Professional Development

Erik, Sarah J, Molly K, and Steve K (anyone else?) attended a web-based conference on marketing institutional repositories to the university. The two presenters were from CalPoly and discussed how their IR supported a wide range of resources including university archives, masters theses, and faculty publications.

They covered a wide range of topics but by far the most interesting comment came from Marisa Ramirez who said that the two positions that are primarily concerned with the IR dedicate about 80% of their time to working with the system.

The morning session of the SPARC DR conference were very interesting. I was thoroughly enjoying the discussion of open access and the implications that access restrictions have on data by John Wilbanks when out of the blue he started talking about the semantic web (one of my favorite topics)! Wilbanks cited several examples of how semantic web principles could be used to unify the data located in multiple IRs into a single unsearchable web of data. More information on his work can be found at http://sciencecommons.org .

It has been interesting to be at three conferences over the month, all of which had different but complementary discussions on the connection between open source and open access, the changing nature of popular document models, and the necessity of forming partnerships with faculty and other organizations for libraries. The top ideas that bubbled out of the morning sessions for me were:

• Archiving and storage of documents/data, regardless of document model, but with emphasis on the value added to the participating researcher is more important than ever
• Provision of innovative services on top of back-end institutional repositories will help grow market share. There was an interesting list of outreach marketing attempts by Shawn Martin at UPenn. He discussed reasons that they often give faculty for participating in an IR including increased page rank in Google, provision of both open and closed access repository services, and scholarly website management
• Institutional repositories are an example of the wider discussion of data management, metadata, and service oriented architecture that is gaining momentum in the library and Information Science world. I have seen parralel discussions in the Duke OLE project and in the current popular movements in Next Generation Catalogs. Ideas of linking, interoperability, and service provision are the emerging direction of Institutional Repositories.

At lunch I had a chance to catch up with (our very own) Debbie Nolan. Among other interesting things (including an embedded liaison program at her library) we had a chance to talk with Charles Watkinson about what managing publishing and repositories in the field of Archaeology is like. One of the themes that emerged in this discussion was how to encourage the submission of undergraduate generated non-traditional content into IRs. Some examples included electronic or print newsletters/magazines, undergraduate research, student-driven open access journals, and student group websites. We could not come to consensus on what would encourage a student to submit this content or what goals students have in relation to publishing and archiving but it was an interesting idea . .

That’s it for now - this afternoon is more about value added services and innovation in IRs. . .

My apologies for posting a stream of consciousness list of topics but for the moment I have a good wifi signal

The second day of ASIS&T included a number of interesting presentations taht talked in broad strokes about many of the issues of current interest to lis realms. There was an interesting discussion on the approaches of using user-generated tags to create ontologies by inferring relationships in the morning session on tagging. It seems that hopes of ‘real-world’ applications in this are not quite grounded enough for traditional use but I did wonder how we could open our DF facets & use the resulting tags as enhancements to our ontological relationships.

On monday afternoon I attended a session which occured in both Second Life and in person. After a few minutes of technical difficulties, we listened to various speakers (both originating in person and in second life). I was struck with the extent to which the graphical experience of viewing slides and other participants in a MUVE enhanced a distributed session in the way that a simple teleconference or even real-world video feed would not have. My takeaway - still complicated & fraught with challenges and a possible time suck but every interesting.

Tuesday afternoon included a series of talks on the use of Institutional Repsitory implementations at various instutions. No action items from this talk were apparent but the discussion of the use of IRs to replace shared server space made me wonder to what extent we could use our own Dspace implementation to serve a collaborative file sharing space.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion at this conference occured for me in the Tuesday morning session on social networks and conference attendance. Given my experience with the SecondLife presentation yesterday I was curious to hear about other’s views regarding the persistent value in real-world conferences. As can be imagined there were a number of perspectives and the questions really centered more on how virtual social networks enahnce conference experiences rather than replace them. In any case, it was refreshing to attend a session that was run as a series of small focus groups rather than a long, multi-person lecture.