Tombrarian

Hard to beleive, but we leave for Monterey three weeks from today for a combined work/fun trip. The work part is Internet Librarian 2006; however, Information Today conferences tend to be a lot of fun as well. This will be my first time at IL and am looking forward to seeing a lot of the people I already know from Computers in Libraries as well as meeting some West Coast people.

The (other) fun part is that my wife and I are arriving early (Friday night and the conference starts on Monday), and we are also staying on the coast a few extra days and driving up to San Francisco.

I still need to update my presentation. I had given a similar presentation back in March at Computers in Libraries, but a lot has happened since March, so I have to revise.

Those of you who saw my presentation at Computers in Libraries 2006 or those thinking about coming to my presentation at Internet Librarian 2006 may be interested to know that La Salle University’s  portal is featured in the June edition of Campus Technology. The article is about the portal as a recruitment tool and not about the library portion I talk about, but it’s an interesting aspect of what we are doing and shows how diverse our portal has become.

Yesterday, Nicole from What I Learned Today and Rich from Fractalblog presented at our annual summer program.  Nicole presented Intranet 2.0: Fostering Collaboration, based on her work with the Jenkins Law Library intranet.  She has also written an article based on this work which appears in the May/June issue of Online Magazine.  Rich presented Blogging the Night Away: Encouraging Student Online Participation.

Both speakers were well-received by our librarians, and the librarians visiting from St. Joseph's University and Villanova University.  Nicole impressed the crowd with the intranet she designed from scratch to help solve the communication, e-mail clutter, and document distribution issues at her workplace.  Working in PHP, she created a workspace which utilizes both blog and wiki technologies.  The only areas of the workspace she did not write are the calendar (open source software which she has significantly modyfied) and the help desk tracking program (third party software).  Her intranet is particularly impressive because she only has the help of one parttime assistant.

Rich showed the blog he uses for his class.  Originally he had a site in Blogger, but has recently switched his site to Squarespace.  You can look at the posts from the spring semester (Jan - May 2006) and see how effective using a blog for class participation is.  His students frequently posted and often commented on the posts.  And the posts are insightful.  Using a blog gives students time to think before they post and relieves the pressure of speaking in class.  I certainly need to find a way to get my writing students to participate more and be more thoughtful and using a blog just may be the way to go.  Certainly, I have had plenty of interested and invested students in my class, but using a blog may pull in those who are reluctant to speak in class.  And if students can work with some ideas in the blog before coming to class, they may be more comfortable speaking up.

Rich ended the presentation by having everyone start a blog using the free Blogger site.  Many of the participants had never used a blog before, but I overhead several people say they would like to keep up with the blogs they created.

One of the more satisfying aspects of the workshop for me was that I was the one who arranged for Nicole to come speak.  One of the benefits of going to conferences is meeting other professionals.  I had met Nicole at Computers in Libraries 2005 and found out that she worked nearby.  When the time came to find a speaker for our summer presentation, I recommended Nicole because I knew she was very enthusiastic about her intranet project and knew that enthusiasm would carry over into her presentation, which certainly turned out to be the case.

Iris has a blog: http://pegasuslibrarian.blogspot.com/

Good luck Iris!

(Though, those of us who met Iris at CiL2006 know that she's only starting a blog so that she can get the wi-fi password at CiL2007.)

Technorati tag: CIL2006

I wanted to go back and add links to my post about Frank Cervone and Darlene Fichter's Cool Tools presentation, but The Industrial Librarian already has a list with all the links, so instead of replicating his work, I'll link to his post.

Technorati tag: CIL2006

I've been home from CiL for 2 days and still haven't gotten to all of my notes, so I'm guessing I never will, especially now that I'm back to work and catching up.

But I do want to point out 2 particularly excellent sessions.

The first was Chad Boeninger's presentation on BizWikiwhich he developed for Ohio University Libraries.  The conference was all abuzz with wiki's and I avoided most of it, but not intentionally.  There were just other compelling sessions.  But I was very fortunate to sit in on this presentation.  Like many people, I had never thought of using a wiki for a subject guide before.  I particularly like the idea that other people can contribute to it.  At our library, whenever there's a new resource, the ref librarians tell me about it and I have to add it to the site.  The wiki could act as a content management system, so that I would no longer have to act as a middle man.  I'm not sure how this would work with our portal, but the presentation has given me something to think about.

The second is one that many people have been talking about: Roy Tennant and Andrew Pace's talk on the future of catalogs.  Tennant's talk was more theoretical and Pace demonstrated the work they have done at North Carolina State University. 

Tennant pointed out that catalogs developed from librarians' needs; therefore, the are good at inventory control, known item searching, and finding items within a particular collection.  However, catalogs are not as helpful to users.  He listed the following things that catalogs do not do well:

• any search beyond known items
• anything beyond books and journal titles
• displaying results by logical groupings
• faceted browsing
• relevance ranking
• recommendation services.

He stated that the problem with catalogs is that they conflate content and discovery, making adding information easy but retrieving information difficult.  He believes that catalogs should be one finding tool among others and that catalogs of the future need to interoperate with other systems, that they will work well alone or as a part of a unified finding tool.

Pace's talk focused mainly on a demonstration of NSCU's catalog and I encourage people to take a look and play around with some of the search and browse options.  It is truly impressive.

Technorati tag: CIL2006

This morning, I posted the final version of my Computers in Libraries presentation, Delivering Individualized Library Content: Wide Open Portals. 

I want to thank all those who attended my session.  Based on the great questions I received afterwards, people seemed truly interested.

Technorati tag: CIL2006

I do still want to post my notes from more of the CiL sessions, but I just wanted to say a few things about next year's location.

About 10 years ago, my wife and I stayed in Crystal City so that we could visit DC on the cheap.  At that time, there was nothing around the hotel, not even a place to have breakfast.  So, when I first heard that Computers in Libraries 2007 was to be in Crystal City, my first reaction was "no one is going to want to go there."  And a few people I talked to expressed similar apprehension.

However, I think there are a few things I failed to consider.  First of all, ITI's job is to provide the best location for the conference, not to ensure things to do after the conference, though it certainly works in their favor if there are.  Although I cerainly love the location of the current hotel, the conference does seem to be outgrowing it.  As a blogger who had spotty wi-fi in only 1 location, I'm hoping the new location will be more ammenable.  And there's always complaining about a lack of bathrooms.

I also failed to consider how difficult it is to pull off such an event.  I think Meredith's analogy to a 3-day wedding for over 2,000 people is an apt one.  Jane Dysart, who does such a great job coordinating CiL, explains some of these difficulties and her decision to move to Crystal City in a recent post.  Computers in Libraries is the best organized conference I have ever been to and the great planning is one of the reasons I keep coming back.  I'm never confused about what is going on when, always have great sessions to choose from, and always have plenty of breaks to eat, visit the exhibits, or hang out with some of the great people.  And since I do think it's the best run conference I've ever been to, I'm certainly willing to give the organizers the benefit of the doubt as to their choice.

Also, my impression of Crystal City is 10 years old.  Someone mentioned that it has really developed over the past few years and the sites for the Hyatt and Crystal City Now certainly makes this claim seem fair.  And I also remember that getting to DC by the Metro was pretty easy.  Coming from another big city (Philadelphia), I'm not shocked by how much things cost in DC, but I know other people are not used to the cost of city life and I would guess staying 3 days in Crystal City would be cheaper than staying near Dupont Circle.

After having such a great week, I'm already looking forward to CiL 2007.

Technorati tag: CIL2006

Spent the morning in 2 sessions about digital libraries.  The first session included Sharon Carlson from Western Michigan University and Margaret Graham from Drexel University College of Medicine, Archives & Special Collections.  Both showed current project at their respective schools, with some surprising overlap.  The digitization project at WMU is of their collection of Civil War diaries and the Drexel project is of historical records of women physicians.  Some of the diaries of the women physicians date from the Civil War era.

Both projects are very impressive.  Our university is thinking of digitizing one of our special collections, so these presentations were extremely helpful.  Sharon Carlson gave some details about the workload required, which is one of our major concerns.  They hired student workers who worked 15-20 hours per week.  They scanned, transcribed and coded an average of 3-5 pages per hour and were able to review about 8 pages per hour.  Margaret Graham’s presentation was good to see mostly because Drexel is also in Philadelphia, so I may have a local brain to pick.  I also met someone from Texas Tech who also have a Viet Nam related special collection and have an excellent online collection.

The second session was a panel of 4 speakers who covered a variety of topics including digitizing technology, the future of science and medical libraries, and the necessity of thinking of what technologies may be in place 5, 10 or more years down the line, especially considering the tools people use other than Web browsers to access online content.

Technorati tag: CIL2006

Wednesday, March 22nd at 7:30 is Dead Tech (formally known as Digi TechForum: Looking at Dead & Emerging Technologies).  Word usually spreads quickly about this session, but it’s always entertaining and certainly worth the time.

Technorati tag: CIL2006