K-State Libraries: Conference Reports

NASIG 2008: Information Shadows

NASIG 2008: Information Shodows
by Gay Youngman - Catser
Information Shadows: Ubiquitous computing serializes everyday things
Presenter: Michael Kuniavsky

This session was probably my favorite all-time presentation. Coming from a background outside the library mindset, the presenter had a fresh and unique perspective that excited the audience with his ability to create pictures in the mind.  Although there is a digital divide in this country, almost everyone experiences computer technology in some way through blenders, shoes, phones, toys, cars, etc. Kuniavsky quoted William Gibson from the Necromancer--The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed.  Kuniavsky urged the audience to be at the forefront of the shadows--to wrangle information about information, organize, purchase, curate (manage/archive), and corral because we are the Shadow Wranglers.

NASIG 2008: Discover and Delivery

Discover and Delivery: Making it work for users
Presenter: Carol Pitts Diedrichs, Dean of Libraries, University of Kentucky

Pointing out that the library catalog disconnects with millennial students, Diedrichs led the attendees through a maze of new services and features that students find interesting.  Tools such as Harper Collins author tracker and recommendations sites, Amazon book pages and  along with the fact that on Google an answer may be had in 2 minutes rather than the 20 minutes often needed to find something in a library catalog.

Librarians know that there are issues that must be addressed with tracking behind the scenes information, but the user wants the same service they get with Amazon, Google and eBay. Deidrichs stated, "We can claim success when users use the libraries site as readily, easily and often as they use Google."

Sharing sites from libraries across the U.S. Diedrichs showed many innovative ideas that could be added to existing catalogs and new software that change the look of the catalog, making it more familiar and easier for students use.  She closed with the Lorcan Dempsey quote,  “Discovery happens everywhere, but discovery without fulfillment disappoints."  Libraries need to be sure we can fulfill the needs of our users.

NASIG 2008: Information Shadows

Information Shadows: Ubiquitous computing serializes everyday things
Presenter: Mike Kuniavsky, ThingM

Kuniavsky, a user experience researcher and designer, and an author, believes "...the power of information processing of a single magic window [i.e. computer]...technology should not be limited to viewing the whole world through the lens, the power of that technology, the potential of that technology, should be brought into everyday life."  He shared with serial librarians, vendors and publishers, how anything can become a serial.  By adding embedded networked computing to the simplest objects, any everyday object can exhibit new properties, allowing them to circulate just as library objects do.  Use of RFID tags and metadata, create what Kuniavsky calls shadow objects.  The id marks (RFID) let you see the information about the item, to point to it, and then add "handles" to allow you to move the object.  When you do this you may no longer need the physical object.  Consider plane tickets.

He pointed out how a journal is an agreement between a publisher and authors.  That agreement is enclosed in a wrapper or as he described it a box with dotted lines. Subscribers purchase the item with the dotted lines and whatever fills in those dotted lines (new articles each time it is published). Think of a time share where the "form" and "time" are fixed, but the contents (the owner) is variable. Kuniavsky describes it as owning the possibility of the object.

From there he moved to city car shares, bike sharing in Germany that is billed to your phone, and designer purses that circulate in a way very similar to NetFlix. The information shadow can be tracked and managed.  Traceable metadata allows for physical objects to fill in the dotted shadow lines.

The fundamental change is that we now live in the age of access.  The shift of ownership of objects is changing to the access of services.

Pointing out that serials librarians have been working with this for years, he informed the attendees that, "The world of dotted line objects need those of you who can connect the dotted line objects to the information shadows."  We are the shadow wranglers!

NASIG 2008: Next Generation Library Automation: Its impact on the Serials community

Presenter: Marshall Breeding, Vanderbilt University

Breeding challenged the attendees to prepare for the future as more libraries move away from the traditional ILS towards next generation or open source solutions. While these provide a front end designed to capture the interest and needs of the patron, serials and electronic resource librarians struggle to manage all the necessary information needed to make sense of the explosively growing collections, especially electronic journals, packages and databases. With a need to integrate what we already have with 3rd party software products, Breeding states that the serials librarian, "...must be aware of and provide input into, the emerging visions of library automation."

German Librarians' Conference: Use and Abuse of Statistics

P. Büning, Düsseldorf
J. Kreische, Düsseldorf
K. Südekum, Würzburg
S. Mundt, Stuttgart
A. Knapp, Karlsruhe

Rather than writing individual posts on all of the talks on the topic of statistics, it seemed to make sense to put it all into one post.

At the center of this talk was the German library statistical rubric BIX (Bibliotheksindex). It's a voluntary tool used to make comparisons between public and academic libraries. Everyone seems a bit critical of the rankings, since as one speaker put it, they are easy to misinterpret. The stated purpose of BIX is to make library performance and evaluation transparent and accessible to politicians and administrators.

German Librarians' Conference: Open Journal Systems (OJS)

A. Geukes, Berlin
B. Bokan, Berlin

Essentially an intro to OJS, which I know well, but I wanted to see how it's viewed from a German perspective. The speakers are at the Free University in Berlin; at the FU, electronic publishing is led by their central IT organization, not the library. That alone raises my interest ...

German Librarians' Conference: Electronic Publishing Using Generic Tools

M. Klatt-Kafemann, Berlin

He was speaking within the context of DINI (Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation), roughly the German equivalent of CNI. The main question he addressed was what tools can one use to publish journals and meet the requirements of a DINI repository.

Incidentally, his was the first talk I saw here with an explicit Creative Commons license.

German Librarians' Conference: What is it?

The German Bibliothekartag, loosely translated it would be librarians' congress, is the annual meeting of the various German library associations. There is no ALA equivalent here, rather a host of associations targeted to specific library types and professional groups. There is no 'midwinter' here, just this one large meeting (~2,500 people this year).

It's a very substantive conference, where the trade show aspect is deemphasized and the papers and panels are the central focus. There are also many meetings of various associations and groups, as one would expect. This is my fourth time at the event and I've always come away with a head and computer full of ideas, notes, and energy. Alas, it's a nearly entirely Germanophonic event, so English speakers are a bit left out, as some colleagues here--who were invited to speak in English but cannot speak German at all--have commented.

One small thing I should mention is that neither Kansas State University nor K-State Libraries provided any funding for this trip. It was partially funded by the German organization Bibliothek & Information International, with other external funding provided via the US Embassy in Berlin. I had to earn that money by giving three lectures in four days last week, so it was no gift. I know that people often wonder how librarians travel to such 'exotic' places (Mannheim, where I currently sit, is far from exotic, I swear), so I thought it worthwhile to leave this little note.

German Librarians' Conference: The Future of Subject Librarians

V. Albrink, C. Holtz, A. Rabeler, Bonn
H. Thomsen, Kiel
N. Lossau, Göttingen
M. Schröter, Rostock

The sessions at the German Bibliothekartag (Librarians' Conference or Congress) typically have multiple speakers, and last two to three hours. I'll try to provide notes on each speaker.

German Librarians' Conference: E-Book Acquisition

K. Junkes-Kirchen, Frankfurt

This talk was part of a three hour session on e-books, where the 'usual' questions arose. Lots of definitions, too, and descriptions of business models, etc. He reviewed traditional acquisition methods, parts of which overlap with e-book acquisition, but not entirely. He also showed an integrated workflow for print materials, which more or less reflects typical US practice.

German Librarians' Conference: E-Books in the Max Planck Digital Library

Tina Planck, Munich

The Max Planck Society (MPG) is a massive, private research organization, with 80 institutes and 12,600 employees, of which 4,400 are researchers. There are 72 libraries, but only 230 employees (27 are OPLs--one-person libraries). Libraries are highly autonomous, no central ILS or cataloging. The MP Digital Library has 38 employees and is a central service provider. Two sides: information provision and research/development.

German Librarians' Conference: E-Book Aggregators

Michaela Hammerl, Munich

One key advantage of purchasing via an e-book aggregator is that they offer individual titles which are only available as part of a package from the publisher direct. Many other advantages, but also disadvantages, e.g.- not everything available, not current, hosting charges, somewhat more expensive than direct purchasing, etc. Aggregators include: NetLibrary, Ebrary, Ciando, MyiLibrary, EBL, Blackwells, Dawson ERA.

Kansas Library Conference: Staying Connected Beyond the Conference

In this session Joshua Neff, Erin Downey Howerton, and Brenda Hough described some of the tools they find most useful for collaborating and connecting with colleagues. Among the technologies they highlighted were:

Blogs. Erin showed the blog she uses for communicating with K-12 teachers (she is the K-12 liaison for the Johnson County Public Library): http://schoolingdotus.blogspot.com/

Wikis. They mentioned the wiki created for Library Camp KS as an example: http://librarycampks.wetpaint.com. They also highly recommended the video Wikis in Plain English as a good introduction to what wikis are about.

Discussion Forums. They suggested using Tangler to embed live discussion forums on websites.

Twitter. All three recommended Twitter as a useful tool for soliciting ideas and opinions from a community of friends. Twitter is a micro-blogging application that supports RSS feeds and has a limit of 140 characters per post.

Other sites (not necessarily tools for staying connected) they recommended were:

Cyber 6 Pack 4 Educators. This is a wiki intended to keep K-12 educators informed about useful Web 2.0 tools for the classroom.

Library Society of the World. A wiki "dedicated to furthering the role of librarians, archivists, information professionals, and information educators through communication and collaboration."

Icanhaz.com. A tool for converting long urls to short ones. This tool allows you to choose part of the short url.

Jason Coleman

Kansas Library Conference: Tech Tools for Check Out

The session I'd planned to attend from 11-11:50 morning on Thursday, April 10th was canceled so I popped into this session. Brian, the presenter, works for Cytek, one of the approved vendors for state contracts with KAN-ED. He demonstrated several products and provided personal recommendations, which I found quite sincere and compelling. Here are a few of his recommendations:

Digital Camcorder: The Panasonic SDR-SW20R is a full feature digital camera that is incredibly durable.

Digital Camera: The Casio Exilim is as an excellent low-end camera/camcorder. I was impressed with the quality of the video he shot with this camera (he showed us footage from a family vacation).

MP3 player: Creative MuVo V100

At the end of his talk, he demonstrated whiteboard paper. This is a roll of a material (not really paper) that can be cut and posted on walls. It functions like a whiteboard.

Jason Coleman

Library Camp Kansas 2008

Prologue

SInce Library Camp Kansas 2008 was an UnConference, it is fitting that this post will deviate a bit from the traditional Conference Report post. It  will be more of an UnReport, perhaps.  The main reason for the deviation is that I found myself more in the role of host-liaison/monitor/photographer than participant. Enough with the prologue and onto...

Some Facts

Library Camp Kansas 2008 took place at K-State Libraries' Hale Library on Wednesday, March 19th from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. About 80 people participated in the Library Camp, with about half coming from Academic Libraries, a quarter from public libraries, and the other quarter from regional systems, special libraries or library schools. One of the initial activities of the camp was a name tag cloud activity in which each participant was given a list of terms and asked to highlight the ones that applied to him or her. The participant then appended the list to his or her nametag. Toward the end of the day, we gathered up the tags and tallied the number of times each term was highlighted. Erin Downey Howerton then plugged the data into  Tag Crowd. The resulting tag cloud gives a sense of who came.

Opening Session

During the opening session, Brenda Hough (from NEKLS) explained the concept of an UnConference and stressed that the success of the day would depend on everyone's willingness to share information and act both as learner and teacher. I then explained how to access the wireless network through the guest account that Anthony Cobb (iTAC) and Richard Becker (CTS) graciously set up for the participants. I also thanked the sponsors for their generous donations of space and facilities (K-State Libraries) and money (NEKLS, KPLACE Roundtable, and K-LIRT). Erin Downey Howerton (from Johnson County Public Library), then led the group in assembling the schedule for the three break-out sessions. This involved soliciting suggestions for topics from the attendees and then soliciting a volunteer to lead the discussion about that topic. Erin then asked for a show of hands to see who wanted to participate in that discussion. With information about the number of people in the discussion, she assigned the discussion to one of the 7 rooms we used for the morning and afternoon breakout sessions (Hemi, 408, 407, 401, 301, 123, 114). The 2nd breakout session was held over lunch. Rather than assign the discussions to rooms, the leader of each chose a destination in Aggieville or the K-State Union.

Breakout sessions

As I was running to-and-fro and hither-and-yon taking pictures and making sure that all the technology was working (which it did!!), I didn't really participate in any of the sessions. I caught part of a session about staff training and the end of a session about Web 2.0 technologies. In both sessions, I was delighted to see that a large number of the participants were sharing ideas and asking questions.  From conversations I had with several people after the Camp, I gather that what I observed was true of most sessions.

A list of the 19 breakout sessions and the person who facilitated each is available on the Camp's wiki.  I was fascinated by the diversity of the topics and found myself wishing I could attend all of them, most especially the sessions led by our own K-State Librarians, Danielle Theiss-White (who led a session on Staff Training and another on the Future of Reference), Dale Askey (who led a session on Library 2.0 technologies), Lisa Loberg (who led a session on Staff Training), and Rhondalyn Peairs (who led a session on Outreach and Programming). Others that struck my interest were sessions on Green Libraries, Gaming, and Creative Commons. Notes from several of the sessions are available on the wiki.

Closing Session

After the three breakout sessions everyone gathered again in the Hemisphere Room for a wrap-up discussion.  Brenda solicited group feedback about the event. In general, everyone said they enjoyed the opportunity to meet their colleagues and discuss ideas and solutions to problems. A few people said they wished there had been more sessions and that there had been a bit more of a focus on solving specific problems, rather than a general wide-ranging discussion. Still, the feedback was sufficiently positive that the group resolved to have a Library Camp 2009 somewhere in Western Kansas.  Erin Downey Howerton's live notes from the session are available on the wiki.

Coverage of the Library Camp

During the opening session, the group decided to use the tag libcampks08 on any photos, blogs, or other information related to the event. This agreement means that it is relatively easy to find post-event coverage of the event at places like Flickr (photos), Technorati (blog search), and Google. The group also agreed to record notes on the Library Camp Kansas 2008 wiki. I notice that several people have done so.

The most recent LISNews podcast (episode #14) features an interview with Joshua Neff, who was one of the Library Camp KS organizers.

Thank Yous!

I want to end what I am certain is the longest Conference Report blog post yet (sorry!!) by extending a huge THANK YOU to K-State Libraries administration for offering the use of Hale Library's rooms and to CTS and iTAC for facilitating access to the wireless network and lending us laptops and projectors.  Of all the positive comments I've heard about the event, the most glowing have been about our facilities and our technologies. Your contributions are greatly appreciated!!

 

ER&L 08: User-Centered Technical Support of E-Resources

Sarah Wessel
Illinois Wesleyan University

"User-Centered Technical Support of E-Resources"

ER&L 08: A Matter of Semantics?

Mason Hall
Electronic Resources Librarian
Jonathan Blackburn
Web Development Librarian
Florida State University

"A matter of semantics? Intelligence, open data, and the future of ERM"

Library Camp Kansas

It would be difficult to write out notes for what transpired today at the first ever library unconference in Kansas (I think it was the first, anyway). There were no papers, panels, or keynotes; rather, there were sessions chosen by the participants that took the form of discussions. The topics ranged broadly. I seemed to end up in two of the "Web 2.0" sessions, one of which I led. My goal in that session was to have a discussion revolving around one of the suggestions made in advance on the conference wiki, namely "How do you measure the success of your libraries social networking endeavors?"

It was a good group, and I appreciate both their participation and ideas, as well as their willingness to let me at least try to steer us back to the main question. Personally, I had what I described as a mini-epiphany, which was that we in libraries actually don't do much in terms of real assessment, despite much ado in this arena. Were we to really assess how we do things, we'd be forced to start making hard decisions about some of our tried and true practices that have likely outlived their usefulness given the radical transformation in the way information is created and disseminated. Some of those practices are incredibly expensive, and should therefore perhaps be subject to far closer scrutiny than low-cost social networking experiments which, after all, are only a few years old, so it should be no surprise that there are some unanswered questions that will take some time to deal with.

ER&L 2008: E-Resource Usage Statistics & Library Assessment

Virginia Kinman
Electronic Resources Librarian
Longwood University

"Putting the Trees back in the Forest: E-Resource Usage Statistics and Library Assessment"

ER&L 2008: Transforming into Effective E-Resource Management

Tyler Walters
Jeff Carrico
Georgia Tech

"Transforming into Effective E-Resource Management"