Conference Reports

ALA Midwinter, LLAMA Leadership Development Seminar

Pat Wagner of Pattern Research, Inc. led attendees through a number of exercises to consider how supervisors and administrators treat their staffs. Pat's specialty is conflict management and it was a fascinating afternoon. What is your style? Beyond how you perceive yourself, how does your staff rate you? One quick way to get information is to conduct an anthropological study. How do others react when you walk into a room? What non-verbal cues are you giving? Pat's session ended with an amusing homework assignment, “Stop delegating humanity.”

Willinsky on Open Access

John Willinsky, Stanford University
KU Union, February 19, 2009

Not a dogmatic open access advocate, more of a "free to read" or even just an increased access supporter (the 99 cent Apple example applied to articles).

Metadata @ KU

This was an all-day event at KU with the title "Our space: the new world of metadata." All sessions were delivered by Karen Calhoun of OCLC.

Access 2008: Closing Keynote

Bob Young, founder/CEO of lulu.com

His philosophy in building companies: brains will always trump experience, so he built his firms by seeking out the best people. He did point out that this didn't work so well with the football team he owns (the Hamilton Tiger Cats of the CFL), but, as he put it, football is a world unto itself with its own dynamics.

Access 2008: Synergies 1.5

Mary Westell, U of Calgary
Lynn Copeland, Simon Fraser U
Rea Devakos, U of Toronto

Idea was born of the notion that Canada needed its own JSTOR. It morphed into Synergies, which is a push to move social sciences and humanities research away from print to the Internet. Copeland was using a lot of Canadian acronyms, which I've gotten better at recognizing, but I missed some of her references.

One thing I do believe I caught is that there is an $11 million grant behind the project, from the CFI (Canadian Foundation for Innovation?).

Access 2008: Evergreen / Conifer

John Fink, McMaster University
Dan Scott, Laurentian University

Started with an intro to Evergreen, which I won't repeat, since you can read it here. Executive summary: it's an open-source ILS already in use in a wide range of libraries, including academic libraries. He did note that the install isn't as easy as it should be (but is getting better) and there's a bit of a learning curve, since it does things in new ways. Well worth the work, he assures us.

Access 2008: Mashing up the library Website

Karen Coombs, University of Houston

When she arrived a bit over three years ago, she inherited a large site (>1500 pages) where all changes were centralized. [Sound familiar?] She wanted to get away from this, but these are the issues faced by a library Website:

• a wide range of staff content owners
• incorporating info from other systems
• some info is repeated in various places on the site
• users what info where they are (i.e.- not on the library Website)
• the library should be integrated into the curriculum

Access 2008: Mass Digitization

Jonathan Bengston, University of Toronto
Sian Meikle, University of Toronto

Bengston gave a quick overview of UT's work with mass digitization. They work together with the Internet Archive, and have a "Scribe" scanning station. They have 23 machines working five days per week, about 161,000 pages per day, which rounds out to more than 100,000 books per year. As he pointed out, after Microsoft pulled out in May 2008 (or better, the MS money ran out), there aren't many of these sites left. It's now just the Open Content Alliance supporting it.

Access 2008: Digitization Portals

Slavko Manojlovich, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Walter Lewis, OurOntario.ca

Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) supports and hosts the Digital Archives Initiative (DAI). The DAI is built on CONTENTdm. When they went live in February 2008, they had 80,000 objects, which has now doubled to 160,000 in short order. In addition to their own content, they also host content for other universities in the region as well as various Newfoundland departments and organizations.

Access 2008: Open Source

Karen Schneider
Community Librarian, Equinox Software

Equinox is a support vendor for the open source ILS Evergreen.

Speaking on open source software. Pointed out that libraries have become quite active with creating OSS. Even OCLC wants to create an infrastructure for open source sharing.