Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Wednesday evening at WAAL

We had a bumper crop of poster sessions this year -- lots of really interesting projects, tools, and resources. See http://www.wla.lib.wi.us/waal/conferences/2006/program.htm#wednesday for a list of them all. Two big excitements were 1) the drawing for fabulous prizes and 2) the fire alarm that drove us all out into the parking lot. Fortunately, the weather's fine and some people didn't want to go back in.

The fun continued with "Trivial Pursuit – Book Lover's Edition" from 8:30 - 10pm. Some really easy questions and some really hard ones. But a good time was had by all six teams and Nerissa and Yan did a good job of keeping things moving.

MetaLib

During the last session of the afternoon, I attended "The Implementation of MetaLib at the University of Wisconsin-Madison" presented by Todd Bruns, Collection Development, UW-Madison; Sue Dentinger, General Library System Library Technical Group, UW-Madison; and Amy Kindschi, College of Engineering, UW-Madison.

MetaLib is both a Content Management System for electronic resources and a metasearching tool. Madison organized their resources into 18 categories with (I think) 171 sub-categories within what they call the E-Resource Gateway (http://metalib.wisconsin.edu/V/?func=change-portal-1&portal-name=MADISON). With Guest access, you can only look at the framework and the categories, but it's worth seeing how they've laid it out.

The QuickSearch feature for resource discovery got a "soft rollout" because they weren't sure how it would be received, but people seemed to really like it, so they did a full implementation (see above link) and it's proved to be even more popular.

Because metasearching is done in real time, it can bog down and grind to a halt if a lot of people are searching at once (in a classroom situation, for instance). But the whole issue of teaching metasearching to unsuspecting patrons is somewhat controversial.

Reasons not to teach metasearching:
- you lose controlled vocabulary (aieee!) and special features of the "native database"
- there are reasons to be suspicious of precision and recall of metasearch results
- not all databases can be metasearched
- it's difficult to do author searching
- it's even harder to distinguish between scholarly and popular stuff

Reasons to teach metasearching:
- it's great for resource discovery
- you can quickly see which resources have the highest results
- students and faculty seem to like it -- a lot
- it's good for quick citation verification
- many metasearch skills transfer to native databases: boolean, truncation, field limiters, etc.

One librarian quoted remarked that if metasearching encourages even shallow engagement with our purchased databases (rather than Google), it's worth it.

Early indications are that students seem to understand that they need to go to the native databases; that the metasearch is really a starting point. Which is a good sign...

More later.

RSS & Alerts

Kudos to Ben Conklin and Eric Larson on their RSS & Alerts presentation. Ben (the self proclaimed "average librarian" in terms of technical skill) ably discussed the ways in which alerting services and RSS feeds can be used by students and faculty in any library. Most databases currently offer an e-mail alert system that is relatively easy to set up. Students and faculty can be notified on a weekly or monthly basis when new articles in their area of interest are published. Some databases (PubMed for one) have started providing RSS feeds that can run the same kinds of searches and can be captured in RSS feed readers.

Eric spent a lot of time discussing the "geekier" aspects of RSS and the many places you can find RSS feeds. He demonstrated Bloglines, one of many RSS feed aggregators, that can be used as a collection point for RSS feeds. Eric also spent some time discussing the ways that RSS can be incorporated into library sites with very cool results.

WWW-Wonderful World of Wikis

While Pete was off learning about the Historical Society's public document collection, others of us attended David Null and Terri Muraski's program "The World of Wikis." Terri presented an overview of wikis, what they are (a social software), what they can do and who's using them. She had lots of examples from Library's that are using wikis for various things, including subject pages.

David used the UW Madison Stem Cell Research Wiki as a specific example of a wiki in action. The stem cell research library group has put together a wiki to keep document the actual stem cell research and to collect reactions to stem cell research in Wisconsin. They are using PMwiki for this project. They have password protected the information so that only those involved in the group can access, add and change information in it.

David's list of pros and cons to using a wiki for this are:
Pros:
1) It's easy to use
2) It is a great way to keep track of web sites
3) It can link to almost everything on the web (word docs., pdf, databases, etc.)
4) It can be customized

Cons:
1) There are other ways that the information could be kept (e.g., MyWebSpace)
2) People don't always remember to update in both places if more than one is being used to keep track of the information
3) Can password protect the information (but questions whether this really needs to be done.)
4) Not good for graphics or images

Overall a very informative program with lots of great ideas for integration into library websites!

Conference Keynote: Michael Gorman

Michael Gorman, ALA President and Dean of Library Services at Cal State, Fresno, delivered an intriguing keynote entitled, "New Directions in Library Education." It's a little weird to be blogging about Gorman because of the fuss last year about the "blog people": http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA502009.html -- but what the heck.

Some random, out of context, stuff from Gorman's talk:

"The only group older than librarians is Elvis fans."

As librarians, we're an aging group and we need enthusiastic and educated librarians to take our places -- but many retirees are not being replaced.

There are 117,000 libraries of all kinds in the US, most of which are school "libraries" (defined variously).

We have to believe that all these libraries need oversight (at least) by trained librarians. It's part of the library faith.

There are 50-ish accredited LIS programs in US and 7 in Canada; many more accrediting agencies for school librarians.

If you think of Canada as a "cold horizontal California," you'd think that California should have 7 or 8 LIS programs instead of 2 (the same number as Denton, TX).

California schools are in very expensive areas -- not where they could do the best for our profession.

Practitioners often have unrealistic expectations of LIS programs -- the difference between education and training. We expect too much of recent LIS graduates: LIS education should bring you to the place where training can get you going on the job...

Librarianship: "professional aspects of work in libraries."

Somebody who gives you a bandaid is not a doctor -- we have to draw a line.

Melvil Dewey taught "library hand" in library school, but we've come a ways since then...

Employers seem unhappy with new graduates -- we can no longer count on LIS graduates having experience with cataloging -- the degree no longer presumes a core of standard courses.

Gorman examined LIS course catalogs and found a trend toward adjuncts teaching the "library" courses -- which might be good: practitioners often have excellent and useful experience, but they're not full-time LIS faculty doing research and advising PhD students.

ALA has standards for LIS school education (http://www.ala.org/ala/accreditation/accreditation.htm) but the actual practice in terms of accreditation seems to be something else. We tend to use a "descriptive approach" that takes what's currently being done as the standard. This is opposed to the American Medical Association which uses a "prescriptive approach" with set agreed-upon standards that have to be met for accreditation.

Gorman's contention is that there should be a set of core courses/competencies that ALA-accredited LIS programs should teach. Things like:

- collection development
- cataloging
- reference and library instruction
- systems and technology
- library administration: the "facts of library life"
- other kinds of libraries -- when other libraries suffer, we all suffer

He described a Norwegian LIS initiative that identified 4 areas that needed to be covered (see: http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla71/papers/061e-Audunson.pdf).

During the Q&A, Michele Besant made the point that the important thing is to keep the lines of communication open. LIS educators may be trying to do one set of things while practitioners/employers need/want something else. We should be talking about whether a core curriculum of library courses, taught by full-time faculty, is desirable or even possible. And then we can talk about what that curriculum looks like.

It's a tough question and one that we should keep thinking about.

Wednesday morning at WAAL

Well, it's a beautiful day in sunny Stevens Point and the conference is off to a terrific start. I had the privilege this morning of introducing Nancy Mulhern's program, "New Bottle for an Old Wine: The Digital Collection of Wisconsin Public Documents 1852-1914." Nancy gave us a good overview of this amazing collection (http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/WI.WIPublicDocs) of documents -- 62 years, 118 volumes, 30 linear feet -- of state agency reports from the beginning of Wisconsin state history.

Searching can sometimes be tricky because this is such a large pile of uncorrected OCR text -- and is not indexed -- but we have good boolean and proximity search options. Indexing would be a terrific addition (Michael Edmonds, are you listening?) but it's a great resource that deserves wide use. Add it to your library's electronic resources page today!

And, of course, this collection is just part of the UWDC's State of Wisconsin Collection (http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/WI) which should be added to your resources lists too.