Conference Reports

ALA Midwinter, ALCTS Scholarly Communications Discussion Group

This well attended session featured Dan Hazen from Harvard University discussing the nuts and bolts of Harvard's open access policy. Unlike K-State's K-Rex, Harvard's institutional repository began first with faculty papers and is only now starting to address ETDRs. A

And now for some fascinating background that I was unaware of until the discussion. Harvard Libraries are comprised of 10 faculty libraries that function as separately funded entities not beholden to the larger Harvard Universities umbrella.

Partners in Excellence – Kansas Assoc of School Librarians, Kansas State Dept of Education, Kansas Reading Assoc. Topeka, Kansas, October 15-17, 2009

Session Highlights

First Lady Stacy Parkinson welcomed the group by talking about Banned Books, libraries, and her life-long love of reading.  Susan Zimmerman, internationally known speaker and author provided the opening keynote/workshop on reading comprehension strategies.  She did a wonderful job of breaking down the process into individual components such as visible and invisible ingredients; led us all in exercises illustrating those components; and provided valuable insights for teachers working with developing readers – not the least of which is reading should be joyful.

“Brain-based literacy instruction: partnering research with practice” was a session led by K-State’s own Dr. Laurie Curtis. She shared basic information and strategies for teaching and engaging students of all ages. Interesting tips that we can all use: Listening and speaking are “naturally” occurring systems- reading and writing are not!  There is NO gene responsible for reading. Information is held for approximately 30 seconds unless continually rehearsed – or it is determined to be very important to the learner (we must be clear as to why students need to learn what we are teaching). Key factors in retaining information are: strong emotional content/low stress, multi-modal input, encoding into long-term memory through various pathways, must be relevant so it is retrievable.  

The “Teaching ethical behavior instructional activities” session presented by Dr. Mirah Dow from SLIM put forth the following principles of information ethics: respect of intellectual property, respect for privacy, fair representation, and nonmaleficense. She presented example activities that librarians and/or teachers can use to foster ethical use of information.

Mark Tyler Nobleman was the afternoon keynote speaker who entertained us with behind the scenes stories of his books.  His latest award-winning picture book is “Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman”.

Bridging the online / offline gap with QR codes

At last week's Bibliothekartag in Erfurt, Germany, at the end of a talk by Regina Pfeifenberger of the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin on designing mobile library sites (great talk, by the way, and made me think that everyone needs a mobile site by 2010), Jin Tan of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin did a short riff on QR tags and their uses for libraries. One can read the Wikipedia page to get the full scoop on QR tags, but in a nutshell what they do is present textual information in a barcode format readable by machines.

How does it work? People with QR enabled devices (iPhones, various Blackberry, Samsung, Nokia phones, etc.) can snap a picture of the code, which is then converted by software on their device into the textual information. No typing, no processing, just snap and it's done. It can be a URL, plain text, a phone number, a YouTube stream, an eBay ID, or just about anything else. Neat, but what can one do? Lot of things, for example:

• On a poster advertising an event, tuck a QR code with all of the details in the corner.
• On the library hours sign, tuck the hours in a QR code and let users get the full scoop with one photo.
• Generate QR codes on the fly from the catalog and let users pick up call numbers simply by taking a picture (no fee, as can occur with texting from the catalog).

The possibilities are endless, and it is quick and easy to generate a QR code. Just google "create QR code" to see the number of sites offering free services.

One of the more whimsical uses of QR tags is the wearable QR code. Jin Tan had a t-shirt on with his business card embedded in a QR code. Take a picture of his shirt, and networking has happened. Slick!

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).

ALA Midwinter, Next Generation Bibliographic Control: What Is the Brave New World?

As of this posting, no slides have been made available on the ALA wiki for this session. This may change in the near future.

ExLibris sponsored the program. It was fortunate I arrived early, as the topic was timely and there were not nearly enough tables, chairs or cookies for the room. And as everyone knows, cookies move all thorny and/or challenging conversations along. Reactions may even be delayed as mouths are busy chewing rather than reacting.

ELSUG 2008: What can VRS do for you?

WHAT CAN VRS DO FOR YOU?
presented by Margaret Kaus & Michelle Turvey-Welch

Margaret & Michelle opened the session by asking how many people had heard of the Voyager Reporting System (VRS)--quite a few hands went up -- and how many were actively using it -- only 2-3.  K-State installed VRS during spring 2008 and has been experimenting with it over the last few months. It not only is able to provide some of the collection statistics we need, but also provides opportunities for collaboration with library staff outside of technical services.

ELSUG 2008: Documenting SFX at K-State Libraries

DOCUMENTING SFX AT K-STATE LIBRARIES: OR 'YOU SHOULD BLOG THAT!'
presented by Jamene Brooks-Kieffer

http://ksulib.typepad.com/sfxdoc/

Jamene provided a history of SFX and blogging at K-State Libraries
--implemented in July 2006; Jamene arrived in September
--SFX is hosted and administered locally by @1.5FTE
--“Get It” with the PowerCat logo is the brand
--blogging began in Dec. 2005: there are @40 active blogs, both internal and external

ELSUG 2008: Improving the Voyager Google Book Search

IMPROVING THE VOYAGER GOOGLE BOOK SEARCH
presented by Prabha Acharya

Adding a Google Book search to Voyager sounds like a good thing. The feature is based on isbn, issn, or lccn searches but Texas A&M's initial testing resulted in many erroneous links, especially for serials and non-book items such as maps. There was a lack of confidence in the feature and the library planned to shelve the implementation until Prabha did some tweaking to make it return better results.

ELSUG 2008: Improving the OPAC

IMPROVING THE OPAC: OVERVIEW OF CHANGES AT WSU
presented by Gemma Blackburn

This was the first time I've seen a presentation on field weighting and Gemma provided extremely useful information that actually made sense!!

Wichita State's last OPAC redesign was in 2005 – looked at appearance and accessibility.

In 2008, a new team was formed: 2 tech serv, 2 from access services, plus some advisors to get different points of view:

Access 2008: VuFind

Andrew Nagy, Villanova

VuFind is an open source library discovery portal. Nagy dislikes the term "catalog," since it has so many negative connotations, so phrases such as "next generation catalog" are to be avoided. We need a discovery tool that works like people expect it to.