Professional Development

Since I reported in yesterday, I finished up my “hosting” jobs of introducing session speakers in concurrent sessions. I introduced Robin Hastings (Missouri River Regional Library) who spoke on “Collaborating in the Cloud.” She discussed how libraries can leverage their social networking presence using various free sites like Google Docs and Flickr. It was a talk geared to those just entering into the social networking realm and gave a good introductory overview. The final session of the day I introduced Michel Nguessan (Governors State University) , who presented his research on “Academic Libraries’ Strategic Planning in the 21st Century: The Role of Information Technology.” He analyzed strategic plans from 100 libraries and confirmed many of the typical goals that you would expect to find in strategic plans.

The final activity of Saturday afternoon was the poster session and it was nice to unwind from a busy day by chatting with folks about their projects (Erik above is hearing about the SDCU Research Cloud. Then Erik and I hike several miles uphill to visit University of Utah to find that it is closed for fall break. So we weren’t able to visit their Marriott Library, although it looked like a substantial operation. Then we jumped on the local light rail for a quick return to the city.

This morning I started early by attending a conference committee planning breakfast (I will continue on the committee one more year). There was one more round of concurrent sessions, but I didn’t have an introduction assignment so was able to pick a session that looked interesting. I went to a session by Andrew Nagy and Scott Garrison: “Next-Gen Catalog is Half the Solution: Making eResources Truly Accessible.” There was a discussion about Vufind as Scott implemented it at his institution (Western Michigan) and then he talked about their beta testing experience with Serial Solution’s Summon product, which Andrew is helping to develop. Summon looked very slick, but it’s not open source ($$). VuFind appeared to operate similarly to what we have seen with our implementation. It was interesting to see VuFind’s experimental browse function.

I’m sure both Lauren and Erik are reporting on the final keynote address by Liz Lawley. Recording her talk was my last official assignment, and was the most challenging as she is a very short woman who could barely see over the podium. So she moved around the stage, which made some recording adjustments necessary. But it turned out well and her presentation was most interesting as she told about her Picture the Impossible project. Be sure and look at Lauren’s in-depth notes.

Overall, this was a very successful conference (both from the view of being an attendee and from the view of being part of the planning). The Twitter feed was active, take a look at what attendees had to say!

David Weinberger Delivering Saturday’s Keynote Address

I learned very quickly yesterday that being a member of a conference planning committee means you are kept busy all day long and into the evening. I had volunteered to record all three keynote addresses, so I worked with Jason Griffrey, who handled the audio portion, to get my equipment all set up and going for Joan Lippincott’s opening keynote. Our new HDD camcorder worked beautifully (thank goodness). As a committee member, we each were assigned to do speaker introductions for the concurrent presentations. My first speaker was Heather Leary, from Utah State University who talked about their 9 year NSF funded project to develop “simple Internet-based tools to help school librarians and teachers better design and share classroom activities that use high-quality online learning resources, especially those housed in a digital libraries.” The site is called Instructional Architect.

I also helped organize two “lightning talk” sessions and I served as the wrangler (aka moderator, don’t ask me where the wrangler designation came from, probably having to get people on and off the stage in five minutes requires wrangling talents). The first of these was yesterday afternoon and the second took place this morning. Today, Erik gave one of the talks, and he presented about our entry into the Amazon cloud.

First thing this morning, I set up to record David Weinberger’s keynote on “Knowledge in the Age of Abundance.” He is a very good speaker offering up lots of ideas to make you think differently. It was fun to be able to chat briefly with him before his talk. The main idea he threw out today that caught my attention because it isn’t often a popular one when put in the context of student instruction was the idea of “good enough is good enough.” Good enough has different realities depending on what you are talking about. What’s “good enough” for advising a student on researching a term paper isn’t the same as “good enough” for a medical student studying brain surgery, of course. Often though, we take the position is that we always have to find the perfect resource for that undergraduate, when really, they just need enough “good enough” resources for their assignment. It is interesting to think how to adapt that idea but still do the right thing for our students.

This afternoon, I am introducing two more speakers so will report on those tomorrow. Thus far, the conference has been well run and well received. There are several vendors here who have supported this conference. The one that caught my attention is Boopsie.com. Their business is mobilizing your data and they offer subscription services to completely offer a library’s web services on a mobile devise. Since the theme of this conference is “Open and Mobile” we’ve been hearing about many great project to build a mobile presence, this vendor offers a way to do that (at a cost).

This year I am a member of the LITA National Forum Planning Committee which is taking place this weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah. Lauren (who is presenting later today) and I traveled yesterday from Raleigh (go for those cheap airline fares). We were surprised when Steve Kelley showed up on our flight. He was heading out for a NASIG Executive Board meeting in Palm Springs! So we parted ways in Dallas.

Once we arrived and got settled in, Lauren and I spent the rest of the afternoon doing a little exploration. We visited the Salt Lake Mormon Temple and the Salt Lake City Public Library. Then we found the best vegetarian restaurant in town (Sage’s Cafe) and had an excellent dinner to finish off the day.

The conference starts in earnest at 1 pm today (there were two preconferences yesterday and this morning), so Lauren spent the morning polishing her presentation while I figured out the new Canon camcorder we just got for ZSR. I’m using it here to record the 3 keynote speakers. See what skill sets you can build if you go on the South Trip as their technology support?

I also will be moderating the sessions called “Lightning Talks” where attendees who want to share new technology focused projects can talk about them for 5 minutes each. I get to introduce them and work the stop watch to keep things moving. They have been very popular sessions the past few conferences since the official presentation proposals have to be submitted months ahead and technology initiatives are so time sensitive!

So look for reports on all of our activities out here in Salt Lake City, there’s plenty of interesting reports to come.