Maira's Library Blog

New Reading Room at University of Chicago Library

2011-06-05T16:22:00.000-04:00

Last week I visited the University of Chicago Regenstein Library to see their new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library that opened May 16. It is actually a reading room, preservation work space and storage facility.

I like the fun bubble next to the main library. I heard some students have already tried to scale it. I remember a friend getting in trouble for scaling the clock tower at Cornell, but he was just compelled to try to climb things.

You get to the Mansueto Library Grand Reading Room through a glass tunnel that connects it from the Regenstein Library. Half of the bubble is devoted to the reading room with four long tables in the middle and tables for four all around the edges. This is a quiet study space. It was packed (I think it was the week before finals) and everybody was focused on their own work. Each seat had a light and power plug - most had brought their laptops. My first thought was, doesn't it get hot in here, but they have tinted the glass to mitigate the sun's rays, and there is plenty of air conditioning coming from the silver columns, so it was quite cool; the fans were a bit loud and distracting. I spent over an hour working there and enjoyed it. The view was great! I often wish for a sliver of a view to the outside from my office, and here you can raise your eyes and look out over the campus or rest them on infinity.

The other half of the bubble is the preservation work area for conservation and digitization. Quite a high profile area for a department that is usually relegated to the basement. They must have been high on the priority list to get space, I wish them well. Maybe preservation and digitization activities will get a higher profile this way. The same question about all that sunlight came to mind - doesn't sunlight damage materials? But I am sure they have thought it out.

University of Chicago had not wanted to have an off site storage for less used library materials, so they built an underground storage facility right under the reading room.It has an automated retrieval system that gets people materials out of storage in 5 minutes to the circulation desk in the reading room. I briefly talked to a colleague at the library and she predicted that students and faculty are going to want that kind of service for the materials in the rest of the library.

Renderings and floor plan and more images of the library can be seen online. I am just fascinated at how people solve library space issues.

ACRL 2011 in Philadelphia

2011-04-11T08:40:00.004-04:00

Another great Association of College and Research Libraries conference! It was a bit overwhelming, but I got lots of information, ideas and opportunities for networking. ACRL created a parallel virtual conference, which included some presentations that were done only virtually and will soon include all the presentation PowerPoints and I believe posters. The ACRL Conference Papers are already up. Plus I have more detailed notes on many of the presentations I attended.

I have to say my biggest "aha" moment was at the Dinner with colleagues, when two librarians from University of California San Diego talked about budget cuts forcing the closing of five of their nine libraries, one having been given a two month notice. Wow! That is intense. They are an ARL library with the same number of students as us, but 50 librarians and 250 staff, down about 10 of the former, 40 of the latter, still painful. I do like our mostly centralized library and have wondered if we ever have had the conversation about the necessity for a separate education library, but cutting over half the branches seems draconian.

Keynote speakers

The first keynote speaker was Tiffany Shlain, an interesting combination of high tech and philosopher. She established the Webby awards and is a producer of documentary films. One was The Tribe on the American Jews. We found out that the creator of Barbie was Jewish and the doll can be an interesting way to look at cultural identity. Shlain developed educational materials to go with the movie with Harvard. She has done a movie on women’s reproductive rights and her latest movie is called Connected – also with educational materials – about our interconnectedness through technology. I did not get to see the full movie, but we saw clips during her presentation, and I think she brought up lots of ideas worthy of discussion. She has instigated an unplugging day once a week in her family and in the end has hope for the human race.

Raj Patel is an economist, activist, writer, who is concerned about the world and especially food sources. He talked charmingly (as I heard later was tweeted from the audience) about the myth of liberty and freedom and our broken economy. He told of Greenspan admitting that his thinking about the economy has been wrong for the last 40 years, but that the media did not really latch on to that admission. He explained how our dollar burger is really worth about $200 in environmental costs. He talked about the huge proportion of unpaid work, especially done by women. I purchased his book, the Value of Nothing and hope to get a better handle on our complex economic issues.

Jaron Lanier was a trip, I am glad I was well rested for his interesting take on the world. He is a Silicon Valley insider, innovator, teacher, composer, artist, and author of You are Not a Gadget. His talk was appropriately named – “The Bipolar Library: How Humanizing and Digitizing Can Both be Advanced.” I won’t even begin to try to recount his talk to us, but it made me think differently about library work. The analogy he used that most set in my mind, is that he was giving us the view from Silicon valley – like Godzilla looking down on ants and worms fighting each other. Libraries and publishers are the ants and worms. One of his main points to us was to value books, authors, intellectual property and to celebrate them, collect them, encourage decent pay for them. He asked us to look closely at the consequences of open access, so the publishing and library business does not go the way of the music industry.

The closing keynote was from Clinton Kelly, the co-host of the TV reality show What Not to Wear. This was definitely a fun ending to an intense conference, but even he had his lessons to give us librarians – and not only about our sometimes not so sharp fashion sense. Lisa Hinchliffe, one of my idols in the library world and current ACRL president, admitted that she does watch TV and finds that What Not to Wear teaches about living your life, embracing change, struggling to find your true self, and if you want to move into the future, you have to leave the past behind. Isn’t that the point of education – growth, development and change? Kelly gave us seven steps, starting with “Admit it – how you dress sends a message to people.” His fashion tips were very general and could fit any librarian and any budget and included things like – distance yourself from the people around you that bring you down. In the question and answer period people asked mostly fashion questions including about beards and shopping at second hand stores (he was OK with that, as long as you tailor things to fit you.)

ACRL Metrics

Dianna and Carrie in front of sculpture

This is fairly new, otherwise I would be concerned that I hadn't heard of it before. ACRL Metrics is an online service that takes the data that libraries have been reporting to ACRL and NCES since 2000, and creates reports, compares statistics over time, compares you to peer and other institutions. The data set includes over 300 performance indicators and lets you combine them in various set ways as well as make custom combinations. I have wanted to see these numbers for WMU and wished we had the ability to compare ourselves to others for years

Library as Space

I found the session by the University of Wisconsin – Madison the most useful, as they had made incremental changes to their undergraduate library entrance space including information desk, reference desk, circulation, reserves, reference collection and computers. They started the process in 2008, and made most of the changes without funding. Funding did come through in 2010 and they were able to purchase new furniture, but the functional changes were the most important.

University of Michigan has also made major changes in the lobby of their undergraduate library. I heard the story of Bert’s Café a year or more ago, but this year they were able to tap the same donor – Bert, and improve the whole entrance area with comfy chairs, a less intimidating check-out & reference area, group work spaces with projection screens, news area (4 news channels on at all times) and more.

Numerous posters addressed library as space issues. One place found that when they combined reference with circulation, their reference questions dropped dramatically, because the huge circulation desk was intimidating and there was no easy way for librarians to get around to actually help a student on the floor. They ended adding a smaller desk in front of the big desk for easy access and friendlier service.

Institutional Repository

The pre-conference sponsored by Digital Commons and SPARC was valuable for my work with our ScholarWorks. I got to meet the guru of institutional repositories – Paul Royster of Univ. of Nebraska Lincoln, as well as Marisa Ramirez from Cal Poly, Marilyn Billings from U Mass Amherst, and Isaac Gillman from Pacific University in Portland. I got some insight on staffing repository work, working with electronic theses and dissertations, getting “off the beaten track” materials, publishing books, thinking of the repository as a service rather than a collection, promoting the IR, and plenty of practical tips.

Web issues

I went to a session called “No more design by committee: Strategies for building lean mean web project teams.” Turns out this was a presentation by my Journal of Web Librarianship editor Jody Fagan from James Madison, who has now published a book Web Project Management for Academic Libraries, and has cited the Web article I wrote with Maria and Pat. I think we are doing what they are suggesting – by creating small teams to work on specific Web projects. We also have a person with authority to sign off and make final decisions on projects.

Philadelphia and Longwood Gardens

Some events were outside of the convention center, plus I was staying with friends, and I did some exploring after the conference, so my travel blog contains something about Philadelphia and Longwood Gardens. The gardens were suggested by a friend and though it was still too early to thoroughly enjoy them outside, the conservatory was incredible. I have put more pictures up on Facebook for those of you who are connected with me there.

Michigan Academy 2011

2011-03-13T11:23:00.001-04:00

I enjoyed another informative, low-key Michigan Academy conference, this year at Saginaw Valley State University. I like meeting my colleagues from Eastern Michigan, Central Michigan, MSU, Uof M, Wayne and other colleges around the state.

Michael Unsworth from MSU and Merle Rozenzweig from UofM collaborated on a session about IRBs or institutional review boards and just reminded us, that though most library research gets exemptions, if we want to publish the results of any surveys, interviews or other human contact research we do, we have to go through the laborious process of getting IRB approval. I have to check if our process is all online now, and if the turnaround time has improved at all, since Uof M can get an expedited review in a couple of days.

There were quite a lot of health sciences librarians present, and I feel these could be good contacts for us when we start planning library resources for our new medical school. MHSLA http://mhsla.org/, a small, inexpensive, but valuable conference for Michigan health sciences librarians was recommended.

Stephanie Swangerg, a student at UofM’s library school presented research on the point-of-care medical databases used by faculty and practitioners. They contacted 29 people, 11 responded, and ended up doing phone interviews with 8, asking about 6 databases – UpToDate, DynaMed, MDConsult, STAT!Ref, Access Medicine and Pediatric Care Online. Though UpToDate was used by all, they found that it did not necessarily have the most current and best information, and it was not accessible off campus, plus it was very expensive. The result was that UofM has decided to drop UpToDate, and make DynaMed their main resource, plus they hope to do more marketing of some of the other databases. A valuable tip was that when they sent out e-mails to the original 29, they asked for “input” on the subject line of the email, addressed them by name and named their liaison librarian, so they might be more likely to respond.

Abby Bedford from Grand Valley State, a first year librarian, talked about embedding herself in the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Program, which is mostly online, except for five intense Thursday-Friday sessions on campus. Originally her sessions were optional – three two hour sessions on Saturdays, but she got such good feedback from the students on how necessary it was for everyone to learn to access medical data, that this semester she has four one hour sessions during their official on campus time. Since these were mostly non-traditional students ages 30-60, working in their professional fields, it was hard to determine their information literacy level, so Abby started with basics, showed searching techniques, databases and ended with RefWorks. She was concerned about retention of this information, so created tutorials on Slide Share and YouTube for things like how to get PubMed articles into RefWorks, a complex process on which she did not want to waste class time.

Elizabeth Bucciarelli talked about how she has partnered with faculty by identifying needs in a department and finding the faculty with which she shares similar interests, goals, and a passion for teaching. She had a list of characteristics she looks for, and does some research on the faculty to determine their interests and focus. Elizabeth then showed how a one shot instruction session in the introductory nursing skills class blossomed into a three tier instruction in nursing and occupational therapy. Evidenced based research is important to nursing, but complex, so she pulled that out of the introductory classes.

A couple of sessions were focused on First Year Experience. The librarians at University of Detroit Mercy wanted to take on teaching the common read for Arts & Sciences, and though originally encouraged, ran into various roadblocks. Then the School of Architecture invited them to work with their freshmen. The book was The Other Side of the River by Kotlowitz about the 1991 racial incident in Benton Harbor. They brought in guest speakers to tie issues brought up in the book to the university and issues in the community. Unfortunately the speakers seemed to have their own agendas, and did not relate their talks to the book, plus the architecture students felt they were wasting time when they could be learning architecture. One librarian added that the older architecture students were much more broad minded.

Another interesting FYE project was presented by Jennifer Meacham at Marygrove College. Their FYS tries to introduce not only the collegiate experience, but the community, Detroit history and service learning. Their recent common read was To Kill a Mockingbird. They have a digitized collection of over 20 interviews of local people talking about immigration, migration and civil rights. The students were asked to listen and write down unfamiliar names, places and things and summarize the interview to the class. This had led to very interesting class discussions.

Ann Franz, a circulation clerk at Wayne State talked about their Subject of the Month display that has been successful and fostered collaboration between reference and access services departments. Subjects are related to special national months, but also cover the various liaison areas. Liaisons are the ones to make the choices, circulation pulls the books. This has increased circulation of those books and provided a point of interest in the library.

Ruth Helwig from Central Michigan University talked about an instructional collection of children’s books, textbooks and teaching aids that was housed in the education college, but moved to the library after the new education building no longer had space for the collection. These materials were now cataloged and allowed to circulate for one week. The response has been positive, though it is hard to tell if the circulation has actually increased. This led to a discussion about departments and individuals continuing to create their own private collections in their offices, often for student use.

It always amazes me how Michael Barnes of Eastern Michigan can make cataloging interesting to the rest of us. This time he tackled authority work and presented it as a fable with kings and knights and dragons, so we did not fall asleep in this after lunch presentation. Basically, Michael pointed out various challenges with keeping up with authority files, including the fact that they had lost a staff position. He estimated the cost of staff time spent on authority work, compared pricing and services of four vendors, and chose Marcive. EMU sent them all their records, they cleaned up all the authority records, and now there is a monthly update for new records and updates on existing authority records. There is still some staff time involved, but much less, so the process costs less than it did and it frees up staff time for other projects.

Ryan Christman is a PhD student at Eastern Michigan, who has worked through an expressive writing program for veterans, now teaches it himself and wants to offer it to veterans across Michigan. He explained his situation through a YouTube interview - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQO2AR-q2Ts and was thankful for this program. Librarians have been a great help to him in this process and he sees our role as expanding beyond what we do now.

Lisa Rabey, a library student at Wayne State as well as an employee at Ann Arbor Public Library did a study with a librarian about the online presence of public libraries and their involvement with social networking. Since a high percentage of adults have access to the Internet, the time has long passed when libraries can opt out of an online presence. Lisa and her colleague looked at about 20% of Michigan public libraries and often found missing contact or address information, and abandoned Web projects. They suggest creating a social media policy to ensure regular use and updating, treating your Web presence like your virtual front door, using free online tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Library Thing and more, but sticking to technologies patrons are most likely to use. Content should be relevant, but personable.

I felt like I was giving an annual report on what I was up to at work. My session was based on previous sessions when I have talked about the READ scale for categorizing the difficulty of reference questions and the training of our student employees. This time I talked about where we are in the process of creating an assessment plan, and how we are trying to organize our various assessment methods under a few general outcomes. I showed some of the results we are getting out of Library Stats, our online way of recording reference interactions.

Saginaw Valley State University Library

2011-03-13T11:11:00.000-04:00

The youngest of Michigan’s state universities (founded 1964), the university is in the middle of corn fields between three small cities – Saginaw, Midland, and Bay City. They have over 10,000 students, mostly undergrad, and though they used to be a commuter school, about 25% now live on campus. The library opened in 1987 and is in a four story building attached to the Dow Doan Science buildings. The fourth story was added on top of the building in 2003. They used to have a food service café, but since they now sit right between the Albert E’s (Einstein’s) Food Court and a Starbucks, the library itself just has an eating area supplied with vending machines. They have great places to study – huge windows around the reference area – two stories high, like KVCC, and a gorgeous reading, reception area on the top floor overlooking the campus. They have 10 group study rooms, lots of comfy seating throughout the library, tables with lamps and electrical outlets, and baseboards with electrical outlets around the perimeter. The Writing Center is on the third floor and the Student Technology Center (IT help) is on the second. They have two classrooms plus other training areas and conference rooms. The main classroom is open for student use when not used for instruction.

They are in the process of weeding their reference collection to make more space for tables and study space. They had a nice India Collection corner, meant for the visiting faculty they get from India. They had specially made wooden shelves with an Indian motif and had gotten funding to purchase books on India. I also liked the popular reading corner. We often get questions about the “fiction” section, when students are just looking for a fun read. The library is full of student art, especially sculptures. In one corner on the first floor there is a sculpture dedicated to Theodore Roethke, a Pulitzer Prize winning author born in Saginaw. They have Ken Follett’s papers, just because a professor who studied mysteries asked the writer for them. You will notice that I have mostly concentrated on how they use their space, as library as space is currently one of my interests in the library world.

I was graciously shown around the library by John Mauch, an alumnus of WMU Library school. He is waiting for the redbuds to bloom, so he can take an inspiring photo of the library and send it in to Choice magazine. I had left my camera at home and have yet to figure out how to get the photos out of the camera on my new phone. I also tried to find the Saginaw Public Library and ended up wandering into a branch as they were closing and ran into another WMU alumnus. Small world.

New York Public Library

2011-01-07T19:15:00.001-05:00

Nothing like being unexpectedly blown away. I stop by the main branch of the New York Public Library on 42nd and 5th, because I need the Internet and I want to ask about the affects of the closing of the Slavic and Baltic Reading Room.

I walk up between the famous lions, a bit cracked, but the building looks gloriously white, like it has been recently cleaned. (buildings in NYC get really sooty.) I head up to the 3rd floor reading room - use the Internet to find the offices I need to find in Westchester county and to get the address and phone number of an old bibliophile I may have time to visit while I am here in New York. Guests are allowed 50 minutes access to the Internet, I don't know about NYC residents. On the my way out, I ask the reference desk how the closure of the Slavic and Baltic Reading Room has affected their work. Of course they still have the incredible collection, but only one employee from the reading room remains, who's time is divided between collection development and other duties. So service to this collection is much reduced and the pages have a difficult time retrieving the books as some of the call numbers have not been transliterated, and the pages can't find the books with the cyrillic letters in the call numbers. I am given the name of the one remaining specialist, who I will have to contact for an update on the collection and to see if it continues to be developed for the Baltic region.

I head downstairs from the epitome of all library reading rooms and remember there is usually an exhibit, so I will just poke my head into it. First I come accross the Scriptorium - the interactive portion of the exhibit. I think of my colleague Sue Steuer and find myself fascinated by all the tools, pigments used for manuscript illustrations, parchment, paper, brushes, quills, gold leaf and more. The center of the room contains a huge light table and people are encouraged to sit down and trace their names in Greek, Arabic, Hebrew or an old English script. I still have business to take care of, so I just grab the script examples and head to the main exhibit.

The Three Faiths - amazing. Even libraries can do their share to further world peace. NYPL takes the three major religions and explains how they are similar with plenty of artifacts from all three. Sue will kill me that I just glance at all of them and just read the major panels on Revelation, Scriptures, Commentaries, Prophets, Spreading the Word, Private Prayer, Public Worship, and Sacred Places. The exhibit is an amazing overview of sacred texts from various ages. Illustrations glitter with gold. Many languages are represented. I think the oldest piece I see is pre-900. I now want to read up on the history of the English translation of the Bible as I get a glimpse of a 14th century Wycliffe edition and an explanation of the evolution of the King James Bible. Of course there is a Gutenberg Bible on display.

My bibliophile treat for the holidays.

University of Minnesota Wilson Library

2010-07-21T11:54:00.001-04:00

Since the University of Minnesota library system is one I admire – they have a powerful online presence and some amazing librarians presenting at conferences, I wanted to visit at least one of their libraries while in Minneapolis. I was told the Wilson Library was one of the main undergraduate libraries – I found out that it was the humanities and social sciences library. Since we are discussing our library space, I was mostly interested in service points and study space. The building has six floors. When you first walk in through the security gates, there is a circulation desk on the left, a reference desk on the right and a security desk with campus police straight ahead.

When I took pictures of this, the security folks asked if I had taken their picture without permission, so I retook the picture without them in it and deleted the one where they were barely visible. That first floor has the reference area- a collection slightly smaller than ours, alternating high and low shelving units – and the Smart Learning Commons. Since this is one of the new buzz words, I asked the reference librarian about it. It is basically a computer lab with a few more intense pieces of equipment for scanning and media work. You can see it behind the security desk and comfy chairs in the picture on the right. This Smart commons is staffed by students – helping with what seemed mostly IT issues. I have to read up on it more closely.

The reference librarian said that the Walker Library, that is the science and engineering library has a more extensive Smart Commons, but that was already closed and I was leaving town.

Group study space.
They have quite a bit of group study space on the three main floors above the first floor. Though they have plenty of 4 people tables in rows on each of these floors (see right), all the space designated as group study space is behind doors and usually glass enclosures. There was at least one if not two long group study rooms along the windows of each of these floors. There were various types of tables, chairs on wheels, some of those comfy chars with attached tablets, which looked like they were used by pairs working together. On one floor one of these long rooms was designated a deep study space – no cell phones or computers allowed. Then there were a few regular small rooms designated as group study rooms on each floor. No keys, first come first serve. I didn’t see any presentation equipment, and I don’t think they had computers in there either. In general there were a few computers on each floor, but I would guess the total was less than we have in Waldo, even at our reduced numbers.

One other thing I liked about the space for students. Their comfy chairs are in these homey spaces with mellow colors, home like wooden furniture and incandescent lamps. Wonder if this could be an answer to those who say our library is sterile.

The level below the first floor contained periodicals – current, bound, and microfilms. Looks like thye have not cancelled print subscriptions. On the other side were government documents, which included UN and Canadian documents. Half the shelves were empty, and it looked like they were doing a major move.I didn’t look for anyone to ask. On the very bottom floor they have an East Asia Collection, South Asia collection, James Ford Bell Library (history of international trade before 1800), and an Annex, which I did not understand. They keep older materials here that are fragile, art books that tend to be vandalized, and some oversized books. A substantial part of the collection was still in Dewey, and that was located on the upper floors of Wilson Library. Since they have such a decentralized library system, they must have rare books in each. I know they have various archives and rare books in undergraound vaults, but I will have to go online and see what I can figure out – or Ask their Librarian.

The instruction classroom was down on this second lower level. Seemed out of the way, but maybe they do instruction elsewhere. Or I seem to recall at conferences the librarians saying that they can't possibly get to all the students in actual classrooms, so they have perfected more of their online help.

Baltic and Slavic Studies Conference, Seattle 2010

2010-04-27T16:54:00.007-04:00

This was a unique conference in a variety of ways. I had not attended one of the biennial conferences of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) since 1994, when I last attended and presented as the Latvian Studies Center Librarian. It has taken me this long to get back to my academic roots. Unfortunately, many of the scholars I once knew have already passed away, retired or have moved to live in Latvia.

I believe this is the first time that AABS has held a joint conference with another association, this time with the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS). Since both organizations are interested in Northern Europe, the histories and concerns of their countries often intertwining, this seems to be a good match. Plus, the University of Washington has programs in both. It was a bit disconcerting to not know almost any of the people at the opening reception, but then I talked to one energetic young man, who was a Dane studying at Tartu University (in Estonia). He helped me see how it all fit together. Of course I did find a group of Latvians at the bar. My panel was attended by Scandinavians as well as Balts, and I attended at least one Scandinavian presentation. At the final banquet, I sat at a table with a Finnish historian, Danish novelist, Lithuanian-American that works for Microsoft, and another Latvian-American. In the end I thought this was a very successful combination.

The other unique factor was the volcanic eruption in Iceland. I just thought of it as an interesting natural phenomenon, not realizing that it had stopped all air travel in Europe. Thus this conference, which was supposed to be full of presenters and participants from Europe was suddenly substantially reduced. Instead of 400 attendees, they only had 300, instead of 41 panels with 134 presenters there were only 26 with 79 presenters. My panel was to have 4 speakers and a discussant – I was the only presenter and luckily the discussant was from the Embassy of Estonia in DC, so she was there, as was the chair of the panel from the University of Washington.

Though I enjoyed presenting on the topic of Baltic National bibliographies at the Slavic studies conference in 2008, here the discussion was very alive and productive. Did I know they were passing a law in Estonia about requiring electronic versions of deposit copies of publications? No - very interesting. The conversations I had in this conference encourage me to continue my research in this field.

I ended up running around between panels and venues, as I wanted to see certain people present, and was interested in a variety of topics. Andris Straumanis presented on Latvian anarchist publications in the early 20^th century. Guntis Smidchens was concerned about the bloody language of a popular song from the peaceful singing revolution in the Baltics, Aldis Purs looked at different versions of an incident from Latvia in 1929, where four youths were detained for public drunkenness. This led to his contention that the history of the period has to be researched from more than the political viewpoint. Laura Dean is researching the sex tourism in the Baltics. Brent McKenzie looked at “dark” tourism – tourism based on death – cemeteries, occupation museums, and strange tours that enact being arrested, etc. Marie-Alice L’Heureux looked at Soviet modernism architecture in the 1960’s by comparing two developments in Finland and Estonia, both originally planned organically, the Finnish one creating a successful community, while the one in Estonia moved away from the original plans into huge, awful, monotonous block housing without landscaping that reminds me of Cabrini-Green. Anne Jenner looked at Heritage collections in universities, especially the Swedish American Historical Society collection at North Park University in Chicago. I had numerous interesting conversations, including one with a librarian from University of Wisconsin – Madison.

I went up to the University of Washington Suzzallo Library to view an exhibit put together by Michael Biggins, who is the head of International Studies, Slavic and East European Studies and Baltic Studies. (He is the one that took on my Latvian Studies collection, gave it a good home and continues to develop it.) In honor of the joint conference, he created an exhibit called "Echoes of Three Woodlands: Scandinavia and the Baltics in the Northwest and at UW." The exhibit showed how much these three regions have in common. There were exhibits of books and artifacts, mostly on folklore, music, and culture, but the thing I found most fascinating was the photographs. There were blown up photos of the Scandinavians in Washington going back to the late 1800's. My favorite photo was of three young men and a young woman with their chaperone, sitting on the beach with a case of wax cylinders of recorded music and a phonograph to play them on. The predecessor to iPods and boom boxes. There was also a section on Baltic Americans in Washington State, a photographic exhibit of about 30 people, accompanied by a paragraph with their story of being a Baltic-Americans. This exhibit has traveled to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

I don't know how many places do this, but in the Minneapolis airport I saw a vending machine for Rosetta Stone language packages. No prices listed. It was next to a vending machine from Best Buy.

I have decided to keep my comments on the places I am visiting during conerences separate, so you can read about my thoughts on Seattle and my wonderful trip to Mt. Rainier in Maira's Travels.

Michigan Academy 2010

2010-03-29T10:35:00.002-04:00

This was the last of the many out of routine things I had to do this month, so it was a joy and relief to present to a small group of interested colleagues from Michigan. I enjoy connecting with other librarians from Eastern Michigan, Michigan State, U of M, and usually Wayne State and Central too. The smaller college librarians are also doing some very interesting things.

Homeless Perspectives on Libraries
The most unusual presentation was on the use of libraries by the homeless. Angie Kelleher from Alma College is a former social worker, so had interest in how homeless view libraries, how they use them, and to get insights on how to better serve this population. She surveyed 120 homeless in the Lansing area and found that most of them frequently use libraries. The reasons they gave most often for using the library was to read for pleasure, use the Internet for information, or communication, some even study for classes. She rarely got responses such as getting in from the cold, sleeping, washing. Many are pleased with library services and the main request was for more time on computers.

Collaborating with High Schools
Kathleen DeMey explained how Calvin College (Grand Rapids) works with its “feeder” high schools, mostly Christian high schools in the area. They have organized three conferences, where high school teachers and media specialists get to meet introductory English class professors to hear what will be expected of their students, and librarians teach them about tools to use for research. Calvin librarians work with all their ENGL 101 classes, creating individualized LibGuides, giving 3 hours of instruction, and providing often mandatory one-on-one sessions with the students.

Ann Arbor schools have a district wide volunteer program, where organizations from the community are asked to partner. High schools teaching the health and wellness classes asked the University of Michigan Health Sciences Libraries to help provide supplemental material for these classes on alcohol, drugs, smoking, domestic violence, stress management and other topics. Merle Rosenzweig and Anbna Schnitzer talked about how the librarians worked with the teachers to create appropriate guides and attended a health and wellness teacher orientation to show them how to get this type of information. They also worked with a new public health class, involving university professors and a university library visit.

Videos in the Catalog
Elizabeth Bucciarelli and Michael Barnes from Eastern Michigan presented on getting videos into their catalog – both internally created videos like the library tour, but also commercial videos (mostly free ones) on various health topics.

Use of Health Sciences Databases
Andrew Hickner and Abby Bedford, two students from University of Michigan presented on a survey they did on the use of health sciences databases. They found MEDLINE/PubMed, Ovid SP and CINAHL most commonly used, but other databases less so, and most users, including faculty, did not know about ISI features of impact factor and H-index (I had to look up H-index myself). Implications were for teaching, collection development (maybe stop getting lesser used databases), and reference work.

Library Environmental Committee
Michigan State University’s Library Environmental Committee seems to have been at the forefront of recycling and other greening of the campus initiatives at Michigan State. Michael Unsworth is contributing to an upcoming book: Greening Libraries. The MSU libraries have moved to using recycled paper, two-sided copying, recycling toner cartridges, reducing library handouts by using more e-mail and more. They sponsor Earth Day activities and a speaker series. MSU has a surplus store and recycling center.

Developing a Scholarly Research Topic
An unexpected twist in these presentations came from Rhonda Fowler, an Eastern Michigan University librarian, who described her own struggle with developing a research topic. She is concerned with the amount of time and energy some librarians expend on supervising others, but had a hard time moving from this concern to a viable research question. She explained her process and showed a few good research process models. Seven Steps of the Research Process (Cornell Libraries) and Kuhlthau's Model of the Stages of the Information Process.

Workshops on APA and MLA Styles
Christine Malmsten and Jennifer Meacham from Marygrove College Library, a small academic library in Detroit, explained how they do 16 workshops a semester on APA and MLA styles. They have created 12 page guides on formatting a paper in both styles, but in the workshops they focus on the citations. From evaluations they learned that the session needs to be longer – 90 minutes - for enough hands on experience. They do work with their writing center.

Finding Rare and Unusual Content in Collections
Eastern Michigan University, which does not have as its mission to collect rare materials, has over the years acquired items that may be of historical, cultural, or monetary value. Robert Kelly explained how EMU generated a report of all items with pre-1940 imprints (got 40,000), sorted them by date and found the first 200 had major issues in the catalog records. They took about a 1000 of the oldest items and looked at them to decide if they belonged in the circulating collection, storage (ARC), or in their archives. They found ACRL standards that addressed what value to look for, but in the end the criteria they used were: market value, number of copies in Michigan, and the bibliographic value to EMU. They ended up moving only 39 titles (94% of these titles were already in storage), but also cleaned up many of the catalog records, e.g. 10% had been cataloged as original publications, but were reprints, and one 1711 was cataloged as a reprint, but was original.

Feminism in Librarianship
Sharon Ladenson from Michigan State and Gloriane Peck from the Library of Michigan collaborated on a survey of librarians on their attitudes towards feminism and how that manifests in library work. They got 560 responses, 88% female, 79% identified themselves as feminists. Feminism is defined in libraries as individual choice, equality, diversity of gender identities, and awareness of gender bias. This affects work at the libraries in treating patrons and colleagues equally, balancing viewpoints in collection development, and seeing the library as a place for all people. Though there is an increasing number of women in management, men are still promoted more quickly. There was some discussion on the gender differences in workplace communication. The younger respondents felt less valued and heard by older colleagues, but it was not clear if this was gender or age bias.

Ladies’ Library Associations in Michigan
Our own Sharon Carlson presented a great historical view of ladies’ library associations in Michigan, especially in Southwest Michigan, and their contributions to the development of public libraries. I learned about how libraries moved from subscription and social libraries to public institutions. Some of the ladies’ library associations are still in existence today.

Training Students for Reference Desk Work
My own presentation was on how we train our students to do the work on the reference desk, as librarians asked me about this at the last Michigan Academy meeting. I was again surprised at the questions and lively discussion that followed.

Calvin College
I always like to see other schools – large and small, and liked the buildings and setting of Calvin College. I asked where I could take a walk during the lunch break and was guided to their ecosystem preserve and interpretive center. I got to try out my first composting toilet in a public building. And the walk through the preserve was just what I needed to clear my head between sessions.

Ideas for Our Library

I think we need to look at a more systematic way of working with area high schools. We do have lighter loads during Apr, May, Nov, & Dec. Maybe we can help provide links to resources as they did in Ann Arbor or start a conversation about college level research expectations. Does anyone know if Kalamazoo or Portage has a program similar to Partners in Excellence – Ann Arbor Public Schools? I believe this can be a great recruiting tool for Western.
Have we thought of putting videos right into the catalog?
I know we have successful RefWorks workshops, but have we considered ones on MLA and APA? Or is our experience with drop-in workshops too dismal?
Have we systematically looked at our older publications and seen if they need to be moved off the circulating shelves? I know Sue and Tom before her have worked on this.

University of Toronto Library

2009-05-17T09:36:00.005-04:00

While I was in Toronto, I thought I would do some additional research on a paper I am writing and knew that the University of Toronto Library would have what I needed. I used to visit Toronto a lot, as there is a large Latvian community and it had (and still has) the largest Latvian library in North America that I turned to for help in setting up the Latvian Studies Center Library. I used the University of Toronto Robarts Library on occasion, plus they microfilmed and then printed out on cards the whole card catalog of the Toronto Latvian Center Library for me. Since I had not been in Robarts Library for years, I stopped at the information desk to ask how I may use the library. First of all I had an interesting conversation with the librarian there about how the security measures had trickled up north from us, and that they too now had to provide information about what certain people were reading.

To use their computers, even to just search the catalog, I had to register for a password. On the first floor (of 13) there was a machine where you could swipe your ID. It didn't recognize my Michigan driver's license, but did take my credit card. Then it printed a small piece of paper with a username and password. I could now use one of only six computers designated for visitor use, four in the main reference area, two in the Slavic and East European Studies reading room. All were in use on a holiday (Victoria Day) Saturday afternoon. Luckily one of the reading room computers opened up pretty quickly, though at the other one the guy was snoozing most of the time.

I found what I needed, sent some articles to print, got a couple of call numbers. What I liked about their stacks was that the lighting was set up with motion censors. The main library building with the 13 floors is a triangle, with the tips of the triangles cut off - OK, it is a hexagon, but feels more triangular. The center area is full of tables and carrels for studying and well lit, but the perimiter contains rows and rows of shelves, color coded for each side of the triangle, and those are dark until you walk into an aisle. Sometimes I had to wave my hand to set off the motion detector. As I walked the aisles I noticed, that the lights went off pretty quickly in the other aisles. I liked this energy saver, but I understand it would be expensive to set up.

Then the printing. They have the same Pharos system as we do, though it lost two of the articles I sent it. I didn't pay attention on how many printing stations they had, but the main one was on the first floor. There was an employee stationed at the printing station to help people. One of the things they had was a visitor card. She had it hanging from her neck, and she gave it to me, so I could put on some money and make copies. Of course I didn't have any Canadian money on me. (I rarely exchange money when I go to Canada and expect to be ripped off half the time, but usually use my card, which does the proper exchange rate calculations.) Since the library cafe and other possible money changing places were closed on this holiday weekend, I had to go outside and buy a hot dog from the vendor and get Canadian money in change. Printing and copies 15 cents.

The first floor was mainly a large area with computers that was labeled as an information commons. It was elegantly set up with low level focused lighting and banks of computers in curves rather than straight rows. There were various service points, but I have to admit I didn't pay close attention to them - one was a loan (check out) desk, one was the printing station, one was a general info desk in the center by the elevators, and I think there was a media center and some other areas were closed off at this time. Reference was on the fourth floor.

I just think it is interesting to see what other libraries are doing. The things that I thought we might consider in our library were - a visitor copy card, stack lighting tied to motion censors (when we do our next remodel), if we go to logins on our computers, we have to make sure there are enough computers available for the general public, as I think we have quite a few users from the commmunity, and at times, like during the Medieval conference, we have many users at once. I did not like swiping in, it felt too much like Big Brother was watching me. Of course I keep wanting us to start the discussion on what an information commons would look like in Waldo Library.

American Latvian Association 58. Congress

2009-05-04T11:38:00.002-04:00

Though I took vacation time to attend the American Latvian Association Congress in St. Pete Beach, FL May 1-3, it definitely has ties to Western Michigan University and my work. The American Latvian Association http://www.alausa.org/ is the umbrella organization for Latvian-Americans that coordinates the educational, cultural, and political work of Latvians throughout the country. Western Michigan University started offering Continuing Education classes in Latvian in 1966. In 1981, a minor in Latvian was established as a contract program with the American Latvian Association (ALA – yes this is another ALA), and was eventually expanded to a major in Latvian. The Latvian Studies Center was built by ALA for housing students in the Latvian Studies Program, and the Latvian Studies Center Library was established in 1983 and grew to be the largest Latvian collection in North America. The Latvian Studies Program was successful for 10 years, but when Latvia regained its independence in 1991, and the Latvian-Americans focused their energy and financial support on Latvia itself, the program no longer attracted students. We were forced to close the program, sell the Latvian Studies Center and disperse the library collection to various libraries throughout North America and Latvia.

The last time I attended an American Latvian Association Congress was in 1995, when the decision was made to sell the Latvian Studies Center. It was a very painful time for me, as I had worked hard to gather the materials for the library. Luckily I was allowed to find appropriate homes for the library (and archive and art) collections. When one door closes, another one opens - so eventually I found myself working here at Western.

The American Latvian Association Congress is a representational body, where member organizations send representatives to the congress, based on how many of their members are individual members of ALA. This year I was representing the Kalamazoo Latvian Association. I participated in the educational and cultural break-out sessions. There are 25 Latvian schools in the U.S., from a full time day care in Chicago, to the weekend Latvian grade schools, to the six week summer high schools. They are working on establishing reading groups and choosing Latvian books to discuss at various venues throughout the U.S. Among the projects initiated by the cultural section is one trying to document art work located in private collections. Another group is working to establish a Latvians in the World Museum, to document our experiences as Latvians outside of Latvia.

At the end of last year I received funding from the ALA Cultural Foundation, to start exploring the possibilities of creating an online union catalog for all the small Latvian libraries owned by the regional organization, churches, and schools. I presented my project at the cultural break-out session and got enthusiastic support, including information about collections and offers of help with the project.

Michigan Academy 2009

2009-04-03T19:21:00.002-04:00

Ironically, since I was section chair of the Library and Information Sciences section of Michigan Academy this year, I was less able to focus on the presentations, as I had to keep watching the clock and give presenters reminders on how much time they have left. I barely took any notes, which is unusual for me. But I have been working on putting all the PowerPoints up on SlideShare, so that they can be viewed by a wider audience. I have also created a page of all the abstracts with links to those presentations where the author(s) gave permission to put them on SlideShare. Here's a quick recap of what I heard.

Information Literacy
Elizabeth Bucciarelli (EMU) talked about information literacy across the curriculum, and why it hasn't taken off like writing across the curriculum. She had some good pointers on how to get it more broadly accepted. Sharon Ladenson (MSU) showed us how feminist pedagogy applies to info lit, and how it encourages active learning techniques.

Digitization
Michael Unsworth (MSU) talked about the problems with four separate organizations digitizing "Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections", all of them missing one volume, and providing no indexing to the whole collection. Michael Barnes (EMU) talked about how a university library can create a digital collection of its unique items with existing resources and minimal expenses.

Gender issues
Julia Nims (EMU) took a look at how women are portrayed in technology ads in library trade magazines. Looks like library folk don't do too badly with this.

Instruction
Since we had so many abstracts submitted, we had to split one session, so I did not attend the instruction presentations, but it sounded like there were some good ideas presented on creating online modules, helping students with databases, plagiarism, government documents and Dianna Sachs (WMU) talked about the First Year Experience.

E-Resources
Two presentations were from Central Michigan about their project to move journals to electronic-only. One focused on the overall project and the problems with insuring access to back issues, licensing agreements, etc. The other talked about the affects on library staff in different departments, but especially in technical processing, where the work-flow has changed substantially. George Boston (WMU) followed with a presentation on how he got all the print holdings into SFX. Ruth Helwig compared the new Educator's Reference Complete with ERIC and Education Abstracts on various factors, and the new database compared well.

Library Space
Melissa Levine (UofM) talked about the new exhibit space in the main library at UofM that has become a way of reaching out to not only the university community, but the town as well. Monique Andrews talked about how Wayne State had reduced their grad library reference collection by 80%. I've heard her before, which started me thinking about how to start discussing the reduction of our collection, so I listened more carefully to details of their process.

Faculty Support
I did not know that the National Institute for Health requires that all articles written with their grant money must be available to the public. Merle Rosenzweig (UofM) explained how the health sciences librarians have been helping their faculty get through the maze of policies. Three people from Eastern Michigan explained how they have been using Web of Science to support their faculty research by finding faculty publication citations and analyzing how many of the sources used are owned by their library. Karen Liston (Wayne State) has been trying to assess the needs of the Classical and Modern Languages and Cultures department for library services. Interesting liaison work.

At lunch we sat with some undergrad biology students from Western, and I realized that Michigan Academy is an opportunity for students to try their hand at presenting. I was disappointed that none of the library science students from Wayne attended.

All in all I was happy with the day. We had a lot of presentations, but had time for some good discussions as well.

Texbooks in the Library

2008-12-22T12:36:00.002-05:00

I am still frustrated with finding way that issues, problems can be tracked within our library. I just thought of starting a personal blog with some of the issues I see, just so there is some sort of time line, but I realized I already have a library blog going, I could post here about these issues.

Here are a few e-mails from the fall 2008 semester on the issue of textbooks in the library. I am sure we will run into this problem again come January, but for now, I don't think any of us have the time or energy to expend on this, but I think this issue should still be kept in some sort of queue:

>>> Maira Bundza 9/29/2008 >>>

I am still getting textbook questions, where the book is not available at the bookstore. It seems to me that this year this has been more of a problem than other years. Are we in on some sort of discussion between faculty the bookstores and the libraries about textbooks? I understand that it can be difficult to order the correct amount of books, if the number of students is unknown. I am so thankful for those rare classes that do ask the library to purchase a copy of their text and put it on reserve, so the students can at least prepare for their classes. I believe it was Wayne State (someone I talked to recently) that as a rule purchases all the text books needed for undergrad classes and puts them on reserve. (I'm trying to imagine the space that takes up, but then again they had a pretty big space behind the circulation desk.) I know that is not our policy and I understand the reasons, I am just saying I got the sense that it was a bigger problem this year than previous years (that is why I am copying Maria, maybe it's just me), and if there is any way in which we could make life less frustrating to students...

>>> Maria Perez-Stable 9/30/2008 >>>
No, Maira, it's not just you. I hear the same thing (the bookstore is out of books) and I just cringe. To me this is an indication of something not right at our university. I don't recall this happening in my own student days. At the last ACRL I saw a poster session (and maybe it was from Wayne State) where they got a pool of funds and bought some of the textbooks from some of the lower-level lecture classes to put on reserve.

Later:
I actually DID find the poster session and have sent the librarian an email. Let's see if she responds. Yes, I do think CD would be the place to start the discussion.

>>> Barbara Cockrell 9/30/2008 >>>
We can discuss this at to tomorrow's CD meeting if you like. I cant say I am very keen on the idea. Apart from budgeting for this need the major issue would be the organization/administration of it. If someone at Central Reference is willing to take responsibility for identifying the classes and books that we would supply that might help convince me. I do not feel that I have the time to take this on at present and I do not want to be responsible for determining which classes are selected and which are not. Its not realistic to think we would purchase all the textbooks that are required each semester - you only have to look at the number of books in the bookstore to realize what an undertaking that is. The other problem with textbooks is that they change pretty much every year not significantly but enough to warrant publishers coming out with a new edition so that they keep their profits healthy so we would constantly be having to update editions etc. Then there is the whole business of managing the reserves. It would definitely represent some serious work and a change in what we have seen as our role here. However we can certainly talk it over and see what other members of the committee think.

>>> Terence Hudson 09/30/08 >>> - from the bookstore
Sorry you guys are being put in the middle of these situations. If you walk down our textbook aisles you'll see that we are far from out of textbooks. Without knowing the particulars concerning which books they are looking for, I can't give you exact reasons for our outages. It could be any number of reasons, such as the number of students enrolled in the course surpassed the number of books requested, or another instructor is using the same book but did not place an order.

We are not the only source for textbooks here at WMU. The private off campus bookstore and any number of online sources compete with us for sales. Knowing this, we do not order 100% of the books needed for many classes. If we did, our shelves would be bulging with even more leftover textbooks right now. That would not be an appropriate use of university funds. Its a real balancing act with every single title we carry, of not buying too many books and yet not running
out. We try to error on the side of the customer but do get caught short sometimes. To help students get copies of out of stock books, we do place special orders that arrive in 3-5 days in most instances.

Slavic Studies Conference 2008 in Philly

2008-11-24T10:54:00.001-05:00

[I have a blog etiquette question – is it best to mention people’s names or not? Is it a good thing or a bad thing to be mentioned in other people’s blogs? I’m going to go with not mentioning them for now, but can always put names in later.]

I started attending some American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) conferences when I realized that all Baltic collections in research libraries were in the Slavic departments, and that the bulk of conversation was happening here, not in the Slavic and East European Section of ALA. I believe I attended about three of these conferences while at the Latvian Studies Center, once chairing a panel on Baltic library issues. Since working at WMU, I had only attended one, but when the head of the European Reading Room from the Library of Congress asked if anyone would be willing to research and present on what has happened to the book chambers (I’ll explain later) of the former Soviet republics since they gained independence in 1991, I volunteered to do the Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Thus I had reason to attend the AAASS 40th annual conference in Philadelphia, held November 20-23, 2008.

Our Presentation
Book chambers were government institutions in each Soviet republic that were responsible for receiving deposit copies of every published item, compiling statistics about them, and documenting each item to create a national bibliography. These were lists of all books, periodicals, sheet music, etc. as well as indexes to the articles in all the periodicals published in the republic. This was all published monthly and annually. I knew something about the situation in Latvia, and was able to talk to the right people when I briefly visited Latvia last March. I found that in all three Baltic States, the responsibilities of the book chambers had been mostly taken over by the national libraries. (To my colleagues at WMU – if this is of interest to anyone, I could do a brownbag lunch presentation.)

I presented with people from the University of Pittsburgh, Library of Congress, and British Library. The chair had researched Armenia, the discussant had information on Georgia, so between all of us we covered 13 of the 15 republics, and intentionally not focusing on Russia, since most in the AAASS audience knew what is happening there. The hardest job was to get information on the Central Asian republics, as they did not have information on websites and often did not respond to e-mail inquiries. Our panel was well attended with a full room of over 30 and lots of questions and a lively discussion. I got a couple of offers to publish my presentation. I plan to publish it in an article, though I think the five of us will also have to come up with a unified article on all the republics.

Digital Access
There was a session on digital projects and issues. The most fascinating idea I heard was about putting Russian (or whatever language) texts online in digitized form and asking the general public to translate them. Then an editorial board of some sort would put a stamp of approval, but the amount of texts made available to the public would be much larger and could grow by this wiki method.

Hidden Library Treasures
We heard about three different “hidden treasures.” The speaker from the British Library explained how BL librarians are being given 10-12 week sabbaticals to research some aspect of the BL collection. She had looked at how the Polish immigrants of the early 1830’s were depicted in Britain. She had identified 3000 periodical articles, 80 popular songs, some plays and a few novels written about the Poles. The Brits were supportive of Polish independence and the poor Polish immigrants, such that some Brits pretended to be Polish.

A representative from the Frick Museum Research Library in New York City talked about all the books, images, catalogs, etc. available there on East European art, though the Frick concentrates on Western European and American art. They catalog each ephemeral item, even announcements of exhibits. I hadn’t thought about the importance of art images, especially to that art, which is no longer around. They also have an art periodicals index going back longer than The Art Index, and there are plans to digitize it.

The last “hidden treasure” was in the Wolfsonian collection in Miami Beach, FL. This is a “museum and research center focusing on how decorative arts, material culture, and design help shape our interpretation of the world.” (http://www.wolfsonian.org/) The collection was donated to the Florida International University by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., who had spent his life collecting books, periodicals, prints, objects, etc. on architecture and design including an extensive collection from Eastern Europe, especially the Soviet Union, Russia, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Grand Duke Alexis’ visit to America
I was reluctant to attend this session, but it was the bibliographic session in the time slot, and I was exposed to the fascinating story of the visit to America by the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia in 1871-72. (His father was emperor Alexander II.) The presentations were based on materials available in libraries and one woman is writing a whole book on this visit. This was the first major contact between Russia and the U.S. and the papers of the times are filled with accounts of the balls and receptions organized for him. The most highly publicized event was his buffalo hunt with Buffalo Bill and General Custer. The Grand Duke gifted books to several libraries including the University of Michigan.

Childhood in Russia
I attended one totally non-library session on childhood in Russia at various historical time periods and sat in on the tail end of another session. What struck me about these sessions was that there was substantial academic criticism by the discussants, which was useful to the presenters as they were getting good feedback before they published their article or book. I didn’t see it in the bibliographic sessions or in library conferences in general. I wonder if there is a place we do this in my profession.

Baltic Collections in the U.S.
The last session I was able to attend was on Baltic collections in the U.S. Two Lithuanian librarians talked about the two major Lithuanian community archives in Chicago and Connecticut. The Estonian representative talked about the Estonian Archives in the U.S. in Lakewood, NJ and read remarks by a man who was unable to attend about Latvian collections. This was the first time I officially heard that the Slavic, East European and Baltic reading room at New York Public Library was closed, though it had come up in conversations at the conference. The most interesting presentation was about statistics on Baltic collections in research libraries throughout the country. There were two graphs depicting the Estonian – Lithuanian – Latvian collections in 16 major research libraries. The first graph showed recent (1990-2005) Baltic imprints and the other showed 1800-1989 Baltic imprints. This did not include exile publications, as those statistics are harder to tease out of library catalogs. Baltic dissertation output since consists of around 250. They are still looking at how many of those were dependent on library collections.

One very interesting fact that came out during the questions and comments time afterwards was that Michigan State University has received and endowment from a Lithuanian for the annual purchase of Baltic materials. They would be interested in collecting retrospectively, so they might be willing to take Latvian book donations.

On the Conference itself and Philadelphia
I don’t have a real sense on how many attended the conference, since there was no opening plenary or keynote speakers, but there were over 500 sessions and about 1300 presenters listed in the conference program. I was surprised that there were no projectors in any of the presentation rooms that I attended. In one of our sessions all three presenters lamented the fact that they had brought along interesting visuals. I too had a PowerPoint, but then I might not have gotten through in 20 minutes. The other observation I had was that in some of the sessions a presenter had not shown up and someone told me that was usual for this conference. I think we had one of the few full panels.

I did not stay at the hotel, but heard that on the first night they had all been woken up in the middle of the night and herded outside for some perceived emergency. And they could not use the elevators. I was glad I was staying with friends.

I met one of the venerable Latvian historians, who has now retired. I was able to give him a lift to the house where he was staying – not far from the downtown hotel in the old part of Philadelphia with narrow streets and nice old houses and apartment buildings. I was staying with friends out in the country near Quakertown, so I didn’t have chance to see anything of Philadelphia, except one restaurant, the convention center and a wonderful indoor market, that was across the street from the conference hotel.

Taking a moment to enjoy the relief of a job well done, I will then take a deep breath and prepare to work on my article and maintain contacts with those colleagues where we could work on some joint project.

Michigan Librarians gather in Kalamazoo

2008-10-24T19:54:00.003-04:00

Michigan Library Association Conference 2008
October 22-24, 2008
Kalamazoo, MI

Though I had some obligations at work, so I was traveling back and forth between downtown and campus, I still feel I got to attend all but one session that I wanted to see. If you have time to read only one thing, read about the last session I attended – I think that was the most important one for me.

Slammin Around the World
Nice presentation by five public librarians of books and films that introduce us to different parts of the world. One presenter talked about graphic novels, one about films, one about “intellectual books,” and the other two had general fiction books that addressed different parts of the world – the kind of books I really like. I will check to make sure we have all the books and films they have on their list. I should also make a guide listing these books, and include ones like this that I have read, maybe other librarians could contribute. This would make the list personal and not overwhelmingly long.

The Psychology of Influence and Persuasion
Dan Norris – keynote speaker
This was an interesting look at how small things make a huge difference in how people perceive things, commit to them, etc. The applications to library work were a bit tentative, but still there. Here’s what I got out of it:

Don’t say “it was nothing” or “no problem” when someone thanks you for your help. At least say “thank you”, or even something like “I’m sure you would have done if for me.”
Maybe hand out something after an interaction like at the desk. (People like gifts that are personal and unexpected.)
When trying to convince others about a project – give stats on other libraries doing this.
Gain trust by subtly showing authority –“over the last 10 years I have seen…”
Get commitment by asking people – and have them commit in a public arena.
Let people know if there is a budget cut coming up, so can prepare to help.
Ask people what the library meant to them when they were growing up.
Frame it cooperatively: “here’s how we support you in the community,” “here’s how we can work together.”

Tech Tools for Reference: A Public and Academic Library Perspective
Holly Hibner from Salem-South Lyon District Library and Christine Tobias from MSU introduced a wide variety of tools for use in our daily work.

The Michigan Evergreen Project – Michigan’s First Open Source Group Catalog
With presenters from MLC and the Grand Rapids Public library, they described a new open source ILS system that has been piloted by GRPL and recently come online. It is mostly being researched by public libraries and MLC is acting as the facilitator. I was mostly interested in hearing about this as a possiblity for my union catalog for small Latvian libraries project. It looked good until they showed the cataloging module. I will be working with non-librarians and the MARC record will not be comprehensible to them. I will still look into this.

Web Presence of Instructional Materials
Two librarians from Wayne State presented on ways of ways of saving and sharing instruction materials with other librarians and users. This repeated some of the tools mentioned in the previous section on tech tools, but had more for our academic work. We may want to share files in many formats: Powerpoints, PDF/Word documents, Screencasts, Audio, Video, Images (of library, screenshots, etc.), Multimedia (more than one of the above), Link lists, HTML pages. Each of these formats can be saved for free on one of the many open source tools on the Web, and that provides a URL for each item. These URL’s can then be saved in a database, which they created in Zoho Creator, with metadata for each item. This is now a searchable database of instructional materials.

Re-visioning the Reference Collection
Last, but definitely not least, and I would say the most important ideas I took home from the conference, was Wayne State’s tale of reducing their Reference Collection by 81%. I actually saw the collection when I visited Wayne for a meeting earlier this fall, and I took pictures of their minimal reference book collection. Now I got to hear about the process.

Library Assessment Conference 08 – Overview

2008-08-15T18:14:00.003-04:00

This overview ended up being a synthesis of what I learned. The conference Web site includes presenter’s PowerPoints where available: http://libraryassessment.org/

Assessment defined
Since WMU is currently defining assessment as mainly about student learning outcomes, it makes it hard for libraries to come up with appropriate assessments, as we usually do not teach semester long courses. If that was all there was to assessment, then three quarters of this conference would have been irrelevant and even LibQual would not be considered an assessment tool. (One contentious commentator called it just an evaluation tool.) Assessment is a complex concept, and the goal is a Culture of Assessment, where people automatically assess to improve what they do. One person said that instead of having a Culture of Complaint, turn it into a Culture of Assessment. Even better, someone called it a Culture of Improvement. I understand assessment in libraries as a way of gathering data on our collections, services and space, and the needs and activities of our users to improve the learning, teaching and research experience of the whole Western Michigan University community.

Organizational culture

Assessment goes hand in hand with strategic planning

“No action without a plan, no plan without data” Rick Luce

Most research libraries have an assessment person, sometimes combined with marketing or communications, sometimes just a designated 15% spent on assessment
Most research libraries have an assessment committee, as do we, though it has not been very active and has focused mostly on LibQual
Employee satisfaction and input

Employees are users too and good judges of quality
Employee satisfaction important in good service
ClimateQual, a tool developed by UofMD to measure staff perceptions about their libraries
Interview or survey individual employees
Focus groups and retreats

Gather data in a timely manner and pass it to appropriate people for implementation
One place for data – so all can access – Penn has - DataFarm
Important to present data visually – see PennLibrary Facts http://metrics.library.upenn.edu/FACTS07.pdf
Master Blog Communication System

One blog per group (committee, task force, project)
Put up agendas before meetings
Minutes of meetings right after meetings
Allows comments
People can set up alerts

What will the scholar in 2050 expect us to have saved? (Question from Betsy Wilson, UW)
Need frameworks and models that reflect our values (Stephen Town, Univ. of York, UK
Rick Luce had many good guidelines on being a successful organization
Great if can work with consultants – one option is Jim Self (UofVA), Steve Hiller (UofWA), and Martha Kyrillidou (ARL) will come to libraries and help them set up better assessment programs (known as the Jim, Steve and Martha show)

Assessment of Place

Mine LibQual comments to inform planning of space
Space consultants can be useful
Surveys – ask what they do in the library, how often they come, how long they stay, when
Observation – visit different areas of the libraries and record how users use space – alone, in groups (2-3, 4+), what furniture they are using, if they are using personal or library materials, their laptop or library computers
Facus groups to get at details of issues found by other methods
Involve staff in findings and planning
Identify affordable changes
U of Chicago redid their wayfinding study – give novice library users 3 books to find and follow them around to see if they do find them – after the first study they redid signage and maps

Information Literacy / Instruction

The Education Testing Service (ETS) test is now called iSkills

Sounds like quite a few institutions are using this, but some of the preliminary results did not sound promising

SAILS mentioned briefly
Megan Oakleaf (Syracuse) and Lisa Hinchliffe from U of IL Champaign-Urbana did a study of 437 instruction librarians and asked if they assess their instruction sessions, if they have data, and if they have used the data. (228 respondents actually use the data) Some reasons for not doing this, besides lack of time and resources:

Questions about whether the results actually measured IL
Lack of knowledge and skills
No centralized support or commitment to gather this data
Lack of a conceptual framework

One school developed a self-assessment tool

Worked closely with teaching faculty
Based on ACRL standards
Students reflect on own research and learning process

Some moving away from instruction on demand, as develop Info Lit program within the curriculum with faculty
When Info Lit is imbedded in the general education program, e-portfolio systems (like our iWebfolio) can keep track of papers over the years

Reference

READ (Reference Effort Assessment Data) Scale – with little effort gives insight into ref

Six point scale given to each reference question answered
1: typical directional question that takes less than a minute
6: working with PhD student or faculty over hours or days
2-5 in between - have to train and calibrate across those who answer
Keep track of questions on and off the desk
Include in person (also WRAP), phone, e-mail, chat
Good for scheduling staff
Can be used in online system like Desk Tracker

Cornell did systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis of it’s reference questions

Transaction type, duration, mode, question content, date, time
As a result have closed ref desk during summer hours in undergrad study library
Thought of reference work as research assistant, information central & problem solver

University of Pennsylvania reference consultation form

Even more elaborate than at Cornell, but worth looking at for ideas

Heard a few instances of reduced reference collections

Idea – let’s keep track of what is used in our reference collection (even by us), probably by call number, so we can start weeding

Other assessment Tools and Methods

Univ. of Rochester anthropological studies

Learn from Rochester, but need to find how our students function
Ask students to map out where they go during a typical day and when
From their studies, as we well know, everyone has a cell phone, so make our phone number(s) more prominent – on home page, in stacks

Latvian Collection at University of Washington

2008-08-11T13:18:00.002-04:00

I spent 15 years collecting Latvian books and other materials at the Latvian Studies Center (LSC) Library, but when Latvia became independent and the Latvian Program at Western Michigan University closed, the nationwide Latvian community could no longer maintain a library. I found a home for it in various institutions, but the primary one was at the University of Washington, which had just started a Baltic program. Michael Biggins, the head of the Slavic and East European division was willing to take it in. Since I was visiting Seattle and UW, I had to visit him and my “child”, as I used to call the LSC Library, before I had a real child. All 12,000 or so books I sent are cataloged, and Michael proudly showed how the Baltic history collection had grown from a couple of shelves to quite a few sections of books. I was most familiar with the literature section, which was shelved in about 16 sections, with about 4000 books. My original collection has been supplemented by regular additions from Latvia – about 250 new books a year. Having this solid Latvian collection has been leveraged to similarly grow the Lithuanian collection (9 sections in literature or about 2250 books), and Estonian is evolving too (4.5 sections or 1100 books). Of course, Latvian materials end up classified in various parts of the library, but the easiest sections to see were the DK’s for history and PG’s for literature, though I had also sent them microfilms and Latvian materials were in various sections of the N’s for art. Since there is a separate art library that focuses on North American and Western European art, this section is just for other art, often in the language of origin. Music too has Latvian materials and the choir director at UW is especially interested in Baltic choral music, so they have asked cataloging to provide additional tagging to be able to pull these out as a Baltic Choral Collection. The UW choir has visited the Baltic States with concerts, and has a Baltic repertoire. With the growth in interest in the study of cinema, they are also purchasing Baltic films.

I met the two catalogers that have worked on my collection – Jake and Nadia, and felt an instant affinity towards the people who had lovingly processed “my” books.

Besides getting books through an exchange program with the National Library of Latvia, they are also subscribing to 40-50 periodical titles. The newspapers in Latvia seem to be especially difficult to obtain, as the online access and archive are held by a private company – Lursoft, which does not allow for institutional subscriptions. The Estonians, on the other hand, have great free access to their news archives.

The Slavic & East European (including Baltic) collection does get used, circulating about 25,000 items (out of 400,000) per year.

I liked their pre-searched lists of new books. See their New Arrival in International Studies by country. You just choose your country of interest and see the books received in the last months, with a link to the catalog record.

One of the digital projects at UW is the William C. Brumfield Russian Architecture Collection. He is the eminent scholar on this in the states and has published numerous books, some in Russia. Brumfield teaches at Tulane in New Orleans, so Hurricane Katrina accelerated the motivation to get everything digitized quickly. There were challenges with metadata describing both the photograph and the building. They have gone with the METS system that lets them catalog the building as the core item, but also allows for full descriptions of the photo.

A woman at UW has photographed 12 members from each local Baltic community, included a short oral history, and an artifact from their own family albums. This exhibit will be traveling to the Baltic States next year and there is talk of expanding it.

Notes from Seattle

2008-08-11T11:31:00.006-04:00

Another wonderful conference and visit to a great city. Barbara and I spent Sunday visiting the Olympic peninsula, beginning with a ferry ride across from Seattle. The day started overcast, but cleared up into a glorious sunny day. The environment is very different, dominated by evergreen trees, lushly green, and bodies of water all around. We stopped off at an authentic Native American store/gallery and a lavender farm, where we picked some lavender, before heading into the Olympic National Park. The center of the park is full of huge snow-capped mountains, so there is no road through the park. You can just drive around them and take various roads in towards the mountains. With our time limit, we did two of these drives.The first was to Hurricane Ridge, through an amazing old growth forest, up quite high with a magnificent vista of many of the mountains, including Mount Olympus itself. You could see that it and a few others are covered by glaciers. They have a lot of blizzards up there and the snow just gathers and never completely melts. As we took a hike around, we came to a couple of spots that still had snow. The other thing that was incredible up here was the variety of wildflowers – blue bells, blue lupines (one of my favorites of all time), Indian paintbrush, including a pink variety that is unique to this area, and many more.

The second drive was in along the Elwha River. We could drive in around 10 miles up the mountain and then we had a 2.5 mile gently sloping hike in to some natural hot springs. The drive was through a forest in areas thick with huge ferns and trees overgrown with moss. Once we started hiking we could really appreciate the immensity of the trees. We got to ford a few streams and finally got to the hot springs flowing out of the mountain side in a half a dozen places. At some, people had put up stone barriers to create a shallow basin to catch the hot water. The first and largest already had a few people in it, another had a single gentleman, but we found one we could have to ourselves. What a wonderful feeling after the long climb, even if we did smell a bit like sulfur afterward.

The only thing with ferries is that they have a limited capacity, and as many people were heading back to the city, there was a three hour wait at the ferry, so we ended driving around the southern tip of Puget Sound and getting back to the hotel fairly late.

The conference was held at the University of Washington student union, a 20 minute walk from our hotel. The campus is beautiful with interesting old (and new) buildings, huge trees and lush bushes and flowers everywhere. As one local said, things grow so well, you almost have to struggle to keep it trimmed back.

In the center is a huge fountain and over that on a clear day you can see Mount Ranier. It was really clear only on Monday, Tuesday morning I was still able to take a picture, after that it disappeared into the mists.

Barbara and I had different opportunities to see downtown Seattle. She attended the reception at the Oly mpic Sculpture Park, I walked around it later. We went into the Seattle Public Library (maybe a separate post), but only I got to see the guys throw fish at the Pike Place Fish Market.

The most surprising thing to both of us was the hilliness of Seattle, it reminded us of the steep streets of San Francisco – made for interesting driving. We left plenty of things to visit if we get back here for ACRL – the Space Needle, art museum, aquarium, Science Fiction museum, etc.

I do feel obligated to mention the weather. While we were there, we had beautiful, sunny, even hot weather. Since this was an assessment conference, they had “assessed” when to hold the conference and showed us charts on precipitation, where it is usually very high, except in July and August. The town isn’t all air conditioned, as I saw in a home I visited, or even the student union, where we had to stop using one of the ballrooms, as it was too hot. And it doesn’t get that cold. There aren’t heavy freezes, so people can grow palm trees, but on the other hand, it is hard to grow tomatoes, as there isn’t enough sun. I also understand that there is a lot of variation. The town of Sequim (pronounced Squim) is one of the sunniest places and a favorite retirement town. That’s where we visited the lavender farm.

LOEX 2008 - Elmhurst Library

2008-05-05T13:10:00.002-04:00

The pre-conference for LOEX was an introduction to and tour of the Elmhurst College Library, about 15 minutes from the conference site.

Designing Library Spaces with a Focus on Information Literacy

In 1999 the Elmhurst College Library got funding to redesign the main floor of the library. They spent 2000-01 planning, writing up the project, working with an architect and in the summer of 2002 the library was closed and construction was done.

The requirements that were passed on to the architect centered around information literacy – focus more on instruction, than print resources, so most of the books and bound periodicals were cleared out of that floor. They weeded out 10% of the material and all bound periodicals went to other two floors.

The resulting space is unlike any I have seen before:

As you walk into the library, there is the check-out desk on one side and the café on the other. The café is an elegant crescent with tables and chairs and serving simple fare of coffee, soda, cookies, chips, granola bars. They wish they had pulled in a water source, so a more extensive menu could be offered. This is popular with students and even professors use the space for conferences with students.

The central space is the classroom with 30 work stations in clumps of 4 or 6 computers, each on a 60x27 table, so more can gather around it. The room is non-rectangular, somewhat fan shaped with two glass walls, so students can see when instruction is being done, and when there is no instruction, they can go in and use the computers. The students have named it the Fishbowl, so for library week, they went and decorated the windows with fish.

The reference desk has been much reduced – it has two chairs, two computers, but open to the room, so students come and sit down to ask for help or just talk, or get a piece of candy. The desk is staffed by paraprofessionals, as the 6 librarians spend most of their time teaching (250-300 sessions a year). Reference is just an extension of the instruction.

The computers are set up in configurations of 4, back to back, with extended tables for each, where four people could easily gather around.

There is a comfy chair reading area and about a quarter of the floor is still bookshelves, but low ones to open up the space and let the art be seen. The shelves contain current periodicals and the much reduced reference collection. The library had money at one time to purchase art from a group of Chicago artists, who graduated from the Chicago Institute of Art in the 70’s to early 80’s. These are displayed on the walls throughout the library and add a wonderful touch of color and interest.

The architect talked about the process. After the library had written up the specifications of what they wanted – to think young and that it had to be multi-use, they drew a bubble diagram of the different zones they planned for the library.

The library was not a badly used building to begin with, but with the renovation it is now a super used building (they haven’t kept actual data). Circulation has stayed the same (instead of dropping) and the number of reference questions and instruction sessions has gone up a lot. The teaching faculty participated in the weeding process, so they had no complaints about the weeding, but a few had fits about circulating videos, so they backed off on that innovation.

What they do with the staff they have is quite amazing. They have 6 librarians, 13 paraprofessionals and 20 student workers for a population of 2800 students, 10% grads. Librarians do all the teaching and have divided liaison responsibilities differently. Each has a science, a big department, a hard to work with department, an easy to work with department. Each is also the head of some department in the library, like access services, tech services or reference/instruction. They also provide much of the tech support for the university. They administer Blackboard and teach instructors to use it. They help faculty and students with most software related technical problems. They offer a credit course “Chicago’s great libraries.”

Another interesting factor is that the public library is right across the street, so they collaborate on collection building, and have only about 20% overlap. I wish Kalamazoo Public was closer to us, so we could send students down for some of the things they need.

Latvia trip March 2008

2008-03-22T13:25:00.006-04:00

This was a whirlwind of a trip, where I had to take care of some personal business, but I got to see quite a few relatives, friends and colleagues in a short amount of time.

Professionally my goal was to visit the Bibliographic Institute of the National Library of Latvia to gather information for a presentation I have to give at a Slavic studies conference this fall. When I first visited Latvia as a librarian for the Latvian Studies Center in 1990, it took me quite a while to understand their library set-up and the role of the Bibliographic Institute (BI). It maintains statistics on publishing throughout the republic, later country and publishes the national bibliography - an index of all publications and all articles in periodicals published in the country and about the country. In 1990 the BI was independent, but it is logical that it is now a division of the National Library. The descriptions created for this national bibliography are modified for the catalog and our Library of Congress considers their cataloging qualitative enough that they use these records for their catalog.

Lots of interesting topics arose in our conversations, for instance the issue of authority files. Latvians tend to butcher non-Latvian names by writing them as Latvians would pronounce them, for example Dzeimss Dzoiss (James Joyce) and Ijans Makjuens (Ian McEwan). Now in the days of electronic databases and non-Latvian users, they have to add the original spelling authority files.

Of course they have tried to keep up with the explosion of technological advances, but have entered the game a little late. They have been creating the indexes with the help of computers since the late 1980's and, but do not provide access to the international databases we use regularly. Full text is minimally available - mostly from a company providing full text for pay to newspapers from 1994 and some journals from recent years. They have moved from a print index to online and CD-ROM, but with the availability of Internet connections throughout libraries in the country (thanks to the Bill Gates Foundation), they will be dropping the CD-ROM version this year.

Another fascinating project is to retrospectively convert all the old bibliographies and indexes. I remember being amazed at the extent of indexing done in the Baltics - all on catalog cards in rooms full of card catalog cabinets. The main reading room in the National Library today has only one room of computers, the other is still the card catalog. It didn't look like they would ever be converted, but with advanced scanning and character recognition programs, they are beginning to convert this mass of bibliographic information. They have the book descriptions entered back to 1920. The old orthography and hand written cards are a special challenge.

Since Latvia still does not have a single building for their National Library, it is scattered throughout the capital city of Riga. I left the Bibliographic Institute in Old Town and went to meet Director Andris Vilks in the main building that also houses the administrative offices. He gave me the background I needed for my research on the changes in the National Library over the late 1980's and early 1990's.

The new building project for the library - The Castle of Light has taken so long to start, that people have lost enthusiasm and are now opposed to the government wasting money on the building. Some question the need for a building in today's online information world, others don't like the architectural design, created by Gunars Birkerts, a Latvian architect from the Detroit area. (It seemed more appropriate when it was first proposed over 10 years ago.) Others are upset that some interesting old buildings were razed to clear space for the new library.

I enjoy the way traveling abroad gives me glimpses of other lives. On the long flight there I sat next to a man from LA who was going to Uganda to distribute Bibles for the Gideons. (They have already provided Bibles to all the new hotels that have been built in China for the Olympics.) In Sweden I had an Iranian taxi driver, that had lived there 20 years. He asked what city I was from and I had to tell him that Kalamazoo was near Chicago. "Oh, gangsters!" Still. Another man was returning to visit his sick father from Italy, where he has taught English for the last 28 years. A young woman from Germany was visiting her boyfriend, who had an internship at Princeton. All interesting lives.

My friends and relatives were very interested in who we were going to elect as our next president. One thought that if we elected Obama, it would mean an end to our racial problems. Others were intently watching the dollar and our economic woes. Though I have seen incredible progress in Latvia, especially in living conditions, they too seem to be in a building slump. Banks are no longer lending money for building projects, and some have over-borrowed to build their dream homes or projects.

Michigan Academy Annual Meeting 2008

2008-03-10T11:38:00.004-04:00

Not only was this year's Michigan Academy meeting conveniently located on our own campus, I thought we had some very interesting presentations. It was great there were a lot of presentations from Western, as I learned about new things happening in my own institution.

An Improved OpenURL Resolver Menu System. George Boston and Deborah Mouw, WMU - George and Deborah talked about the way they redesigned the SFX system to work for us, and I think it was a very worthwhile process to be shared with others.

Reordering the Ordering Process and Workflow in Acquisitions. Randle Gedeon, WMU - We don't really get to find out what others are doing in their units, and this was a good overview of the changes down in Acquisitions.

Using CONTENTdm at Central Michigan University Library. Ruth M. Helwig, CMU - Very interesting to hear about the process (I am obsessed with processes) of getting an institutional depository going at CMU.

How Can Using an Online Storage Material Request Form Facilitate Document Delivery? Birong Ho, WMU - Again a very useful process to share with others.

Beyond Access: Transformation of Primary Source Materials. Sheila Bair, WMU - Totally fascinating. I knew our Civil War diaries were cool, and that a lot of work went into digitizing them and adding metadata, but Sheila just made this snippet of history come so alive. She got a lot of questions, which showed that her topic and presentation were very engaging.

Institutional Functional Analysis of Archival Records: A Practical Application at Northern Michigan University. Marcus C. Robyns, NMU and Jason Woolman, University of British Columbia - This presentation made me realize how little I know about archive work. I don't even know how Sharon and her crew organize all of our institutional archives. Marcus addressed ways to keep track of the ever changing university structure and important records, a daunting task.

Principles and Practices for Library Outreach to First Year Students. Jane P. Currie, Hope College - Jane reviewed programs to first years. What I liked best was their flexibility at Hope. For a while they tried one thing, then when that wasn't working as well as they would have liked, tried something else.

First Year Experience at Western Michigan University Libraries. Dianna E. Sachs, Western Michigan University - Dianna had a nice overview of the programs we are offering FYE students.

Learning Outcomes, Instructional Design, and the 50-Minute Information Literacy Session. Sara D. Miller, Michigan State University - Sara's presentation had the most implications for my own work. I admire her undertaking instruction in this manner - dividing the class into 5 groups, each finding a different type of resource for the class (a scholarly article, background information, opinion piece, book and website) without instruction. Then each group presents what they found and she gently guides them to better tools. She said it was a real eye opener to see how they really search.

Women Library Leaders as Trailblazers: Mary Spencer and Loleta Fyan. Sharon Ladenson and Portia Vescio, Michigan State University. - Interesting to hear about early Michigan State Librarians and the challenges they faced. One had little formal education, while the other was the first professionally trained state librarian. Michigan has had women State librarians from 1869 to 1968. Laurel has studies these ladies herself and her questions afterward were about the use of archival materials.

On the Family Track: the Effect of Motherhood on the Tenure and Promotion of Library Faculty in Higher Education. Elizabeth Bucciarelli, Eastern Michigan University - Elizabeth had found almost no research on the effects of motherhood on library faculty, so the research she did find was mostly about faculty at universities in general. She plans on doing an in depth research study on this topic. One interesting factor came up in discussion, that librarians might be more supportive of each other than other faculty, as we work together more closely.

Research Behavior of Graduate Engineering Students as Evidenced by Citation Patterns in Master’s Theses and PhD Dissertations. Edward J. Eckel, Western Michigan University - I hadn't seen this aspect of Ed's citation analysis. His results weren't surprising, that PhD dissertations use more scholarly resources than Master's Theses, but there was interesting information on the type of resources used by engineers.

Using Toolbars to Deliver Library-Related Information. Michael C. Sensiba, Wayne State University - Mike talked about toolbars that can be customized to provide links to library users without them having to go to the library home page. It wasn't clear to me why students would download this toolbar, but it it definitely cool and great alternative for library resource users - including ourselves.

Data Curation: A New Frontier in Faculty-Librarian Collaboration. John M. Potter, ITT Technical Institute - This was the last presentation in a long day of presentations, but it is an interesting idea - that librarians could help teaching faculty manage the data sets they create. In the beginning I thought this was just an extension of an Institutional repository, but it is actually a lot more, and there is now a degree available in data curation.

Samuel Tietse from France and Carol A. Zeile from Alma College did not present.

ACE Internationalization Collaborative Annual Meeting

2008-02-15T15:04:00.003-05:00

Faculty Engagement in Comprehensive Internationalization
February 1 - 2, 2008, Washington, DC

Comprehensive Internationalization
Though this has been the focus of the last few ACE meetings, I think I really understood this concept better this time. I think WMU is striving for comprehensive internationalization, but I now see that it needs a much more organized effort to really make it happen. The process involves the following:

1. Select a leadership team
2. Articulate global learning outcomes
3. Conduct an Internationalization Review
4. Develop an Internationalization Plan

Why do we need to do this?

Small number of our students get abroad
Non-traditional students have even less time to study abroad
Faculty may still be lukewarm about internationalization in the curriculum
We are not always good at connecting things we are already doing

Learning Outcomes
It is important to get internationalization into the whole fabric of the university, so it is not considered an add-on, but part of what we all do, with outcomes in:

University mission statement
General education
Departmental and class outcomes

Internationalization Review - Self Study
This is an important piece of the comprehensive internationalization process and it was suggested not to rush this process, and involve as many people on campus as possible in the conversation.

Environmental scan – compare to other universities
Internationalization inventory – what doing already
Survey & do focus groups with faculty, staff & students

Faculty Involvement
Internationalization needs to be faculty driven, because when faculty members are not on board, internationalization will not be implemented effectively. Some ideas from the meeting:

Fund for international initiatives
Mini-grants for developing short term study abroad, or internationalizing course
Survey faculty
Hold conferences and workshops
Visit departments with a small group
Send faculty overseas

Encourage applying for Fulbright & other grants in unusual places

Work on professional organizations to encourage teaching global perspective
Have proactive leadership leading discussions, providing examples
Create a support and reward structure
Include in tenure and promotion considerations
Work on current grad students – they will be future faculty members
Explain initiatives to faculty advisors, so they can inform their students

Staff and Administration
Get all players involved – administration, faculty, staff, and students

Student affairs, admissions, budget, career services
Open programs to staff too

One school has staff (including custodial, cafeteria, office) accompany freshmen on trip to UK
Have staff do logistical planning and then come on trip

Students

Internationalization linked to improved student retention and engagement
Parents and students come in with expectations of study abroad, but few do
Innovative advising techniques – “Picture Yourself Global”, “Get Global!”
First year experience – live and learn together, go abroad first semester, etc.
International Café (Hawaii)
Support international clubs
Involve international students in classes and co-curricular activities

Other issues

International and Multicultural – more institutions are integrating these, ACE is holding a symposium in June
International service learning – can be major draw

Internationalization Across the Curriculum
To give those students who don’t have the opportunity to study abroad, and even those that do, to experience and reflect on international and global issues. Some ideas and issues:

Designate certain courses as “international” – some don’t like the “I” designation
Some go abroad, some explore an ethnic, cultural group in the area
Use the knowledge of international faculty, staff and students, multiculturalism in class
Draw on global issues –global warming, health, environment
Create courses that fulfill various requirements – program, ethics, internationalization
Parallel to writing across curriculum – don’t want people saying “someone else will teach that” – involve in everything
Co-curricular events – international education weeks, festivals, community involvement

Study Abroad
So that it can’t be said that this is just partying in a different time zone, goals must be clear for the study abroad experiences. Students must be adequately prepared.

Articulate outcomes
Debrief – K-College does an overnight retreat afterwards
Ask them to reflect, write papers
Ask questions about how their discipline handled in other country
Have students do workshops for others
Assess
Goal could be at least one study abroad program for each department (Juniata)
Work with financial aid

Projects

Global Connections Experience (Arcadia, PA) – must spend a semester in a community other than their own.
Global Design Studio (IUPUI) – an architectural service learning project throughout the world, but currently focused on New Orleans and Indonesia – helping to rebuild after disasters. Involves, engineers, journalists and other departments and local communities and businesses.
Global Learning for All (Kennesaw State University, GA) - A Quality Enhancement Plan project for accreditation affected the whole campus and made all the international efforts more cohesive. Impressive changes in five years.
Global Learning Certification -(Kennesaw State University, GA) – some may choose to get this additional certification, which should be useful in getting jobs.
Ground water project in Bangladesh (Wagner, Staten Island, NY) – project involved chemistry, environmental studies, biology.

Internationalization Laboratory
ACE Internationalization Collaborative offers this opportunity to 8 institutions every year, to go through an extensive process to move to the next level in internationalization. Timing is important and this might be a good time for WMU with new president and dean. Doing this with ACE gives more weight to our actions. The lab includes:

A site visit
Meeting with cohorts at beginning and after 6 months
Monthly meetings with Barbara Hill
Meetings with leaders throughout campus
Writing a report including a plan for the future

Some definitions:

Global – denoting the systems and phenomena that transcend national borders

Global learning – international, global, and intercultural learning

Globalization – avoid, because it has negative connotations

International – focusing on the nations and their relationships

Intercultural – focusing on knowledge and skills to understand and navigate cultural differences

Internationalization – process by which institutions foster global learning

Comprehensive internationalization – strategic and integrated approach to internationalization – articulate internationalization as institutional goal, develop internationalization plan, bring together the different aspects of internationalization

Co-Curricular activities - previously known as Extracurricular Activities are activities that education organizations in some parts of the world create for school students. They serve to promote a variety of activities which all school students must attend alongside the standard study curriculum. (from Wikipedia)

“Inter” Framework – intergenerational, inter-cultural, international, interdisciplinary, inter-institutional

Internationalizing in DC

2008-02-03T20:15:00.000-05:00

I’ve just gotten back from a great conference in DC. I love to travel and go to conferences, especially when I’m “in the flow” and I keep meeting interesting people or things happen. First of all, I missed the snow storm by hours and got out of Kalamazoo and Detroit more or less on time. Then I had a great conversation on the plane to DC (no middle person), with a guy who spent most of his career in mental health, used to lead the drug and alcohol abuse programs in Maryland, now is evaluating health programs throughout the country. Since my first job was in a state hospital in Ohio, we had lots to talk about. My favorite story of his was about a group of dispirited vets, and the problem of foster care kids needing a place to stay between homes. He had gotten an old house for the kids that needed a lot of repairs, but had no funds. The vets stepped in and fixed and painted the house, just asked that it be called Rainbow Beginnings. He told me to look out for the George Bush Center for Intelligence (CIA) sign on the drive to my friends’ house. Made me smile each time I passed it.

The conference was the American Council on Education (ACE) Internationalization Collaborative annual meeting. I know it’s another absurdly long title. But WMU is part of this collaborative of higher education institutions that are trying to work towards better international programs. The buzzword this time was “comprehensive internationalization.” Western has some pretty impressive programs going, but we are still looking at how to make sure every graduate is ready to function in the ever changing global environment, even if they don’t do study abroad or don’t hang out with our international students.

I attended one of the pre-conferences that was focused on doing an Internationalization Review, and extended process of evaluating where you are and where you want to go. I am in an International Education Council (IEC) working group trying to review the state of Western’s internationalization across the curriculum, but I think we might need to think more broadly about reviewing all of our internationalization efforts and seeing how they interconnect or could connect. I also found myself thinking how we could apply this to the library. We are doing this with our strategic planning, various task forces, LibQual and other initiatives, but I’m not seeing where we are going clearly. Maybe it’s just me.

The conference itself consisted of plenary sessions with panels, and breakout discussion groups on the topic presented either by discipline or type of institution we represented. Many interesting projects and initiatives were presented. Some stick out in my mind:

Global Design Studio (IUPUI) – an architecture professor works with his students on real life situations throughout the world and has students design appropriate housing for people who have lost their homes in disasters like Katrina in New Orleans and the tsunami in Indonesia. They work with local communities as well as local companies to make sure they are fulfilling actual needs. This has expanded way beyond architecture into an interdisciplinary project, where students and faculty from other university departments are involved - environmentalists, health workers, social workers, journalists, and more.

Arcadia University (PA, outside Philadelphia) has a couple of amazing things they do with their freshmen. First of all they take every freshman, 500 of them, to the UK during spring break. This 8 day trip is often their first outside the country, so there is a lot of preparatory work, lots of hand-holding, debriefing, etc. and they only charge the students $300. Arcadia also houses the Center for Educational Abroad, which is a service providing study abroad opportunities for students from many universities, so they have the staff and facilities in place overseas. The other part of this project that was really exciting was that to chaperone the students, they ask staff to come along – and not just staff from the international office – this includes all staff – custodial, cafeteria and office workers throughout the campus. The second freshmen project is that they have some freshmen do their first semester abroad. They actually get much more individual attention that they would on the US campus, and the experience solidifies a cohort that stays together through graduation, an event that happens at a much higher rate than usual.

The most library oriented thing I did was my meeting with the head of the European Reading Room at the Library of Congress. I am going to be on his panel about the changes in book chambers in the post-Soviet republics at the Slavic studies conference in November. We will look at how many of these national bibliography agencies have been incorporated into the national libraries. After discussing our panel, we had a wonderful Indian dinner prepared by his French wife. (He specializes in Romania.) Is that international enough?

During a break on the second day, I just had to stretch my legs and went outside to find a beautiful sunny day. As I walked down the block I came upon the Society of the Cincinnati, with a sign that their museum was open for a couple of hours on this day. I couldn’t resist peeking in. The guide swooped down on me and asked how much time I had – 15 minutes – OK, she’d give me a 15 minute tour. And here I was going to stretch my legs and cool my brain, but got an intense lecture on Larz and Isabel Anderson, who built this house by 1905, to have a place to entertain when the Congress started sessions –I guess it was THE place to be. He was an ambassador, she the richest woman of her time – her father controlled the Boston Harbor for a while. When Mr. Anderson died in 1937, the building and most of its contents was donated to the Society of the Cincinnati – an exclusive club of male descendants of officers of the American Revolution - both Lafayette’s and Washington’s men. The Society is an historical and educational organization that promotes knowledge of the Revolution. The house was amazing, as could be expected. Marble floors, paintings including a massive painting by Villegas that no museum wanted and was brought to town on their yacht, choir stalls taken out of some poor European church – for decoration, not religious reasons. Of course I was a few minutes late to my next session.

After the conference was over, I needed to air my brain, before heading to an evening with my friends. I went to see the Vietnam Memorial. It definitely has a reverent aura around it, especially in light of the ongoing loss of American lives overseas. I hadn’t climbed up to see Lincoln’s memorial since my parents took me there as a child. That huge, gleaming white sculpture also left me in awe. I was there just at dusk, so I saw the incredible view from the Lincoln Memorial, down the reflecting pool towards the Washington Monument transform in the changing light. I seem to remember quite a few movie moments occurring here. On the way back to my car I saw Einstein’s memorial. I loved the clumpy sculpture (I am sure there is a more sophisticated term for this) of this brilliant man, in his rumpled sweater and sandals, casually sitting with one foot up, papers in his hand. Though the sculpture is substantially larger than life, it looks like he was a short man. At his feet is a celestial map.

To end my delightful experience, at my friends, we played Cranium – I was partnered with my 10 year old goddaughter, and we had fun guessing each other’s charades, songs, drawings, spelling words backwards, running around the house finding things, figuring out words in categories. We tried to do most of it in Latvian, but some of the word games had to stay in English.

The Regan National Airport was also a new adventure, as I have always driven to DC, never flown in. I somehow didn’t realize how close it was to downtown and the main mall – just across the river in Virginia. It was strange to be greeted by the Washington Monument as I was driving away from the airport. Leaving this morning I had my first experience with a new safety contraption that shot bursts of air from head to toe. This was looking for explosive chemicals on me. Ah yes, we must be especially vigilant for terrorists in the capital. But as we were taking off above the city, and I saw all those government buildings, I realized that there is a lot of power concentrated in one area that could be vulnerable to attacks by those who hate us. Though we have given them plenty of reasons why, it was still a bit disconcerting.

Reading as an addiction

2007-12-22T10:36:00.000-05:00

Great quote from Diane Setterfield in the back of her book The Thirteenth Tale. (see my review) Setterfield is answering the question:
Margaret says on page 4 that reading can be dangerous. In what ways do you think that is true, besides falling off of stone walls while wrapped in a story?

an excerpt of Setterfield's answer:
... about whether reading could be considered an addiction. It is, after all, mind altering. (I'd be interested to know what what happens inside the brain, chemically and structurally, when someone reads. It might shed light on the reading addiction question.) I know there are people who don't read fiction at all and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time. ... I find it so soothing to have another mind I can just hop into by opening a book. In fact if I have to get a train and I don't have enough reading with me, I can feel quite panicky. So am I addicted? And is it dangerous?
...
Is reading dangerous? I don't know. But I know one thing that is always dangerous, and that is not living. So I resist the lure of the kitchen/library. For now, at least.

IUPUI Library

2007-07-04T16:04:00.001-04:00

While visiting Indianapolis, I stopped by in the IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis) Library It serves a mostly commuter population of 21,000. The main library is five stories, the lower level containing the archives, an auditorium and student lounge with vending machines. The first floor has the Teaching & Learning Cetner and the IUPUI Office for Professional Development, Library administrations and some meeting rooms. The second floor is the main floor of the library with circulation and the reference area, which includes an Academic Commons, reduced reference stacks, current periodicals, micorforms, and government documents in compressed shelving. The Academic Commons consists of numerous computers - regular single service stations, an area for multi-media, and a couple of areas with wavy partitions, tables with computers for groups, with movable tables, chairs, and white boards for working. This was largely funded by local businesses interested in technically savvy workers. There was also a special philanthropy library on this floor and the grad student at the reference desk had gotten a MA in philanthropy studies and showed me that they are offering the first PhD program in the field. The third and fourth floors were quiet areas with book stacks, four areas of 28 computers each with a computer consultant on the fourth floor. There were faculty offices (library and university), banks of carrels, all having electrical outlets and various other connections available. Grad carrels were out in the open, but had lockable cabinets. Every floor had comfy seating areas. Almost all the computer needed login access.

Reference Question from UN Diplomat

2007-06-29T10:45:00.000-04:00

I don't know how to title this. On one hand it was a wonderful personal adventure, on the other it was the ultimate answer to a reference question, it also talks to trust and serendipity. I just want to share the story with friends and colleagues who might appreciate it.

Yesterday afternoon I got a phone call at the Reference Desk from a woman who asked if we had a student ride service. She needed a ride for her husband, a UN diplomat, from Kalamazoo to Charlevoix or at least Cadillac ASAP. I spent some time trying to find a service like that for her, we even called one of our students, but found nothing. Before I could call the woman back, her husband called - he has just started the job at the UN, and just ended his job with Newsweek, so his credit cards don't work. I started thinking, maybe I could give this interesting person the ride. I left numbers with a colleague for safety's sake and went to pick him up at the airport. He provided the most delightful two and a half hours of conversation I've had in a long time.

Michael Meyer started as a banker, was bored, wrote a list of what he'd really like to do - travel, meet people, be on the edge of change, and realized that he could be a foreign correspondent. The next day he requested an application to the journalism program at Columbia.

Mike was working for Newsweek when in 1988 he applied to be the East European correspondent. Someone else got the job, but decided that would not be a good career move, as nothing much was happening there, so Mike took the position. He traveled extensively throughout Eastern Europe during the times of change. He even visited Latvia in 1991, the year of the barricades and eventual freedom. So you can imagine we had a lot to discuss. He is now writing a book titled 1989: The Year the World Changed (or something like that). In writing his book he is going through foreign policy memos and is amazed at how wrong Condoleezza Rice was about the Soviet Union back then. As a journalist he could see that there were real changes happening.

At one point he took over a year off to live in Kosovo and worked with the UN peace keeping mission. Then back to Newsweek, the European office, then focused on technology issues in the mid 90's. I'll have to read some of his articles (276 for his name and Newsweek in ProQuest).

Three weeks ago he started working for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as head of communications. (Thank goodness I had just read an article about Ki-moon.) Mike's job is to find the "voice" for Ki-moon, some way to communicate his ideas to the world. While we were driving, Mike got a phone call from someone at the UN, who was upset about an article that had just appeared in the journal Foreign Policy, criticizing Ki-moon's first six months at the UN. Mike knows the editor of Foreign Policy and promised to get out a letter to the editor soon. Later he got a text message that it wasn't in the journal, but on a blog. Mike had warned them that the six month mark was coming up and to be prepared for criticism.

Turns out that Mike has been on the Council of Foreign Relations for the last ten years. I have been in their office in NYC, because one of my Latvian teachers - Janis Kreslins - worked in the library there. They publish the journal Foreign Affairs. I just lucked out that I knew something about most of the things we talked about.

Mike's wife Suzanne is a champion of using games for educational purposes. He described A Force More Powerful, a game of nonviolent strategy. Mike recommended the book Everything Bad is Good for You that talks to this. In our brief phone conversation Suzanne mentioned that she is working with a major foundation, and that funding for libraries has recently come up. Must be why she thought to call us.

Anyway, the time flew by and I've got an invitation to lunch in NYC, a tour of the UN, and an introduction to the General-Secretary, if he's in his office. The chances of collecting on that are slim, but just thinking about the possibility is fun.

I didn't consider this to be going the extra mile (or 300 miles) in answering a reference question, but a wonderful adventure.

Best of ACRL in Baltimore

2007-04-02T11:21:00.000-04:00

The best presentations had little to do with libraries, but the two keynote speakers I had the privilege to hear were outstanding. Michael Eric Dyson, a scholar who has written on the effect of Hurricane Katrina on the Black community, has refuted Bill Cosby, analyzed rap, and more, just about rapped his whole speech. I was amazed and wondered what David Isaacson would have made of him. His sense of the language was incredible, he covered many relevant topics to librarians and he explained the linguistic complexity of Ebonics. This was entertaining and informational all at once.

John Waters, director of movies like Hairspray and Polyester, though I only have seen his Pink Flamingos, was entertaining and edgy. Most would think this was too outlandish for librarians, but he knew he was talking to one of the most liberal minded groups ever – at least in the sense that we fight hard to protect everyone’s freedom of speech. Waters has definitely been one of those to test the limits. He suggested some ways librarians could increase the interest in libraries – by disrobing (no one would believe it happened), padding crotches, translating books into Ebonics, if kids are on drugs – act like we are on drugs. I found myself laughing a lot, though not everyone at my table was laughing, so even among librarians, this was a bit edgy. I found his talk refreshing, like refreshing your palette between courses, this refreshed my mind between serious conference presentations.

Before I get to the nitty-gritty, I have to say the session that excited me the most personally and has gotten me dreaming pipe dreams, was a session on information literacy in the Arab countries. I went to see if I could glean some ideas for our international students, but instead, I am ready to take off and work in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. One of the presenters was Carol Hansen, my mentor at the Immersion program a few years back, who was just getting ready to go to UAE. She presented with a colleague from Zayed University in UAE, and another colleague from the American University in Cairo. After the session a man from a Midwest college was talking about being asked to set up a library in UAE for an engineering college being set up by his school. These places are looking for librarians, and Dubai sounded like a very interesting place to go. Wonder if I could talk my son into going?r (I think they usually ask for a 3 year contract, so it might be after he’s done with high school.)

Otherwise the most exciting session was from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on the things they have done to appeal to the millennials. Whenever I have heard Lisa Hinchcliffe speak, she has impressed me, and this was no exception. Their undergrad library is full to capacity and beyond, starting from the second half of the semester. Their circulation statistics have gone up tremendously. What are they doing?

Learning Commons – with coordinator
Combined four service desks – circulation, reference, media booking, and ??? (have to check)
Gaming nights
Purchased games and game consoles (Playstations, X-boxes)

75% of the games are out at any one time
Have chosen to get a few less books

Check out laptops, MP3 players and more
Videos and DVDs out of closed stacks -open circulation
Priority to digital formats – who uses print reference sources willingly?
Quiet study areas are in other libraries, but students have self designated the lower level as quiet

These are all good ideas, but the thing that amazed me the most, was that from idea to implementation takes about 2 to 3 weeks for them. They are not afraid to try things, change policies, and if they don’t work, they go back, and move on. The only real example of things not working was that when they combined the service desks, they thought they didn’t need a real chain of command, and that responsibilities would work out for themselves and they didn’t.

There were many, many good ideas presented in panels, papers, poster sessions, exhibits, and just in talking with people. The rest I will try to organize into categories.

Web 2.0/ MySpace/ FaceBook/ Second Life

Create a library search box that students can put on MySpace or Web CT
Use FaceBook to offer lib help to specific classes
Use student blogs to advertise what student life is like at WMU

Librarians can search and respond to any research issues

Get involved with Second Life – even if it isn’t used for traditional reference yet, we need to know how to maneuver in it

Tutorials

Trends: shorter, modular, point of need, more interactivity, assessment component, gaming elements
Use multimedia creation software, team approach, oustource parts, get grant support
Trends in use – course requirement, links from course mgmt systems, distance learning, marketing to select groups, point of need “push” marketing

Reference

Side by side reference, sometimes with 2 computers, so students can do with you
Reference blog – a special blog to keep track of reference questions – keeps statistics, lets you see how students and your colleagues are answering questions, lets you add ideas, makes it easier for repeat questions (open source)

Information Literacy Assessment

South Dakota continues to refine their Info Lit Exam and we could still be beta testers
James Madison seems to be another one to check out
SAILS – seems ready for prime time according to a poster session

Subject Guides

Portland State has created Topic Watch guides for business & film studies

Composed of RSS feeds (news blogs), podcasts, webinars, federated search, some programmable websites, new book lists

International

Get involved with Study Abroad programs – help prepare students

Miscellaneous

Creative commons – new term I learned for open publication license

Michigan Academy Annual Meeting 2007

2007-03-26T16:58:00.000-04:00

Michigan Academy of Science Arts and Letters Annual Meeting
Library and Information Science Section
Friday, March 9, 2007
Held at Ferris State University, Big Rapids, MI

Presider: Aparna Zambare, Central Michigan University

SESSION 1

Material requests in an electronic environment. Joe Badics, Eastern Michigan University Library
Badics reported how they have phased out paper forms for acquisitions at EMU, and analyzed the requests received. 80% are for books, 78% requests were filled. The most interesting analysis concerned who was requesting materials. Art and history were the most active, 50% of the requests came from 4 people (or some other very small number.) Only 42 our of 736 faculty are requesting materials and only 30 students out of thousands. Many departments are not requesting anything. Another side note – people don’t use reserves much.

Trends in Online Library Tutorials. Maira Bundza, Western Michigan University

Consumer Health Websites as a Platform for Teaching Evaluation of Internet Content in a Library Instruction Course. Robin M. Sabo, Central Michigan University
50% of adults are not health literate, and since looking for health issues is the third most common use of the Internet, maybe librarians can help. In the Introduction to Library Research class, Sabo has students evaluate health websites, such as www.lasikathome.com hoax site. There are public initiatives for improving information literacy as well as health literacy.

Teaching the Evidence-Based Practice Model in an Academic Health Sciences Library. Elizabeth Retzel Bucciarelli, Eastern Michigan University

Process of Constructing Medical Strategic Information Sources Use Value: Applications to Brussels (Belgium) and Lyon (France) Universities hospitals Setting. Samuel Tietse, University of Lille3 (France)
This librarian from France shared his research on the information sources used by medical professionals. One of the most often used was online contact with colleagues.

Googleocity: Information at the Speed of Chaos. Rhonda Fowler and Susann deVries, Eastern Michigan University

Sharing the New, Cool and Useful: WSU’s Emerging Issues Forum. Michael C. Sensiba, Wayne State University
This was the most interesting session on a way to keep librarians aware and on top of rapid and profound change. Using a commercial website Squidoo as a tool, Michael posts materials on this site for pre-discussion reading, which helps focus the discussion, and allows those who were unable to attend to still get the information. Discussions have been held on Social Networking http://www.squidoo.com/eifsocialnetworking/ , Viral Marketing & Libraries http://www.squidoo.com/eifviralmarketing/ , Citation Management http://www.squidoo.com/eifcitationmanagement/, and the next one will be on Second Life.

Why Should My Library Be Involved in the Institutional Repository? Ruth Helwig, Central Michigan University

Digital Commons Inspires Chapbook Project For Urban High School Poets: A Wayne State University Libraries Community Outreach Program. Lothar Spang, Wayne State University, and Deborah J. Tucker, Wayne State University
These librarians talked about an outreach project, where they encouraged at risk kids to write poems and then format them for in print and digital publication. Students were proud of their work, wanted a print copy and were interested in keeping the rights to their work.

LUNCH KEYNOTE
Challenges of Undergraduate Education – Mark Harris, Ferris State University

SESSION 2

PromptCat or Brief: Using Vendors Records in the Acquisitions Process. Randle Gedeon, Western Michigan University
I learned what we are doing in our own institution!

Teaching Our Teachers Part Two: Identifying, Ranking, and Assessing the Acquisition of Core Competencies for Instruction Librarians. Sarah Fabian, Eastern Michigan University

Patron privacy are we serious? Daniel Fidel Ferrer, Central Michigan University

Venturing off the island: Librarian involvement in the campus community. Jennifer Starkey & Angela Kelleher, Alma College

Faculty Status and Collective Bargaining: Panel Discussion of Professional Issues for Academic Librarians. Panel Presentation: Daniel Ferrer, Central Michigan University, Scott Garrison, Galen Rike, and Dianna Sachs, Western Michigan University

Notes from Charlottesville

2006-09-27T12:36:00.000-04:00

Barbara and I are enjoying our time in the town of Charlottesville, which in some ways is very similar to Kalamazoo – the airport is about the same size, the university is a large part of the town and economy, and downtown consists of a pedestrian mall anchored by an hotel – the Omni, where we are staying. The first night I was talking on my cell to my son and looking out of my hotel room window, across the open atrium, I saw lights beyond the trees and people circling around. Turns out they have put an ice arena there and a hockey game was going on. Looking for dinner, Barbara and I left the hotel and found ourselves in a bustling pedestrian mall – full of restaurants, bars, galleries, book and gift shops. Later I talked to friends who live here and they said that their downtown mall almost died too, but they didn’t give up, drew in the hotel, opened a movie theater, the skating rink, and people started coming, restaurants opened, and now it is very much alive. The university is about a mile away, but the merchants have paid for a free trolley service to bring students downtown. We used it to get to a reception at the university library and found it is well used.

I have to admit I didn’t know anything about the University of Virginia before coming here, so the following is just a miniscule window to the place, but I have to say I really liked what I saw. It was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson (called Mr. Jefferson by UVA folks), and his influence is still felt today. He designed the first buildings – two rows of buildings with a huge Lawn in between. The buildings alternated between two story “pavilions” and one story rooms for students. Faculty lived on the second floor of the pavilions with classes below. Each pavilion has its own unique set of columns and friezes, and there is a fenced walkway along the rooftops connecting all the pavilions, so the faculty could visit without dealing with the student riff-raff. Jefferson loved visual games, so there are some unique things about the spacing too. Behind each pavilion were two sets of gardens, set off by snaking brick walls – an upper garden for flowers, the lower for animals. Today, the pavilions still house upper level administrators, and the student rooms are the most prestigious place to live on campus, or on the grounds, as they say here. There is a tough competition for these rooms that have their own fireplaces, and a stack of university provided wood outside, but they have no air conditioning or bathrooms – students have to go outside and use a group bathroom. The rooms are awarded by a point system based on university involvement. When students graduate, they gather by the Rotunda (former library) – at one end of the Lawn, come around the sides of the rotunda and march eight abreast down the Lawn to the amphitheater where graduation is held. So graduation is called “Walking the Lawn” around here.

I had to look up the quick facts. It is usually ranked first or second best public university by US News & World Report (though their state funding is down to 12%) and in the top 25 universities in general, usually comparable to the University of Michigan. They have 20,000 students, of which 4700 are grads, and 1700 are in law or medicine.

The Libraries are a happy place. They have numerous libraries scattered around campus, but we got to see three that are next to each other. The reception was at the Harrison Institute – a new special collections library that has a reception building above ground, but the collection is housed underneath the lawn and is marked by a few skylights that are visible above ground. I missed the reception, as I was having dinner with some family friends that teach at UVA, so I just took a quick look around and was duly impressed – similar to the underground set-up at Cornell.

Alderman Library is the Humanities & Social Sciences graduate library. I was most interested in seeing their Information Commons set-up, though I don’t think they call it that. As you walk in the door into the large main hall, you see it is divided into 4 areas: the café, the comfy seating area, the computers, and the circulation/information/reference desk. We talked to the circ students and they explained that they will answer simple reference questions if they are asked and know them, otherwise they are handled by the reference people. There is also an IT consultant available to answer technical questions at most times. There was a small ready reference collection by the desk. The reference room with a reference collection comparable to ours was off of the main hall. At the other end of the main hall was a passage to the Scholars Lab. This is a new area with high end computers, scanners and other equipment. It is used by students and faculty to create digital projects. My friend Dr. Benjamin Ray had worked with this lab to scan and XML code the transcripts of the Salem witch trials and had used the GIS system to locate the proximity of the accusers and accused. Barbara and I talked to the woman working there and she explained that is was a joint effort between the library and IT. Specialized IT help was split between this lab that mostly helps with digitizing and GIS projects, while the scientific software experts went to the science library. The quiet study area was two stories below in the former rare book area – with dark paneling, comfortable furniture, and old style feel like in our Meader Room.

The Clemons Library is the undergraduate library and we just had time to peek in the first floor main room. The room was full and bustling and Barbara and I thought it rather loud. The room was one large open space with different pods for computers, comfortable chairs, and tables. Along one wall were booths with padded seating and a table for working. As you walked in, there was a circulation/information desk – which acted as both circulation and reference. In the middle of the room was an IT consultant’s desk, which was not staffed at the time (8:30pm), and the reference person complained about them constantly changing their schedule. On one side was a Reserves desk.

My faculty friend said everyone was very happy with the library. They get books delivered to their offices, and he talked of a Tool Kit, which I later found out was a home grown course management software, that lets faculty create their own online coursepacks/course reserves. They have also negotiated for lower prices on journals with the help of lawyers.

ALA - Exhibits

2006-07-03T14:40:00.000-04:00

I spent quite a few hours in the exhibits, including time getting a few signed books and picking up quite a few free galley proofs (the pile is in the Reference office for anyone to read, but please return them.) Below are notes on some things that were related to my work and may impact our library as a whole.

Russian/International/Multicultural materials
I’ll have to talk to Bettina on how we are developing our international and multi-cultural collection that supports various programs and could support internationalization across the curriculum.
East View – we can have a minimal selection plan with them. I will have to talk to Dasha Nisula, and maybe some of the local Russian community, what we should order.
Russia Online is another one of the major vendors for Russian materials. They had an interesting encyclopedia of Russian military equipment and tour books for Ukraine.
SpeakEasy http://www.speakeasyspanish.com/ provides a series of books called Survival Spanish. We have been talking in the International Ed. Council about the need for courses that teach a professional enough of a language, to be able deal with clients, without learning all about the grammar, etc. Speak Easy has been teaching courses to health care workers, bankers, construction folk, and many others. The course materials have evolved into books and CD’s. I’ve talked to Maria about this.
Multicultural Books and Videos (in Michigan!) – I picked up the main catalogs from this company, that covers Arabic, Chinese, Farsi/Persian, French, German, Haitian-Creole, Hmong, Italian, Korean, Languages of India, Polish, Portugese, Romanian, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Turkish, and Vietnamese, with dictionaries available in more languages, and contacts to get to materials in even more languages.

Other things to possibly order
PREP Publishing has a series of Real-Resumes for X (various different fields) http://www.prep-pub.com/
AskART.com was an interesting American art database.
College Prowler publishes guides and grades for 200 top colleges and some regional guides based on student evaluations. I think we should get a few, at least the ones for UofM, MSU, Chicago schools, Ivy League, Big 10. http://www.collegeprowler.com/

Chat Reference
Tutor.com has an Ask a Librarian service http://tutor.com/products/aal.aspx that can work in tandem with our own – they would cover hours we were not available.
QuestionPoint is still out there from OCLC to help provide 24/7 reference.

Audio Books
Playaway is a new system of listening. It works like an I-pod and all the controls are right on the book.
NAXOS carries a lot of classics.

Systems
There were many vendors offering RFID services. I stopped to talk to just one of them. They showed me how a chip that looks like a regular paper sticker is inserted into each book – like our current bar codes, and is used for inventory purposes as well as much quicker check-out, allowing self-checkout. I saw the check-out stations and they reminded me of the self-ticketing machines in airports. I did not ask about price, because I knew it would be high, but this vendor said he had a library that found that their RFID system paid for itself in two years. (Must have been a small library.)
Koha, an open source ILS system? We have other experts here at ALA, and we probably have too much invested with Endeavor, but it was interesting to see an open source system available for library use. Plus, LibLime, the vendor helping people adapt Koha, is based in Athens, OH, an old stomping ground of mine.

Random items
Drop boxes – I asked a drop box vendor about students using it as a garbage bin, and was told that doesn’t occur very much. Some boxes even have slots for liquids or small objects to fall through in a separate space from the books. Prices from this one company ranged from $1700 - $6000 per drop box.
I asked MLA vendors to pass on my request for abstracts in their indexing. They seemed surprised and thought the esoteric subject headings they add were adequate.
Google had a much more substantial booth than last year – showing services to librarians that they could use. I learned more about their services like Book Search, Google Earth, Google News, etc. and I picked up a couple of CD’s with downloads of some of their services. I liked the way they had us fill out a quiz – to see if we knew the details of their services, and only after we had verified our answers with someone, we could get a prize.
I briefly talked to a representative from Family Search, one of the three large genealogy search services from Utah, but the only one that is free. http://www.familysearch.org/
I stopped by at the Endeavor booth, but got an inexperienced rep. I just wanted to see where they have gone with their federated searching (now called Discovery: Finder). I know others are researching federated searching and ERM for us, so I didn’t dwell on it.
Rebuild New Orleans Public Library – the most heart wrenching experience at a booth was talking to the people from the New Orleans Public Library. They do not expect to see NOPL back to “normal” during their work careers. There is no longer a tax base for them to get funding, and a small percentage of the staff (I think it was something like 40) are trying to run all current open branches. I bought a T-shirt and buttons to support them.

ALA - Assessment preconference

2006-06-30T13:33:00.000-04:00

The most valuable thing for me, as I had already predicted, was the day long pre-conference on assessment. This nicely covered different aspects of library assessment. When I asked Lisa Hinchliffe how much overlap there was going to be with the Library Assessment conference in Charlottesville, VA in September, she said almost none.

The introduction was given by Fred Heath of University of Texas - Austin Libraries. He was one of the developers of LibQual and was able to give us the background of ServQual, the theory behind it, and how LibQual grew out of that. The perceptions of our users are important - their perceptions of their needs and how the feel their institution provides for this need. I now understood why it was important that this can't be done by a single institution alone. Results from numerous institutions need to be gathered, so you can see how your institution rates compared to others. It was interesting to hear all this from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

Dave Baca from the University of Arizona had just defended his PhD thesis on using interviews for assessment purposes and was able to tell us the ins and outs of working with interviews. The hardest and most tedious part of the process is the coding of the responses, but it provides a wealth of in-depth information. This process can also be used for focus groups.

Lisa Hinchliffe from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was engaging and informative, as usual. She talked about collecting and using instruction data to improve library instruction.

The most practically useful presentation for me was the one on developing surveys. David Consiglio from Bryn Mawr College gave good suggestions on how to plan, create, test and implement a survey. I was intrigued by some of the simple guidelines he gave in creating good survey questions. It was fund to look at the various assessment surveys we got that day and throughout the conference and find what could have been improved.

Usability testing was covered by Brian Quigley from Univ. of California Berkeley Engineering Library. None of the information was new, but a good refresher on what usability testing should be like. It was interesting to see some of the user specific idiosyncrasies on their site. Since this is for the engineering library, they listed the acronyms for all of the different engineering departments. The rest of us might not know them, but they do, and for outsiders they provided the full name in a mouse-over, but it kept the home page clean and manageable.

Peggy Johnson from the University of Minnesota told us about assessing collections. She mostly talked about the different statistics one can gather to make collection development decisions and that LibQual will always show that some (mostly faculty) think we don't have enough.

Best ideas from ALA

2006-06-29T13:20:00.000-04:00

1. Ongoing training - We could survey employees for what they would like to learn about and have regular training sessions. Bring in people from other institutions, if necessary (could be from down the road), and use inhouse knowledge. U of M has formalized this into their Instructor College. We should also keep an eye on what they are doing and there could be sessions we could attend too.

2. Coordinate library surveys - Survey fatigue happens when people are asked to respond to too many surveys, so we should do some planning on what we want to find out from which people and how often we will do this. If we are targeting teaching faculty, we should look at the best time to reach them.

3. Good teaching methods used on me –
a. The ACRL President’s Program on Information Literacy was presented with a lot of humor and goofy “interludes” between semi-serious presentations. We laughed a lot, but we were engaged and I think it made us think more about the issues.
b. Google was handing out prizes in it’s booth, but only after you took a quiz on Google services and checked your answers with Google employees that were each demonstrating some aspect of Google. The quiz was hard, but I really did learn more about what they have to offer.

On FEMA trailers

2006-06-29T12:48:00.000-04:00

(Written June 22 in New Orleans) I am having the privilege of staying in an official FEMA trailer. My cousin, whose house was damaged, but not in any major way, has a FEMA trailer, which they are using as a storage place (until they can get all parts of their house usable) and guest room. The trailer is great for me – I have a nice double bed to sleep in, my own kitchenette and a toilet sink and even a shower, if I could squeeze into it. The toilet space is equivalent to those on airplanes. The air conditioning works well, which is a must in this humidly hot climate. The FEMA guys hook the trailer up to electric, water and sewer, so it is fully functioning. For one person staying a few days, this is luxury, bet when I think of whole families trying to live here, I don’t see how they do it. There technically is room to sleep 6 – the double, one couch-bed, the kitchen table/benches can become a bed, and then there are two bunk beds tucked away in a corner. We couldn’t figure out how even a kid would get up into the upper bunk as there is no ladder or footholds. The feel is much more RV than trailer (I lived in a trailer for three years in the back woods of SE Ohio.)
But when ones home has been destroyed, this is a roof over your head – clean, cool (up north we’d be more concerned with warm), a place to get out of the elements and to store a few essential items – not much. As I drove around New Orleans, especially the devastated parts of it, I realized the sight of a FEMA trailer was a sign of hope. If a FEMA trailer was set up in someone’s yard, it meant someone was working on fixing up their house. FEMA trailers were found in front of large beautiful homes as well as small modest houses. But most of the houses in the devastated neighborhoods were just deserted. Some were boarded up, some, you could see that they had been gutted – wall studs were visible through the often broken windows. In many places there were still piles of junk – everything cleared out of the homes – furniture, rugs, clothing - everything people owned. Wonder how much they could salvage?
My cousin’s book store was a total loss – it had been in a couple of feet of water, and other than the money in the safe (which had gotten wet and needed to be laundered) everything was removed and disposed of by the haz-mat team. I keep forgetting how foul the water was – full of sewage and dead materials dangerous to everyone’s health.(Individuals were taught to wear masks, gloves, boots, etc. when cleaning out their houses.) My cousin’s store was also totally gutted, the only thing remaining was the old, somewhat rusty safe. The bookstore has new fixtures, carpet, walls, ceiling tiles, wiring – everything. My cousin is working hard getting all the new stock up on the shelves for opening on July 3 – over 10 months after the disaster. There was no use in opening it any sooner, as the med students were still in Houston.
Another interesting word around here is “compromised.” Can you imagine the nightmare of insurance claims around here? The items listed for insurance don’t need to necessarily be “ruined” or “destroyed”, but just “compromised.” So if your VCR isn’t working quite right after the storm, you can claim it as “compromised,” and get money for a new one. But other interesting things are happening. With all the repair work going on, building inspectors are coming out to look at properties, and they are not always up to code. So before the insurance company is willing to insure my cousin’s house again, they have to bring the electrical wiring up to code. In a sense this is a good thing, but they have to pay for this themselves. The garage is being rebuilt with insurance money, but much of the other things come out of their own pocket. With the incredibly high demand for building materials, the price of them has skyrocketed. I got the sense that they have spent their life savings in getting things back to normal, and are now starting to go into debt. All the paperwork and financial stress on top of all the losses is incredibly hard on people. I just saw a microcosm of it in my cousin’s house. I didn’t feel much like partying after being with them.

American Library Association Conference in New Orleans

2006-06-28T13:26:00.000-04:00

This was the first time there was a significant connection between the conference I was attending and its location. ALA was the first large conference theat New Orleans had tried hosting since Hurricane Katrina. I think we were all proud to be part of ALA, which chose to keep its conference in New Orleans and we all participated in whatever small way we could to help rebuild the city. This was emphasized in the opening session by ALA president Michael Gorman. Were were also greeted by New Orleans major Ray Nagin and Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu. Nagin encouraged us to forget our diets and pay the New Orleans tax at the casino.

Madeline Albright as the keynote speaker was just plain awesome. She started with her appreciation of librarians and their role in the fight for the freedom of speech and access to information. She then went into the topic of her latest book The Mighty & the Almighty, about the role religion plays in global politics. I regret not buying the book and getting her to sign it.

I liked the new format of many sessions, where the panel or presentation was quite short and was followed by poster sessions pertaining to the topic. This was much better than the mass of poster sessions in the exhibit hall about everything under the sun.

Dinner at Lance's house was delightful. All of the WMU contingent was there, even those who never did experience Lance as our dean. Luche had made a wonderful jambalaya with veggies and salad. The flan and chocolate covered strawberries disappeared quickly. I was happy to hear that their house, though affected, hadn't suffered any water damage. But the story of the Tulane library was much more sobering. Lance was a natural choice for speaking about disaster preparedness at the conference.