Michigan Academy 2012

Michigan Academy continues to be one of my favorite little conferences, where I get to visit a Michigan college or university, and share with my library colleagues across the state. I like to hear what librarians across the state are doing, I always learn something new, get to share something about what I am doing, and it is just fun to hang out. The last presentation of the day was full of cataloging humor that only a room of librarians could appreciate.

I was reminded that four years ago I had predicted that more librarians would be attending Michigan Academy as travel funding decreases, since it is an inexpensive, close to home conference. They had so many paper proposals submitted, that they ran two parallel sessions all day long, so this is only reflecting half the presentations in the Library and Information Science section of Michigan Academy

The most useful presentation to me was from Mariella Gunn of Oakland University, who took a new look at guides we are creating. Now that we have LibGuides and other ways of easily creating guides, we are creating a lot of them, but are we usability testing them? Mariella proposed that we make sure we are naming them according to departments and programs students find in the course catalogs, and to create class guides whenever possible. With the new course management systems we can have them automatically link to either the class guide, or the next most appropriate departmental or program guide. She suggested that we organize them by assignment parts, not resource types, as we think of them. There were more things to think about, so I hope to get a copy of her presentation.

Abby Bedford from Grand Valley continued the theme with a presentation on how to best use slide decks (a generic term for PowerPoints) and screencasts at point of need to explain things to students. Good ideas.

I always find Elizabeth Bucchiarelli (EMU) has something interesting to say, and this time she had explored gray literature, as it is important for her health sciences patrons.  She did a nice job of defining it, telling us the advantages and disadvantages, where to find it, etc.

One of the participants in the University Library Associates program at U of M, explained that the students in the School of Information apply to be ULAs (associates) at the library, so they are more employees than interns working on special projects and get a sense of the type of work they want to do when they graduate.

Karen Liston from Wayne State talked about involving "senior librarians strategically." She had some good ideas about mentoring, and making sure everyone has equal access to opportunities, but I feel we are trying our own approach - preparing ourselves to be 21st century librarians.

Michael McDonnel presented on a system he uses to follow the government documents we are being offered at Western - I actually understand his job just a bit better after this. His presentation went well with Rhonda Fowler's presentation about moving towards more electronic government documents at Eastern Michigan. I think we are moving in that direction all the time, not sure what Michael makes sure we still get in print.

Ed Eckel presented on this analysis of engineering masters theses and dissertations. I hadn't heard recently how far he has gotten with his research - very interesting and stimulated a good conversation in the group.

Among the interesting and somewhat unusual presentations was the one on zines at Michigan State by Joshua Barton - sure I had heard of zines, but never really had them defined nor understood their cultural value. Later in the day Jennie Russell told us about the Cartoon Museum and its library in London, England. Then KT Lowe, recent grad of UofM had an interesting take on the purpose of museums and how they need to reach out to people of today. I must still be in that small sliver of people to whom museum exhibits talk to. The last presentation was from Steven Putt of Calvin College on how "veganism" shows up in the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Believe it or not, it was not only informative, but also funny.

I talked about my progress with my Baltic Research Handbook.  It was very useful for me to have to start pulling what I have seen so far together and start formulating my research questions.

On the lunch break I  went to visit the Alma College Library - so I wrote that up in the next post.