Martha's ACRL Report
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