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?

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!

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!

It’s not truly a librarian conference until there are strong words about the nuances that differentiate the Borg Collective and the Q Continuum.  (Let us not speak of librarian pon farr.)  That’s just what happened at the benignly named Beyond Literacy: Are reading and writing doomed?  Learning French from a pill? Sacre bleu!  Post-literacy is a blessing… from aliens!?! Nanu nanu!  Better telepathy through technology?  It’s like he’s reading my mind!  This guy needs to put on his own conference.  I’m crafting my tin foil hat already.

The highlight of the day was of course Sherman Alexie.  We laughed, we cried, we passed in the hall at least twice.  I am a big fan of Sherman Alexie’s books, and of course Smoke Signals  (Would that I could get away with a Fry Bread Power t-shirt.) but I was unaware of his television work, such as laying a smackdown on Stephen Colbert and doing an interview with Oprah in a flu induced haze.  (Before the interview the vomited up a melon ball which he had not previously eaten.  That’s the reality warping power of Oprah!)  He was a great speaker and I highly recommend going to see him if you ever get the chance.  Just be aware that he really… really… really likes librarians.  (Wear an oatmeal sweater at your own risk.)

There are about 200 people listening to John McGinty Director, Loyola/Notre Dame Library (jmcginty@loyola.edu www.lndl.org), present his contributed paper, Digital Libraries Need Digital Organization: Identifying, defining, and creating new academic library management structures

How do we move from analog as default, to a digital default?

Mr. McGinty begins with some brief history via a time line.

Wow! MARC records were created in 1966!

OCLC Union Catalog debuted in 1971! Significant due to it’s collaborative nature and as a precursor to modern day efficiency in cataloging.

How to balance print and electronic journals?

Are efficiencies being created continually?

“Raise your hand if your library does not have anything to do with your website, academically.” Of course, nobody raised there hand.

Three models for handling digital initiatives:

1. Do own work outside of IT

2. Digital Dept. within the library

3. Partner with IT

There will be increasing reliance on collaboration between institutions for resources and for services.

How can community colleges benefit from thinking about “workplace information literacy”?  I think its clear that every institution can benefit from improving upon its partnerships, upon its collaboration and upon its ability to self assess.  There are some clear barriers to improvement in community colleges where there is a predominance of adjunct faculty both within the library and within other departments and programs.  However, now is the time to reinvest in collaboration, innovation, and creativity.  We, at the community college level, could benefit greatly from renewed efforts to increase our understanding of how we initiate participation, how we learn from and illicit feedback, how we incorporate new information into our processes.

I know at my own institution there seems to be a need to first analyze our work processes and from there take that knowledge forward into our work with colleagues in other departments.  The effort could greatly improve our ability to reach other adjuncts, to complete our desired initiatives, and to continue moving forward in this ever evolving process of gathering, analyzing, and planning the use of information.

I’m starting to think the answer to that question is “probably,” having attended the morning’s first paper presentation and poster sessions here at the conference.  Judging by the topics being presented and the questions I hear being asked, there’s a fair number of librarians thinking about the kinds of things I spend a fair bit of my time pondering–principally, how do we get our library resources into users’ paths of web research? 

The first session I went to this was the pair of papers on metadata: one concerning librarian-created metadata for library-hosted open access scholarship, and one comparing user-created tags in LibraryThing with LOC subject headings. I especially appreciated the latter paper’s data-driven take on the potential usefulness of tags. I love tags as an individual webizen, but as a librarian I’m never sure how to think about them. Are they worth the time and expense of creating a structure for patrons to tag within our catalogs? This question is unanswerable without quantitative looks at what tags add. The observation from their data that I’m struck by is that tags in LibraryThing generally include the information conveyed by LCSH’s, but LCSH’s don’t have as broad a spectrum of information as that contributed by the users in LT. I’m going to follow up on studies they cited suggesting that this lack of spectrum contributes to zero results searches. Patrons think about our materials in ways we can’t predict, and LCSH’s are designed to be focused rather than fuzzy. What we should do with this disconnect is an open question–attendees brought up several valid and familiar concerns about the role of a tagging infrastructure in our academic library catalogs–but I find it incredibly valuable to have ways of quantifying what tags reveal about our traditional organization methods.

After hearing these papers, I headed to the poster session, and found more than a few that directly addressed projects we are considering at my library: assignment calculators tailored to assignments and subjects to lead students to our online instructional materials, informal information literacy videos that avoid librarian-ese by getting students and faculty to answer our how-to questions, and using YouTube as a platform for sharing videos we create. 

What’s on my mind is on our minds–it’s reassuring and inspiring. The web is flexible–can we be flexible to thrive in it? Looking around this morning, I feel hopeful that we can.

Session Description:
The goal of this ALA grant-funded research project is to better understand, from a user perspective, the motivations, attitudes, and perceptions of e-book usage. To do this we employed Q methodology. This hybrid of qualitative and quantitative statistical techniques provides a method for discovering clusters of different opinion types or attitudinal typologies. Once discovered, these opinion types or attitudinal typologies will aid in the understanding of how and why e-books are used.

Benefits/Objectives:

• Learn about clusters of opinions among academic library patrons about e-books in order to better understand user attitudes about this emerging technology.
• Gain a basic understanding of Q methodology in order to see possible applications of it in library research.
• State their own opinions and attitudes about e-books in order to place themselves within the clusters identified in our study.

Presenters:
Aaron Shrimplin, Miami University, Oxford, OH, United States
Andrew Revelle, Miami University, Oxford, OH, United States

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DYNAMIC SCREEN CAPTURE - Conflict and Consensus - Clusters of Opinions on E-books

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Session Description:
The Knowledge Base and Related Tools (KBART) project is a joint UKSG/NISO undertaking, designed to define best practices for transferring data among and between participants in the e-resource supply chain, including librarians, publishers, ERAMS vendors, aggregators, and consortia. This session will present the project’s work, and highlight its benefits to library patrons. In addition, the presenter, a born- and bred-Seattleite, will provide his recommendations for the best sites worth visiting while in Seattle.

Benefits/Objectives:

• Learn about and understand a recently-completed best-practices project for data transfer
• Apply tools to improve the accuracy of metadata from content providers
• Learn the REAL best coffee shops in Seattle; find the best ways to see the best parts of the city

Presenters:
Peter McCracken, Serials Solutions, Seattle, WA, United States

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DYNAMIC SCREEN CAPTURE - KBART: Improving Access to Electronic Resources; plus, Finding the Hidden Side of Seattle

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Session Description:
The advent of user collaborative technology provides new ways to address reference services. The same spirited, innovative thinking that catapulted Web 2.0 services to the forefront in many academic libraries can also reinvigorate how libraries and information centers develop partnerships. Creating partnerships with international universities, foundations, and not-for-profit institutes offer exceptional opportunities for academic libraries in the developed world to “”cast their nets”" and facilitate reference and resource training to patrons in developing world countries.

Benefits/Objectives:

• Recognize specific international, or national, access to information needs in order to develop partnerships;
• Examine and critically assess current endeavors in order to ensure that new efforts are not duplicates of other, already existing program initiatives;
• Know the potential of existing technologies in order to ignite and reinvent reference services.

Presenters:
Jaron-Alena Porciello, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States

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HANDOUT- Partnership 2.0: Designing Reference Services for Patrons in Developing Countries

DYNAMIC SCREEN CAPTURE - Partnership 2.0: Designing Reference Services for Patrons in Developing Countries

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