Roundup

Again, far too much time has passed since my last posting and far too much has happened. Here’s a roundup of just some of the things that are happening.

OLA is undergoing some strategic planning discussions at the moment. I love being able to take time to stop and look at the big picture, to figure out what it really is that we want to accomplish as individuals, an association, as a profession. We rarely have the chance to stop the daily routine to see where we are going. This scares a lot of people, or at least makes them uncomfortable but this isn’t a bad thing. Some of this comes down to a fear of change but that could be a whole blog post for another time. You can take part in the OLA discussion on  the ola site, facebook and twitter.

We launched the big project I was part of this summer. We made a series of 6 short, humourous videos promoting library services to new students. You can check them out on our youtube channel. One even made a top 5 list!

I just came back from presenting at Internet Librarian. This is one of my favourite conferences – amazing people with great ideas. You can find my presentation here – feel free to contact me with any questions. One of the highlights of the conference was the launch of Michael Porter and David Lee King’s video Library 101 – be sure to check it out!  I attended the unconference and my first preconference (on digital natives and digital immigrants) – both great events with amazing discussion. One of my favourite things about conferences is the chance to sit around with smart people and discuss the issues we all face as librarians. As usual, I came back from the conference full of ideas and energy – something I was in great need of. It feels like it’s been busier than usual with instruction this year, which is a sign of liaison success I suppose.

I recall thinking “ooh, I should blog about this” in the past few months but in the busy-ness of life, they have gotten lost. At least you’re a little more up-to-date on the state of things though!

Library Day in the Life: wrap up and Floods

Better late than never.  This was an interesting exercise for me, as I hope it was for you. It’s been an eye opening experience as I got a chance to see what my colleagues in this profession are up to (a lot!).  I hope you’ve gotten a new appreciation for libraries, librarians, and all they do. For myself, it gave me a chance to reflect back on what I accomplished in the day – something I don’t often leave time for and something I should perhaps be doing more often. It does seem I’m rather all over the place in my day and while that may be expected during summer, a time full of committee work, projects and First Year Experience things, I don’t think it’s very productive. I think I need to work on scheduling my time better, when I can, in order to help my productivity move along. I know I work well under pressure and this may be hard fought battle, but I’ll keep you posted on how that scheduling goes. My days also show I like to be busy (yes) and I like to have variety (also very true). Trying to balance all of this may be a challenge.

On another note, many will have heard of the flood that hit the Louiseville Free Public Library. The Library Society of the World is trying to raise money to help out the library and you can find out more about it here and on Boing Boing. It’s great to see the library community, and others, coming together to help out!

Library Day in the Life: Friday

Ok, I’m cheating a bit and posting this just after midnight, but here’s my day for Friday

• vacation!!

So, I hope you’ll forgive the early post as I take a day off!

Library Day in the Life: Thursday

Here’s what today looked like:

• in a surprising twist, the day did not start with checking email,etc. Instead, I was up and at work for 7am so that we could shoot our latest video. We need to be there early to shoot before the library opens. It went well – we had some great actors.
• meeting to talk about consultation process/guidelines for blended service
• finally catch up on email, etc
• set up for group participation in Handheld Librarian Online Conference (#hhlib)
• listened to keynote of the #hhlib
• meeting
• attended remaining sessions on #hhlib. Lots of info on using SMS/text for reference service and other mobile goodness, which of course, got me thinking about it. Canada is behind when it comes to cell phones and half decent plans. Unless you have a plan, and admittedly most people I know do, texting costs to both send and receive. While it would be nice to offer service through text, one of the dominant ways students communicate these days, I wonder if this service would create a digital divide. Not everyone may be willing to pay to use the service. Of course, we offer IM service and many are without computers still, but libraries also offer access to computers; we do not offer access to cell phones. I doubt that this line of thinking would affect too many, but it did make me pause and consider who it is we are trying to serve and what about the rest of our users?
• 1 hour shift on email/im

Library Day in the Life: Wednesday

I hope you’re not bored of my days yet. Here’s how today went:

• catch up an emails, etc – you know the drill
• met with colleague from First Year Experience Office to discuss library involvement in Welcome Day and let them know some of the cool things we’re doing (First Year Experience wiki, videos, etc). They will be linking to our resources from their own pages (yay!) and I’ll now be part of the first gen session on Welcome Day, as well as the Parent Panel (another yay!). Also arranged to work out some first year research/writing courses, partnering with a prof (one more yay!) for FYEO.
• listened to latest Adventures in Library Instruction podcast
• finalized high school instruction request form
• attempted to participate in part of ACRL’s OnPoint Chat series, “Are Reference Desks Passé?” but it was full (I guess I need to sign in much earlier).
• networking lunch with colleague in learning technologies. As always, a good time that got ideas flowing
• researched guidelines for consultations/referrals for blended services and looked for good examples
• picked up another liaison area (arts and science inquiry) and will have to look into instruction sessions

Speed Dating

Just finished my first speed dating meeting. No, it’s not what you’re thinking, at least, not exactly. We had visitors from another university visit us. We used the prinicples of speed dating to coordinate the meeting. People were invited based on the interests of the visitors and we had equal numbers on both sides. Everyone from our institution had 5 minutes with one of the visitors and then we moved on. We then had two longer half hour sessions in small groups. It was great! I need to work on my networking skills and this was a great way to ensure I talked with everyone. The biggest problem – 5 minutes ran out far too quickly! I learned lots from the visitors, about what they were doing and their questions made me think about what we’re doing. I highly recommend the speed dating meeting – it was fun and informative.

Creating 3D Reference

Thanks to all those who came to Amy’s and my session on Creating 3D Reference: Adventures in Second Life. It was a tough time slot – the last day, right after lunch on a sunny 31 degree day and up against the Pecha Kucha (which sounded like it was a blast next door). We were honoured to present with the Schanachies (and suitably awed). Here are the slides from our portion of the presentation from il2008. And a big thanks to Amy – a great presentation buddy! More to come on the conference when I return – it’s been amazing.

Peace and War and So Much More

There’s always something afoot at my place of work. Here’s another great project that just finished up – Peace and War in the 20th Century. Go check it out! Congrats to Nick and the rest of the team working on the project! More on the project can be found here.

Not sure if I mentioned this one, but it’s worth repeating if I did. Amanda recently launched the 2.0 Toolbox for faculty to create wikis, blogs and other 2.0 goodness. More info here.

Oh, there’s also the major digitization project that’s going on of our rare books. More info here.

There’s lots of other projects on the go – more on them in the future.

Unconference Goodness

Sitting outside, blogging. I love summer. Summer also means conferences but I attended my first unconference. The One Big Library Unconference, hosted by York University Library’s Emerging Technologies group, discussed exactly that – how can we create the One Big Library. I really loved that the unconference idea means that there are more round table discussions rather than presentations. It was all done sans powerpoint, which is something I’ve been leaning more and more to in recent days, although I find it hard to actual achieve. The unconference was great – a lot of great minds got together and had some great discussions (did I mention is was great?). Here are some of the highlights and my thoughts. As with all sessions, there were too many great topics all at the same time.

The first session was on Zotero. I have used Zotero for quite some time now and think there is a lot of potential. The most exciting news is that syncing is coming in the very near future and there are other neat features common soon. I recently talked about Zotero and its possible uses for gov pubs 2.0. It can take a snap shot of the top page which would be a great way for libraries to save ever changing gov pubs pages(or at least prove they have changed). I’d love to know if any one else is considering Zotero for this kind of use.

The second session was on educating for the one big library. This topic was a little too huge for the time slot – it might have been best to identify a group (staff, library students, all others). We started by trying to define one big library only to discover there is no one way at this moment – is it one big library, one big virtual library, is it sharing collections, is it using technology, is it more than a set of trends, is it even possible to do, is there even a library in one big library? Needless to say, there were no definitive answers but there was some interesting discussions, including how new tools and technologies are changing the definition of librarians.

Other sessions I attended included a discussion on open access and copyright rights; cataloguing, the semantic web and folksonomies, and one big library on one little device. When talked turned to institutional repositories in the open access talk, it was raised that there has to be  need in order for people to want to participate in such movements. It also has to be seductive – flickr is seductive and it fills a need. Institutional repositories on the other hand, are not seductive and while we think they fill a need, many faculty have not recognized this yet. The cataloguing discussion raised some interesting points about tagging and the possibility of using tagging on Library of Congress Subject Headings. This also got me thinking about other ways tagging can help students find their info needs. Wordle is hot right now and cloud tags have been around for a while. I’d love to see cloud tags at the side of search results – showing words searched, related and relevant subject headings, and if you’re already doing it, tags that other users have contributed to your records. Most relevant hits would show in bigger text. I’ve mentioned this to our systems librarian and will be bugging him about it again in the future. If you’re using cloud tags in your library catalogue, let me know!

All in all, a great unconference. The only thing I would have liked a little more of was more discussion on what one big library would be – how are people envisioning it? How can we achieve it? The topics we discussed all have the possibility of contributing to the one big library but we didn’t define what one big library would be as a group. I can’t wait for the next unconference!

Serendipity or Saving Time?

We’re having conversations again as we move to new models and bring the library forward, attempting to stay relevant in a world of changing information needs and information access. One of the recent conversations revolved around changes in services, including the ability for patrons to browse our storage area and a stack retrieval service. This in turn lead to a discussion on saving time vs. serendipity.

We all want our patrons to find what they need and this can be accomplished in a number of ways, mainly searching and finding. Searching requires the use of the library catalogue, Google or even a librarian. Finding may also include Google but there is often more serendipity involved. There is an obvious desire for serendipitous finding, hence the feedback from patrons for the ability to browse journals in our storage. Stack retrieval however, may hamper some of this serendipitous finding. Part of the joy of getting a book for your research, at least for me, is going to the stacks and finding another book that fits your research by chance. Are we doing a disservice by getting the book for them? Are we limiting their finding ability? I know many libraries offer stack retrieval and it is certainly something our patrons are asking for – it is a great time saver to call ahead and get the book pulled so that it is ready and waiting for you. Of course, stack retrieval will not stop patrons from going to the stacks themselves but it will be interesting to see how this service will affect circulation numbers.

Despite the question of saving time vs. serendipity, I am glad to see that our library is moving to answer the needs and requests of our patrons. We have lots of other changes in services coming too but that is another blog post or two for the future.