Professional Development

Cristina Yu made arrangements for Ellen Makaravage, Patty Strickland, and me to visit the Carpenter Library on Monday, March 23. The three of us had never been to Carpenter, so the purpose of the visit was to see the library and learn more about how they operate.

We entered the hospital at the door closest to the public parking garage, then began the long walk to the far corner of the hospital. When we finally made it there, we saw that the front door has been set up for card access-staff and students only. The public is allowed access, but only by prior appointment or by buzzing the front desk via intercom. We learned later that the library has had some problems with a few people essentially setting up camp in the library, so they instituted the security not to limit access to library materials, but to help with crowd control.

We started with a tour of the library’s public areas. Carpenter has a computer lab, open to all patrons (students and public alike). They have several study rooms, color-coded (so you can use the “blue study room” or the “yellow study room”). We saw the History of Medicine room, and got a peek at the 5 levels of stacks, mostly bound journals. Carpenter is also in the process of combining their reference and circulation desks into a single service point.

After touring the public areas, we went through the keypadded door into the staff offices. Then we (well, Cristina and Ellen mostly) had a conversation with Hilary Doane about Carpenter’s ILL operation. Carpenter is a net lender, and they often provide resources to community medical providers. For interlibrary borrowing, they charge their patrons a set fee (though I forget the amount). They also provide document delivery, including (for a fee) to outside users-community clinics, lawyers, businesses.

When we were finished, Patty impressed us all with her sense of direction as she led the way, without any hesitation, back to the parking lot!

Roz, Susan and I started out the day with the “Chocolate, Wine and Waterfalls” tour. The tour was populated with two buses full of librarians, so I guess there were plenty interested here at the conference. (The tour of area glass blowing facilities, didn’t make it, however.) It was a fun and engaging tour of the region. I’ve been here to Seattle several times since both of my sisters live here, but hadn’t ever done a real organized tour combining these three fabulous things.

Roz and Susan sat together on the bus with me on the seat behind them so I had an opportunity to meet a librarian who sat down next to me. His name was Nigel, originally from Belfast, who used to work at Notre Dame, and now works as the Univesity Librarian at Franklin College in …wait for it…Switzerland! He was very easy to talk to, but somehow we never got around to sharing stories of challenges in libraries, aside from the economic situation, which is truly worldwide. Over lunch, we discovered he had worked with Caroline Numbers, and wrote her a letter of recommendation before she came to Wake Forest. Small world.

I think that Susan’s pics will tell more of the day than my words will, but aside from the fact that the tour was very rushed, (they planned too much, but needed to get back to the Conference Center in time for the Keynote speaker), it was well done. Expect some chocolate on our return!

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the keynote speaker, Rushworth Kidder. He was filling in for Naomi Klein, author of No Logos, and I had been looking forward to hearing her speak. We all agreed after Kidder’s speech that he did a good job. He clearly defined the problems of our time as attributable to a lack of ethics more than the result of economics or politics. He galvanized us to continue to cling to our ethical roots, and honored the profession of librarianship several times in his speech.

From there, we went to the Exhibits floor where I met up with several former colleagues from Wayne State. We had dinner at the hors d’oeuvres table. Tomorrow the conference begins in earnest.

As you might guess I spend the evening in the back of the room, live-blogging the talk. Kniffel was addressing a number of audiences: writers, librarians, and students, so he spoke on a wide array of topics. My notes focus on things that seemed relevant from the academic library perspective. Here’s the post.

I am currently attending the 2007 ALA Gaming Symposium in Chicago! (Actually, it is at the Marriott near O’Hare) Since arriving Sunday morning, I’ve listened to a bevy of speakers, participated in a Wii tournament, and given a presentation with Lynn and Lori Critz from Georgia Tech, and there is still an entire day left in this two day conference!

The conference, sponsored by ALA And ACRL, began on Sunday afternoon with three excellent speakers. The keynote speaker was Henry Jenkins, the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He talked about his white paper for the MacArthur Foundation. It focuses on Media Literacy. He describes how one half of teens have created content on the web.

The next speaker was Dr. Scott Nicholson from Syracuse University. He released newly published survey data of phone interviews with 400 libraries (I’m happy to say ZSR participated in his recent unpublishd SurveyMonkey survey of 313 libraries) You can find a quick review of the data at Stephen’s Lighthouse or read the full report at The Library Game Lab at Syracuse

The final speaker on Sunday was Eli Neiburger, who is my new hero in gaming (along with Jenny Levine of course!) He runs the gaming program at the Ann Arbor District Library . He announced they are opening up their tournament software GT System to all libraries who want to run regional and national tournaments! Woohoo!! Thanks Eli!

Sunday night Amy Harris from UNCG (who is here presenting with Scott Rice) team up with me to play in the Wii Tennis Tournament! We won our first round but lost in the quarter finals! Monday morning Lynn, Lori and I gave our presentation on “Gaming in Academic Libraries: The Why and How.” The program went well, including our clicker questions! (Gotta love the clickers!)

While I could write more, I think the best approach is to point you to the blog of Paul Waelchli, the Assistant Director for Library Instruction and Public Services at the Charles C. Myers Library at the University of Dubuque. His blog, first recommended to me by Rosalind Tedford before I had even met Paul, is called ResearchQuest and he is far more eloquent than I could be. Paul does a great job describing Greg Trefry-Big Fun, Big Learning: Transforming the World Through Play
Discussion of “Big Play” program here.

Check out the photos on flickr by searching for the tag “glls2007″

Wanda and Erik were in Decatur, GA on Thursday attending an ASERL institute on the new age of discovery. Karen Calhoun kicked things off with a presentation on the need to change library systems, bibliographic control, and user services to keep the library a relevant part of the research process. Some interesting links that she referred to are:

• Habib’s research paper
• Taiga Forum provocative statements
• Educause

The morning discussion panel included Andrew Pace (NCSU/Endeca), Marshall Breeding (Vanderbilt/Primo), and Judi Brien (U. Rochester/eXtensible Catalog). The presentations included overviews of C4 (eXtensible Catalog), NCSU Endeca, and Vanderbilt’s Primo system. some interesting ideas discussed included creating interoperable systems, key usability features (facet use, enhanced info), and metadata issues (data normalization, indexing, display).

In the first afternoon session, Beth Davis-Brown presented on LC’s external advisory committee on the future of cataloging. She quickly covered the scope and content of the meetings and pointed to some interesting documents and webcasts created for the three meetings. One of my favorites is Calhoun’s response to the background paper.

Roberta Winjum looked at the work of catalogers and cataloging. She listed two essential features of the cataloger in 2007:

• Must be able to thrive in an environment of constant change
• Must be able to both respond to and initiate change

Roberta used some interesting quotes to spark discussion. . .(quotes are mostly accurate and somewhat cited. . .)

“There is a disconnect between the effort libraries expend on verifying individual lc records for monographs, and the fact that thousands of record for large sets enter the catalog almost unnoticed”

• Lack of trust, have to verify records
• Law of diminishing returns – how much time is it worth?
• It takes as much energy to load sets into collections as it does to describe a single book
• Isn’t it all about quality vs quantity? – define quality, where are the quantifiable measures? Have we ever analyzed what quality means?
• How do you back away from over-analysis of copy cataloging?
• If our users start with web-searching, why is subject-descriptive cataloging important?
• Is a hybrid system of metadata / full text indexing a good approach?
• Two libraries are doing authority work on the same record, we need a different working model so that improvements do not get made over and over.
• How do contractual limits impact local changes?
• What do you feel like you gain from doing all this – series analysis – series provides a valuable access point.
• Someone should set themselves up as the big library to put their best records into LC (I think LC did this – did it work?)

“The universe of book published every year is much smaller and much more manageable than the universe of web sites; this is the niche of sources to which professional cataloging should be primarily devoted” – Thomas Mann

“Within five years we’ll be past the notion that th online catalog is the way you find things in libraries” – Calhoun report 2005

• How could we not have a catalog?
• Will there still be a role for describing resources?

Perhaps the most disastrous and shortsighted aspect of policy decisions such as minimal level records and the abandonment of series authorities is the fact that future technological capabilities will depend – as they do now – on the presence rather than absence of information in the record – David Bade – MLA 2006, May

• The question for cataloging is how does the record get created – other issues are term extraction, name, date, incorporation of automation with human analysis
• Think about needs of discovery systems/users, not on methods, there are more important things than description,
• What about NLp/ir – what value can be added?
• Can we be part of the changing nature of record creation/description?
• Can we move from where we are to new methods for addressing needs? Can we find our niche

There is a professional obsession with the bibliographic record – it’s unhealthy (Anthony Franks – July 9^th)

• New metadata standards are more user-centric – what about those?
• We need CV, but not generalized LC – more subject/user specific
• We have lots invested in MARC – how do we move from this to the new thing?
• We don’t know which solution to choose. – how do you determine what is supportable / cost-effective?
• We aren’t on the cusp – the profession has been in a state of flux for years,
• There isn’t just one solution, perhaps more, pace of change is so quick that it is difficult to implement a solution

Karen Schneider wound up the conference with a discussion on professional jurisdiction. She pointed to components of professions that define who/what they are and looked at where librarians fall on these ideas.

• Jurisdictional control - “a profession that defines itself in terms of tasks is highly susceptible to technological changes”
• Defining the ‘heartland’ - what is the core of the profession of librarianship? - freedom of information access, right to read, organization?
• Making inroads to emerging jurisdictions -is librarianship making inroad on emerging information arenas?
• Evidence- based decision making - is librarianship basing its actions on real-world data?

Schneider wound up by pointing to things that librarians need:

• To embed Librarians in other professions
• To redirect efforts towards automated / interoperability uses
• To steal/co-op others ideas, gain a stake in emerging jurisdictions
• To develop clear statements of jurisdiction
• To provide support for think tanks/incubators to produce next great theorist
• To stop getting mowed over by other information professions

Here is Schneider’s presentation.

I attended the ACRL-Science & Technology Section (ACRL-STS) Council meeting on Friday evening.  STS Council consists of the STS Executive Board and Co-chairs of STS committees and Discussion Groups.  ACRL-STS has created 2 new Member at Large positions on the Executive Board.

On Saturday morning, I attended a program on collection assessment.   Betty Galbraith and Diane Carroll from Washington State Univ. gave an informative presentation on “Using Journal-Use Statistics to Make Collections Decisions.”  They use journal-use statistics in a variety of ways: considering journals for cancellation, considering backfile purchases, new subscription decisions, establishing core titles, and research on journal-use patterns at Washington State Univ.

On Saturday afternoon, I attended the ACRL/SPARC Forum on “The Progress of Open Access Publishing Models.”  The panel included Mark Patterson from Public Library of Science (PLoS), Bryan Vickery from Biomed Central (BMC), and Paul Peters from Hindawi Publishing.  According to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), there are currently approximately 2,500 open access journals.  PLoS was originally an advocacy organization, but it reorganized into a publishing organization in 2003.  PLoS has been innovative in the application of Web 2.0 tools to their electronic journals.  Authors can include streaming video in their journal articles.  PLoS ONE, a peer-reviewed journal which covers all of the sciences, allows readers to electronically annotate articles by highlighting minor points and contribute to threaded discussions about the articles. 

Biomed Central is the largest publisher of peer-reviewed open access journals.  BMC currently publishes over 170 open access titles.  BMC recently launched Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central, which provides access to peer-reviewed research on chemistry, math and physics in open access journals.

Hindawi Publishing Corp. was launched in 1997.  Their journals cover mathematics, engineering, biomedicine, and the physical sciences.  In 2007, Hindawi Publishing Corp. converted all of their journals to open access journals.  They publish over 80 open access journals and have a 43% acceptance rate.

On Sunday morning, I attended the ACRL-Science & Technology Section (ACRL-STS) Breakfast meeting.  We broke up into discussion groups on various topics.  I participated in the discussion group on tenure-track v. non-tenure track.  We discussed the need for mentoring programs at libraries with tenure-track programs.  Dossier preparation workshops and writing working groups, where librarians can meet regularly to get feedback on their works in progress, were also discussed.

After the STS Breakfast Meeting, I attended a RUSA-CODES Liaisons with Users committee meeting.  We discussed the results of a survey which was conducted last fall.  The survey was on liaison responsibilities in collection development among academic and public librarians.  Approximately 700 academic librarians and 200 public librarians responded to our survey.

On Sunday afternoon, I attended the STS College Librarians Discussion Group on “Replacing Subscriptions: Article Access via Pay-per-view (PPV).”  Recently, the Trinity Univ. Library cancelled subscriptions from one major publisher and switched to a pay-per-view model.  Benefits of PPV include greater immediate access and access to color copies of journal articles.  Trinity University Library set up a username and password for each department and established a budget for each department.  They discovered that faculty were accessing journals which were not available through their previous subscription. 

I attended the ACRL-STS Research Forum Sunday afternoon.  Amy Paster, Helen Smith, and Janet Hughes from the Life Sciences Library from Penn State University presented their research on “Assessing Reference Service in Academic Science and Technology Libraries.”  They are using the Wisconsin-Ohio Reference Evaluation Program (WOREP) to assess the outcomes of reference transactions and compare their results with other science library reference services nationally.  David Stern from Yale University served as guest commentator.

On Monday, I attended the ACRL-Science & Technology Section (ACRL-STS) Poster Session.  As Co-chair of the ACRL-STS Research Committee, I organized the poster session and served on the committee which reviewed the poster proposals.  Poster presentations focused on digital repositories which provide access to non-textual information.  Over 100 people attended the poster session. One poster presenter brought a book on institutional repositories, which was recently published.  It is entitled The Institutional Repository by Richard Jones, Theo Andrew, and John MacColl (Chandos Publishing, 2006).

Overall, this year’s programs at ALA Annual were informative and enlightening.  On Monday evening, I had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant.  This was my first taste of Ethiopian cuisine, and it was excellent! 

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.

I am a regular attendee of the NASIG (North American Serials Interest Group) Conference, but this year’s experience was quite different because I was on the Conference Planning Committee. The conference (including pre-conferences) was held from May 30 through June 3 in Louisville, Kentucky, and I was the Chair of the AV Committee, which meant I was kept very busy throughout the whole conference. I had to make sure that each meeting room was set up correctly for each session, had to field numerous questions regarding AV, and also worked the Registration desk. Although I only managed to attend one full session, it was still a rewarding experience, and I think the conference went well. If anybody else is interested in doing conference planning work for a future conference, I would recommend you try it, but would suggest that you keep your sense of humor and, no matter how much you plan, be prepared to make any number of last minute changes.

The one full session I attended was a presentation by Katherine Adams and Britta Santamauro of Yale University, called “Successive Entry, Latest Entry, or None of the Above? How the MARC21 Format, the Concept of a Work and FRBR Revitalize Serials Management.” In this session, Adams and Santamauro presented their vision of an ideal “best of all possible worlds” catalog system. In this vision, they assumed that technical innovations would make this possible, that rule creating and managing agencies would adopt new standards, and that legacy data and systems would take care of themselves. Basically, it was more of a thought experiment and a dream, rather than a real, practical solution. That’s not to put it down, I actually think that more of this kind of thinking is needed from catalogers to try to prod system developers to create the sort of systems that can do what librarians want them to do, not just take the systems sold to us. In Adams and Santamauro’s ideal catalog, FRBR concepts would fully be integrated into both cataloging rules and cataloging systems. Accordingly, serials would be cataloged using three basic records: a superworkspression record, a manifestation record, and an item/holdings record. The superworkspression record would be a FRBR-style expression record, that would incorporate all title changes and variations throughout the history of a serial into one record. The manifestation record would have data for a particular title and its particular format. And the item/holdings record would be virtually the same as current item records. It was an interesting model, but one that is a bit hard to describe in a blog entry without diagrams and stuff. Nevertheless, the takeaway idea that librarians should speak up about what they want their catalog systems to do is a good one.

Along with Elise, Scott & Charles attended the first day of the annual Library Purchasing Committee Meeting of North Carolina Independent Colleges & Universities (NCICU) on May 23rd. We went to hear the panel discussion, led by committee members, on how to handle gifts and two presentations by organizations that sell libraries’ unwanted books.The overviews of the general accepting and processing of gifts were routine and unsurprising. Everyone seemed to be in agreement that, while gift collections often contain some items that are useful, much of what is taken in is “dross.” The importance of having a clearly defined policy of what a library does and doesn’t accept was emphasized as the best protection against being overwhelmed with unwanted volumes.

Still, the positive aspects of taking in donations were firmly emphasized. Social capital is to be had by providing a way for donors to responsibly dispose of the personal libraries of departed loved ones and for retirees to pass on things they no longer need or have space for. Another point made was that donors may be more likely to make monetary donations later, if the library has assisted them in this way first.

More interesting were the detailed discussions of how some of the other libraries deal with their unwanted gift items. While their operations fell into one or more of the three expected options (annual or occasional book sales, year round continuous book sales or giveaways, and selling items through a third party), it was interesting to hear how their approaches varied.

Guilford College, for example, has arranged a fairly efficient relationship with a local book dealer who “cherry picks” through their unwanted items periodically and carts off those that they anticipate they can sell in their shop or online. The library receives a quarterly check for their share of the profits. The vendor buys the books they are unable to sell after a certain period of time at a nominal price.

This basic idea is taken to a much more organized and high tech level by the two vendors whose presentations followed next. Better World Books and BLogistics are both organizations who deal with many libraries. Unwanted items are shipped to them, and they sell them through a large number of online vendors like Amazon.com, Ebay and Alibris. While basically similar, there are a few differences between the two. Blogistics is associated with Solinet. They prefer to deal in large shipments of books shipped by freight. Better World Books is able to handle shipments of books as small as 6 boxes, shipped via United Parcel. They are a “green” company, donating part of the profits to a carbon fund and another part to literacy charities. Both vendors donate or recycle unsold items after a specified amount of time.

Submitted by Charles & Scott

This morning started with a session on student computer use in the classroom. They looked at tablets and laptop use by students at the Univ. or Vermont School of Business where they REQUIRE TABLETS of all their students - undergrad and grad. Their faculty struggle with needing the students to have computers in the class with the fact that computers are now fully-functional entertainment centers (sound familiar?) They revamped the class to use the tablets and installed activity monitoring software on the computers to track what the students ‘really’ do in class. They found that 20% of the time students were not doing class-related activities. The found that tablet users did less instant messaging but more gaming, email, web surfing than the laptop users. They also found that the more time a student spent instant messaging the worse grade they got in the class (shocking!). They also found that 50% of web browsing done in a class is unproductive. They also found that to some degree the tablet students did better on the course final grade. There are still some questions to be answered, but an interesting empirical look at classroom computer use.