ACRL/NY Symposium 2008

21st Century-Library: Targeting the Trends http://acrlnysymp2008.wordpress.com/

December 5, 2008

8:30 am-3:15 pm

Baruch College, 151 East 25th Street, New York

If you are still reading this, you are, no doubt, beyond finished with my transportation adventures, so I will spare you my trip to Baruch College in Manhattan, except to ask, mostly rhetorically, a question which always occurs to me when I go from Larchmont to the city: “Why do I live in Westchester?”  Everytime I go to the city I start mentally calculating how long it would take me to get to Purchase from each Metro-North stop closer to the city. “See,” I say to myself, “Harlem-125th is almost the SAME as living in Larchmont.”

Anyway, I missed the initial round of coffee and pastries, but there was plenty of food later. I got there just as the keynote speaker was starting, which was fortunate since I had agreed to “write up” this speaker for the ACRL/NY newsletter.

 

Dr. Julie Todaro

21st Century Libraries: Identifying, Assessing and Integrating Trends

(This is the text of my draft for said article…I will be adding useful links, etc)

 Dr. Julie Beth Todaro, the 2007-2008 ACRL President, and the Dean for Library Services at the award winning (2001 ACRL Excellence in Academic Libraries) Austin Community College, Austin, TX, brought her formidable presence, intelligence and enthusiasm to her keynote presentation.

 As soon as Dr. Todaro took the stage in her red-trimmed, Holstein-print cowboy boots and matching bag, attendees knew they were in for a treat. Citing the new book “Future Files” by Richard Watson (http://www.futuretrendsbook.com/), she began her informative presentation with a discussion of the importance of identifying “trends and trending” in library planning. She suggests that while trends themselves do not constitute a direction for a library’s future planning, they can be used “as supporting data for the plan, strategy or direction.”

 To discover trends relevant to our libraries, Dr. Todaro suggests we identify subject headings and keywords in areas of interest, review the latest issues of popular magazines and journals, document and repeat topical web searches, and scan professional literature. The hand-out she distributed  provides links to useful resources, many Internet-based, for identifying trends in several categories: Library Trends/In Libraries/In the Profession; Trends for Umbrella Entities; and General Societal Trends.

 Dr. Todaro’s trend analysis yields two tangible products. First, the trend list, which provides a way to collect relevant trends in the environment moving at a pace of what she refers to as “dog year change” (one year equals seven). The second product is the trend chart, which allows a glimpse of “trends a glance,” and documents the presence and frequency of trends and those who identify them. Once these documents are created, Todaro proposes a list of questions librarians can use to assess trends and decide if they are worth integrating into their libraries, and if so, how that integration can best be accomplished.

 Dr. Todaro mentioned keywords in “trends in trending” she has found through her own research, including the terms:  green, mobile broadband, conversation, convergence, content, zeitgeist, social systems, citizen journalism, best practices, 24/7 reference and adoption horizon. She closed her talk by suggesting we need to learn to “think about how we think.” According to this leader in the field of academic librarianship, we need to move the discussion of the library of the future away from technology and toward a focus on learning to learn, adapt to change and scan the horizon for new developments.

Poster Sessions

You can read about the poster sessions on the beautiful symposium blog Susanne created: http://acrlnysymp2008.wordpress.com/posters/

All of the posters were really good, but the ideas that particularly stood out for me as being potentially useful at Purchase were:

•  the library NetFlix account Dickinson College is using 
• adding Simple Faceted Classification to the library Delicious site at NYU’s Health Sciences Library.

 

Jennifer Bowen: Envisioning an “eXtensible” Future: Opportunities presented by the eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project

Jennifer Bowen of Rochester University is co-principle investigator on an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded prject to develop “open-source software to provide libraries with an alternative way to reveal their collections to users.” In her presentation, Jennifer described some of the limitations of current library metadata, and talked about ways this XC project could address these limitations. The XC catalog “will run alongside a library’s current Integrated Library System to privde more intuitive access to resources, a customizable interface to include Web 2.0 functionality, seamless connections to other web applications…and sophisticated metadata services capabilities.” (http://acrlnysymp2008.wordpress.com/about/)

This presentation was vaguely exciting to me, in the way things I don’t really understand often are. I remember reading about the semantic web while in library school, and I know that Google searches don’t routinely return library metadata from MARC records and the like, but other than that, I don’t really understand the nuance involved. I am glad, however, that Jennifer Bowen is working on this…I went home and tried to tell Garth about the project, of which, as a recovered cataloger, he is aware. I think I may have said something about Dublin Core and the limitation of the MARC record in a web environment. He leapt valiantly to the defense of the MARC record and said the problem lies not with the MARC record’s limitations, but rather in the limitiations of people who don’t know how to utilized all the fields. This argument is somewhat reminscent of that of the NRA’s famous bumper sticker… ”Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and monkeys do too (if they have a gun)” Eddie Izzard.

 Monika Antonelli: The Greening of Libraries

Monika Antonelli is a Reference / Instruction Librarian at Minnesota State Mankato.  Her presentation focused on the various strategies libraries have adopted to become more environmentally friendly and sustainable. She talked about the history of environmental awareness in libraries from Earth Day to present. She also discussed LEED “green building” certification for libraries, old and new ecologically conscious library programming including garden tool check out, seed libraries, and tips for practical ways libraries can be kinder to the environment.

I would’ve liked to hear a bit more about specific examples of applications of these ideas, especially in academic libraries, but it was good to think about “information and resources” from a different angle–that of shovels. Actually, I vaguely remember my mom and her friends doing something gardening co-op-ish like this in the late 70’s, so maybe it’s time has come back around. Thankfully, I live in an apartment without a yard, so I am exempt from actually trying to grow things, as much as I admire the idea conceptually.

Lunch and Raffle

Since Susanne went to library school at UT Austin, Julie Todaro was one of her professors, and she got to sit with her at lunch. Since I work with Susanne and she is a nice person, I got to sit at this table as well. Julie Todaro is smart. She has about a million ideas a second and seems to know something about everything relating to libraries. She also talked about her (very visible) love of jewelry, her feelings about camping (these aren’t good feelings), and her insane travel schedule. Raffle tickets were sold to benefit the ACRLNY scholarship fund. A Google Kindle was beign raffled off, so the tickets were quite popular. No where, perhaps, as popular as they were at my table, where Carrie bought $40 worth of tickets, out of her deep concern for LIS scholarships, I am sure.

The drawing was held after lunch and the suspense was excruciating as the numbers were called out. I watched over Carrie’s shoulder to see if she held the winning number in her hand….and YES, sure enough. Carrie won the Kindle, and, for the record, though she was on the symposium committee, Carrie was a paid attendee and is now the legal and proud new owner of an electronic book reader.

 

Chad Boeninger: Have You Got a Gameplan?” Adapting our Libraries to the Needs of Gamers

This was a cool presentation because Chad, a gamer himself and Reference and Instruction Technology Coordinator at Ohio University in Athens, OH, didn’t present on the useof video games in academic libraries. Instead, he talked about “how video games attract players, retain their attention, and make them learn.” Chad discussed the overwhelming ubiquity of video games in the lives of undergraduates, demonstrated different kinds of games and the skills they use, and talked about some common misperceptions about games and games. He argues that we can take some of our instructional cues from the learning principles in video games, including providing our students with

1.  Consistent interfaces to facilitate exploration (feedback loops in the catalog?)
2. Immersive space (i.e. info commons, cafe, tech support, moveable technology and furniture)
3. Customizable interfaces (give students control of virtual library)
4. Facilitate “learning while doing” (encourage mastery through multiple difficulties
5. Incorporate hands-on experiences in our teaching, allow students to experiment and talk less & teach less

I like the ideas in this presentation because they seemed to me a way of taking that hand-wringing, didactic argument about “lazy information illiterate undergraduates,” and changing the narrative in such a way that we can begin to recognize how students actually ARE learning, rather than lamenting and documenting all the ways in which they are not…

Panel

Then there was a panel discussion with Dr. Todaro, Jennifer Bowen and Chad Boeninger. Then everybody took their free water bottles and tote bags and left.

Afters, I saw the Xmas tree at Rockefeller Center, witnessed a Fox News broadcast occurring in a hotel bar and saw some of the lovely ladies and gentlemen of NASCAR, in their finery, in NYC for some kind of NASCAR gala, which may have been at the Waldorf Astoria. Wait, I just looked it up. The NASCAR thing was their awards ceremony: http://www.nascar.com/2005/news/features/viewers_guide/12/01/new_york/index.html 

Then, I had Glogg and Gravlax with some librarians at a Swedish restaurant called Smorgas Chef http://www.smorgaschef.com/ in Manhattan and went home.