Webinar links and reflections

Last week’s webinar seemed to go very well. It’s a whole different experience for me, making a presentation in a format which makes it impossible for me to see or hear the audience. There were apparently 83 people in attendance, and the feedback I’ve received both from bepress and via email has been positive.

Plus, my sign totally worked:

If you’re interested in what I had to say about getting faculty involved in a digital repository, but weren’t able to attend, there are a few ways you can check it out. First, here are the slides from Prezi:

Building Content by Building Community: Engaging Faculty at Cornell’s ILR School on Prezi

Or, you could watch the video of slides with voice-over:

Both of those, plus a PDF of the slides, are available here.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how this went. I probably talked too long,* and so we didn’t have as much time for questions as I’d like.** But I thought the questions I did get were good, and I’m hopeful that folks might send me more.

I enjoy talking about this stuff, and I try to frame the conversation in terms of relationships: both between the folks who work at libraries and the folks who make content, and between the material within the repositories and its users/creators.

Back when I spoke at an IR Day in April, the one piece of negative commentary I received was that I didn’t use the DigitalCommons software at any point in my presentation. Frankly, I can’t imagine giving that kind of presentation outside of training folks within my library or school to use the software, and one of the reasons I’m glad give webinars or presentations in conjunction with bepress is that I don’t have to frame my presentation in a DigitalCommons-specific way.***

I try to make this stuff generally applicable, regardless of what kind of repository software you use (and maybe even to digital library projects beyond repositories). Hopefully, I succeeded this time around.

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* SHOCKING.
** I can’t really fault bepress for cutting things off right at an hour, though; I actually needed to end the webinar and start a chat reference shift.
*** I did talk a bit about the upload interface, I believe, but even then I tried to frame in the context of how much you could expect folks outside the library to contribute to repository workflow.

IR Day Retrospective

It’s a short one, I must confess; a paragraph and some links.

The event was very well put together, and attended by folks who were very cool and asked great questions. I even ended up getting a tour of the Thurgood Marshall Law Library, which was great. On the whole I thought it was a solid event, and the feedback I received was positive.

Now, links!

• The full schedule.
• Dan Kipnis’s presentation, complete with video and a PDF version of his slides.
• “How to Use Social Media to Engage Students,” an excellent report Dan discussed during his presentation.
• My presentation, with video, slides, and an Easter Egg.
• Our metrics panel discussion, which actually ranged over a number of topics.

I wish I’d written this stuff up sooner, when then event was fresher in my mind. Next week I’ll try to get to SLA, before that fades entirely.

Next speaking engagement: Upstate New York SLA

I really thought I’d have time to write up that reflective post on CiL 2011, but apparently time did not stop while I was in DC. Terribly inconsiderate, and it made for a crazy week.

In any case, I’ve got another opportunity to do the public speaking thing this Friday, April 8, at the UNYSLA‘s “Toot Your Own Horn: Measuring & Meeting Your Objectives” event. Here’s the blurb for my bit:

Plural of Anecdote: Assessing the Success of a Digital Repository

Anyone who’s taken a stats class — and plenty of other folks besides — knows the danger of relying on unsupported anecdotal evidence. Yet the data available to us through our myriad assessment tools often proves ineffective or disconnected without the context provided by a strong narrative. This session will discuss how the Web & Digital Projects Group at Cornell University’s Catherwood Library seeks to find a balance, using stories and data analysis to not only assess the success of DigitalCommons@ILR and their other projects, but also define what success means for those projects.

Honestly, you should just click through and read the description of the whole event: listening to Jill Hurst-Wahl speak is always worth it, and while I’m not as familiar with his work it sounds like Sean Branagan should bring a lot to the table as well.

So if you can make the trip, I’m betting it’ll be worth your while to do so. Hope to see you there!

Day 3 of #cil11 (I don’t *feel* tardy)

I’m not even gonna pretend this isn’t almost a week late.

Wednesday started with a lot of logistical stuff: checking out of the hotel, packing the car, bidding Nina farewell as she drove down to Virginia to the home of the folks we stayed with post-conference. I followed much later, via Metro.

Then I went to one of the best presentations I’ve seen at a CiL. The semantic web is a concept that I’ve only had the vaguest grasp of previously, but Lisa Goddard and Gillian Byrne of the Memorial University of Newfoundland explained it thoroughly and engagingly. Did you know Drupal 7 incorporates RDF as a core functionality? I didn’t.* Don Hawkins over at LibConf.com breaks the whole thing down damned well; go give it a read.

In the afternoon, I was up again. First, Mitzi Cole and Jeremy Gottwig discussed the great repository work they’re doing at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.** Then Amy Buckland rocked the mic, cutting through some of the rhetoric surrounding repositories, and exposing many of the inherent assumptions that underlie their perception and planning.

Finally, I got up and ranted for a bit. My thesis statement, presented almost immediately so that folks could tweet it and run were they so inclined: “Digital projects in libraries are chronically understaffed; as librarians and digital projects staff, we must become advocates for changing that situation if we want these projects to succeed.” I consider myself quite lucky when it comes to the staff hours my library is willing to commit to our work, but even we’re stretched pretty thin… and you rarely go to a presentation about digital projects without hearing about how the presenters wish they had more people.

The rest of the presentation included funny pictures, the insulting of Disney, and the tweaking of Google. Many folks tweeted the bit about how technologies go obsolete, shiny gets dull, but people will last.*** Some folks dug my reference to the 1893 World’s Fair. Thank the gods for Twitter; how else would I have known how it went?

I think there may be a blog post at some point to render what I said into text. But it was an enjoyable presentation to give, despite the difficult topic, and I’m glad folks seemed to dig it.

I may have one more post left in me, on the conference as a whole. We’ll see.

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* Hell, I don’t even know if I said that right.

** No relation, I think.

*** I think the images helped; if you check the presentation, that line starts with the picture of the Apple IIe. How can you not love that machine?

#cil11 Day 1

This morning began with thunderstorms and delayed keynote speakers and busted wifi.  But I try not to see omens, especially before a presentation.

Still getting my head around arriving a day early, especially a day as packed as yesterday. Usually, the keynote is my signal to spool up to full conference readiness; right now, my body feels pretty convinced that this shindig is over. My body, on the other hand, is pretty damned excited about what’s coming up. Hurrah for periodic and helpful dualism.

There are ways I might like to spend the time prior to presenting, but desperately trying to reactivate the wifi card on my work-borrowed laptop is not among them. Such is the world, and as problems go it’s minor indeed.

——-

The presentation went very well, I think. I went second, but the folks preceding me were stunningly considerate about time. I still felt like I was paced like a freight train, but I got through.

 

Digital Repository Success on Prezi

I feel awkward posting that: I’m increasingly of the school of thought that mandates as few words of possible on slides, so flipping through that presentation will likely prove confusing. Maybe I could put together something with sound?

In any case, I got a tone of great questions afterwards, and a long talk with Courtney Young. She felt that — and I’m hopefully paraphrasing correctly, here — that I was putting forward a fundamentally un-collaborative process forward as collaboration. If I did so, it was an error: I don’t see our “give us your vita, we’ll take it from there” repository policy as collaborative. We see it as effective for getting faculty content into the repository, and also setting the stage for actual collaboration with some faculty later. For most faculty, they really don’t go beyond that, and that’s fine; the ones who do come back with more, though, help provide the stuff that makes DigitalCommons@ILR shine.

Such a good talk, and exactly the sort of thing I hope for when I get asked to present.

If you flip through that thing, you’ll notice I wrap up with a focus on stories. I was thrilled to hear that emphasized again in Rebecca Jones‘ presentation later in the day, “Performance Measures: Illustrating Value to Your Community”. It was inspiring, informative, and quite a lot of fun. If I can find a link to it, I’ll add it here. Great, great stuff.

Afterwards, a lovely dinner and an evening spent around a firepit behind the hotel. Firecon forever, y’all. Can’t wait for tomorrow.

#cil11 Day 0

Sunrise found me walking the streets of Washington, DC in search of coffee and an oddly specific number of nickels and pennies.

I was walking alone, since a Sunday filled with eight or so hours of workshops is apparently sufficient cause for my wife and I to exchange our positions on early mornings. She’s sleeping soundly as I write this, and I’m only slightly envious.

The aforementioned coinage is necessary for part of my first workshop today. It’ll run from nine to noon, and my second from 1:30 to 4:30. I’m wired as all hell right now, over an hour before the party gets started. I have no idea what condition I’ll be in when it finally winds down.

——-

Many hours later…

My feet are killing me.

Workshops went really well. Scott Nicholson is a damned genius at interactive games and teaching, and I’d have been glad just to watch.  Getting a chance to help him run a workshop was phenomenal. We ran folks through a number of learning games and discussed the principles behind them. I think his simulation section was stronger than my roleplay section, but I felt like I acquitted myself well.

One of the big things I took away from that was “Thiagi’s six-stage* debriefing process,” from Thiagarajan’s Design your Own Games and Activities, a book I need to pick up. I implemented the process in my own post-activity debriefs, both in this workshop and the next, and it worked great.

(While you’re taking my book recommendations: check out Scott’s awesome Everyone Plays at The Library, too. He really captures the wide applicability gaming has in this profession.)

After that, Amy Buckland and I talked shop about repositories with a fine crew of folks for our afternoon workshop. We had a good mix of folks: public librarians, academic librarians, school librarians, vendor reps, folks with repositories, folks planning ‘em, and folks just thinking about ‘em.

Great discussion resulted, focusing on the obstacles facing repository managers and librarians, and how best to overcome those obstacles. People were willing to bring their own experiences to bear on the discussion, and used that to build a list of stakeholders, what they could bring to a project and how to get them to buy in. Then we let folks do some roleplay of how they’d make the last bit happen; good times were had by all.

After that, it was just getting my butt kicked in that PS3 Move gladiator game, hanging out with some most excellent library folks, and walking with Nina to get burgers from Five Guys.

Oh, and I confess I find The Amazing Race oddly compelling. Not that I’m gonna get cable or anything, but I’m totally rooting for the Globetrotters.

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* “How do you feel? What happened? What did you learn? How does it relate to the real world? What if? What next?”