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

Poster Session Presenters and librarians have the chance to discuss projects.

Aside from attending a few sessions and the exhibits this afternoon, I made sure that I stopped by the poster sessions.  I just caught the tail end of the morning’s group and was pleasantly surprised at the spectrum and depth of the poster sessions this afternoon.  The amount of information presented in large panel sessions can be a bit daunting and although there is always time at the end for questions, you do not get the opportunity to really talk through the presenters’ project or have time for discussion.  Therefore, it was refreshing to meet poster session presenters and discuss their projects with them. 

Poster Session: The Liaison Kitchen

Poster sessions are always one of my favorite parts at a conference because they allow you to gather a wide variety of ideas in a small amount of time.  For example, this afternoon I spoke to Patricia Keogh  and Zhonghong Wang about their survey of academic librarians and grant writing activities.  At the same time, Irene  Ke,  Catherine Essinger, Veronica  Arellano, and Adrian  Ho discussed liaison opportunities and experiences.  It was interesting to hear their marketing ideas and stories.  David  Newbold also had an interesting poster session on teaching classes to make poster presentations - allowing students to get involved with exhibiting their research and have the opportunity to practice for more professional events.  Echoing information that I’ve heard all day, students (and particularly millennials) want to be engaged and what better way to do that than to get them talking about their research.  As a millennial librarian, I can tell you that I was the most engaged this afternoon as the poster sessions.  Bravo ACRL - thank you for giving us the opportunity to discuss and engage our peers!

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 collaborative efforts of the distance learning and health sciences librarians at a medium-sized state university to develop an online “”designer”" information literacy class for RN-to-BSN students are described. The impetus for the course is a statewide workplace ready initiative designed to expedite the transition of associate or diploma trained nurses to BSN prepared professionals. It addresses acute nursing shortages in a federally designated Health Care Shortage Area following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Benefits/Objectives:

• Attendees will be able to identify three ways to customize online information literacy course content to a discipline specific cohort.

• Attendees will be able to describe how government mandated workplace initiatives can trickle down to impact information literacy instruction .
• Attendees will be able to identify three challenges to teaching associate or diploma trained students in a university setting.

Presenters:
Beth Stahr, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, LA, United States
Ladonna Guillot, Southeastern Louisiana University, Baton Rouge, LA, United States

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Session Description:
This poster will look at the creation of the Wayne State University Social Science Portal, which re-envisions the online subject resource as social space. It will explain how this approach supports research communities, speak to the application of web technologies to traditional problems in librarianship, and discuss areas crucial to the project’s success. Librarians should come away challenged and encouraged to reinvent the online mediated library resource in the light of open source technologies.

Benefits/Objectives:
Re-envision online library resources as social spaces in order to draw the university-at-large and the greater academic community into conversation with the library.

Explore how collaborative web systems and open source platforms can be applied to problems traditional to librarianship in order to encourage librarians to take a do-it-yourself approach to scholarly communication, collaboration, and networking.

Bring the branches of the social science community together in a virtual space to foster collaboration that reaches outside the university and into the greater research world.

Presenters:
Joshua Neds-Fox, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, United States, Suzan Alteri, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, United States

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Session Description:
Recipe for a Collaborative Resource:

Take one shared vision (digitization, open access and preservation of U.S. government technical reports), fold in a collaborative team of engineering and government document librarians (from Greater Western Library Alliance institutions) and stir in support and participation from CRL, OCLC, Google, government agencies plus Stanford, Michigan and other contributing schools. Blend well. Result is the Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL).

Serves: everyone.

Benefits/Objectives:
Identify the participants in the TRAIL project in order to demonstrate the meta-community network that forms the basis of the TRAIL project

Summarize the underlying gift-culture of the Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL) in order to provide a replicable model in whole or part that presents alternatives for library participation in collaborative efforts

Report the cost per institution for Greater Western Library Alliance members in order for posters viewers to compare the cost of their own scanning projects to the cost and return on investment for the TRAIL project.

Presenters:
Mel DeSart, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States, Sinai Wood, Baylor University, Waco, TX, United States, Maliaca Oxnam, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States

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Session Description:
Have you ever written a grant? Have you ever thought about it? What does it take to write a grant? What are other librarians doing about it? This poster session will present survey results outlining grant writing activity among academic librarians. We will endeavor to provide a snapshot of current conditions, practices, and lessons learned in pursuing innovative fundraising.
Benefits/Objectives:
To present data from academic librarians regarding grant writing activity

To present survey findings which identify subjects receiving grant funding

To suggest practices that lead to more success in grant writing
Presenters:
Patricia Keogh, Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY, United States, Zhonghong Wang, Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY, United States,If you are logged in, you can access the presentation materials below.

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Session Description:
In 2008 librarians working in geographically dispersed for-profit academic libraries asked for an opportunity to discuss shared cataloging concerns. One month later, we delivered a wildly successful series of 10 classes called:”Basics N Beyond: Cataloging in an EDMC Library.” Each class was led by peer librarians, who talked from experience about applying cataloging best practices in a leanly-staffed, fiscally-accountable work environment. This is how we pulled it off.

Benefits/Outcomes:

• Describe best practices when training via web tools
• Relate the desire for community building to concrete skills building
• Cheap, fast, good, you don’t have to pick just two

Presenters:
Catherine Donaldson, EDMC, Seattle, WA, United States

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