The LIBRARY MEMO

Hi All,

I was able to attend the Annual Association of Colleges and Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference –“Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend” in Seattle, WA, March 12-15.

This conference had much to offer and I was able to attend many different sessions.

I attended a pre-conference on Thursday called “Assessment Baristas: Can we start a Rubric for you?” This was part lecture and part workshop gave a good overview about rubrics construction, how they can be simple to complex, rubrics can also assist in the preparation for a class, especially if you need to do some type assessment.

Some highlights from Friday--
“We’re Not Playing around: Gaming Literate Librarians=Information Literate Students”— Chick out the Blog http://www.informationgames.info/blog/?page_id=118

“Data Literacy for Reference Librarians; or How to win at Statistical Jeopardy” was a good overview of how statistics are collected and what to look at so they can work for you.

Some librarians from MIT had a program called “Solve it!: Challenging Students Through Puzzles” This started with a library PR project that found its way to Puzzles because of the climate at MIT. Check out the communications program at http://libstaff.mit.edu/communications/tools.html and the archive of the puzzles http://libraries.mit.edu/about/puzzle/.

Friday’s session ended with the keynote speaker Sherman Alexie, which was very entertaining. (http://www.fallsapart.com/)

Highlights from Saturday—
“Creating Instruction “to go”: Maximizing Resources, Maximizing Impact”
http://instructiontogo.wetpaint.com/

“Finding the Fish in the Sea: Identifying, collaborating, and Sustaining Partnerships with Student Service Programs”
This panel discussion had some success working with student groups on their campus and they spoke about how they did it and how they are now sustaining the partnerships.

The All Conference Reception was held at the Experience Music Project/ Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (http://www.empsfm.org/)
This was a cool museum that included the guitars of Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobian and some unique science fiction items.

Sunday Highlights
This invited paper was presented Robin Chase who was a cofounder and former CEO for Zipcar (http://www.zipcar.com/) Currently she is the CEO of GoLoco (http://www.goloco.org/greetings/guest)
Since this conference had an underlying theme of going green this was an appropriate speaker and she related what she does with what libraries do for their users.

The last presentation I attend was “If Fish Markets Can Do It so can We: Designing Memorable Library Experiences for Students and Faculty”
This panel presentation was very good. It gave some good ideas of users perspectives and how to meet their needs.

Some of the blogs the presenters maintain include:
Designing Better Libraries: http://dbl.lishost.org/blog/
Brain Matthews: http://theubiquitouslibrarian.typepad.com/

The closing keynote was Ira Glass from This American Life gave his keynote as if he was doing one of his radio programs and he talked about the process of the show and how they do research. (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/)

If you have any questions please let me know.
Thank you
Jodi

Posted by Sue Trettel at 1:00 PM | Permalink

I'd like to thank the library for the opportunity to take an 8-week online class about programming, “Intro to JavaScript” through the HTML Writer’s Guild. This was a class where we did readings from two books and weekly online homework (see http://tinyurl.com/c7neeg ) This just shows a tip of the iceberg regarding what Javascript is capable of.

The purpose of Javascript is to add interactivity to web pages. A good example would be our Group Study Room page at http://www.d.umn.edu/lib/gsr/index.htm. Javascript has been around for a long time, but there was an era not too long ago where it was somewhat avoided due to security concerns, but it’s made a comeback with the better browsers of today.

This is pared down, but here is a sample of what we covered. We learned about creating variables, functions, “for” and “while” loops, switches, conditional statements, prompting for input, making alert and confirm boxes, doing validation, debugging scripts, converting between strings and numbers, creating things like timers, rollovers, resizable window popups, and time converters. Other important concepts were:

* Functions, arrays, and objects
* Events and event handlers
* Browser Object Model and Document Object Model
* Graceful degradation
* Importance of separating structure, presentation, and behavior

Here is another example of a made-with-Javascript tool. I do use this color-picker gadget a lot when I need to see what color a particular code represents. Firefox has an add-on called Colorzilla that's good too, but I still find myself using this simple little picker.

http://ecritters.biz/colorselector/
Many of the online converters and calculators you see online would be Javascript based.

Posted by Sue Trettel at 8:31 AM | Permalink

I attended the 2009 Library Technology Conference at Macalester College on March 18th and 19th.

Doreen Hansen and I participated in the poster session with a poster about the library's new widgets. The poster had a good number of viewers who read the text and nodded appreciatively. We answered some questions.

I attended some very interesting sessions at the conference.

One interesting session was about "distributed reference," which in this case meant reference service provided remotely by part time librarians in different parts of the country, supporting students in a private, for-profit, online university. There was a certain sense that what these librarians were doing is a trail-blazing model for reference, in that online education is a growing trend. I found it interesting that this university has 31,000 students and provides access to only 14,000 e-books, and no physical books whatsoever, and no ILL access to physical books whatsoever. And the vast majority of their students are in Masters and Doctoral programs. Some things about what they are doing do not compute. They seem very understaffed to support so many students, and they agree that they are. Their presentation had the quality of a dystopian sci-fi novel in some respects.

Another interesting session was called "Reading for Digital Natives," and it was presented by a school librarian who has studied a lot of education and looked at a lot of brain research. The focus of her talk was on how the younger generation has developed their brains differently because of so much exposure to video games and other new media, resulting in difficulty reading and concentrating. Like many people who talk about how the new generation is different, she seemed a little bit conflicted about whether educators should adapt to the new generation's differences, or find new ways (try harder) to teach them to think as educators have traditionally expected to think.

I attended other presentations that were interesting, including a good presentation on copyright and another one on the basics of InDesign.

Submitted by Rory

Posted by Sue Trettel at 1:26 PM | Permalink

I attended ACRL in Seattle, Washington from March 11-15. The opening keynote speaker was Rushworth Kidder who discussed ethical decisions. He stated in October, 2008 we became corrupted and irresponsible. There are four types of dilemmas regarding ethics: truth telling vs loyalty; industry vs commercial; short term vs long term; and justice vs mercy (expectations vs exceptions). He discussed moral courage to do what’s right in spite of consequences. An example provided was a boy who distributed pamphlets during World War II on what was really happening from information from BBC and Voice of America. Ethics often is a choice between right and right. Decisions must by based on honesty, fairness, responsibility, respect and compassion.

Several of the sessions I attend dealt with library/subject guides. LibGuides were shown including the fact that you could enter your proxy url and check a box so that the url will be added to all the links in the guide. In addition, RSS feeds, widgets, polls, and video can be added to the guide. Another resource mentioned for library guides, was Library ala Carte which was developed by Oregon State University and is open source. More information regarding Library ala Carte is available at: http://alacarte.library.oregonstate.edu/. This software also allows you to add chat, RSS feeds, videos, as well as links to library resources.

Meg Scharf, Associate Director for Public Services, University of Central Florida Libraries gave an interesting talk on assessment results on academic library web sites. She graded 250 academic library web sites on whether it was possible to find the assessment results on the web page. 5% received an A, 16% received a B or C, and 73% received an F with no results. Examples of In Library Use Surveys: University of Washington Libraries Assessment (http://lib.washington.edu/assessment/surveys/ILU2005/default.html). The University of Southern California survey were mentioned as excellent since it mentioned users concern and the action taken. (http://www.usc.edu/libraries/about/libqual/index.php).

I appreciate the library providing the opportunity to attend this conference and I picked up some ideas I would like to try.

Martha

Posted by Sue Trettel at 11:25 AM | Permalink