IRs@Cornell

On Monday I made a presentation for CUL’s Professional Development Week titled, “IRs@Cornell: The Expanding Role of Institutional Repositories“. I used Prezi.com to make it, so it’s viewable online.

Like many of my presentations, it loses something without my “voiceover,” therefore I will provide an excerpt from said that may clarify one portion of the presentation:

The purpose of institutions and measures like the Federal Depository Library Program was to preserve government documentation in case of fire, flood, technological mishap, or other natural disasters.

(beat)

Too soon?

See if you can guess where it goes!

News analysis

News: Thanks to my internship having a significant component applicable to the field of digital libraries, it looks like I’ll be graduating this August, rather than December.
What this means: I’m gonna have to start rationalizing not changing the name of this blog about four months early.

News: The ILR Student Government Association decided to take our library as the inspiration for their t-shirt this year. The front of the shirt reads “CLUB CATHERWOOD”, while the back says, “WHAT HAPPENS IN CATHERWOOD, STAYS IN CATHERWOOD”. 
What this means: While it may indicate that the student body doesn’t fully appreciate Catherwood’s commitment to outreach, the main lesson to be learned is that other libraries should be totally jealous that their patrons don’t compare them to freakin’ Vegas.

The trendy and the dead

Another CiL has come and gone, leaving in its wake longer Facebook friends lists, crowded Twitter feeds, numerous travel horror stories, and several gaggles of library folk who’re more informed and engaged than they were a week ago.* My Day 3 began with Michael Edson’s excellent keynote address detailing the insights he’s gained as the Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian, and ended in a Holiday Inn in Edison, NJ, quite further from home than I’d hoped to be. (But then, getting back to Ithaca can be difficult.)

Since the conference, I’ve found myself considering and reconsidering Amanda Etches-Johnson’s presentation during Tuesday evening’s Dead and Innovative Technologies session.  In a display of audience participation which warmed the cockles of this former teacher’s heart, she’d put the name of a technology up on the big screen and ask the audience if it was alive or dead. Unsurprisingly, “blogs”, “Twitter”, “Second Life”, and “information architecture” went up on the screen to be soundly and joyously declared deceased by the crowd, and Amanda concurred with their assessment.

But then, with the first two examples, she did something I found very interesting. She showed how the purposes of blogs and Twitter had become diluted in content and infested with corporate advertising, and noted that this proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that such things were no longer trendy.  And the part of me that used to teach LSAT prep perked up and said, “That’s a scope shift. Just because something’s not trendy doesn’t mean it’s dead.” And sure enough, then she showed a blog that was honest and interesting, and a helfpul Twitter conversation between a library and a patron. In cases like these, such tech doesn’t seem nearly so dead.

It’s easy, I think, when we play around with so much new tech, to mistake trendiness for viability.** It’s easy for library folk to forget that, by and large, we are not our target audience. Neglecting technology that our patrons might still be using because it’s not trendy is just another iteration of the mindset that gives us user-unfriendly OPACs that librarians think are awesome.  And considering that most studies of library presence in Facebook indicate that the kids don’t really want us there right now, maybe communication and networking technologies like these only become viable for libraries when they’re not trendy anymore.  

Finding the viability window for communication technology strikes me as one of the major issues that librarians need to grapple with in coming years, and Amanda and the other presenters did a great job of kicking folks’ brains into gear on the subject. And, it was fun to play RockBand with her.

* Based on extrapolation from a representative gaggle who’s posted to this effect on their various blogs.
** Of course, the fact that I’m still blogging and Twittering indicates that I’m clearly immune to this. Or slow. One of those.

Wow on multiple counts

So, my Day 3 retrospective on CiL was driven from my head by my absolutely awful trip home. Rather than dwell on that, I’ll put together my thoughts on the whole shebang this weekend, perhaps with a discussion of trendy vs. viable.

Until then, check out something glorious (that some of you have probably seen already, but hey).

CiL 2009, Day 2: Retrospective

Since I never seem to write these on the day itself…

Yesterday was theatrical. It began with a keynote interview with Paul Holdengraber, who’s bringing a magnificent sense of theatre to the NYPL, and ended with a boisterous panel on dead and innovative technologies who cursed and ranted and raved and challenged and generally played the audiences assumptions and biases like pros. (Which, I suppose, they were.) 

In between, I spent most of the day on the Open Libraries track, the highlights of which were Jessamyn West tempting me back to the verdant fields of Firefox add-ons and Shane Beers and Amy Buckland talking open access (and reassuring me that I’m not alone in dealing with the tribulations inherent in maintaining an academic institutional repository).

Amy also gave me a Library Society of the World banner for my badge. Rock.

Last night was also the first time I went on one of the semi-organized dine-outs, this one dedicated to taxonomies and folksonomies. The discussion of those issues ended up taking a backseat to more general chat and delicious tapas (and lots of chat about the delicious tapas), but it still made for a fun evening. This year involved a lot more networking for me, and I enjoyed the conference far more because of it.

And I ended up with two banners on my badge. I’m reasonably sure that’s how they keep score.

CiL2009, Day 1: A retrospective

This retrospective was supposed to be written and posted last night, but while delicious tapas and a pitcher of sangria have many virtues, the facilitation of effective blogging lies not amongst them. Instead, I’m typing this while waiting for the second day’s keynote (an interview which seems to involve at least one individual that I played RockBand with on Sunday) to begin.

Saw a number of interesting presentations yesterday; the two most interesting involved sharing code from your library and learning about academic library users, respectively. The first half of the latter described a study of students at the University of Maryland that, among other findings, happily noted that 54% of students used UMD’s ResearchPort system in their last batch of course-related research (with 35% using it first), while only 36% used Google (18% using it first). And they even put all the tools necessary to run a similar study in the conference materials, and put their prototype up on the web for us to look at. The second half involved an interesting discussion of user-generated social tagging of library resources.

The first presentation that really struck me, though, was from the University of Colorado’s Nina McHale, who talked about building widgets and other chunks of sharing code based on library resources, and allowing people to take that code and do with it what they will. It was one of those presentations that turns your brain inside out in a good way, because while we’ve snagged other folks’ embeddable code — most notably Meebo — we haven’t thought of building our own widgets for others to use. It’s an idea that I think may find a lot of traction back home, and I’m excited about exploring it.

Another fun note: I had a question for Nina, but I watching the clock told me that having to leave for my lunch committment would prevent me from asking it. On a lark, I looked for her in Facebook, found her, and — apologizing for the possible presumptuousness — asked my question via Facebook message. She not only answered it, but friended me… which made our accidental face-to-face meeting later that day all the more interesting.

I love living in the future.

Back to the beginning

Well, the beginning of this blog, anyway. CiL2008 inspired me to start this thing, so it’s exciting to be back at CiL2009. And not just because I got to regale librarians with RockBand renditions of “Call Me” and “Dead or Alive”.

Last year I took a tremendous amount of information back to Catherwood and Syracuse. The study that I talked about in one of the first posts here found its way into a major project for my planning, marketing and assessment class (and a number of minor assignments for others), not to mention informing my contributions to the Web & Digital Projects Group and the various committees I serve on in CUL.  And that’s only one presentation.

Hopefully, this year will top it.

New gig at my old digs

As of tomorrow, I will be leaving behind the humdrum life of a web editor and reference assistant for the hustling and/or bustling existence of a web and digital project manager. This career mobility isn’t as mobile as it might have been, though, as I’ll still be going to work every day at the Catherwood Library; I’m taking over the team I’ve been a part of since 2006. 

To say I’m excited about this is an understatement.  I enjoy the work our team does, and the work that the library does.  I also dig the folks I work with, which is always a plus. This move means more management responsibilities (obviously), but also more involvement in the vision end of web work within the library.  It’ll be a big change in a lot of ways, and not just that I’ll be trading a demi-cubicle for an office.

I think it’s gonna be keen. But, despite the image in this post, I doubt I’ll be expanding my wardrobe to include a tie, a briefcase, or hair anytime soon.

Drupal

Does anyone out there with experience using Drupal have advice on the best way to get started on learning to use it? I’m going to enact my usual game plan (“set up and account and play around”), but if others have better suggetions I’d definitely appreciate them.

Thanks!

(And a note for people who read my previous post: there is a subtle but important different between “narcissistic” and “selfish”.)

Post-mortem: Professional Development Week 2008

Friday marked the end of CUL’s Professional Development Week, one in which my own participation was both less and more than I might’ve hoped. On the final day I sat on two panels and made a presentation, but the preparation needed meant I didn’t have time to go to many events during the rest of the week.

The first panel discussed the CUL Mentoring Program, which I’ve participated in since Fall of 2006. I’d only been invited to sit on the panel the previous week, but it was a fun opportunity to talk about a program I think highly of. My mentor, Jesse Koennecke, helped me get into library school and has provided great advice on navigating the ins and outs of CUL, so I was glad to get a chance to talk up the program.

The second panel was on Web 2.0, and consisted of the folks who taught hands-on training sessions for various 2.0 applications over the past year as a part of a program sponsored by the Committee for Professional Development. I taught a session on RSS back in November, and the panel led a great discussion on the application of stuff like blogs, wikis, Facebook, and del.icio.us within the library. However, going on about the potential for that sort of thing on a blog would be preaching to the choir, so I’ll just say it was good to share ideas, and move on.

My presentation was on Berkeley Electronic Press’s SelectedWorks, and the use it’s been getting at the Catherwood Library. The slides were sparser than usual for me, with more time spent on the SelectedWorks site itself. But the product speaks strongly to elements of Dr. Lankes’s keynote address, specifically in how it lets the library cast itself as a facilitator of faculty-to-faculty conversations. The level of use SelectedWorks has seen at Catherwood, and the fact that it was created specifically to fulfill requests from faculty, seemed to get people’s attention.

The case can be made that services like SelectedWorks are within the purview of the academic library, and represent a definitive service that such institutions can offer the academy going forward (which again ties into elements of Dr. Lankes’s keynote). The case I’m less sure of, and frankly one that I didn’t even touch upon, is that such a service likes within the purview of a librarian. I’d like to think that this sort of thing doesn’t just provide purpose to paraprofessionals, but my own lack of experience leaves me without the confidence necessary to claim otherwise. Hopefully, that will change as time goes on.

All things considered, PD Week was probably a good thing for me, in terms of discussing the work with others, learning about what librarians are working on, and getting my face in front of the people I hope to be working with for the foreseeable future.