Professional Development

This morning I got rained out of a long run in SLC but did get to hear the incredible sound of thunder as it reverberated across the valley. As I finished up my run on a treadmill I saw a few lighning bolts hit the mountains to the west and was very happy to be inside.

I attended a session from Los Alamos National Laboratory for the one open session of the day and heard about a service oriented approach to creating a large indexing/discovery/service information system. While we are struggling with 1.7 million records, LANL is indexing 95 million! The presentation had lots of technical details but one fascinating standard that they used is the Information Environment Service Registry.

The final keynote by Elizabeth Lawley at RIT discussed a city-wide game that RIT developed in conjunction with the newspaper. The slides are available at slideshare. The game included a number of neat activities including photosynths, quizzes, recipies, photography, and a scavenger hunt. The scavenger hunt was developed using scvngr (a commercial text-message based scavenger system).

Some themes that proved to be interesting this weekend:

1. Library technology solutions continue to push towards more complex systems. XC/RIT, the LANL system, and Vufind were all a few steps further this year. There were lots of libraries who are actively using small scale open source systems and experimenting with open source systems.
2. Libraries are increasingly thinking about their data. I saw a number of small and medium scale projects built on use or resource metadata that historically would not have been heavily used. Likewise, the systems that got demonstrated all had a focus on how to index and manage large datasets. There is an interesting contrast to this trend in the push towards cloud and hosted data/service platforms.
3. Electronic books continue to nudge the marketplace of print books. The GoogleBooks settlement came up several times and there were some interesting ideas surrounding how ebooks could be more heavily used including the adoption of a netflix model (no due dates, automatic queues, intelligent suggestions), the need for more ubiquitous e-book readers (yale research), and the growing comfort with online reading “we spend more time reading information online than we ever did with books but it is still thought of as different.

On the E-book theme there was a great article on the impact that piracy is having on the e-book platform. I also stumbled across the florida orange grove http://florida.theorangegrove.org, a k20 site for open access textbooks. While both of these recent experiences are on opposite side of the same idea (free books!), seeing them both in mainstream media on the same day makes me wonder how central E-books are becoming.

“Technology Central in Birmingham”

Greetings from the Deep South. Erik and I are traveling for 16 days with the 2009 iteration of Drs. Hattery and Smith’s “Social Stratification in the Deep South” experiential summer course. This year there are 19 students, 13 from Colgate University (where Hattery and Smith taught this past year), 5 from Wake Forest and 1 from NC State. Our role on this trip is to deliver the technology that makes the course interactive to our virtual audience and to document the course activities through video, still images, and audio. As you probably know already, our “course shell” is a facebook page, coupled with a twitter feed and flickr. We have been kept busy, particularly with our “just in time” learning on video editing. Barry, we miss you!

We have been in Alabama since Sunday and the course focus has been on Civil Rights issues and history. This morning, after we spend the morning at the South Poverty Law Center, we will get back on the bus for a 7 hour ride to New Iberia, LA. We will spend the next four days there in our service project, helping with the reconstruction of a diner damaged by Katrina and subsequent storms.

Thus far, we are totally impressed with the student engagement with the coursework. The students are sharp and enjoy initiating discussions on the wide range of issues that have been introduced in the first few days. On the first day, a spirited discussion was interrupted by a lunch stop. After we started back on the road, the students asked to resume the interchange and continue exploring the topic. As Lynn can attest to from last trip, usually, post-lunch riding was a prime time for an afternoon nap!

We invite you to keep an eye on our facebook page and see the activities that take place as the trip evolves.

Today I watched in amazement as our own Susan Smith taped, edited, and posted videos from our Social Stratification course to our Facebook course page. Susan and I spent the last few days recording video and have over 70 GB of data and, as we should have expected, it brought our machines to a crawl. Today we turned our attention to producing shorter, more manageable videos and things are going much better

The south trip has been pretty exciting so far with lots of great discussions and opportunities to see new things and we are just getting started.

Tomorrow we head to New Iberia to begin our service project. Wish us luck!

I’m back from this year’s annual conference of the Music Library Association, held in Chicago (during a snowstorm) Feb. 17-21. This year I also attended the pre-conference hosted by MOUG (Music OCLC Users Group). Some highlights:

Sound Recordings and Copyright

Tim Brooks of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections described the ARSC’s work lobbying Congress to reform US copyright law on pre-1972 sound recordings. These recordings are not covered by federal law, but are often governed by state law, which tends to give copyright holders, in Tim’s words, “absolute control.” Tim cited some startling statistics: of all recordings made in the 1940s-70s, only 30% have been made available by the copyright holders; of recordings made in the 1920s-30s, only 10% are available; and of the enormous corpus of ethnic and traditional music from all over the world that was recorded by Columbia and Victor in the early years of the 20th century, only 1% is available. Because US copyright law for sound recordings is the most restrictive in the world, early recordings of American artists are currently legally available in other countries but not in the US — which means that American libraries and archives are unable to preserve this portion of our own heritage.

In response, the ARSC has made the following reccomendations:

• Place pre-1972 recordings under a single federal law.
• Harmonize US copyright law with that of other countries.
• Legalize use of “orphaned” works (whose copyright holders cannot be identified).
• Permit use of “abandoned” works, with compensation to the copyright holders.
• Permit “best practices” digitization for preservation. Libraries and archives are the most likely to preserve early recordings (they have a better track record on this than the recording companies themselves) and the least likely to re-issue recordings (so they’re no financial threat to copyright holders).

Of ARSC’s experiences lobbying Congress members, Tim reports that many were simply unaware of the situation, but were sympathetic when informed; that libraries are seen as non-partisan and a public good, “the guys in the white hats”; and that there is now much “soft” support in Congress. Other ARSC activities include a “white paper” for the Obama administration, and the establishment of an organization called the Historical Recording Coalition for Access and Preservation (HRCAP) to further lobbying efforts.

In another copyright session, attendees and speakers offered some good tips for approaching your legal counsel re digitization projects:

• Present your own credentials (copyright workshops you’ve attended, etc.) pertaining to libraries and copyright.
• Cite specific passages of the law (section 108, 110, etc.)
• Show you’ve done due diligence (e.g., you’ve replaced LPs with CD re-issues where available; you’ve determined other LPs are in deteriorating condition, etc.)
• Try to persuade counsel to adopt a “risk assessment” approach (i.e., just how likely is it that a copyright holder will challenge you in this case) versus the more typical “most conservative” approach.
• File a “contemporaneous writing” — a memo or other document, written at the outset of a digitization project, in which you explain why you believe that you are acting in good faith. This will go a long way towards protecting you if you are in fact challenged by a copyright holder.

Is the Compact Disc Dead?

This was the question addressed by a very interesting panel of speakers, including a VP of Digital Product Strategy at Universal Music Group; the CEO of the Cedille recording label; a concert violinst (Rachel Barton Pine); a former president of the American Symphony Orchestra League; and a music librarian at Northwestern U.

The panel quickly cited a number of reasons to believe that the CD remains a viable format: among these, the universal human desire to own a physical artifact “to give and to show”; the ability to listen on room speakers, not just earbuds; violinst Pine noted that she sells and autographs some 40-70 of her CDs after each performance, that people enjoy the personal contact with the artist, and relish being able to take home a souvenir of the concert. Flaws of downloadable releases were cited in comparison: garbled indexing, making identifying and retrieving of classical works difficult; frequent lack of program notes to provide historical context; the inferior audio quality of compressed files. Changes in student behavior were also noted: in online databases, students tend to retrieve only selected works, or excerpts of works; there doesn’t seem to be the inherent incentive to browse like that offered by physical albums, with the result that students don’t develop as much in-depth knowledge of a composer’s works. On the other hand, the reduced cost of digital distribution has enabled smaller orchestras and other groups to reach a larger audience.

Concern was expressed over an increasing trend among major labels to release performances only in the form of downloadable files, often with a license restricted to “end user only” — preventing libraries from purchasing and making available these performances to their users. The panel proposed that performers and IAML (the International Association of Music Libraries) put pressure on the record companies. Alternative approaches? CDs-on-demand: Cedille’s boss sees this as a growing trend. Also, consortial deals with individual record companies: OhioLink has recently done one with Naxos.

Finally, a concern was expressed about the aggregator model of audio-steaming databases: that these hamper libraries’ responsiveness to local user needs, and the building of the unique collections important for research. The music library community needs to negotiate for distribution models that enable individual selection for traditional collection development.

How Music Libraries are Using New Technologies

• Videos demonstrating specific resources, such as composers’ thematic catalogs (similar to Lauren’s Research Toolkits).
• “Un-associations,” in informal online forums like Yahoo or Google groups. There are currently groups for orchestra libraries, flutists, etc.
• Use of Delicious to create user guides.
• Meebo for virtual ref.
• Twitter for virtual ref and for announcements/updates.
• Widgets and gadgets to embed customized searches, other libraries’ searchboxes, and other web content into LibGuides, etc.
• ChaCha (a cellphone question-answering service) for virtual ref. Indiana U is partnering with ChaCha in a beta test.

JSTOR

A JSTOR rep presented palns to add 20 more music journals to the database, including more area-studies and foreign-language titles. Attendees pointed out that popular music serials (Downbeat, Rolling Stone, etc.) are becoming primary source material for scholarly research — would JSTOR consider including them? The rep replied that JSTOR originally required that journals be peer-reviewed, but had recently begun to relax this rule. A dabate ensued among attendees as to whether the pop publications were sufficiently relevant to JSTOR’s mission — some believed that JSTOR should stick to its original focus on scholarly literature, and that others could preserve the pop stuff.

Bibliographic Control and the LC Working Group (or: Music Catalogers Freak Out)

The MOUG plenary session gave catalogers a forum to discuss ramifications of the LC Working Group’s recommendations on bibliographic control (see my blog posting for RTSS 08). Concerns expressed:

If collaboration is properly defined as “doing something together for a purpose,” then the disparate (and sometimes opposing) purposes of publishers, vendors, and libraries means that LC’s vision of collective responsibility for metadata and bibliographic control will not constitute true collaboration, but merely exploitation.

The Working Group appears to some to harbor a naive faith in digital architecture to meet all discovery and retrieval needs (it reminded one attendee of predictions that microform would solve all our problems). This is perceived to cultivate a gobal, generalist, one-size-fits-all outlook divorced from existing patterns of scholarly communication and “communities of practice” (e.g., the subject specialist and the community of practitioners that he/she serves). Bibliographic control should be “a network of communication between communities of practice.” An MLA liaison to ALA’s RDA committee noted that the RDA folks expected local catalogers to help fill in the gaps in the currently-vague RDA code — but when specialist communities actually propose details (such as a list of genre terms for music), they’re “dissed.”

Others fear that if LC backs away from its historical role as national library, relying on the larger community of publishers, vendors, and libraries to collaborate in bibliographic control, the actual effect will be that library administrators will think: “If LC isn’t doing this work, then we don’t have to either” — and collaboration will disappear.

Yet others fear the “commodification of cataloging.” With the increasing availability of MARC records and other metadata from third-party sources, there seems to be a growing perception that all metadata is the same — and a concommitant decline in willingness to investigate its source and quality. Administrators increasingly speak of metadata as a commodity.

Remember Katrina?

I’ll close with an item from the business meeting of SEMLA (the Southeast chapter) which was a cause of great celebration: our colleagues from Tulane University in New Orleans, whose music collection was flooded in Hurricane Katrina, announced that 70% of their collection has successfully been restored, and the last portion of it recently returned to them. They brought along a few representative items for show and tell — including a score died pink by its red paper covers. Recalling photos of the original damage, a 70% recovery rate seems a miracle!

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.

An early direct flight (who knew they still exist?) landed Erik and me in Cincinnati before breakfast. The trip began with a most interesting shuttle trip from the airport where the driver (who was about 80), immediately took us off the interstate onto a scenic mountainous, winding, trecherous road that followed the Ohio River on the Kentucky side. We traveled through 5 different little river towns, and were treated to a running travelogue, complete with jokes. The conference didn’t start until after lunch, and neither of our rooms were ready, so we set off to explore the downtown Cincinnati area. We found a suspension bridge designed by the engineer who used it as a prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge, an unusually shaped condominum building designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect doing the World Trade Center, and a very lovely riverfront park at Sawyer Point.

After lunch, it was down to business, however, it was a bit disorienting to be at a techie conference that doesn’t provide any wireless options, free or otherwise. For the LITA bloggers they had a table set up at the rear of the room that was hard wired!

The opening keynote, by Tim Spaulding from LibraryThing was interesting mainly because I have never used or explored it. He has taken his product to a high level social experience with social cataloging. He told the audience that LibraryThing is now larger than LOC, but allowed that LOC doesn’t have 256 different JK Rowling titles (which is a prime example of the outcome of democracy of social cataloging to me). He spent quite awhile discussing the tagging in LibraryThing. There are 41 million tags now. There are tag mirrors (which shows what tags other people have placed on the books in your catalog), Tag Mash (which combines individual tags for a most exact hit on the meaning: ie romance zombies), and a common knowledge feature that captures things a tradition catalog wouldn’t: who are the most important characters in the book).

The first concurrent session I attended was given by two women (Gretchen Gueguen and Ann Hanlon) who worked with the digitization initiatives at University of Maryland (and knew Jennifer Roper). Neither is still at UMd and one of them (Gretchen) is now at East Carolina. Their talk was “Crowdsourcing Digitization: Harnessing Workflow to Increase Ouput.” They talked about the issues they faced getting Maryland’s large scale, decentralized scanning initiatives under control. They faced many of the types of decisions that we have been faced with in our Digital Forsyth project. The “crowdsourcing” idea speaks to their decision to go with the “wisdom of crowds”, in this case that of patrons and co-wokers. Utimately, they moved to a user driven model to direct their selection of what to digitize rather than preselecting “trophy” collections to showcase. This means they are digitizing those materials that are requested by patron researchers rather than digitizing and then hoping folks will use what they digitize. Now that Gretchen has moved to East Carolina, they are doing the same approach. She showed a screenshot of Joyner’s forthcoming newest collection that contains many of the same features you see in Digital Forsyth including tag clouds and facets. It would be worthwhile to plan a field trip to exchange ideas, don’t you all think?

I joined Erik for the second concurrent session on “Reswizzling the IT Enterprise for the Next Generation” where NC State’s Maurice York talked about how they have restructured their IT operation to be more effective to their customers (over 250 staff with over 700 computers to manage, plus all the servers, services etc. you might expect from NC State). We were both tickled to hear Maurice talk about instituting Service Level Agreements, much like our WFU friends in IS are doing. I wish him luck with that one. The main value of this session for me was that it affirmed that, even on our smaller scale operation, we face the same complexities and challenges to properly serve all of our customers and manage your expectations. There were some good ideas that Erik and his group might try as more and more projects and technologies come our way!

The day ended with a “vendor showcase” reception. LITA has a very small vendor presence compared to many other conferences (maybe 6-8 tables), but there was good conversation between colleagues and roasted veggies, mashed potatoes (a strange addition to an appetizer type party) and other good food.

Today, our presentation is right after lunch, so we’ll report back this evening on how that went!

On Wednesday, March 25th, 7 members of the ZSR Staff, Rosalind Tedford, Mary Beth Lock, Lauren Pressley, Kaeley McMahon, Sarah Jeong, Christian Burris and myself loaded up in the WFU Student Life van and headed up 421 to visit the ASU Library and Information Commons in Boone. We arrived and started a tour around 10:30am. Four members of the ASU staff (see list below) who were members of the”Library Internal Building Group” led us all over the building. After an amazing tour (see highlights listed below) we were treated to lunch by our host and had a discussion about the lessons they learned in this building process. After lunch and discussion we resumed our tour and by 3:30pm were back on 421 to WFU! Our ASU hosts were just amazing as was their facility. To see pictures of the ASU Library and Information Commons, check out the library’s photo set from this trip!

Below is a list of tour highlights, positives outcomes from the building experience and lessons learned. The seven staff who attended collected these items together in a Google Doc to make this a truly collaborative report!

Present from ASU

• Ann Viles- Associate University Librarian
• Lynne Lysiak- Head of Systems
• Pat Sweet-Facility Manager
• Lori Davis- Position in Technical Services

(All Four were on the “Library Internal Building Group”)

Library and Building History Highlights

• 1996-Planning began
• Funding received in 2000/2001
• Funding included building and Parking Deck
• Building completed in 2005, deck in 2006 (Architect-Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott)
• ASU uses the Innovative Library System

Tour Highlights

• Aluminum table in the conference room made for a very nice light movable piece of furniture, but makes the wireless mouse and keyboard unusable.
• They had 26 study rooms. Booked study rooms with III Millennium client with an opac interface
• Chairs in the conference room were stackable and colorful, light and wheeled.
• Floors had outlet junction boxes built in with covers that were flush with the floor when not opened. Made for flexible use.
• They shared students from circulation to reference desk and back.
• Had “stacks workrooms” on each floor where books that were picked up from study tables were scanned in to have a record of “in building use.”
• Movable shelves for microform cabinets!
• DVD collection was in open stacks, retrievable by patrons. Shelved in assession number order.
• DVDs, microfiche, children’s books collection, periodicals, all together on the lower level. All periodicals, both current and bound, were shelved together using compact shelving.
• Computing stations were facing each other but off set in a herringbone fashion. Made great use of space and students weren’t looking directly at each other.
• Computer lab tables had great cord management, and the chairs were light, comfortable, wheeled and cheap. Flooring in labs/classrooms was also raised to allow for flexible room configurations.

Positives Outcomes

• Lots of light, lots of study space
• carpet squares
• Ref collection shrunk by 50%
• The atrium was glassed in. This really cut down on noise but still allowed for beautiful and open views.
• The shelving in reference was half regular stacks height. This gave users plenty of flat surfaces to spread out or to write on. This also meant that everyone had a clear view of the area. Library staff could see anywhere if there was a problem, and students could see the desk (to know if the librarian was available, etc) from anywhere in the room.
• They have a building manager and really recommend this role.
• The library houses a large lecture hall that can be used by other campus groups during specific times. There are 120 theater-styled seats that are ADA compliant and each has an outlet.
• Sign displays are all easily changeable. (They really recommend temporary signage for the first few years as it takes a while to determine the best location for things.)
• The reference desk was designed for students to come around to the back to work side-by-side with the library staff member.
• Student employees are cross trained and have periodic group training sessions on specific skills (a database, a new technology, etc). These sessions are held three or four times in one week so that there are several chances to attend.
• There are 29 active group study rooms with various levels of technology. A few have international satellite for foreign language programming. A few have smartboards, but they have taken a beating as some used them as whiteboards.
• One computer classroom has 34 computers set up so that the front of the classroom is to the side (rather than in front of behind the monitors). There are two projectors so that everything is visible from any point in the room. There are two smartboards. The computers run software to allow instructors to restrict what students can do or to push screens to all computers.
• There is a server room in the library that runs things like the clocks (set by GPS) and security cameras. (The ILS server is housed elsewhere.)

Lessons Learned

• Be Wary of Value Engineering (cost-cutting)
• Getting lots of pressure to be open 24hours. The atrium was designed for that, but not the rest of the building. (going 24 with 4 security guards and 1 library staff.)
• Management support of campus using library classrooms created more than expected amount of work, training faculty, management, scheduling.
• Volume of patrons, 600,000 when opened, now 860,000
• Would run fewer Ethernet jacks (900 wired jacks)
• Some critical folks did not get to review particular designs
• Follow behind the engineers (what standards are they using?)
• They recommended to us to look into the Brooklyn College Library. It’s in a Carnegie library building and has some similar renovation interests.

If you have any questions about our visit, just ask one of us who attended!

Top Technology Trends

I started off the day bright and early, attending the Top Technology Trends committee meeting. It was different than the one I went to a year earlier. Since it is Midwinter, it was more informal, with the technology gurus seated around a table having an informal discussion about technology trends. Those of us who went to observe sat in chairs around the edge of the room. Since not all committee members were able to be here, a valiant attempt was made to connect one member virtually via Skype. It didn’t work seamlessly, but it was a nice touch since, after all, it was a technology session with a room full of geeks. What struck me was that instead of hearing much talk about far out “new” potential technologies, the greatest portion of the 2 hours was spent discussing topics we are all grappling with: liability and security concerns regarding storing documents remotely (ie on Goggle servers), implications for equipment and services when the Web becomes the operating system and the application server, and why our organizations are so far behind in providing adequate server space for their constituents when Goggle will give gigs away for free. A most interesting exchange concerned the difficulty these folks are having at their home institutions getting their IT units to provide locally housed and controlled wiki and blog space (Yea, ZSR for being ahead of this trend!)

Two interesting concepts that Karen Schneider discussed were the “architecture of participation” and the “architecture of aesthetics.” The first refers to the whole Library 2.0 movement of user involvement and empowerment and how many commercial vendors (ie Library Thing) get it, when major library vendors (OCLC was mentioned) still don’t. The architecture of aesthetics is her way of describing that users are making it known, in many different ways, that aesthetics count. Of course, the most current example of this is the IPhone. That sparked a discussion of ebooks and their aesthetics and functionality. And, Erik will be thrilled to hear this, a big discussion took place about what Erik coined “federated services.” (No, Erik they called it “seamless fulfillment”, but they were talking about exactly what you recognized a need for 2 years ago: the technology and interface that allows a user to request some service or item in a single place without him having to know at all what will take place behind the scenes to fulfill his needs). Other familiar topics included copyright, digital storage, preservation storage, the coming of age of open source and what users want from libraries! Finally, in the last 10 minutes they did a lightening round where some hot new trends were mentioned oh so briefly: location awareness, cloud computing, green computing and surface computing. Hopefully, these are discussed in more depth in the LITA blog where the trends are posted.

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.

I was able to attend a program on Monday! I went to “Once upon a Furl in a Podcast Long Ago: Using New Technologies to Support Library Instruction.” Not only was this program all about some of my favorite topics (technology in education), but it was sponsored by the Women’s Studies Section (my home within ACRL).

The program started with awards. This year’s WSS award for significant achievement in Women’s Studies Librarianship went to Jennifer Gilley, Kayo Denda, Jenna Freedman, and Sharon Ladenson for their 2006 NWSA Conference presentation. This was a presentation at an academic conference for Women and Gender Studies scholars focusing on library research. The WSS award for career achievement in Women’s Studies Librarianship went to Sandy River, long time, active member. In her speech she talked about how WSS gave her a home in ALA and how she has received at least as much from WSS as she has given. Her speech really resonated with me because the WSS committee was the one that really brought me into the fold right away. It’s a great group of people, and they’re doing really great things at their institutions and in ACRL.

After the awards section, the program began. This was an overwhelmingly popular program! The crowd overflowed and the hotel staff had to take down one of the walls to make more room. I took a lot of notes, so I’ll try to keep it to the point (with links for more information) here:

From Joan K. Lippincott:

• We’re at a critical point where we need to fundamentally rethink our services & information literacy
• Emphasize information and content, technology as vehicle
• What about non-traditional students who aren’t connected? They will need to be to function in today’s business world, so we should work to teach them to use these technologies.
  Convergence of literacies: Written Literacy, Information Literacy, Technology Literacy, Visual Literacy
• Pointed towards MacArthur Foundation Project (Digital Media and Learning)
  Areas to consider (New T&L Partnerships): Center for Teaching and Learning, New Media Center, Instructional Technology Group, FIlm or Multimedia Studies Department (on our own campuses)
• Columbia’s Shakespeare & the Book: Study Environment
• Georgetown U, CNDLS
• LINK Dartmouth RWIT: Center for research, writing, and IT (one stop shopping)
• New Resources like PennTags, TeamSpot (at Stanford), Student Multi-media Design Center (U. Delaware), Practice Presentation Room (Georgia Tech)
• We’re changing focus: from teaching about access to library resources to teaching about access to information and tools (Amen!)
• Data for visualization is going to become more important in all fields
• Webcasts, podcasts, blogs, images, etc. are rich resources for students, do we connect them to this type of resource, or limit our reference to library-purchased information?
• Research Channel videos (high level academic content)
• D-Lib article on Wikipedia to extend access to digital collections
• Georgetown portal for community based research (about Washington DC)
• George Mason History Tools
• Showing information
• Digital collections as screensavers on library computers
• NCSU Learning Commons eBoards images
• Changing focus: from teaching policies as rules, to focusing on policy awareness and discussion
• Media Education Foundation’s fair(y) use tale
• UPenn Library mashup Contest in conjunction with LL’s Free Culture
• Creative Commons Licensing (are we teaching our students? grad students?)
• Cornell’s Thoughts on Facebook (are we sharing our thoughts on these issues with our students?)
• Methods: online tutorials, online games, contest, social networking sites, students collect resource before class & jointly critique, simulation, instruction in virtual worlds
  supporting materials: social sites like blogs developed by students, wikis, etc
• Challenges for faculty: interest in inserting skills in faculty curriculum, willingness to collaborate, acceptance of new forms of projects, developing of grading for new forms of expressions
• Challenges for librarians: broaden conception of information literacy, convergence, overall service program, not just classes, engagement in collaborative learning with students, development of new skills, promoting services to faculty
• We must transform information literacy!
• We will have to let go of some things (We can’t keep doing all we’ve done & add new, have to decide what to stop doing)
• Assist in student transition from recreational use of technology to academic use
• Provide with environment with engage students (both physically and virtually)
• Promote creativity

From Dr. Kathleen Burnett:

• 10 years from now the field of librarianship will mostly be digital natives
• “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach .” Mark Prensky
• Digital Natives assume connectivity & see the world through he lens of games and play.
• “Over the past 20 years, young adults have declined from being the most likely to read literature to those least likely. The rate of decline for the youngest adults, aged 18 to 24 was 55% greater than the total adult population. ” Kelly Hill
• “Even if the lecturer is charismatic, holding the attention of students for an entire lecture of fifty minutes or longer is impossible.” Joel Foreman
• “It is clear from talking with them that they already know they don’t want to live and work the way we do. ” Brian O’Reilly (However LIS enrollment is increasing and age of first enrollment is lower than it has ever been.)
• Cited D. Oblinger’s research of learning preferences
• Ideal learning situation: customizable, immediate feedback, constructive to explore learning environments, motivates students to persist in excess of any externally imposed requirements, builds enduring conceptual structures. (Joel Forman)
• Strategies: interaction & feedback, engage, accelerate, experiential learning, increase options, peer-to-peer, more “pull” web based options, more interactive multimedia.
• Suggestions for implementation:
• Podcasts & vodcasts: bring other voices and faces into discussion, or students can create presentations
• Blogs & social networks: support class and discussion, or extend bounds of classroom (invite other participants), or to encourage individual responsibility for information
• Wikis: support collaborative development of info resources and dissemination of information, or to teach consensus building and teamwork
• Games and simulations: explore relationship between physical and virtual, or to teach the concepts of programming or to engage kinetic and spatial learners
• Pew Internet & American Life Project: Web 2.0 Users
• Men and women balanced in Omnivore, Females tend to be Connectors
• This indicates we’re equalizing in terms of computer use skills in some ways

From Kathryn Shaughnessy:

This presentation was based on a specific distance program at St. John’s University. I’m only noting things that would be useful to us, too:

• Used technology to improve library instruct: creation, distribution, and impact
• Used open source alternatives that could be continue to be used after graduation
• Again, brought up the synthesis of literacies
• Technologies of choice: Captivate for tutorials, Audacity for podcasts, Wordpress for blogging, PBwiki or Wikipm for wikis, also RSS, RefWorks, Skype, del.icio.us tagging, and courseware.
• Said that if you only had time to learn one technology in the coming year, she would say “RSS, all the way.” This resonates with my “RSS will change your life!”
• Updated Information Literacy (Modular) Tutorial in Captivate (with images, text, and demonstration)
• Academic Podcasting Initiative
• Uses RefWorks to generate RSS for courses. I wonder if there would be a way to do this for our podcasting pilot using EndNote Web?
• del.icio.us for course bookmarks
• Skype was the second most important technology according to Shaughnessy, certainly could be useful for distance education with our abroad houses (particularly with camera)
• St. John’s uses podlinez to do an audio tour of library that you can dial into on your cell phone

From Heather Tompkins:

• WGS as interdisciplinary: cutting edge, CV not yet developed, falls outside traditional resources, breaks down expert/novice barriers, emphasizes connections and process, considers materials informally published
• She explained social bookmarking as a way to share bookmarks across the library professionally. Do you use del.icio.us or furl? Let me know, i’ll add you to my network! (My del.icio.us account username is laurenpressley)
• Pulls social bookmarks to library page
• Used Flickr to annotate floor maps of the library for her specific disciplines
• Pointed to Google customized search engine
• Pointed to meebo widget and Google Calendar
• There is a potential information literacy tie in: looking at friends’ friends is like citation research, a blogroll is like bibliography, tagging is like controlled vocab, etc.

So, to be honest, I assumed I would know everything that this session would about, and I attended mostly just to be supportive. However, it was a really really good session! The speakers articulated ideas well and shared several new ones!