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.
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