SLA handouts
Many of the handouts at SLA were posted at:
http://www.sla.org/content/Events/conference/ac2009/Conference/handouts/index.cfm
Enjoy
Pam
Many of the handouts at SLA were posted at:
http://www.sla.org/content/Events/conference/ac2009/Conference/handouts/index.cfm
Enjoy
Pam
I'd like to thank the library for its continued support in sending me to ELUNA (Ex Libris Users of North America) 2009 in Richmond, VA in May.
This is an important conference for my day-to-day activities. It generates a lot of new ideas, helps fix persistent problems and allows me to continually improve our access to resources through SFX.
This year I stuck solely with the SFX track, as this is the Ex Libris product I primarily manage.
Some highlights of things I did and learned about:
I attended the Media in Transition 6 conference in Cambridge, Mass. April 24-26. I want to thank the library for giving me the opportunity to attend.
The conference was an academic conference concerning new media of communication, and how they are changing society.
I attended sessions with papers and presentations on archives (especially digital archives), libraries, journalism, blogs, privacy, media effects, publishing, streaming television, and technology trends. I presented a paper about Walter Ong and his investigations in the cultural effects of the invention of alphabetic writing.
The abstracts to the papers and many of the actual papers are on the website at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/ .
I recently attended and presented at the 14th biannual ACRL conference in Seattle, WA. I attended many interesting sessions and brought back ideas I’d like to explore further. I’ve highlighted a few notable sessions and have provided information about my presentation below. If you’d like more information on any of these sessions, please let me know.
Reinventing Research Guides: LibGuides at Two Academic Libraries
This session, given by librarians from Grand Valley State University (three of my former colleagues) and Boston College, presented the findings from a user survey of LibGuides at their respective institutions. They discussed the history, purpose and continuing evolution of research guides, the implementation of their LibGuides and the survey they conducted. For more information, including their survey and results, see http://libguides.gvsu.edu/content.php?pid=36651&sid=269663.
Reeling in the Faculty: Baiting the Information Literacy Hook
Librarians and a Sociology faculty member, all from IUPUI, collaborated and created Information Literacy Community of Practice to help integrate information literacy into the curriculum. They shared advice from the perspective of librarians and faculty on how to develop partnerships which increase information literacy awareness across disciplines. It was great to hear from a faculty point of view about what realistic steps librarians can take to integrate IL into curricula and make it possible for faculty members to easily include it in the classes they teach. Notable tips include:
• Provide information literacy-related teaching materials to faculty
• Have a non-stakeholder as your champion (i.e., faculty member outside the library)
• Focus on faculty concerns like not enough time, etc. (attend discipline-related conferences if possible)
• Publicize teaching tools and resources
For more information, see http://tiny.cc/v97Ps.
Solve It!: Challenging Students Through Puzzles
This session, presented by three MIT librarians, was my personal favorite at the conference. What began as an advertising campaign for the MIT libraries expanded to a very popular puzzle series aimed at MIT students. Each puzzle required students to use one or more library resources or services in order to solve it. Successful entries were entered in a drawing for prizes such as an iPod. The librarians found that the students were highly motivated to complete the puzzles and that this increased awareness and use of several library resources. The message I took away was the importance of knowing our library community and adapting this to what would work our own institutions.
For more information see http://libraries.mit.edu/about/puzzle/ and http://libstaff.mit.edu/communications/tools.html. This project got students engaged and familiarized them with important library services and resources.
Recasting the Role of Comprehensive University Libraries: Starting Points for Educating Librarians on the Issues of Scholarly Communication and Institutional Repositories
This is the session I co-presented with two former GVSU colleagues. We discussed the program that we designed and implemented to educate our library faculty on the issues of scholarly communication as the library implemented an institutional repository. We covered the importance of tailoring such a program to meet our institution’s needs, ways to sustain enthusiasm and strategies for communicating with faculty outside the library about these topics. Because many comprehensive universities, including Grand Valley State, do not have a person or department devoted solely to scholarly communication, the success of projects like institutional repositories rely heavily on relationships between liaison librarians and faculty throughout campus.
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
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
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
I'd like to thank the library for help supporting my trip to the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Leadership Summit in Savannah last week.
This meeting is really a working meeting to do organization business, start planning the programs for 2010 (in New Orleans), and do division business. Our keynote speaker was Stephen McGarvey who talked about motivating people and how our choice of words can do great harm or good. For example, if you use the word but rather than and it can be perceived as negating the other person's message.
For those of you who are interested, the programs for the Sci-Tech Division of which I am current chair are at: http://www.d.umn.edu/~penrici/scitechprelimprog.pdf
One of the big discussion was the SLA alignment project. This is a big project of defining what a special librarian is and whether the name really resonates with what we do. For more information go to:
I attended the Minnesota Library Conference in Bloomington.
Thursday
I presented with a panel from MILE 2007—“MILE—Discover Your Inner Leader @ MILE 2009?. This panel consisted of participants from the Minnesota Leadership Institute in 2007 and 2 mentors. We talked about MILE 2007 from the perspectives of the mentors and participants. We also promoted the 2009 Leadership Institute, which I am part of the planning committee. If interested in applying for the Institute or being a mentor check out the MLA page--(http://mnlibraryassociation.org)
50 in 75 Book Talks
Romance, YA, Mystery, WWII and Literacy fiction were covered during this fast-paced book talk. Some I have read, others are now added to my growing reading list.
“Different Approach to Promoting Critical Thinking With (In) Literacy? This presentation was from a librarian and Arts Education Partnership Coordinator from the Perpich Center for Arts Education. (http://www.mcae.k12.mn.us)
Friday
“What do Students learn in High School?? A librarian decided find out what students were learning and what resources they had access to before coming to college. She found information at Minnesota Department of Education Report Card website and also from the school web pages.
I moderated the session “Politics in Minnesota? presented by Sarah Janecek.
Ms. Janecek produces “Politics in Minnesota: The Directory?. This was an insightful look at politics in the Twin Cities area and also about the political news coverage. (http://www.politicsinminnesota.com)
I also attended 3 meetings at this conference: MLA/GODORT meeting and ARLD meeting on Thursday. On Friday I attended the MILE meeting.
I'd like to thank the library for help supporting my trip to the Special Libraries Association Annual meeting. I attended a number of sessions (many of them planning).
Continue reading "Special Libraries Association Annual Meeting" »
I'd like to thank the library for paying for this seminar and allowing me the time off to go. I've long admired Dr. Tufte's approaches to dealing with displaying information and data. He used a series of examples from his books(which we already have!).
Continue reading "Edward Tufte's Seminar on Presenting Data & Information" »
I'd like to thank the library for paying for this seminar and allowing me the time off to go. I've long admired Dr. Tufte's
approaches to dealing with displaying information and data. He used a series of examples from his books (which we already have!). Above all, whatever you do should be driven by content not what you can do. You need to do whatever it takes to make that content usable.
He articulated a series of design principles that apply to a webpage, a presentation, or a paper. The first principle is that you need to show comparisions, contrasts and differences. The second is to show causality (mechanisms, structures, and explorations), the third, is to show multivariate analysis (almost everything has more than 1 variate). The fourth is to show the integration of the evidence, the fifth is to show documentation (I thought this was particularly of interest to librarians who sometimes feel like they are a voice in the darkness talking about this), the sixth is really to make sure that content not design is paramount, and the seventh is to make sure the important material is adjacent in space (i.e. not stacked as in a series of powerpoints). These principles come from the principles of analytic thinking.
A couple of neat things he showed was a 1570 English edition of Euclid's Elements of geometry (we have an e-book copy of Early English books) and a 1613 book about sunspots by Galileo (which had the only place in print where he states that the earth revolves around the sun).
He also has a moderated forum on a series of topics at:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1
Some of the topics are PowerPoint and bad teaching, Sidenotes v footnotes, Good web design, web standards, user testing and many others.
If you want more information, let me know.
Submitted by Pam
I'd like to thank the library for help supporting my trip to the Special Libraries Association Annual meeting. I attended a number of sessions (many of them planning). The most noteworthy were the Computer Science roundtable here we discussed among other things, using e-books as texts - not only in computer sciences but just generally. To each "So They Can Learn" was also a very good session.
Ilda Carreiro King gave practical suggestions on doing training sessions. Although most of her tips were aimed at a corporate audience many of her suggestions could be used by academic librarians. I also attended a talk by Sam Stovall, Standard & Poors chief investment strategist. He discussed the economy and his ideas on how soon will it recover (not soon) and why this recovery is slower than other times that the stock market took a dump.
I helped set up this program but couldn't attend because of a conflict but some of you might be interested in seeing he powerpoints for Alternative fuels given by Dr. Richard Nelson (Kansas State University) and Ms. Alvetta Pindell (National Agriculture library) at http://units.sla.org/division/dtrn/seattle08.html#altfuel.
Submitted by Pam
I attended the 21st Annual Minnesota - South Dakota Government Publications Information Forum --From Local to International: Government Information Everywhere on May 15. Thursday started off at the Andersen Library and the afternoon speakers were at the legislative library.
The speakers were:
Promoting Government Information: Library 2.0 Style - Sarah Gewirtz
The Met Council and Regional Progress - Steve Dornfield and Jan Price
Then off to the Legislative Reference Library
International Government Information - Mary Ann Archer
New Access to Old Information - Robbie LaFleur
State Documents Old and New - But All Online - David Schmidtke
All the speakers had good information to share and when the PowerPoint presentations are available I will let you know.
Some sites of interest:
Check out what CSB/SJU is doing with Blogs, Flickr and YouTube
http://csbsjulibrary.blogspot.com/
http://www.csbsju.edu/library/
The Metropolitan Council site has some great information
http://www.metrocouncil.org/
Some of the Legislative Library Projects (http://www.leg.state.mn.us/lrl/)
Minnesota Legislators Past & Present
http://www.leg.state.mn.us/legdb/index.asp
Historical Information About the Minnesota Legislature
http://www.leg.state.mn.us/lrl/histleg/histdat.asp
Let me know if you have any questions.
Jodi
I attended the 21st Annual Minnesota - South Dakota Government Publications Information Forum --From Local to International: Government Information Everywhere on May 15. Thursday started off at the Andersen Library and the afternoon speakers were at the legislative library.
The speakers were:
Promoting Government Information: Library 2.0 Style - Sarah Gewirtz
The Met Council and Regional Progress - Steve Dornfield and Jan Price
Then off to the Legislative Reference Library
International Government Information - Mary Ann Archer
New Access to Old Information - Robbie LaFleur
State Documents Old and New - But All Online - David Schmidtke
All the speakers had good information to share and when the PowerPoint presentations are available I will let you know.
Some sites of interest:
Check out what CSB/SJU is doing with Blogs, Flickr and YouTube
http://csbsjulibrary.blogspot.com/
http://www.csbsju.edu/library/
The Metropolitan Council site has some great information
http://www.metrocouncil.org/
Some of the Legislative Library Projects (http://www.leg.state.mn.us/lrl/)
Minnesota Legislators Past & Present
http://www.leg.state.mn.us/legdb/index.asp
Historical Information About the Minnesota Legislature
http://www.leg.state.mn.us/lrl/histleg/histdat.asp
Let me know if you have any questions.
Jodi
Greetings!
If all goes to plan, on March 24th, the UMD Library will be offering our students, faculty, and staff extended 24/7 online reference assistance via the new Minnesota statewide cooperative know as "AskMN." (See press release below). UMD Library patrons will still access our reference librarians at any time the Reference Desk is open via our Instant Messaging Chat service. That will remain the same. However, during the hours our Reference Desk is closed, people who have need for information can use the new AskMN service.
As part of UMD's contribution to the cooperative, Sunshine Carter, Pam Enrici, and Jim Vileta will be answering AskMN questions at certain hours each week, as will librarians from the other cooperating institutions. In return, these institutions will be receiving 24/7 reference service from OCLC's QuestionPoint service via AskMN.
AskMN librarians are still receiving training from Minitex staff and we are hopeful that we can meet the March 24th start date. If not, the launch will be very close to that date.
The new service will require changes to our "AskUs" page and to the UMD Library Home page. Doreen Hansen will be providing our AskMN team web and other technical assistance.
If you have questions or comments, please contact Jim Vileta.
-----------------
January 10, 2008
AskMN: Minnesota's Statewide Cooperative Virtual Reference Service
MINITEX Library Information Network, working in collaboration with eight participating libraries, is delighted to announce the creation of AskMN: The Librarian Is In, Minnesota's new statewide cooperative virtual reference service!
In December, eight academic and public libraries came together to discuss the issues involved in cooperatively creating and running a Minnesota statewide virtual reference service. It was decided to move forward with the initiative to provide quality reference service and assistance online to all Minnesota residents with the use and support from the ELM databases (elm4you.org). Initially, the service will be operated by the eight libraries: Hennepin County Library -- Suburban and Minneapolis locations; Rochester Public Library; Minnesota State University, Mankato; St. Cloud State University; Joint Libraries of the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University; College of St. Catherine; and University of Minnesota, Duluth, as well as MINITEX Reference Services, with plans to extend participation to many more interested libraries in the near future.
The service will use OCLC's QuestionPoint virtual reference management software, which is well suited to handle multiple-library and cooperatively run programs like Minnesota's. Staff members of participating libraries will work together to answer questions from residents during selected hours Monday-Saturday with backup service provided by the QuestionPoint national cooperative virtual reference program to give us 24/7 coverage for anywhere, anytime answers. The service will be launched sometime this Spring.
Submitted by Jim
Greetings!
If all goes to plan, on March 24th, the UMD Library will be offering our students, faculty, and staff extended 24/7 online reference assistance via the new Minnesota statewide cooperative know as "AskMN." (See press release below). UMD Library patrons will still access our reference librarians at any time the Reference Desk is open via our Instant Messaging Chat service. That will remain the same. However, during the hours our Reference Desk is closed, people who have need for information can use the new AskMN service.
As part of UMD's contribution to the cooperative, Sunshine Carter, Pam Enrici, and Jim Vileta will be answering AskMN questions at certain hours each week, as will librarians from the other cooperating institutions. In return, these institutions will be receiving 24/7 reference service from OCLC's QuestionPoint service via AskMN.
AskMN librarians are still receiving training from Minitex staff and we are hopeful that we can meet the March 24th start date. If not, the launch will be very close to that date.
The new service will require changes to our "AskUs" page and to the UMD Library Home page. Doreen Hansen will be providing our AskMN team web and other technical assistance.
If you have questions or comments, please contact Jim Vileta.
-----------------
January 10, 2008
AskMN: Minnesota's Statewide Cooperative Virtual Reference Service
MINITEX Library Information Network, working in collaboration with eight participating libraries, is delighted to announce the creation of AskMN: The Librarian Is In, Minnesota's new statewide cooperative virtual reference service!
In December, eight academic and public libraries came together to discuss the issues involved in cooperatively creating and running a Minnesota statewide virtual reference service. It was decided to move forward with the initiative to provide quality reference service and assistance online to all Minnesota residents with the use and support from the ELM databases (elm4you.org). Initially, the service will be operated by the eight libraries: Hennepin County Library -- Suburban and Minneapolis locations; Rochester Public Library; Minnesota State University, Mankato; St. Cloud State University; Joint Libraries of the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University; College of St. Catherine; and University of Minnesota, Duluth, as well as MINITEX Reference Services, with plans to extend participation to many more interested libraries in the near future.
The service will use OCLC's QuestionPoint virtual reference management software, which is well suited to handle multiple-library and cooperatively run programs like Minnesota's. Staff members of participating libraries will work together to answer questions from residents during selected hours Monday-Saturday with backup service provided by the QuestionPoint national cooperative virtual reference program to give us 24/7 coverage for anywhere, anytime answers. The service will be launched sometime this Spring.
Submitted by Jim
Greetings!
If all goes to plan, on March 24th, the UMD Library will be offering our students, faculty, and staff extended 24/7 online reference assistance via the new Minnesota statewide cooperative know as "AskMN." (See press release below). UMD Library patrons will still access our reference librarians at any time the Reference Desk is open via our Instant Messaging Chat service. That will remain the same. However, during the hours our Reference Desk is closed, people who have need for information can use the new AskMN service.
As part of UMD's contribution to the cooperative, Sunshine Carter, Pam Enrici, and Jim Vileta will be answering AskMN questions at certain hours each week, as will librarians from the other cooperating institutions. In return, these institutions will be receiving 24/7 reference service from OCLC's QuestionPoint service via AskMN.
AskMN librarians are still receiving training from Minitex staff and we are hopeful that we can meet the March 24th start date. If not, the launch will be very close to that date.
The new service will require changes to our "AskUs" page and to the UMD Library Home page. Doreen Hansen will be providing our AskMN team web and other technical assistance.
If you have questions or comments, please contact Jim Vileta.
-----------------
January 10, 2008
AskMN: Minnesota's Statewide Cooperative Virtual Reference Service
MINITEX Library Information Network, working in collaboration with eight participating libraries, is delighted to announce the creation of AskMN: The Librarian Is In, Minnesota's new statewide cooperative virtual reference service!
In December, eight academic and public libraries came together to discuss the issues involved in cooperatively creating and running a Minnesota statewide virtual reference service. It was decided to move forward with the initiative to provide quality reference service and assistance online to all Minnesota residents with the use and support from the ELM databases (elm4you.org). Initially, the service will be operated by the eight libraries: Hennepin County Library -- Suburban and Minneapolis locations; Rochester Public Library; Minnesota State University, Mankato; St. Cloud State University; Joint Libraries of the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University; College of St. Catherine; and University of Minnesota, Duluth, as well as MINITEX Reference Services, with plans to extend participation to many more interested libraries in the near future.
The service will use OCLC's QuestionPoint virtual reference management software, which is well suited to handle multiple-library and cooperatively run programs like Minnesota's. Staff members of participating libraries will work together to answer questions from residents during selected hours Monday-Saturday with backup service provided by the QuestionPoint national cooperative virtual reference program to give us 24/7 coverage for anywhere, anytime answers. The service will be launched sometime this Spring.
Submitted by Jim
Towards the end of November, I was able to attend a webcast off-campus called Scholarly Publishing and Open Access: Straight Talk.
As the Electronic Resources Librarian, I have been a big advocate and user of open access scholarly publications.
To quote Peter Suber (OA guru)"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." For the rest of the definition, go to http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm
One of the first suggestions I made when becoming the ELR librarian was the activation of open-access journals in our FindIt. We've added thousands of journals to our collections with just the click of a button. They appear in the catalog and in our e-journal locator and get A LOT OF USE. You may already be familiar with collections such as DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Highwire Press Free, Miscellaneous Free E-Journals, etc.
Open access has two major hurdles: publishers and academia. Publishers for obvious reasons ($). Academia because the academic culture is so entrenched in publishing in specific well-defined journals. Open access is new, so is it as authoritative and respected? A good question.
Many libraries are trying to bring the issue of open access to the forefront with their faculty. The UM has made some steps. Do we want to?
There are many more aspects to open access, but this will wet your whistle.
For more exciting information and cool links I've put together, go to:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddf84pnc_5k7bpqxcn
Submitted by Sunshine
Last week I attended the Minnesota Library Association Annual conference in Mankato. The theme was “All the World’s a Stage—Becoming the Lead Player You Were Meant to be?. On Wednesday I attended the annual MLA Government Documents Roundtable meeting and then the MILE Leadership Luncheon. I attended the session about the American Community Survey and how gathering information for the Census is changing. I also met with my MILE mentor that afternoon.
On Thursday I attended “Performing on the Library Instruction Stage? which had some good tips about being in front of an audience and the similarities between a performer and a teacher. I attended Cody Hanson’s session on “Podcast, Screencast and Social Media?. Hanson is the Technology Librarian at the University of MN. Check out his blog at http://codyhanson.com/blog for 2007 and 2006 MLA Presentations. The Keynote speaker on Thursday was the author Sandra Benitez. I also attend the presentation by Paul Dahl “Being a Servant-Leader in the Library Setting?. The Blue County Library held a very nice reception on Thursday evening.
On Friday I attended “Using technology to Teach Information Literacy: Leveraging the Tech Tools Your Patrons Already Know? and the “Embedded Librarian: Engaging Students in Library Research?. Both of these sessions has some good ideas about library instruction, including making tutorials for point of use and classes having more than one library instruction /session. The Friday keynote speakers were Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum of Unshelved. The presentation was entitled “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Library?. Check out their comic strip at http://www.unshelved.com/
I also checked out the booths and the posters sessions between the sessions.
Some library 2.0 things the Minnesota Library Association (http://www.mnlibraryassociation.org) are doing include:
MLA Blog--http://www.mlaupdate.blogspot.com/
Facebook Group -- http://minnesota.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2384944595
LibraryThing Group --http://www.librarything.com/groups/minnesotalibraryasso
Let me know if you have any questions about the conference.
Submitted by Jodi Carlson
I attended the Minnesota Data Center Meeting on June 21, 2007 at Concordia University in St. Paul.
The meeting began with Jim Ramstrom’s presentation “Celebrating Minnesota’s Sesquicentennial – Designing Minnesota, 1783-1858??. This was a very informative about MN before it became a state. When the slides are posted I will send the link.
Martha McMurry from the Minnesota State Demographic Center presented on the published population projections to 2035. These projections are by county, age and gender. If you would like to see these projections check out the report at http://www.demography.state.mn.us/resource.html?Id=19167
John Shepard from the Southwest Regional Development Commission gave a presentation entitled “Outmigration as an Economic Indicator: A Case Study of Southwest MN??. He talked about economic issues like underemployment, people holding multiple jobs, aging in place and the migration of the population to other parts of the state and beyond for better employment opportunities.
Census, American Community Survey and State Demographic Center updates was given by Barbara Ronningen from the Minnesota Demographic Center.
Minneapolis Public Library-- New Building, New Services -- Helen Burke, Government Documents Coordinator, gave an update on some of the new services at Minneapolis Public which include the New American Center, monthly classes about patents and other classes for the public. Check out the library’s website for more information. (http://www.mpls.lib.mn.us)
Ray Murray from the Hmong Cultural Center talked about getting online access to Hmong Census. He gave the participants a good handout on how to find Hmong census information. The center also has a website http://www.hmongcenter.org/
Wendy Thomas from the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota gave an update on what is happening at the center and the services provided. She talked about historical data, the IPUMS database (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) and the other census data being used. The current research and projects can be found at http://www.pop.umn.edu/.
If you have any question please let me know.
Sumbitted by Jodi Carlson
I attended the Ex Libris North American 2007 Technical Seminar from June 4-5 and the 2nd Annual Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) Conference from June 6-8, both held in Spearfish, South Dakota. Both events are intended for institutions and individuals who work closely with one or more of the many Ex Libris products. At UMD we use (or will be using) the following Ex Libris Products: Aleph, SFX, MARCit, MetaLib, Primo, Verde.
As I was there for five days, I went to many sessions (a full list of the sessions I attended is located at the end of this post) and met a lot of people. Here are some highlights of my conference experience:
1. The big hubbabaloo while at the conference was Verde and all the functionality problems its been facing. Now that everyone knows about the problems, Ex Libris will be working diligently to resolve them. The release of Verde 3.0 will be delayed until further notice. Verde is a system that facilitates managing electronic resources.
2. Although I can muck my way through OpenURL's, I never knew about their history or their architecture. Nettie Lagace, SFX/Verde Product Manager, gave a presentation on the origins and the structure of OpenURL 0.1 and OpenURL 1.0. OpenURL's are needed to make our link resolver (SFX or FindIt) work properly. A sample OpenURL for an article I located in Google Scholar is:
http://duluth.liblink.umn.edu/duluth?sid=google;auinit=JG;aulast=Kappernman;atitle=Bracing%20for%20the%20geomagnetic%20storms;
title=IEEE%20spectrum;volume=27;issue=3;date=1990;spage=27;issn=0018-9235
3. I went to a SFX Statistics session, presented by Maribeth Manoff (University of Tennessee), Margery Tibbetts (California Digital Library), Donnice Cochenour and Nancy Chaffin (Colorado State University). I was interested in the work done by the CDL to evaluate "full text not found by source". They examined a small sampling of 360 OpenURL's that did not find fulltext (the CDL's eJournal collection is about as close to comprehensive as you can get, so theoretically they should have access to mostly everything). 9% of the URL's should have resolved to full-text, which was caused mostly bye bad metadata in the OpenURL and knowledge base problems in SFX (e.g. title not activated, title name change, etc.). I am interested in taking a look at our own OpenURL's that didn't link to fulltext and see if I can fix any possible problems.
While there I met many of the UMTwinCities personnel, chatted with Joe Holtermann, witnessed a performance by Brule and got to eat at Sanford's (as in & Sons).
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Sessions Attended
Ex Libris North American 2007 Technical Seminar
*An Introduction to Verde
*An In-Depth Look at Verde Architecture and Verde as an Open System
*Verde Data Warehousing and Statistical Services
*Implementing Verde
*Open URL 1.0
*KB Update Process, Reporting and Influence of Local Changes
*SFX Exports, SFX API, A-Z and More
*Local SFX Configuration
2nd Annual Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) Conference
*Conference Welcome/Ex Libris Company Updates
*SFX Stats
*Ex Libris Strategic Direction
*RSS Feeds While You Wait
*Implementing MetaLib for Your Users
*Verde Discussion Group
*Verde Consortial Implementation: Best Practices, Data Population and Authority
*SFX/MetaLib Product Working Group
Submitted by Sunshine
Minnesota Digital Library--Fifth Annual Meeting, June 11, 2007
College of St. Benedict, St. Joseph, Minnesota
Joint report from Bill Sozansky, Pat Maus, and Tom Ambrosi
Liz Bishoff or the U of Colorado, Boulder gave the keynote address “Digitization: What’s Going On and How Does Minnesota Fit In?? She emphasized moving from digital projects to digital programs. She described how “boutique? projects could be scaled up to programs by clarifying how digitization programs fit an institution’s mission. She made a case that digitization programs require clear policies and procedures, standards, transparency, long-term preservation, service fees, and resources for sustainability. In most cases she recommends outsourcing the actual digitizing to private vendors.
A session on “Copyright and Digitization? by John Chapman of the University of Minnesota Libraries covered a number of specifics including the fairly new MMPA, Minnesota Museums Property Act, signed into law in 2004. MPPA does not apply to libraries, but it allows museums to acquire title to items/documents that are abandoned loans, undocumented loans, or presumed gifts, including doorstep donations or “walk and drop? items.
At “Beyond Photos – What’s Being Digitized in Minnesota? Eric Hillemann talked about digitizing the student paper at Carleton College. This work was done by ArcaSearch (a division of ColorMax) and provides full-text searching capabilities in addition to image scans of the pages. See: http://www.arcasearch.com/main/ArcaSearch/pages/clientlist.html. The Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) reported that amongst its many projects it intends to provide full text online of Minnesota History, its quarterly magazine. (The index is already available.) MHS is also doing a map project called True North.
Marian Rengel, MDL Outreach Coordinator, presented a session on “MDL Metadata,? a review of the descriptive guidelines and spreadsheets used in creating and managing metadata for MDL.
Jason Roy, of the University of Minnesota Libraries, spoke on “Digital Project Management.? He acquires, prepares, and manages collection-related information in digital format for web delivery. He previously worked at the Minnesota Historical Society, where he directed a number of online projects, including the Birth Records Online Index, Visual Resources Database, Duluth Lynchings Online Resource, and Jerome Hill Papers Online.
Jason confirmed that libraries are already fully on-board with digitized collections and the public’s expectations are large and expanding. Reliability is central. Surveys confirmed the public found traditional libraries trustworthy and believe today’s libraries are still trustworthy. Building on that fact, he addressed adding value to our collections. We must know who our audiences are. We need to manage digitized projects well from defining them tightly to designed workflow: work plan, staff roles, hard and software, space, materials, training, technical specs, and cost analysis.
Submitted by Tom A
I attended the 2007 SLA annual convention last week. I am also on the Seattle planning committee, so I spend a number of hours in planning sessions. I also attended the Sci-Tech business meeting. I will be running unopposed as Chair Elect of the Division. I will be planning the Sci-Tech Division's programs in Washington, D.C. and will be Chair of Sci-Tech during SLA's 100th anniversary.
Our keynote speaker was Al Gore - who talked about global warming. His talk is available at: http://www.sla.org/content/Events/conference/ac2007/conference/keynoters/algore/video.cfm
Our closing speaker was Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert.
Some of the programs I attended were: Synergy General Session, Mad Deer! Prions and chronic Wasting Disease, Federated Seraching Vendor Update, Science & Enginnering Resources 101, and Designer Drugs? biomarkers? Real Personalized Medicine.
I attended a luncheon that was the launch of Scitopia (Search over 3 million documents, plus patents and government data it includes fifteen societies spanning 150 years of sci-tech scholarship help you with your queries.) A "new" type of federated searching. Very interesting.
I met with a lot of vendors and got a lot of update information on what's going to happen in the next year and stuff that's just happened that flew under MY radar.
I participated in the Sci-Tech/Chemistry Divisions poster session. My poster(s) were about the pubmed training that we had last fall using the Breeze (now Adobe connect software). Lots of people stopped by - I was suprised by the number of corporate librarians who were interested (and in a few cases said they hadn't thought of using conferencing software) in distance education. The posters at the session will be part of a non-synchronous electronic conference in October. I'll let people know more as time approaches.
There were a lot of conference bloggers. Go to: http://slablogger.typepad.com/sla_blog/ to see the blogs.
For you science fiction fans, there is always one evening that has one or more science fiction writers that give brief speeches, have a Q & A session, and sell their books. This year it was Wil McCarthy and Ed Bryant. Sam Scovall, the head stock prognosticator at S&P, spoke at their cocktail party. He's always been fun to listen to and to get information from.
If you have any questions, let me know.
Pam
P.s. the Segway was neat - I wish they had them for each of us - instead of gimmick type of thing. The big (and I mean 1 1/2 or 2 story tall) blue bear was the outstanding sculpture. She is peaking into the conference
center, standing on her hind legs - just like a bear trying to peak into a
window. Pictures at http://slablogger.typepad.com/sla_blog/2007/06/denvers_big_blu.html
Submitted by Pam
Last week I attended the MLA Institute for Leadership Excellence-
AKA MILE 2007: The Leadership Journey
MILE 2007 started on April 17 at the Koinonia Retreat Center in South Haven, MN and concluded on April 20. There were 30 participants from throughout the state representing academic, public and special libraries. There was homework before the start of the institute -including some readings and taking a StrengthsFinder Profile. MILE was a combination of presenters and group work. Some of the presenters included Don Kelsey, Stevie Ray (of Stevie Rays Improv Company) Barbara Strandell and Lonnie Dupree. Also, as a part of MILE I will working with my mentor for at least the next 18 months, presenting at MLA and be involved with the planning MILE 2009.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
I attended the annual Association of American Geographers(AAG) Meeting April 18-21 in San Francisco. I have been an AAG member since 1979. There were seven programs that I attended, averaging 1.7 hours each, typically with 3-4 speakers, plus exhibits that took a few hours. A new atlas and many maps were acquired for our collection. Rather than use the conventio ncenter, the AAG used the San Francisco Hilton, which is a block long and has many meeting rooms.
We serve computers to such a degree that it is easy to let slip the "academic" in academic librarian. Attending a subject conference like AAG is perhaps the best way to impress faculty of my subject interest, since Larry Knopp, Olaf Kuhlke, and Tongxin Zhu of the UMD Geography Department gave papers, chaired sessions, or were discussants at sessions that I attended. It adds an important dimension to keeping up with geography research, beyond reading the two journals that come with my AAG membership.
There was a session on Google, entitled "Google Earth as the 'view from nowhere': the spatial politics of high resolution satellite imagery." Keeping in mind that Google earth is a commercial product, and that Google's reputation is secretive and casual about accuracy and completeness, the catch phrase that stuck was that Google is a "global scratchpad" that can improve in time.
Tongxin gave a paper on physical geography: "Gullying and Tunneling in the Hilly Loess Region of Northern China." Olaf chaired the session on "Radical Pedagogy in Geography." Larry was the discussant in the "Negotiating the Political landscape of Activist Research" session and he gave a paper entitled "How stable are Red and Blue America?" in the Political Geography: Electoral Issues in USA program. Larry included Minnesota in his presentation.
I also heard a couple geography heroes of mine -- Alexander Murphy and Julian Minghi -- in the program on US and EU Borders in Comparison. Alexander gave the opening remarks and Julian presented his new typology entitles "Borderscapes: a Tentative Classification."
The last session that I attended was on European Cities.
Submitted by Tom Z.
I’d like to thank the library for allowing me to attend this conference. This was the largest CIL conference they have even had. Well over 2000 people attended. I think it had to do a lot with the topic, Beyond Library 2.0. The phrase of the conference seemed to be “tag cloud?. Almost everyone has their powerpoints on the web. Some are even part of the convention proceedings. For those of you interested, I’ll be happy to loan you the proceedings or give you the URL if it was included in the proceedings, or if I attended something. By the way, the powerpoint of my presentation is at presentation is at: http://www.d.umn.edu/~penrici/cil2007/presentation.ppt
There was lots of blogging going on! There was a conference Wiki and an official blog site with links to a lot of blogs is at: http://cil2007.pbwiki.com/ConferenceBloggers
There were 3 different keynote speakers for the conference. The first presentation was on Monday morning called Web 2.0 & the Internet World by Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. He talked about some of the surveys the Pew has done on people using the web and where he sees the future trends.
The second keynote speaker, on Tuesday morning, was a last minute replacement. Andy Carvin works for NPR and talked, again, about the web and where it is going. (It was particularly timely because the Virginia Tech massacre occurred the day before.) He emphasized the social aspects of Web 2.0 (We Media or Read-Write web) and how news broadcasting is changing.
The third keynote speaker, on Wednesday, was John Van Oudenaren who is the Senior Advisor or the World Digital Library Initiative of LC. He described the project and gave a timeline for when it might be up (hopefully Sept. 2008). This is NOT a project to digitize books such as Google is doing but to take the significant original cultural materials representing all of the major cultures of the world: rare books, mss, music scores, maps, photos, video, sound recordings, and 3-d presentation of architectural monuments. They are currently working with Russia (the Russian State Library and the National Library of Russia as well as a team in Novosibirsk), Egypt, and Brasil. The url is : www.worlddigitallibrary.org.
There were an additional five major sessions each day and 15 minute cybertours on Tuesday and Wednesday. (Sharon Brown and I gave a cybertour on Tuesday about the NLM training using Breeze that we were involved with last fall). For me, the two most interesting talks were by Chad Boeninger of Ohio University Libraries on Dynamic Instructional Content: Library 2.0 on a Budget. He demonstrated in real time some free software programs that worked well for library instruction. He showed a piece of software that converts text messages to e-mail. I asked around and there are some that convert text-messages to IM. He also showed a free screencast software. He even created something on the fly with that. There was a workshop on Search Engines for Books that was very interesting and very practical by Greg Notess, publisher of SearchEngineShowdown.com.
All of the sessions I attended were good, some less useful such as SecondLife for teens (and adults) where there is a real library presence. Other sessions of note were: What’s a Mashup and why would I want one (I thought a Mashup was something different – and I learned about widgets), Innovative Tools for Reference Services, Millenials and the Library and Gadgets, Gadgets, Gadgets.
On Thursday morning, I attended a post-conference class on Creating Podcasts and Videocasts. We actually created one of each. There was a discussion of various freeware and inexpensive software that you can use. I got a lot out of the class.
There were a number of vendors and while there were academic publishers and Ex Libris there but since this conference was also geared toward public libraries and coincided with Computers in School Libraries many of them were school or public library vendors.
Submitted by Pam Enrici
I was able to attend the13th Annual ACRL conference held in Baltimore from March 29 - April 1, 2007. Sailing Into the Future ~ Charting Our Destiny.
I attended many sessions, visited the exhibits, gathered information from the poster sessions and went to some vendor presentations. The main conference page can be found at http://www.acrl.org/ala/acrl/acrlevents/baltimore/baltimore.htm. Here are some of the highlights of what I attended.
I attended the preconference Knowledge Management in Academic Libraries. Joseph Branin, Sally Rogers and Crit Stuart presented on Knowledge management from different viewpoints. Branin gave an overview of knowledge management. Rogers dealt with tools, services and competencies for knowledge managers. Stuart dealt with knowledge management on the public side-library users. The presenters all came from different viewpoints, but all agreed that knowledge has a cycle and one the "basic" ones was "Creation-Capture-Retention-Sharing-Use" which has effects in libraries.
After the preconference the Opening Keynote speaking was Michael Eric Dyson and then the Exhibit Hall opened.
On Friday morning I attended Advanced Search Techniques in the New LexisNexis Academic which had some good tips on using LexisNexis and also had some updates on the new interface-we should have beta by the summer.
The Reference Question - Where has Reference Been? Where is Reference Going? This panel discussion had a running theme of that change is inevitable and the libraries need to play a constructive role in the change. The next session I attended had 2 topics one on Subject Search Disconnect and Library Mashups for the Virtual Campus: Using Web 2.0 Tools to Create New Current Awareness Resources. Some of the tools mentioned were podcasts, central search, mouse over balloons and screen scraping. Also talked about how students multi-task and use technology as a tool.
John Waters was the Luncheon Keynote and he was very entertaining and he had some interesting stories about Baltimore. He did an interview after the luncheon and if you want to listen to the podcast it can be found at http://blip.tv/file/185048/
In the afternoon I attended Reflecting on Online Instruction and Learning: Best Practices and Trends in Information Literacy Tutorials and Get Blended: Injecting Instruction Design and Technology Skills into Academic Library Jobs.
On Saturday I attended Improving Teaching and Learning Trough Multi-Intuitional Cooperation: Partnering Between Academic Libraries and the Library of Congress panel that discussed how a partnership evolved and how the Library of Congress is also trying to stay relevant in today's world. The Library of Congress is also developing many online resources including some digital collections that can be found at http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html
Another pair of presentations included Evaluating Library Instruction: Measures for Assessing Educational Quality and Impact and Integrating Information Literacy Using the LPSS Political Science Research Competency Guidelines.
I stopped by the Cyber Zed Shed to see the I-GO Library Tool Bar-
Check out how IL is using it http://www.learningtimes.net/acrlblog/228/i-go-library-toolbar-embedding-the-library-in-the-web-browser/
Saturday night was the all conference reception at the National Aquarium at Baltimore-very cool!
On Sunday I attended Strategies for Redesigning the Website to Reflect Library Transformation before we headed to the airport for the eventful trip back to Minnesota.
Some of the poster sessions information I gathered.
A quick and Easy guide to Usability Testing for Librarians
https://webspace.utexas.edu/kernjm1/usability.htm
You've Been Audited! Analyzing Syllabi to Promote Literacy Across the Curriculum
http://library.usu.edu/instruct/gened-il-audit.pdf
Taking the Show on the Road: information literacy on a college choir tour
http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~furlongk/ACRL2007/
If you have any questions or want more information, please let me know.
Submitted by Jodi
I attended this 2 hour telecast Wednesday that was sponsored by the Medical Library Association. There were some interesting points made and some case studies given as well. There was not attention paid to WIKIs or RSS feeds and the likes, though.
I have a packet of information that included most of the slides and a nice bibliography by each of the 3 main speakers.
If you are interested, you are more than welcome to borrow this packet from me.
Pam
Submitted by Pam