Market on Thursday and saw the super-friendly guys in orange rubber jumpsuits. The four guiding principles to their work (that we could all learn from) are

• Play
• Make Someone’s Day
• Be There
• Choose Your Own Attitude (my personal favorite)

I left the FISH program early to attend the end of a Director’s reception with Ex Libris (our new ILS vendor since they merged with Endeavor). My first contact was positive, with an Ex Libris staffer based in Jerusalem, but then I was surrounded by ex-Endeavor employees and I made a quick exit.  More on that when we get back to the ranch.

So now I sit in the hotel room, hoping Tom Brady and New England don’t blow the game to the hated Peyton Manning…but they did.

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!

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…..

Hello All! This is my first time as a blogger, so bear with me!

Yesterday was a day of planes and airports for me. I left my house around 9am and arrived at my hotel in Seattle after midnight EST. I was able to watch The Queen on the flight from Atlanta to Seattle. I also had a nice chat with my seatmate who is an engineer with the U.S. Forest Service and a cattle rancher in Missouri. She also happens to be the Treasurer of her local public library board. She was eager to tell me all the improvements they have made in the last few years, including providing internet access to county residents. They have done a lot with grants, including building a combo library/tornado shelter with a grant from FEMA!

Unlike Susan, the west coast time suits me. It is nice to think that my 8am meetings will begin around 11 according to my body clock. My first meeting this morning (Saturday) is with the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Bylaws Committee. We will be considering a slight change to the Law and Political and Sciences Section’s (LPSS) bylaws and then begin a discussion of the need for section by-laws in general. This can be dry stuff, but by-laws do keep an organization as large as ALA, and its divisions, on the ’straight and narrow.’ After this I will be heading over to the Convention Center to pick up my packet and meet with the Government Documents Roundtable’s (GODORT) Federal Documents Task Force (FDTF). I’m serving as the GODORT Cataloging Committee’s liaison to FDTF. We will spend the first part of our meeting talking to representatives from the EPA about the EPA library closures. We hope to come up with some ideas on where the EPA material might be able to go to remain accessible. Then we’ll have a representative from the Government Printing Office (GPO) give us an update on the happenings in DC. Later on in the day I’ll be doing some reading for my Monday committee meeting that I couldn’t get to before I left W-S.