How I plan to apply some of the things I learned at ACRL to have a direct, immediate impact on the way I do my job and conduct myself professionally:

Start Blogging (and Publishing) More Seriously. I have a blog, which hasn’t been updated since roughly January, but judging by some of the traffic that it’s received this week alone, it’s clear that several of my professional peers might indeed be interested in what I have to say. This was confirmed in the Mapping Your Path to the Mountaintop, where Steven Bell and his three panelists (as well as several insightful volunteers at the mics) championed blogging as a valid mode of publication, something to be reckoned with during the tenure process. I made the choice at my institution to be non-tenured faculty, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to publish, nor does it mean that my making the effort to do so, in whatever form, won’t be appreciated.

Use Google Docs for Collaborative Class Assignments. I’m so glad I stuck around at the Shed for its last presentation of the conference, Rosalind Tedford’s talk about how she and her colleagues use Google Docs, both internally and as a teaching tool. I am particularly interested in the latter, because the Medical Informatics class that I teach to first-year medical students has, as its final project, a presentation of a New England Journal of Medecine case that the students collaborate on, in groups of 9 or 10. When that many people are submitting data into the project, you can imagine what a mess these can turn into. Google Docs can alleviate much of this stress by giving all the group members access to the same presentation, enabling my students access to the same presentation and the ability to make instant changes that everyone will be able to see. Using Google Docs will take some considerable buy-in from both me and them (I have to commit to teaching it; they have to have Gmail accounts, if they don’t already) but the impact that this software could have on the efficiency and quality of their work could be considerable.

Resuscitate Reference. One of the poster presentations that had the greatest impact on me was the “But We’re Not Dead Yet” poster from Kansas State. My home library just shut down our reference desk after the new year, but it was fascinating seeing how small changes in design, location, and service brought reference back from the dead at K-State. Perhaps an autopsy is in order back home.

Tweet Like There’s No Tomorrow. There was no escaping Twitter at this conference, although at times I kind of wanted to! (One glance at my activity will tell you that periodic bouts of “Twitter-sickness” never lasted very long). But Twitter was a huge and essential part of my conference experience. I made so many contacts and held so many interesting discussions, which began as virtual “@replies” and often extended into real-world debates. Twitter provided instant, pithy updates of concurrent sessions that I happened to be missing. While I’m not completely sold on Twitter’s utility as a library marketing tool (full disclosure: I missed Saturday afternoon’s Shed session), as a professional networking service and a grassroots-level news feed, it was utterly invaluable. And when the regional meeting of the Medical Library Association rolls around later this year, I am going to encourage as many of my colleagues as possible to join and use Twitter.

I’m sure I’ll think of more ways to apply what I’ve learned in the coming days and weeks, but for now, let me just say what an amazing experience this conference has been. See everyone in Philadelphia!

…that’s what it’s like for a first-time attendee. And I must say, I don’t know how my roommate and the other first-time attendees who are also presenting or facilitating or working/volunteering do it…especially when I am here just trying to keep up with everything!

To borrow from Sherman Alexie, I saw first-hand a glimpse of what he referred to as “Librarians Unleashed” last night as I attended my first “sponsored event” of the conference: the Gale Gala at the Space Needle. The location for such an event couldn’t be beat, the food and drink were plentiful, and the energy was lively, to say the least. I couldn’t help but wonder how much $$$ such an event must cost. And then I couldn’t help but think about my community college’s teeny tiny budget (which is getting teenier and tinier as I write) and how maybe if/when next time I am invited to such an event I might politely ask if our Library could get a discount on the Gale databases we purchase annually instead. Doesn’t that sound like a more sensible exchange? I mean, if a good product/publication exists, I’m going to purchase it regardless of whether the company offers me some kind of perk in return–after all, I’m in librarianship not pharmaceutical sales.  All I expect is an affordable quality product accompanied by satisfactory customer service and as long as the content continues to support the college’s curriculum and/or the library’s collection needs, I am satisfied. I would like to think I will continue to feel this way for years to come, but who knows. Maybe I’ll one day find myself asking “what’s in it for me” before making a decision about purchasing something for my library’s collection. I hope not. So I’m not sure what exactly I learned from this experience (or all the free swag I was offered in the Exhibit Hall), but I can’t help but critically reflect upon it and wonder what the value is in being pampered by companies who turn around and charge my Library an arm and a leg for their products.

So, last night Sheman Alexie rocked the house! I hadn’t laughed so hard since meeting the Emery-Pratt robot (see earlier post for more on that). But one thing I noticed at the keynote that was totally NOT funny was someone taking a mobile phone call and proceeding to have 5 minute conversation in the ballroom as Mr Alexie was being introduced! I was completely shocked and disconcerted (and from the looks of others around me, I wasn’t the only one). It’s one thing for an 18-year old first-year college student to mistake the library as an appropriate place for a phone conversation, but I would like to think that anyone attending this conference would understand that it is just not good etiquette to do such a thing. But wait! It gets even worse. So, today at the final invited paper presentation “I would sort of appreciate a little more understanding:” Engaging Net Gen Students in Virtual Reference, I actually witnessed this happen again. This time, however, the woman taking the call didn’t even bother getting up from her seat. As Mary Kate or Ashley Olson from the Full House days might say, “How Rude!”

But to prove that I’m not just another annoyed librarian, I will share at least a few more positive experiences…

Today I attended my first (and only) round-table discussion. I joined a small group discussing how to improve/increase delivery of online library services to distance students. I learned our little community college library is perhaps a bit behind (or below) other institutions in what we offer, but we are certainly being innovative in our own way and are doing what we can with the limited resources/budget we have available to us.  I enjoyed the discussion and now I know what to expect and perhaps in the future I could even propose my own round-table discussion…?

While I attended and learned something from all of the poster sessions, the most memorable presentation for me was Library Secrets!:… I loved the originality and creativity of this poster.  According to this conference the whole world is tweeting, but I highly doubt my urban community college student body is doing much with twitter. Even so, I really appreciated the innovation behind the various library/library services “presence projects”  (some people call this “marketing,” but I like to use the terms “visibility” or “presence”) Jennifer Kelley presented on behalf of the College of DuPage. Her library MOO cards are exactly the kind of Guerrilla marketing project I can take back to my campus and pitch as an idea as it is a very practical approach to reaching our students…especially in a time of deep budget cuts!

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?

Earlier, I went to the Sony Reader presentationby Anne Behler of Penn State University.  I was curious about the selection of the Sony Reader over the Kindle, which gets all the buzz.  Apparently, at the time, Amazon was not prepared to partner with a university, but Sony jumped at the chance.  The pilot project was pretty limited.  They used the Readersin a limited number of classes, including a Libraries First Year Seminar class, English Composition, and a limited number of available leisure reading units.  In the second semester, they also included uses for disability services.  While the disability services uses “failed miserably,” the leisure reading activities seemed to show promise.  Overall, Behler and co. came to the conclusion that the potential is there, but the technology isn’t quite where it needs to be yet.  Ultimately, they’d like to deliver material that is “device independent,” so students can use whatever they have in their hands at the moment.  I’m quite impressed by the forward thinking approach taken by Penn State.  The fact that they were able to collaborate in a seemingly genuine manner with a corporation like Sony is also heartening.

Jennifer Sharkey and Catherine Fraser Riehle, Purdue University librarians, conducted a workshop this morning called “Beyond the Entertainment Factor: Integrating Multimedia into Information Literacy Instruction.”  Jennifer and Catherine drew upon their experience with information literacy and instructional design to share theoretical and practical ideas with workshop participants.  Following is what I took away from the workshop:

• Learning goals are broad (e.g. Students will understand the value of using scholarly resources), while learning outcomes are specific (e.g. Students will differentiate between scholarly and popular resources)
• The ICT (Information & Communication Technology) model combines with information literacy with technology literacy.
• Information literacy instruction can be enriched by using education and instructional design theories.
• Establishing learning goals and objectives is essential for deciding what you want to teach and why, especially when integrating multimedia into instruction.
• Keep in mind: ”In general, students don’t know as much about technology as we give them credit for” (Jennifer Sharkey).

Well done, Jennifer and Catherine! 

I just scanned through my fellow bloggers’ posts from today and I have to say, I am humbled.  How does anyone have the energy to write such lengthy posts after such a long day!!?!

I had a full day today of poster sessions, contributed paper presentations, and workshops.  I am always so inspired by the work of my colleagues, and I look forward to building on some of the connections I made here today.  Sherman Alexie was a perfect ending to the day - I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time. 

I promise a more engaging post later on, but it is after 12 and I have to be at the convention center by 8 tomorrow for my roundtable.  And I still don’t have much of a voice!  So come by the 8am roundtables tomorrow and help me out.

How’s the virtual conference going for everyone?

Baiting the information literacy hook

Indiana University - Purdue

Old model primarily based on subject liaisons, with classroom instruction. Librarians have faculty status, so there is an opportunity to interact with faculty as an equal.

The Information Literacy Strategy Group. Created their own Mission statement and goals. Developed their own customized competencies vs. ACRL standards. Used as guidelines and looked at what others had done. (thanks everyone that makes their information literacy available online.) Mapped to IUPUI Principles of Undergraduate Learning. Now the librarians on the various campus committees share these IL guidelines with their colleagues in the meetings, to reinforce the importance of IL.

Information literacy through out the curriculum. Based on the writing throughout the curriculum model.

Overcoming barriers to faculty involvement: changing technologies, availability of IL-related teaching materials, institutional incentives, TIME! Faculty members think that they know how to research, but most learned with card catalogs. Searching through the new technologies, which tend to change every few years, is difficult.

Librarians and faculty tend to talk past each other about information literacy.

“How to be a freshman” course.

Need to publicize teaching tools and resources.

Tips:
- Find a faculty champion
- Make it relevant
focus on faculty concerns
be concrete
- Make it easy
- Combine efforts; work with other librarians that are working on similar projects
- Present at campus conferences
- Attend discipline-specific conferences; move out of library conferences. Here, we’re preaching to the choir.
- Look for other opportunities that your might support IL integration, such as accreditation reviews.
- Create a collaborative online space or repository for documentation, sample assignments, and other materials
- Consider hosting town hall meetings or open forums on your campus.

Publicize your documentation so it can be easily shared.

Investigate all opportunities for faculty collaboration on your campus, such as:
- faculty governance committees
academic affairs
undergraduate curriculum advisory committee
school/department library committees
- community of practice
- scholarship of teaching and learning
- consortium for learning and scholarship (teaching, research, learning)

In today’s session, Fishing for Information: Using Focus Group Research to Discover Student Perceptions of Library Services and Resources, William Weare and Rebecca Byrum of Valparaiso University did double-duty on showing attendees how to conduct focus groups.  First they discussed how they conducted a focus group at their library.  Then they demonstrated how to conduct one using audience volunteers.  I learned the following from their session:

• Focus groups help answer the how? and why? of issues.
• Good focus group questions are short, open-ended, one-dimensional, and conversational.
• Participants are grateful to be fed a meal of some sort right before the focus group session begins.
• Transcribing the tapes is the most time-consuming portion.
• Conducting focus groups is great PR!

Thanks William and Rebecca!

Unfortunately, the Cyber Zed Shed presentation that I planned on going to at 1:00 (APIs) did not come off.  Therefore, I thought I’d take this time to finish up the blog post I started earlier.

At 10:30, I attended the Reinventing Research Guides session.  This was the first of quite a few sessions related to LibGuides.  Our library has recently adoptedLibGuides, so I was interested in hearing other librarians’ experiences.  My experience with the product has been very positive so far, and I can’t wait to learn more about what we can do with it. 

The session was presented by Ken Liss from Boston College, Emily Frigo and Laura Harris from GVSU and Maura Seele from Georgetown (formerly of GVSU).  The session focused on the history of library research guides, the questions that the literature has raised about them, the implementation of LibGuides and the results of a joint student survey carried out by BC and GVSU.

History of Research Guides

• MIT Pathfinders from the early 1970s. 
• Included instruction instead of just lists of resources.
• Were aimed at beginning researchers.
• Were “syndicated” for use at other libraries through Addison-Wesley

Questions from Literature

• Scope - how broad or narrow should RGs be?
• Guidance - should it guide students to resources or show them how to find their own?
• design/terminology - what do you call them? how should they look? what vocab to use?
• standardization - how standardized or individual should they be?
• workload - how do they impact overall librarian workload
• The missing ingredient:  what do users actually think of them?

Libguides @GVSU and BC

• Librarians at both schools very frustrated with the old ways of doing research guides.
• LibGuides gave them new flexibility and a way to bypass the hierarchy of getting someone else to do it.
• Initially a lot of work to transfer old guides, but the workload decreases over time.
• Struggling to decide what uses are appropriate and which are “seeing every thing as a nail just because you have a hammer.”
• Standardization has been an issue for GVSU.
• Finding they need to make them as specific as possible (not too general or broad).

Student Survey

• Scope: prefer more specific; many students mentioned course and major info; descriptions preferred by 90% of respondents.
• Guidance: students wanted specific help and “how-to” information added; expected “credible” sources; students not much more likely to approach librarians through LibGuides than in person (”library anxiety” not necessarily lessened).
• Design/Terminology: 90% found tabs at the top helpful; 97% at BC liked the term “Research Guides”; 75% of GVSU students liked the term “Library Guides”; 92% @ BC said they found the guides “very easy” or “fairly easy” to find from the main page.
• Promotion: issues of where to link from on website; blackboard and syllabus popular with students; students not so keen on using facebook as a portal to LibGuides (doesn’t seem “professional” to some of them)

Next Steps

• Promotion steps: market to major institutional stakeholders; get links on CMS and syllabi; integrate with instruction sessions; develop more course guides; add more “how-tos.”
• 92%+ said they would use LibGuides guides again.
• The presenters have, kindly, created a LibGuide about their project:  http://libguides.gvsu.edu/acrl09 .  Check it out!

On another note, I ran into a colleague from my days as a grad assistant at the University of Tennessee at the session.  Go Vols!

I arrived in Seattle late last night, so today’s my first day at ACRL 09. While I missed the First-Timers Orientation on Thursday, I arrived just in the nick of time for the meat of the programs.

My initial thoughts: Is there a way to for me to clone myself so I can attend every session I want to? Barring any new developments in cloning technologies over the weekend, I’ll just have to pick and choose between sessions, trying to juggle that with the poster sessions and presentations at Cyber Zed Shed (if anyone knows how that crazy name was thought up, can you let me know?!)

Speaking of which, Cyber Zed Shed is smokin! This morning the area was so packed that many attendees were sitting on the floor or standing so they could hear about recent uses of technology in to improve services. Word is additional seating will be set up over lunch to accomodate the interest. One of the many interesting topics there was a presentation from Jacob Hill at Elmhurst College on accomodating mobile devices in library web services.

After that I attended a great session titled “Reinventing Research Guides: LibGuides at Two Academic Libraries.” The presenters from Boston College and Great Valley gave a nice overview of subject guides and their purpose, and discussed the results of their surveys of student impressions & use of LibGuides.

Now it’s time to find lunch–judging by the map of local librarian-recommended restaurants (near the conference registration), there’s no shortage of great restaurants. There’s also a Google map of nearby eateries that I found useful (not to mention the long list of Food and Drink on the conference wiki). Any recommendations for good locally-owned restaurants?