DIY Librarian

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!

Tomorrow I’m headed to Denver for SLA 2007. I’ll be blogging here and at the SLA Blog.

Some things on my schedule:

• Walking Miles in the Mile High City (free pedometers from the Social Science Division and Thomson Scientific & Dialog!)
• The Personal Trainer (library services as an employee benefit)
• Meet the Non-Profit Sector
• NAFTA at 13: Unruly Teen or Happily Ever Afta (includes a presentation by Jen Darragh, who used to work with me)
• Visualizing Statistics: Making Use and Sense of Graphs, Charts and Diagrams (I’m moderating)
• Bloggers Get-together
• Planning meetings for SLA 2008
• High-altitude running and good beer!

My conference experience has certainly changed since I got involved in division leadership. I don’t have time to attend as many sessions, but I find I am very focused on the ones I can get to. I may not have time to get to any of the contributed papers sessions this year, but if you do, I would strongly encourage you to go. They are usually sparsely attended, but some of the best conference sessions I’ve ever been to have been contributed papers.

It’s conference season again, and I’ll bet that most conferences will include a session where attendees can work on their elevator speeches.

I worked on mine at the SLA Leadership Summit in January, but it hasn’t gotten much use since our elevator’s been on the fritz. (It’s difficult to talk about much of anything when you’re climbing 6 flights of stairs.) I’ve decided that instead I will work on my plane speech.

After the last few conferences I’ve attended, I’ve sat next to a talker on the plane. The talker invariably asks lots of questions upon learning that I’ve been at a library conference.

Aren’t libraries obsolete? Isn’t everything on the internet? What do I think of Google? What do librarians talk about at library conferences?

This is a perfect opportunity to talk about why libraries are important, the good and the bad of Google, and dispel a few librarian myths (why yes, I do have a master’s in that). I have a captive and interested audience. I’ve just been at a conference talking about all of these issues.

After attending the APLIC-I conference this year, I sat next to a man who was curious about Google. Having just heard Siva Vaidhyanathan talk about the Google book scanning project, I was prepared to talk about the pros and cons.

If you sit next to me on the plane coming back from SLA, watch out! If you don’t want to know about libraries, you might want to bring a book, or break out the crossword from the in-flight magazine.