K-State Libraries: Conference Reports

Acquistions Institute at Timberline

This was a very interesting conference with about 60 people attending (including vendors, acquisitions librairans, publishers, and others).  No selling allowed, so the vendors and publishers participated in the meetings and presented.  Clever way to broaden the perspective of the conference by adding voices outside of libraries who participate in the acquisitions process.

Presentations ranged from

• Bonnie Allen (Dean of Libraries at University of Montana) talking about the Long Tail and how libraries can reclaim lost content because of budget woes and increasing costs
• to a panel of publishers including David Jackson from Stanford UP, Mehdi Khosrow-Pour from IGI Group (formerlyIdea Group), and Pascal Schwarzer from Springer-Verlag talking about publishing trends (including e-books)
• to Sheila Bair from Western Michigan talking about Metadata Planning and capturing different viewpoints with controlled vocabulary
• to Linda DiBiase, Susan Hinken, and Mark Watson talking about creating a shared print repository among Washington and Oregon academic libraries
• to yours truly talking about swarms, linear workflows, and capturing the best of both worlds to make more flexible organizations.

There were many other presentations as well.

I particularly enjoyed the intimacy of this conference.  The camaraderie and the willingness to have conversations brought out many ideas and helped make good connections between librarians who are dealing with similar issues.

A couple of big things that I heard at the conference:

1. Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate -- we are in an era where isolation won't help us... and it may even hurt us financially. Long-term thinking demands that libraries begin to think of themselves as part of something bigger.
2. Technology is increasing our ability to distribute information more quickly, freely, and customizably (is that even a word?).
3. Libraries are questioning the value of print collections, particularly in serials.  They are beginning to trust digital... a little.
4. Technical services needs to lean toward the digital by putting money and workforce behind digital content management.
5. Other schools have:

• gotten rid of their review rooms
• stopped cataloging on series records and gone cat-sep on everything
• gone fully EDI in their ordering and invoicing
• merged copy cataloging and receiving so that firm orders can be cataloged as they walk in the door
• created personalized library web pages for professors which pull relevant article content from RSS feeds, point to relevant databases, and create one-click access to relevant library services -- see one here!
• created blogs for departments to announce books and to work with them on collection development -- see one here!
• started keeping E-Book statistics that might even show that e-books get more use than their print counterparts... (what?!?)

Adam

2007 ACRL Conference in Baltimore

After a major conference, people are usually left with a “conference high”.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but after reflecting back on the ACRL conference for a few weeks, I decided to share some of my thoughts and experiences.

I went to the Conference Luncheon with no particular expectations about the film maker and Keynote Speaker—John Waters.  But as the speech proceeded I was fascinated with the charming, almost childlike, characteristics Waters exhibited, as he aimed to shock and titillate the audience.

The Library Journal, 5/1/2007, captured the spirit of his commentary:

Waters’s rollicking and often blue talk had librarians rolling in the aisles—and, in a few cases, walking out of the room. “I know you belie the fuddy-duddy perception of librarians,” Waters said, opening his push-the-boundaries performance. “You’ve read too much, you’re twisted people.”

Waters also offered advice for making libraries cool again: highlight the dirty parts in books, urge librarians to go nude for a day or pretend they’re on drugs, and suggest people sleep only with librarians for a year. “

…And my view? I can assure you that these comments mentioned by the Library Journal were on the mild side.  Prudish idealism wins over fascination for someone who has washed her sister’s mouth out with soap.  Is this the right path for getting people into the library?  Yes, some of the message John Waters conveyed about using provocative and out-of-the-box measures to attract patrons was very important, but how far will we go?  Libraries have always had a comfort level for all those who enter.  Do we throw that out with MySpace, Facebook, and Gaming?  Those will all change, mutate or die out within a limited time frame and be replaced with something else.  Or can we mix the wild with the sedate?  I have to admit to a certain amount of fascination for some of these new “things” myself, but… who are we as an organization?  What do we want to accomplish?  I think these decisions need to be decided very quickly, because those decisions will be too late coming within possibly 5 years.

Conference Presentations

As a whole, I wasn’t too impressed with many of the presentations.  At first I felt somewhat like the “Grinch”, but post-conference conversations indicate that a number of attendees shared this feeling that the presentations could have been much better.

All was not lost, however.  Three stood out and two of those were by presented by a couple of seasoned presenters I have seen at other conferences.

Charting Your Course to Success—Nancy Davenport, presenter

She talked about marketing your successes, and her suggestion is to begin at the end.  Write the press release announcing the project’s launch into production – who, what, where, when, why, and how; be realistic about the timeline, costs, benefits, and partners; manage expectations which would include everyone’s expectations; then build on success.  Most importantly set your benchmarks and celebrate your success.  Be sure to announce and share this success.  Next, start all over on another project.

Technology and Change in Academic Libraries: What Does the Future Hold?

Steven Bell, moderator 

The common theme, strongly presented was –CHANGE.  Libraries are dealing with change, whether we admit it or not.  The difference is acknowledging that we have choices.  We can choose to be victims or leaders.  Our perception of our own achievements can be based on a philosophy of either half empty or half full.

 

Building the European Digital Library—An Insider’s Point of View

Olaf D. Janssen, Presenter

This was my favorite presentation.  Why, because this is where I think the “world” is headed--toward the Foundation series by Arthur C. Clarke.  Despite almost losing half an hour of the presentation because of equipment problems or whatever, the concept really grabbed me.  Someday this type of project will eventually happen everywhere.  Access will be collective except for the unique collections in libraries all over the world.  At the end of the program, though, the presenter mentioned the project had very few staff and needed new partners to advance.  Oh well, we may have to wait for someday.

Gay Youngman

EndUser 2007

I think I may have picked one of the most interesting years to attend EndUser. Being as it was my first time attending this conference, I had nothing to gauge it against. For those unaware, Endeavor sold Voyager to ExLibris. The EndUser Board met with their ExLibris user group counterparts (ELUNA and IGeLU, North American and International respectively). No formal action was taken at conference, but given the change in ownership, the EndUser group will be merging with ELUNA and the international Voyager clients will be joining IGeLU. ELUNA and IGeLU are organized around working product groups who provide product feedback. This approach seems different than the focus I saw at EndUser, but hopefully the merging of groups will bring out the best in each approach. ELUNA and IGeLU are fee based organizations (fees paid by either institution or consortium) in order to vote and participate in the enhancement process. From what I have gathered, this differs significantly from how EndUser has operated and this has folks talking.

The conference had many interesting sessions and I was able to bring back some great ideas to share. The presentation that Margaret and I gave went well and we had some good questions from the audience. The presentation was an extension of the one given at SCVUGM 2006 only now we had 7 months of data and new work flows to add to the discussion. The presentation focused on our outsourcing of authority control and database maintenance and how we are approaching the vast number of reports being generated and training.

Sessions I attended included one on enhancing WebVoyage using Google and Yahoo APIs to address misspellings in searches, analysis of WebVoyage logs to reorder the default search boxes and try to see what types of searches are being done as well as addressing search failures, and two sessions on improving Access report writing skills. With a continued nod to technology, I attended a session on implementing EDI and another on creating a database to track status of order requests.

I hope LIT or another group would consider forming an ad hoc group to examine the latest wave of integrated finding tools with their nod to social network tagging. They take the notion of a library portal another step. These new tools make the best of all present finding technologies (federated searching, better displays, Open-URL resolvers, deep linking, etc.). The ExLibris product is called Primo and was quite impressive in demo. Two universities, University of Minnesota and University of Vanderbilt are currently using it. Competitors to Primo include Endeca and an Open Source product being developed by the University of Rochester called eXtentsible Catalog (XC). I am sure there are other products I am unaware of that do the same sort of things.