TCL Goes to Washington

LAMA -MAES   Survey Fatigue? An Rx for Avoiding the Problem
Date: Monday, 6/25/2007
Time: 1:30 PM-3:30 PM

Program Description: Survey fatigue is a commonly acknowledged problem of immediate interest to “surveyors” and “surveyed” alike. This program will provide practical strategies and techniques to reduce the phenomenon by suggesting ways to improve surveys that must be used and describing several alternative approaches to evaluate existing programs and services, to provide meaningful assessment, and set new directions in planning and management. Panelists will also discuss how to build the case for alternative methods with library staff, upper-level administrators, and supervisory agencies.

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Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios presented this very engaging and interesting program.  Morville is author of Ambient Findability, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and The Internet Searcher’s Handbook: Locating Information, People, and Software as well as an adjunct faculty at the University of Michigan.  Read the rest of this entry »

One thing I learned about attending ALA is arrive early to the sessions, really early. All but one session I attended was WAY overcrowded and I usually ended up sitting on the floor. I only saw one speaker in this session because I came in halfway through (after leaving another session that didn’t even have floor space to sit on). The speaker was Meredith Farkas who wrote a book on social software and libraries. She mostly gave examples of cool things libraries were doing with social software applications. Such as:

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Alexander Street’s Customer Appreciation breakfast featuring Dr. James McPherson Sunday June 24

This is a rather large event.  An estimated 400 librarians were there.  By my estimation, at least 250 were interested in more than just the food.  A surprising number left before Dr. McPherson’s comments, which was my main interest (although the fruit selection was pretty good.)

Alexander Street used the occasion to talk about some of their forthcoming products, including a Civil War suite of products which looked interesting.

McPherson is a noted Civil War historian. His book Battle Cry of Freedom is part of the The Oxford history of the United States and is available through the ALCS Humanities E-Book project (connect through the catalog.)  He described the Civil War as competing views of freedom as seen through two different social structures.  

Both presentations are available to view (but not eat) at:

http://alexanderstreet.com/events/ala07.htm

(Loads of info, including a spreadsheet of titles covered available at: http://www.scopus.com/)

This session was held at the Elsevier exhibit booth on Sunday morning.  If you’ve ever been to ALA you know how these things go; it’s the smiley, glamorous sales force with giveaways and sometimes food!  (I wore a Scopus button for 2 days hoping to get tagged for a free iPod, but suspect the I’m-from-the-University-of-South-Carolina-where-we-have-WOS on my nametag lowered my chance to be *randomly* selected.)

Anyway, this “users forum” was led by 2 librarians - Kimberly Hill, Associate Librarian, Technology Initiatives, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (formerly employed by - ahem - Scopus) and Stephanie Willen Brown, Electronic Resources Librarian, University of Connecticut Libraries.  Read the rest of this entry »

This was a great program, really got you thinking about the future of information in general and the reference librarian’s role. The general consensus was that libraries and librarians will always be around in some fashion…nothing shocking there, we have heard that before. But the panel was a really interesting mix and provided a wide range of perspectives. They were told to think ahead to 2017 and describe the role of libraries and librarians in the future. I am going to try to briefly sum up their presentations:

Genevieve Bell - PhD in Anthropology, Director of User Experience, Intel

An anthropologist studying user experience at Intel…how cool is that? Read the rest of this entry »

 I was initially excited to attend this session since it was being moderated by Andrew Pace, (ALA columnist and Head of Information Technology, NCSU.)  The session was, unfortunately, held on the “reading stage” in back of the Exhibit hall.  It was extremely crowded with folks spilling out into traffic aisles and sprawled on the floor.  The ambiance of the hall made it difficult to hear.  Nonetheless, I persevered for some time but bolted before concluding remarks.  Marshall Breeding, Director, Innovative Technologies and Research (a title to die for, eh?) Vanderbilt University co-chaired the session.  The program was advertised as conversation “from a vendor perspective,” so I should’ve been prepared for the corporateness, but I was hoping for less pitch.  The panel of vendors were OCLC, III, ExLibris, Sirsi Dynix, and MediaLab (the AquaBrowser folks) http://www.medialab.nl/, TLC http://www.tlcdelivers.com/tlc/default.asp, and Talis http://www.talis.com/. The moderators did a good job of keeping the panelists on their toes - none of the questions were pre-scripted or distributed in advance.  This made for some interesting discussion and some not-so-interesting thinking on their feet.  My note-taking was the least effective at this venue, but here are a few highlights:  discussion on prioritizing technology expenditures, debate on the merits of open source; the advantages of hosted software (imagine an III world where they host all of their customers’ apps and do all of the upgrades/updates/patches), OPACs vs. products like AquaBrowser.

Portico enlists publishers to agree to provide continued access to ejournals even if the publisher goes out of business. (http://www.portico.org/) USC-Columbia is a participating library. In all, 362 libraries participate.  Our annual cost to participate is $8050.00/yr.

This was Portico’s 2^nd all participants meeting. 

Presenters were: Anne Kenney, Interim University Librarian, Cornell University Library and Richard Fyffe, Librarian of the College, Grinnell College.

After the presentations we got an update from Eileen Fenton, Portico’s Executive Director.  Read the rest of this entry »

RUSA -MARS   See it, Hear it, Touch it: How Do Learning Styles Affect Virtual Reference Service?
Date: Monday, 6/25/2007
Time: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM

This was a panel discussion where virtual reference service leaders were asked questions about the present and future of VR.  One of driving points of this session was that there are approximately 75 million millennials.  The millennial population is a population that has four main attributes:  They want choice, don’t like (want) forced instruction, want to save time and they are multitaskers.  If you service doesn’t meet these needs, they will not use it.  Well I must be a millennial, because that sounds just like me.  

What did I take from this session?  Well, I’ve brought back several things.  Read the rest of this entry »

This program was sponsored by the Women’s Studies Section of ACRL. It and was one of the best programs that I attended while at ALA and provided me with a lot of instruction ideas.

Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, started the program with an overview of the NetGen, characteristics of deeper learning, and implications for libraries and learning.  Lippincott believes that we are now seeing a convergence of literacies.  Specifically, written literacy, information literacy, technology literacy, and visual literacy.  Libraries tend to focus on information literacy. However, information literacy is becoming more intertwined with technology literacy.  Read the rest of this entry »