Michigan Academy 2010

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

1. 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.
2. Have we thought of putting videos right into the catalog?
3. 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?
4. 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

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

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

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

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

[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

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.