DIY Librarian

APS booth at StampShow 2010

I’ve written before about my experiences attending technology conferences as a librarian outsider. Last week I got another perspective on conferences and trade shows as I sat on the other side of the booth at the American Philatelic Society’s StampShow in Richmond.

It was an exhausting–but exciting–four days. Many APS members came to the booth looking to meet “the new librarian.” It was great to meet so many library users in person, because most of them use the library remotely.

I got used to saying, “I don’t know, but I’ll see if I can find out,” pretty quickly. When interviewed for this job, I said that I would learn about philately in part from library users, and I learned quite a bit at the show, both from talking to people at the booth and from listening to my coworkers answer questions.

I’ve gotten a taste of being behind the scenes at conferences before, by doing program planning for APLIC and for the SLA Social Science Division, but now that I’ve done everything from shake hands with a famous keynote speaker at a fancy dinner to pack up the booth at the end of the show, I have even more appreciation for what it takes to put on an event like this.

I just finished posting the program for APLIC’s 2009 Annual Conference.

I look forward to this conference every year, and I think this year’s conference will be particularly good. While APLIC is geared toward population information professionals, the range of topics for this very small conference is impressive: data confidentiality; author’s rights and open access; delivering user training; China demographic data and GIS; ROI for libraries; and tours of ICPSR, the University of Michigan’s vast data archive, and the Ann Arbor District Library. (I’m not responsible for this great line-up, just for getting it up on the web site.)

I’m also looking forward to having the conference on the University of Michigan campus instead of in a big-city hotel. It’s always an intimate conference and I think it will be even more so this year.

If you’re interested in attending, the 3-day conference is a bargain – $200 ($75 for students) includes all the sessions and tours plus a banquet.

Back in December, Walt Crawford asked the PALINET Leadership Network Challenge group what conference besides ALA offers the most value as a leader or future leader. John Dupuis, a science librarian, suggested that librarians should go to the conferences their users go to:

I hope there’s room for a dissenting idea–that we should go to the conferences where our users go and not just to library conferences. I’ve been to three non-library, science conferences this year and they were really valuable experiences because they helped me understand where my user community is coming from.

I couldn’t agree more. One of my favorite library conferences is the very small APLIC conference. It is so small, in fact, that it is a pre-conference event of the academic conference that most of our users go to (the Population Association of America), which makes it relatively easy and inexpensive to stay for the academic conference. When I attended my first PAA conference, I found myself nearly bored to tears, in part because so much of the material was beyond my understanding. The faculty and graduate students I saw seemed surprised to see me at “their” conference, which made me feel uncomfortable.

By the end of the conference, though, I’d begun to realize its value.

My users were surprised to see me there in a good way. The same way we get excited when faculty take an interest in the library, they get excited when we take an interest in their research. I got to know many of them better through the social parts of the conference, too.

While much of the conference was still over my head, I was learning–both about the subject matter and the way research works. The best part, for me, was hearing the discussion during conference sessions, because I started to understand how scholars develop their research and interact with each other. I also began to develop an understanding of the publication process and the concerns scholars face at various points in their careers.

I got to see firsthand what a poster session is like, so I can better advise graduate students when they come to me for help putting together their first poster.

I can’t afford to go to an academic conference and a library conference every year, so I try to replicate these experiences as much as I can when I’m on campus. I go to brown bag lunches and seminars. I read my users’ journal articles. I go to department social events (it helps that I work for the research center and not for the library, so I get invitations).

Even if you have no hope of getting the funding to diversify your national conference experience, there are surely local events you can go to to meet your users on their own turf.

At Information Wants To Be Free, Meredith Farkas asks:

I always come from conferences with great ideas, but it’s usually more from talking to people instead of from going to sessions. Is that something I really need to fly across the country for?

Having recently gotten back from the other side of the country (Seattle) where I was attending SLA 2008, I’ve been thinking about what made it worthwhile for me.

The people always come first for me, whether they are people I’ve known for years, people I’ve just met, or speakers. I love that we have all kinds of technology to keep in touch with each other now, but there is something about face-to-face meetings, and particularly in the conference atmosphere, that is different, and (to me, at least) worth traveling for.

Aside from the wonderful people I met and reconnected with, here is what are a few of the things that made SLA 2008 worthwhile for me. Pretty much all of this is Social Science Division programming – because I am the Social Science Division planner and so went to all of the division programs.

Ilda Carreiro King on teaching adults. I don’t do enough teaching to do much reading about it, so this session was perfect for me. King is a really engaging speaker and I got ideas I could go back and apply to my job right away. For example, I usually do individual instruction (or consulting) for faculty, but after King described the advantages of small group instruction, I decided to offer a small group consulting session for faculty here. And you know what? A small group signed up and came to the session, and I really think we all got more out of it for having a group.

Social Science and Museums, Arts, and Humanities poster session. I’d wanted the division to have a poster session for a while, and put a lot of work into adding posters to our usual joint division open house. The presenters seemed to enjoy having a place to showcase their work, and attendees seemed to like having an open house where they could learn something in addition to networking. I thought the posters were all terrific (I have been to poster sessions where people were pinning pages of 12-pt. text to the poster boards, so it was nice to see very professional, creative posters) and I was so happy and relieved when this was over that I think I ate all of the remaining chocolate on the dessert table for dinner.

Seattle. If I’m going to fly across the country, I like to be somewhere I can explore rather than trapped in a convention center. (Not that Nashville’s paradise-in-a-shopping-mall wasn’t an interesting experience, of course.) Seattle was perfect – mild weather, pedestrian-friendly streets, and a human-scale convention center. A small group of runners got together a few mornings during the conference and explored the waterfront, I visited the Pike Place Market several times, snuck in trips to the public library and the lovely Elliott Bay Book Company, and didn’t have a bad meal the whole time.

Jack Hamann, author of On American Soil. For a long time I didn’t read much nonfiction, and I doubt I would have picked this book up on my own. But since we invited the author to speak at our 85th anniversary luncheon, I decided to read it, and I’m glad I did. Not only was the book good, but so was Hamann’s talk. He updated us on events since the book was published, and described his research at the National Archives. I think it’s good to attend at least one conference session that doesn’t have a direct professional application, and this was the best one I’ve attended in that category since The Island of Lost Maps at the Peabody Library in Baltimore.

As I was busy finalizing details for my division programs at SLA 2008, I stumbled across Conference Rules, Part 1 at the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article gives advice for moderators of panel sessions at academic conferences, but I think much of the advice is useful for moderators of other types of sessions as well. The tips for how to keep a Q&A session on track are particularly good. (Because when Q&A goes bad, it is really, really bad.)

I am attending my first tech conference today – Plone Symposium East. It is being hosted at my university, and it is about an open source CMS we are using at work, so it was an easy one for me to infiltrate. So far I’m feeling a bit out of my element, but everyone has been very welcoming. And there are other library people here.

It’s a very different atmosphere from the library conferences I have attended. There are no lines in the ladies room. Everyone has their laptop out. There are power strips under all the tables so they can plug in. Jeans and t-shirts are not out of place.

I’ll write more on what I’m learning later, but I wanted to let you know that some of the conference sessions are being streamed live and all of them will be available on the web after the conference. If you’re at all interested in Plone or content management systems in general, check it out.

This is a revision of an earlier announcement – note that there is now a prize for the best poster! (You maybe wondering, what is a poster session?)

The Social Science Division and the Museum, Arts, & Humanities Division invite proposals for a poster session to be held during the DSOC & MAHD Joint Open House at SLA 2008 in Seattle, Washington. DSOC and MAHD will award a one-year SLA membership to the first author of the best poster.

In keeping with the SLA 2008 conference theme, “Breaking Rules, Building Bridges,” the theme for the poster session is “Building Bridges with Collaboration Tools.” Proposals should focus on the use of collaboration tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) in libraries or information work. Posters may include examples of collaboration tools in use, innovative ideas for future uses, comparisons of available tools, or any other idea relevant to the theme.

The poster session will be a relaxed and informal time to share ideas with your colleagues. We welcome proposals from any SLA member, new or experienced, and especially from students. In the event we receive more qualified submissions than we can accommodate, members of the two sponsoring divisions and student members will be given priority.

Proposals should be submitted by March 1, 2008 via e-mail to murray@pop.psu.edu or mail to Tara Murray, Population Research Institute, Penn State, 601 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA 16802. Please include a title and description of about 250 words, and your name, institution, e-mail address, and address. Proposals will be reviewed by a committee for relevance to the theme and quality. We will notify applicants of our decision by April 1, 2008.

The Open House and Poster Session will be held on Sunday, June 15 from 8:00-10:00 p.m.

Wondering what a poster session is? I like this definite from the University at Buffalo Libraries:

Poster sessions are frequently used as a means to convey information in a brief format (typically 4′ x 8′) in classrooms, conferences and symposia, and workshops. Designing effective poster presentations is an art unto itself.

Here’s an opportunity for SLA members to share ideas with colleagues at the Social Science/Museums, Arts and Humanities Open House at SLA 2008:

Call for Posters: Building Bridges with Collaboration Tools

The Social Science Division and the Museum, Arts, & Humanities Division invite proposals for a poster session to be held during the DSOC & MAHD Joint Open House at SLA 2008 in Seattle, Washington. The Open House and Poster Session will be held on Sunday, June 15 from 8:00-10:00 p.m.

In keeping with the SLA 2008 conference theme, “Breaking Rules, Building Bridges,” the theme for the poster session is Building Bridges with Collaboration Tools. Proposals should focus on the use of collaboration tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) in libraries or information work. Posters may include examples of collaboration tools in use, innovative ideas for future uses, comparisons of available tools, or any other idea relevant to the theme.

The poster session will be a relaxed and informal time to share ideas with your colleagues. We welcome proposals from any SLA member, new or experienced, and especially from students. In the event we receive more qualified submissions than we can accommodate, members of the two sponsoring divisions and student members will be given priority.

Proposals should be submitted by March 1, 2008 via e-mail to murray@pop.psu.edu or mail to Tara Murray, Population Research Institute, Penn State, 601 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA 16802. Please include a title and description of about 250 words, and your name, institution, e-mail address, and address. Proposals will be reviewed by a committee for relevance to the theme and quality. We will notify applicants of our decision by April 1, 2008.

Steven Bell, writing on ACRLog, says that static personal web sites are becoming less common among academic librarians as they are replaced by blogs, social networking profiles, and other interactive web tools. He argues, however, that a static site can still benefit librarians. Brock Read, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus, asks, “Should professors and librarians delete seldom-used personal pages, or keep them around for posterity?”

More important than whether your site runs on WordPress or Drupal or hand-coded HTML is whether visitors can find out about your professional accomplishments. (I’m assuming here that your blog is not anonymous or pseudonymous, and that you consider it part of your professional self.) Is there a link on your blog to your academic credentials? to awards and honors you’ve received? to your publications and presentations?

In my roles as a conference and program planner for professional associations, I often look at personal and staff pages of all varieties looking for information. And I do sometimes rely on web searches to help me identify potential speakers. I’m much more likely to give you a call if I can find that you’ve already presented on a topic I’m interested in. In this day and age, why not also add video of yourself speaking?

I think (though I’m not as immersed in the culture) that other academics benefit from enhanced personal sites as well. I regularly research potential speakers for lectures and symposia sponsored by my organization, as well as prospects for open faculty positions. I can give the committee a much more detailed profile if I can find a recently updated profile (or CV or resume or whatever you want to call it). If I can’t find a profile, I have to rely on what I can find through web searches and literature searches, which is probably not as complete, nor as focused.

The bottom line: a personal web site, of any variety, gives you some control over how people view you. Here’s mine, also linked from the sidebar of DIY Librarian, and from my employer’s web site. OK, the design won’t get me hired as a web designer, and it’s nothing revolutionary, but it is up-to-date.

Upon my return from SLA 2007 in Denver, I attended another conference, because I just can’t get enough of conferences.

The conference I attended was a conference for web developers at my university. This was my first time attending a technology conference, so I was afraid most of it would be over my head. Maybe I just chose my sessions wisely, but I thought the conference was very relevant to my work and not above my technical level at all. From looking at the program, I think there were also more technical sessions for real web developers.

Not surprisingly, many of the speakers focused on Web 2.0 and its place in higher education.

The opening keynote speaker, Jared Spool, defined Web 2.0 as “designing with an attention to the total experience of the user.” He added that user generated content does not mean Web 2.0, citing Amazon.com reviews and eBay, both of which have had user generated content for a long time.

As an example of what Web 2.0 is, he took a photo of the audience with his cell phone and uploaded it to Flickr. He then discussed mashups, RSS, tagging, and social networks.

His comment about the problem with chronological data in RSS feeds caught my librarian’s ear: “Imagine if the library was one big in/out queue,” he said, adding that RSS is not a good way to find specific information.

From there, I went to a session on “Web 2.0 and the Higher Education Enterprise 2.0”, where we got an update on Web 2.0 applications at Penn State. The presenters said that both student expectations and budget and staffing constraints are driving these developments.

Much of the presentation focused on the differences between this year’s presentation and a similar presentation last year. The big difference seemed to be that rather than trying to develop its own social spaces, Penn State is instead going to the spaces where the students already are.

An example of the power of social networking sites was the ability of Penn State students to organize a tribute to the shooting victims at Virginia Tech in a matter of days.

Then I attended a more applied session on web graphics. Cyndi Carey said that web design is different from all other design because of end user control over the display and differences in equipment. She also noted that we have gone backwards, in a way, because so many people are accessing web sites using handheld devices. She urged developers to “use graphics responsibly,” using them only when they enhance communication and keeping download speed in mind.

My next session, “Creating Web (2.0) Sites to Support Communities and Collaboration” provided examples of the use of CMS and blog software at Penn State.

The final session I attended was not directly relevant to my work but was one of the more interesting. Christian Johansen and Jerry Maddox spoke about scholarly publishing on the web. Johansen talked about the semantic web and “lost (X)HTML tags” and metadata. Jerry Maddox, an art professor, spoke about making long texts easier to read online. He emphasized typography and eliminating “density” (extraneous information that is not part of the text). He demonstrated a style switcher he developed for reading texts online.

Maddox began his talk with another library story. He talked about sitting in Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library, taking advantage of the wifi. A little boy came up and started talking to him, and wondered whether sharks have babies. Maddox typed “do sharks have babies?” into Google and got the boy an answer in a matter of minutes (some sharks lay eggs while others have babies). I started to be offended, but then realized I would have done the same thing. As Maddox pointed out, it would have taken much longer to go into the library and look up the answer. For the purpose at hand, the Google answer was good enough, and Maddox is probably an astute enough web user to evaluate his sources. And Maddux warmed this librarian’s heart by ending his story with a note that it then started to rain and he went into the library.

Though I did get to meet some of my campus colleagues, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to do more networking. To tell the truth, though, I may have just been too tired after SLA to network. All in all, I’m very glad I attended the conference, and I’d encourage other librarians to attend conferences outside of the library field.

Tomorrow morning I’m attending a post-conference tutorial on writing for the web. Because I really just can’t get enough conferencing!