The sun has taken its leave of us, but I must say that as a first time visitor, I’m enjoying seeing Seattle in both rainy and sunny weather. Saturday was another full day, though I’ve felt less pressured than at some other conferences, because I know that much that can be re-visited later on the virtual conference site.

I camped out in the Cyber Zed Shed for a good portion of the day where there were several widget-related presentations (Sprout, Library Subject Guide Widgets, Online Info Lit Tool) that focused on portability, flexibility, and customization. In my opinion, this is definitely where libraries are headed.

I also attended a panel session, Mapping Your Path to the Mountaintop: Planning Where You Want To Be In Your Career which was moderated by Steven Bell. It was informative and inspiring and included input from the audience too. If you missed this one, I highly recommend that you check out the recorded version.

I had dinner at Dragonfish (tasty!) before grabbing a shuttle back to SeaTac for my flight out Saturday night. I will leave Seattle with a lot to think about. And really, the conference is not over, because there are several things I missed or want to review on the virtual conference site. I hoping some of the conversations will continue too.

Many of this year’s presenters approached interactive technologies for libraries from theoretical and practical perspectives. One recurring theme, as Char Booth, and her mother or grandmother (?) before her so eloquently put it, was that “one size fits no one.” While large, broad research initiatives published by organizations such as ECAR, Pew, and the New Media Consortium are getting a lot of attention and calling on librarians to respond to the needs of the 21st century college student, individual libraries are zooming in on their specific populations and getting dramatically different results from each other and from the broader national and global samples. Lynn Sutton of Wake Forest University and Rosann Bazirjian of UNC Greensboro replicated the OCLC Perceptions study at their institutions, and found that what mattered to their students about the library differed as much as their respective universities do, and that neither population resembled the global sample. Char Booth and Christopher Gruder revealed in their presentation about surveying Ohio University students on their web 2.0 interests and habits that their data didn’t match national averages or other universities’ samples either. The obvious conclusion, emphasized in both presentations, and which Jackie B. highlighted in her post below, is that college and university libraries need to understand their local patron cultures and design and implement services accordingly. But I think the fact that this was a recurring theme at this year’s conference begs a question, at least among those of us who are fairly new to the profession and to higher education. One can assume that, due to socioeconomic variables, there have always been differences among student populations. But can demographics/socioeconomics totally explain what’s going on today? Why do many students at one university blog, for example, while practically no one at another school does? And, in terms of increased student engagement and learning, what are the broader implications of understanding these differences?

One of the biggest themes I’ve seen in this year’s conference is subject guides. I think there were about 7 presentatons in all.  This has been a hot topic at my university as well.  The LibGuides session on Friday was packed - standing room only.  Their presentation was great (and entertaining) so I recommend viewing the slides if you missed it.  One cool new feature they mentioned is that you can now enter your proxy URL and check a box and it will add the URL to all your links in the guides so that students can use resources from off-campus. There are a lot of templates for sharing available at http://springsharelounge.com. LibGuides has built in templates for adding RSS feeds, video, tag clouds, polls. and widgets.

I was interested to hear that OSU has developed an open source package for subject guides called Library ala carte.  It has many of the features of LibGuides.  We do a lot of open source at my library so I am definitely going to check this out.

Session Description:
Investigate the use of ePortfolios as an interactive and dynamic tool for evaluating student employees. With the collaboration of three additional campus units, the Washington State University Libraries implemented an ePortfolio initiative to facilitate assessment, while providing student employees with a means of marketing their academic and work experience.

Learning Objectives

An understanding of how academic libraries can use and promote ePortfolios for employee assessment. An appreciation for the obstacles and pitfalls of implementing an ePortfolio requirement. Tips for communicating the power of the ePortfolio for self-reflection and the building of a professional Edentity.

Presenter(s):
Brian  McManus, bmcmanus@wsu.edu
Washington State University 

Gabriella  Reznowski, reznowski@wsu.edu
Washington State University 

This was my first time attending an ACRL national conference and unfortunately I was only able to attend for a couple of hours due to a family emergency.  I am a LIS student in my first semester at SJSU and work full-time WSU Libraries as a paraprofessional.  This conference was an excellent opportunity for me to network and understand the issues that face academic and research libraries across the nation, to find out what the hot-button topics in our specific field really matter.  Unfortunately, I was not able o explore those topics to my full satisfaction.  However, I am reticent in the idea that I will be able to come back to the ACRL’s website after the conference and peruse the goings on and follow up on those topics I missed. 

For the one aspect of the conference I was able to attend, the poster presentations on the morning of Friday, March 14th, I will say that it was intense.  My experience could not have been better, my team member and I were busy the entire session with questions about Edentity, assessment, and e-portfolios!  Every question led to more questions by attendees and with each question there was an exchange of information that benefited us all, every participant gained something from the interactions and it was a thrill!  So I would like to thank all the poster session attendees and poster session organizers of the Friday morning session, you are all awesome!!!!

For everyone interested in more information about the poster presentationa my teammate and I gave, I will have more information posted to the virtual conference site.  Thanks again ACRL-Seattle attendees!!!!!

Kind regards,

Brian McManus

bmcmanus@wsu.edu

Green Pledge

The ACRL’s Green Component Committee for the ACRL 14th National Conference makes me proud to be a librarian! At this panel presentation, members of the Green Committee shared their experience planning a green conference, the first one for ACRL. As they mentioned, Seattle is a great place to start this trend, as the “green” opportunities here are more widespread and more accessible.

The efforts this committee made went far beyond the usual recycling containers. Their process included surveying ACRL members for conference attendees’ environmental priorities, creating a planning wiki called The Big Green Wiki, collaborating with other conference planning committees such as the Local Arrangements for information about sustainable businesses, and marketing/educating attendees and participants to their options for an environmentally-friendly conference experience.

This type of goal inspires all sorts of support. Over 80% of conference registrants signed the Green Pledge at registration, and received a green watermark on their conference badge. Seven exhibitors committed to being green, and information about them is on page 78 of the conference schedule. A volunteer created a Google map mashup with locations shown of the local sustainable/local restaurants and businesses. Presenters reduced the number of their handouts, or eliminated handouts altogether.

Some of the specific actions the committee took with this conference included efforts to reduce, reuse, recycle in various ways. Paper usage and waste was significantly reduced through the use of the Virtual Conference. Handouts and presentations are posted online, accessible to conference registrants. I appreciate this not only for the environmental aspect, but the access to simultaneously scheduled sessions that I couldn’t attend. It gives me the opportunity to virtually be in multiple places at once! Another reduction in paper came from the conversion of press kits and binder manuals for vendors from paper-based products to online documents. For the conference-related paper that was printed, soy-based ink on recycled paper was used, and the printer didn’t charge any extra. The cost of “going green” for this conference was less in some areas (A Lot less paper), more in others (bamboo plates and corn forks), and some costs were the same (printing).

Food scraps and leftovers are being handled in a way I’ve only seen at my hippie friends’ houses: Composting! Surplus food from the kitchens that wasn’t needed (and wasn’t unwrapped) is donated to FareStart. Vendor giveaways left over will be donated to local charities, and leftover vendor books are donated to Better World Books.

The committee members emphasized that communication and marketing through multiple outlets helped ensure the success of the green initiatives: website, wiki, newsletters, articles, emails, and word of mouth. For planning our own green conferences, events or meetings, it’s important to get membership initiation and drive, association buy-in and support, and formalize plans via a committee. The Green Committee plans to document their experience and efforts for next year’s committee, and hopefully we can take what they’ve done back to our own events to spread the word.

To hear more, come listen to the invited Green Speaker: Robin Chase (Sunday morning 8 am Sheraton ballroom). She’s the former CEO of ZipCar, now head of GoLoco.

Go Green!

Just like the other bloggers, I can hardly believe how fast this conference seemed to fly by.  It’s early Saturday evening and I have just had the chance to catch my breath.  This afternoon I went to a panel session titled Mapping Your Path to the Mountaintop: Planning Where You Want To Be In Your Career with Steven  Bell, John  Shank, Brian  Mathews, and Lauren Pressley.   Bell encouraged adn moderated the conversation between panelist and the audience.  The audience (of all ages) was encouraged notto compare their careers to others in the library world.  Instead, audience members were encouraged to come up with a motto that would reflect their individual goals and strategic plans.  Through a series of questions, panelists and audience members were encouraged to think about where they are going and what they want with their career.  The interactive panel provided lots of audience participation and an opportunity to share ideas on the different aspects that contribute to a career: strategic plan, presenting, publishing, innovation, entrepreneurship, and future plans.  I think that the panel can be best summarized by saying: be fearless, volunteer for as much as you can, learn new skills or technologies when presented to you and talk to your colleagues - you never know where your next opportunity might be.  We were encouraged to take some time to think and come up with a motto that can help guide us in our professional development.

This panel motivated me, especially since I was presenting a CyberZed Shed presentation on Facebook right after it.  I’ll admit it - I was nervous.  It was my first presentation at a large, national conference.  Halfway through my presentation though a thought struck me.  My peers are listening to me and they want me to succeed because what I have to say contributes to the profession.  The thought whizzed through my mind but I’ve had the remainder of the afternoon to think about it.  For anyone else out there considering writing a blog, submitting a proposal, or creating a survey: be fearless.  This echos the discussion from the Mapping Your Path to the Mountaintopsession earlier.  We all get nervous and we will all face rejection at some point, but it is worth the try.  After this afternoon’s activities and thoughts, my motto might be: be fearless.

Developing data services - or just teaching data fluency - is a missed opportunity for many academic librarians.  The current environment of data, accountability, quantitative research, and scientific information encourages many university professors and librarians to teach the importance of locating and interpreting data for many purposes. 

In today’s session, Get It While It’s Hot: Developing Data Services in the Academic Library, Lynda Kellam, Sheree Fu, and Susan Metcalf covered levels of data services, ideas for teaching data and statistical literacy, favorite web and print resources, and what a library might want to do if they can’t devote an entire position or service to the area.  Following are 3 practical tips I picked up today.

1. Consider asking vendors and local data experts to do free training for your library - this is a way to learn more about data sources such as Roper, ICPSR, World Bank, etc.
2. Develop web-based guides that lead users to data sources even if you don’t have a full-fledged data service.
3. A few of the best resources for data and statistics: state data centers, Lexis Nexis Statistical, SimplyMap (GIS Lite), U.S. Census, Justice, and Labor departments, IASSIST, ICPSR, General Social Survey, Pew Research Center, and the Roper Center.

Instruction for data and statistical literacy provides a new teaching opportunity for librarians as it is very important to many disciplines in the social sciences.  Kudos and thanks to today’s presenters!

This year’s conference has been filled with enlightening and informative sessions about library technologies. The best ones, in my opinion, have been focused not just on the technologies themselves or what they can do for librarians, but rather, on what they mean for our users. This morning, I attended Lynn Silipigni Connaway’s invited talk about engaging students in virtual reference. Connaway offered all kinds of information on what makes people use (or not use) virtual reference, including a number of illuminating and often humorous direct quotes from research participants. One method Connaway and her colleague Marie Radford employed in their research was the “critical incident technique,” a qualitative method wherein participants are asked to describe their most memorable event or experience. Users and non-users alike of virtual reference most often described the interpersonal aspect of the reference experience, and indicated that a positive attitude on the part of the librarian toward both the user and the task at hand was the hallmark of a successful interaction. (Naturally, the reverse was also true.) This got me thinking about the cues according to which we perceive others’ attitudes, and how those cues manifest in the virtual environment. In the absence of body language, etc., how are we letting our users know that we truly are happy to help?

Over the past few days, I’ve been listening to presentations and talking to poster presenters who have been experimenting with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and more.  My own library is not exempt - we have a presence on Facebook.  Therefore it was good to here the Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librarians paper  by Joseph Murphy of Yale University Science Libraries and Heather L. Moulaison of Ecole des Sciences de l’information, Rabat and Rutgers.   My fellow blogger, Joshua Hogan, also attended and wrote a very nice summary for the conference blog.   I was glad to hear a lot of thoughtful questions and discussion among the participants in the room.  Murphy encouraged discourse and explained that the points were beginning points and open to debate.   As we are presented with more and more technology (and who know what’s coming next - Facebook updated their interface last night), we should also be keeping in mind standards and guidelines.  Hopefully, if we establish some guidelines as a profession, we will be able to adapt to whatever is thrown our way.

Seattle skyline from Pier 52

I, of course, returned to the poster sessions this morning and caught the Instruction ‘to go’session that Karl Ericson blogged about earlier.  Integrating social technologies into the classroom once you have designed corresponding learning objectives can be a very powerful learning tool.  Since it is a darker and rainy day here in Seattle, I figured that I would leave you with a photo of the sunnier weather yesterday.  After the conference yesterday, I was able to walk down to the piers to check the scene out.  Back with more updates later and I hope you are enjoying the blog!