Professional Development

ALA Midwinter 2009, Denver,Lauren Corbett

CONTENTS

• Committee work for Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) division of ALA :

oContinuing Resources Section (CRS)

oBudget & Finance Committee (B&F)

oAcquisitions Section (AS)

• Time in the exhibits to meet with vendors, foreign in particular

• Forum on WorldCat Records Transfer Policy and Guidelines

Fulfilling CRS and B&F Committee Responsibilities

For those who aren’t familiar, ALA has Divisions such as Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) and Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).Then within the ALCTS Division are numerous sections, including Continuing Resources Section (CRS) and Acquisitions Section (AS).Some committees operate on behalf of the entire division and members of such committees are designated from each section.I’m working with the Budget & Finance Committee (B&F), at the ALCTS Division level, liaising from and to the CRS.This work took the majority of my time.

The CRS meeting was information sharing about association activities and goals, supportingthe ALCTS Strategic Plan, and program/preconference planning for ALA Annual in 2010.Program planning for conferences begins 18 months in advance and includes the vetting of the program topics, coordination between different sections to eliminate overlapping content in programs and to make agreements to co-plan programs.

B&F meets two different times during the weekend in order to review the fiscal year that just closed (FY 2008), to examine the first quarter reports from the current fiscal year, and to vet and approve a budget plan for the next fiscal year (FY2010) to be presented to the ALCTS Board at their Monday meeting. We squint at lots of spreadsheets with tiny print since the level of access by the Executive Director of ALCTS doesn’t let him manipulate them.

Acquisitions Section and Becoming Chair

I also attended the All Committee meeting of the ALCTS Acquisitions Section, since I learned that I’m running unopposed for Chair of the section in the spring election.All committees of a section meet at the same time in a single room, allowing the section leaders to talk with each committee by moving from table to table.I took the opportunity to get acquainted with each committee in Acquisitions Section, since I have primarily worked with the CRS in the past.I learned that Bill Kane is the new Chair of the Policy and Planning Committee of the Acquisitions Section.

Unless a write-in campaign defeats me, I’ll serve as Vice Chair of ALCTS Acquisitions Section starting in July of 2009, which means in the fall I’ll be reviewing large numbers (I hope) of volunteer forms and try to make the best possible appointments to committees, replacing members who are rotating out.Then in July of 2010, I will become Chair and will plan and lead meetings of the Executive Committee of the section at Midwinter and Annual Conferences as well as attending ALCTS Board meetings.Being an ALCTS Board member and Chair of a section usually eliminates time for visiting vendors in the exhibits.

Meeting Foreign Vendors

Since I’m not yet on the ALCTS Board, I did schedule meetings with two vendors in direct response to inquiries from our faculty.First, Latin American Studies would benefit from a steady source of reliable information regarding new scholarly publications in Spanish that would be of interest to us.I met with a vendor to discuss starting an electronic notification service. Second, Romance Languages would benefit from an approval plan, which has been of interest to Spanish in particular for many years. I met with a European vendor to discuss parameters to start a notification plan.After refinement we may be able to arrange some automatic shipments for new academic publications and give firm order attention to more specialized items.The trick is to set very narrow parameters when working with a small amount of money.This is why it became very important to use the opportunity to discuss back and forth with the vendors in person.

Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records

I attended a forum early on Monday morning, which was advertised like this:

ALCTS Forum: Creating and Sustaining Communities Around Shared Library Data: the OCLC Record Use Policy and Libraries

In November, OCLC announced OCLC’s proposed “Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records.” This announcement was greeted with criticism and concern from the cataloguing and library communities. The main issue, among others, has been the “reasonable use” clause, seen as restricting the rights to use records, including ones libraries added. Karen Calhoun of OCLC, Brian Schottlaender, Peter Murray and John Mark Ockerbloom will discuss the background and implications of the change in relations to shared library data.

Library Journal.com has already published a good summary ( http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6632413.html ) but the three presenters have all posted content online and you can go to the primary sources, all linked from the last paragraph of the blog from Murray (aka the Disruptive Library Technology Jester) at http://dltj.org/article/oclc-records-use-policy-2/.

Briefly, Karen Calhoun of OCLC made a presentation clarifying the need and intent of the update to the Policy, the first update in 21 years, followed by presentations by two librarians who were concerned that the updated guidelines would stifle creative use.One primary impetus for the updated guidelines, protecting the WorldCat records as a financial asset of the Cooperative (OCLC members), was briefly touched upon in multiple presentations.Brian Schottlaender was not actually a presenter, but a facilitator and summarized the main points of the three speakers with some commentary and then facilitated questions and answers.Most of the librarians present, speakers and audience members alike, had a lot of questions about who really owns the records.

If you really want to pursue one more perspective on this later, eventually there should be a post-conference report from an attendee in the ALCTS Online Newsletter (ANO) http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/resources/ano/index.cfm .

Denver airport around lunchtime on 1/26/09 — see how short the visibility range is?

Cincinnati airport midmorning on 1/27/09 — see how the snow followed me eastward?

I was invited to two receptions last evening and luckily both were in close proximity at the Seattle Center. The Center is on a big campus that was built for the 1962 World’s Fair and was a pleasant mile walk from my hotel.

ALA Editons hosts a reception each ALA Conference for authors and their committee members. This was my first opportunity to attend one and it was interesting to meet other authors. It was held at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, a place that made me think of Chris Burris, who I think would enjoy it. We were restricted to an event room so didn’t really get to roam around and view exhibits.

My second reception was the one hosted by ExLibris for their customers. It was held in the Pacific Science Center, at the opposite end of the campus. They had RSVP’s from 800 people, but our group had the run of the place so it wasn’t crowded. I finally met up with Mary Horton there and after the reception we had a great dinner at The Pink Door.

The Space Needle made it simple to find the Seattle Center Night view of the Ferris Wheel at the foot of the Space Needle This robots greets visitors at the entry of the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame ALA Editions Reception at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame An animated praying mantis at the entry of the Insect Village in the Pacific Science Center Mary Horton at the ExLibris reception

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 lunch I went to the exhibit hall with three main goals: to talk with Syndetic Solutions, to stop and say “hey” to Bill Kane and to find some free chocolates to satisfy my sweet tooth! I am pleased to report I met all three goals.

Syndetic was the toughest. I could not see them listed on the vendor list. I put on my librarian’s hat, found the Internet Cafe and did a bit of research to discover they are owed by Bowker. Whew, hard to keep all that vendor consolidation straight. Chris, the regional sale rep from Charlotte, gave me a demo of some of the sites using the product. Take a look at Purdue’s implementation. They are a Voyager site so the look is probably more similar to what we could expect than some of the others he showed me. If you search for “48 laws of power” as a title keyword, you should see a result with cover art. Go into the individual record and find the link to additional information to see the enriched content. The data is all stored on the host server, libraries simply link to the data they have subscribed to receive.

If we would like, we can try the service out with a two week trial. Erik and I will canvas you all once we both get back in the library next week.

The second session I attended this morning was a demonstration of Primo by ExLibris. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is a new resource discovery and delivery product that is coming to the market. Its competition includes AquaBrowser and Grokker. Its purpose is to provide an interface that incorporates the varied information users want to see and provide a way for them to participate through comments and reviews.

Two development partners also gave presentations on their experiences and progress in the partnership. One is University of Minnesota Libraries which is an Aleph site, and the second was Vanderbilt, which is a Unicorn site. Both are satisfied with the development so far, however, the product is not in production yet. ExLibris is starting to program a pipe for Voyager.

I won’t bore you all with the product details, but you can be sure we’ll be taking a closer look at it and other products as well as open source possibilities to improve the way our patrons find, access and use our resources.

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!

Today I attended my first breakfast with Alexander Street Press, and it was amazing.

First: I love ASP.  I think they offer a lot of interesting and innovative products in interesting and emerging fields, so I feel they are future minded.  This became more evident as they discussed the evolution of a new architecture for some of their databases using Web 2.0 and community into their databases.  This architecture allows for more immediate updating, handles external searches, has cross-search abilities, allows peer and student interaction through playlists, feature releases, OpenURLs, permanent URLs, tag clouds, folksonomy, and RSS.  They’re also doing some really innovative things, allowing collaboration across different media databases.  For example, you can pull together text, a score of music, and a recording of music into one place. If you stumble across one of their pages from an internet search, it has a real “Amazon.com” feel to it.  These databases can be an endpoint of a search (after using a search engine) as well as a starting point (from a library website).

Second: Angela Davis was the amazing speaker.  She started her talk explaining the importance of the library to her as a child, but that the libraries in her community were segregated.  She then talked about her use of a library as a scholar.  She remembers spending lots of time hunting down journals and making photocopies, but now, like a lot of us, primarily uses databases.  She misses the tangibility of books and paper, but also sees value in the ease of finding information today.  She continued on to talk about legacies and the importance of realizing that for every “leader” there is a community doing a lot of work to make change happen.  I talk more about that over at the COSWL Cause.  She considers her life work to be what she is doing around prison issues and emphasized the importance of educational opportunities for those in prison. She also posed an interesting question: how do you imagine a self-abolishing academic field? (For example, the field “critical prison studies” focuses on problems with prisons; if they are successful there won’t be prisons, so there can’t then be a “critical prison studies.”)  Overall, her talk emphasized the importance of community work towards change and the need to be critical of people’s current stances regardless of the stances they’ve made in the past.

Endeavor customers were invited to attend this meeting last evening with the EndUser Board and ExLibris Management. The late hour of the meeting may have affected the attendance because only about 20 of us showed up (in addition to the meeting participants). It was scheduled to go for an hour and a half. An hour and 10 minutes into the meeting, introductions were finally completed. We heard from each ExLibris person about their role in the new organization. As you might expect, it was all very upbeat and positive. Of the 20 minutes left to cover the actual agenda, 18 were devoted to sharing information about the forthcoming 2007 EndUser Conference plans (75 sessions planned and since Voyager is the only product left, it will be interested to see what those sessions are about), and an overview of the plans to move both Voyager and Aleph forward. There will be a Voyager 7.0 upgrade. They are still sticking with the WebVoyage for the short term…..

Finally, at 8:28, “product issues” came up on the agenda. I finally had a chance to ask about continued support and the upgrade future for EnCompass  (was supposed to be Curator by now) and Meridian. I was able to get confirmation that sites that have not been upgraded to Curator won’t be. This is something we have been trying mightily to find out about since we are in the middle of Digital Forsyth and have a new EnCompass server that we were planning to do a fresh install of Curator on instead of migrating the old version. Meridian will have one more upgrade to 2.0, but nobody was talking about what it entails. They focused on the need for us “legacy” customers to start communications with ExLibris to map out migration plans.

We’ll have alot to discuss on how to move forward once we all get back to campus….

It’s my dirty little secret. I’m scared of the exhibit halls. They’re big, crowded, loud, and I’m not ever sure exactly what I’m supposed to do. I normally just make time to do a quick run through, see what’s going on (so that when people are talking about Google, I know what they’re doing), and get out. Today was about par for the course, but I did see this stellar view:

Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.