library+instruction+technology

I finally installed the new WordPress app tonight. I like it so far.

Still love my Droid and still very busy at work. I worked with six classes this week. My favorite class was International Trade. They had to find a wide range of statistics.

This is a shameless plug for my committee's discussion forum at Midwinter. If you are not going to Boston or not interested in "discovery services" then go ahead and mark this post as read.

The RUSA/MARS Local Systems & Services Committee invites you to join our discussion forum 'Discovery Systems: Solutions a User Could Love?' at Midwinter.

When: Sunday, January 17, 2010 from 1:30-3:00 pm
Where: Westin Waterfront, Faneiul Room (Mezzanine Level)
425 Summer Street connected to the Boston Convention and Exhibit Center

Panelists include:

• Marshall Breeding, Director for Innovative Technology and Research, Vanderbilt University who will provide a brief "Overview of Discovery Systems."
• Cody Hanson, Technology Librarian, University of Minnesota, who will briefly discuss "User testing and feedback on Primo at the University of Minnesota."
  
• Frances McNamara, Director, Integrated Library Systems and Administrative and Desktop Systems, University of Chicago, who will briefly share experiences of the "LENS Discovery System, based on AquaBrowser." and; 
  
• Barbara DeFelice, Director Digital Resources Program, Dartmouth College who will discuss "Summon @ Dartmouth College: the User View."
  

Our panelists will highlight the experiences of libraries that have implemented "next generation discovery tools" that provide access to disparate library collections from a single search box. Panelists will focus their comments on user response and subsequent assessment of the local implementation. 

Discussion forum participants will be able to share their experiences with discovery tools and ask questions following the panelists. A summary of the key ideas gleaned will be posted on the MARS Local Systems & Services web page following Midwinter.

Photo credit: The photo "Magnified" was taken by Jake Bouma (jakebouma) on March 9, 2009 and uploaded to Flickr on March 10, 2009 with an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License. The photo was downloaded on January 3, 2010 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakebouma/3345296623/ 

Ok, that may be overkill. I’m posting from my Droid. I’ve had it for a week. I’m still getting use to it. This is my first smartphone. I know, I’m 2000 and late. Stay tuned…

I've enjoyed reading the various Library Day in the Life posts this week. I thought I would add my two cents, but in different format. Instead of a single day, here is an overview of my entire week. I will probably attempt the actual day in the life post once the semester gets into swing. That's when my life is most interesting. Summers are a hodgepodge of boring back office stuff.

Monday

• Updated information about new MLA and APA styles on web site
• Installed new barcode wand on first circulation computer and replaced the broken cord on the barcode wand on the second circulation computer
• Met with Physical Plant Director about roof leak
• Began to write staff performance appraisals
• Notified everyone working in the building of the problem with the A/C chiller and Physical Plant's timeframe for the fix
• Wrote narrative describing library resources supporting the athletic training curriculum as part of a self-study team for program re-accreditation

Tuesday

• Updated content on athletic training subject guide on web site
• Posted draft minutes of RUSA Reference Services Section's Web Advisory Committee to ALA Connect and emailed to appropriate RSS folks
• Sent email welcoming new member who has agreed to join RUSA MARS Local Systems & Services
• Posted draft minutes of Local Systems & Services Committee to ALA Connect and emailed to new member not yet in the system
• Created a planning document in ALA Connect for our discussion forum on the local customization and evaluation of discovery services to be held at Midwinter in Boston
• Ran a wide variety of reports on circulation statistics of unbound and bound journals
• Met with Director of Academic Resource Center to learn about the positive changes being made to the football study tables that are held in the library during fall semester
• Re-iterated my philosophy that "fear of theft" is not a criterion for collection development

Wednesday

• Signed authorizations for bill payment and entered amounts into my budget tracking spreadsheet.
• Continued to write performance appraisals
• Met with faculty member coordinating the last class in our Arts & Humanities sequence to refine library instruction objectives from last semester
• Reviewed the final details of the DVD relocation and reclassification (from Dewey to LC) project
• Reviewed existing processing workflow of serials and the long standing circulation policy of serials (Circ stats are low, time investment in front/backend processing is high, rationale for circulating is no longer valid in my opinion..again fear of theft and cutting.)
• Met with Computer Services staff to learn what network services will still be available to the second year (were DC now are Northwest State) students in our 1+2+1 nursing program with Northwest State Community College 

Thursday

• Met with circulation supervisor and A/V coordinator to plan for student worker needs for coming academic year and talk about potential for cross-training students to work circulation and A/V tech support
• Reviewed existing loan rules, loan rule limiter table, and what authorizations our students have in Millennium with circulation supervisor in order to submit a request to OPAL Help to enact the policy change to no longer circulate serials
• Met with faculty member coordinating Master of Arts in Education graduate program to finalize process for loading theses into the OhioLINK Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Center
• Created authorization form and letter to be sent to targeted past graduates to obtain permission to digitize their theses to load into the ETD Center
• Emailed and then talked on the phone with the Assistant Dean for Adult and Graduate Programs to initiate process with OhioLINK for Defiance College to join the ETD Center

Friday

• Reviewed our current statistics of missing items and discussed the "search for missing item process" with circulation supervisor
• Walked the stacks for 15 minutes and found six of the missing books (go me!)
• Learned via email that I chose wisely during database funding reconstruction. The Library will be paying a larger percentage than in the past, but our students and faculty will still have access to specific discipline databases. 
• Exchanged emails with OhioLINK about our request to join the ETD Center
• Met with circulation supervisor about student worker evaluation process
• Continued to write staff performance appraisals
• Submitted request to OPAL Help to make necessary changes to specific loan rules to enact our policy change of making serials non-circulating

Taking a year off from blogging has created an interesting situation. This post outlining my plans for Annual 2009 in Chicago is only one post away from the one I wrote last June listing what I intended to do at Annual 2008 in Anaheim. This should create a double take for future readers browsing my blog in chrono-order. No, I don’t think that many people browse my blog…but I can dream…

Here are my plans for Chicago. As always, there are multiple things I would love to do every spare minute of Annual. In reality, my brain gets fried and I tend to skip a session in the afternoon…so this is my optimistic schedule.

Let me know if you are going to be attending any of these events or feel free to say hello if you see me around.

Friday, July 10, 2009
3:30-4:30 PM – MARS Executive Committee I (New Chairs Orientation)

5:30-7:30 PM – MARS Happy Hour at Big Bar/Hyatt Regency

Saturday, July 11, 2009
8:00-10:30 AM – RSS Open House and Web Advisory Committee

10:30-Noon – FYE: Connecting First-Year College Students with the Library. Not holding my breath that I can make it to McCormick…so I may end up at Information Commons Discussion Group.

1:30-3:00 PM – Discussion Group: Open Source
I have no clue what this is going to be about, but it is being sponsored by RUSA Reference Services Section.

3:30-5:00 PM – Instruction Section Current Topics Discussion I: Teacher Proficiencies: Applying Proficiency Standards for Instruction Librarians in Your Library

Sunday, July 12, 2009
8:00-10:00 AM – MARS All Committee Meeting/Local Systems & Services Committee. I agreed to serve as chair for this year.

10:30-Noon – Instruction Section Current Topics Discussion II: Using Discovery-Based Learning to Engage Students with Information Literacy

Lunch with a friend

1:30-3:00 PM – College Library Directors Discussion Group

3:30-5:30 PM – You Got Me, Do You Like Me? Evaluating Next Generation Catalogs OR Illuminating New Instruction Research: Applying Research to Practice

4:00-5:30 PM 5th Annual Book cart Drill Team Championship

Monday, July 13, 2009
8:00-Noon – MARS Executive Committee II. Report out as Local Systems & Services Chair. I don’t think I’ll have to be there the entire time.

Lunch with a former OPAL colleague

1:30-3:00 PM – RUSA President’s Program: From the Book and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Readers’ Advisory

5:00-6:30 PM – PLA President’s Program and Awards Presentation featuring Cokie Roberts. I’m going for Cokie Roberts and not so much for the PLA Awards.

I’m not heading back to Ohio until Tuesday morning.

For the record, I am not dead. I have been on a blogcation…or maybe that is a blog-sabbatical…or maybe life just got busy and my use of alternate communication channels increased.

I’ve read a couple of posts over the last few days from other librarians feeling guilty about not tending to their blog as they would like. I didn’t intentionally plan on taking a year off. Like most of you, a lot of my communication has dispersed into various social media streams. You know the obvious culprits…Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, and del.icio.us. I did consider abandoning this blog, until I noticed that my site visit stats show that people are still tripping across content. The stats indicate that people are mostly “reading” the posts written about conference sessions. I guess I will keep the blog up for awhile and see if I can get into another posting groove (if only to buck the dead and dying blog trend that not many people are blogging about but lamenting on those other social channels).

In case you are curious, here is what I did during my year long blogcation…

• Interviewed for a job and was not the successful candidate in June 2008. Oh to have national exposure. Knowing what I know now…it worked out for the best that I didn’t get the position.
• Attended ALA Annual 2008 in Anaheim (pictures). My first trip to SoCal and also to Disneyland. I realize that Anaheim isn’t representative of all of southern California, but I think I still prefer San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area.
• Right-sized the reference collection at MFPOW in July and August (pictures).
• Received the Ohio Private Academic Library service award at the 10th OPAL Conference held at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus at the beginning of August.
• Interviewed for a library director position in mid-August (yeah about two weeks before classes started). Was offered and accepted an excellent opportunity at Defiance College in northwest Ohio (35 miles from where I grew up).
• Worked very hard to wrap-up projects and transition knowledge to colleagues and get the house sold in Zanesville during August and September.
• Left my former position as Head of User Services at Muskingum College on September 30 and started as Director of Library and Informational Resources on October 1. I don’t recommend the “no downtime” plan when switching jobs. My preference would have been not to do it that way, but that’s how it worked out. I think I was able to pull it off, because I had family in the area (no need to find an apartment for a few weeks) and because both libraries are members of OPAL (Ohio Private Academic Libraries…not the Online Programming yada yada group) and OhioLINK.
• Accepted into the CLS College Library Directors Mentor Program and assigned a terrific mentor.
• Wrote a successful application for a team from Defiance College to attend the CIC/NITLE/Project Kaleidoscope 2009 Learning Spaces and Technology Workshop for our learning commons renovation project.
• Closed on the sale of the Zanesville house on Halloween. We didn’t make as much off of the sale as we had hoped, but still not complaining because we actually walked away with a check when most houses were not selling.
• Looked at 12 houses in Defiance on November 1. Made an offer two days later on an empty 1960s two story that needed mostly cosmetic work and moved in on November 13. Moving company delivered our worldly possessions the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
• Reworked the entire Pilgrim Library web site over Christmas break.
• Attended the College Library Directors Mentor Program preceding Midwinter in Denver. Learned a lot about myself and what it takes to lead a smaller library. Perfected my elevator speech on how Defiance, Ohio was named.
• Had a successful RSS Web Advisory committee meeting at Midwinter. My other committee meeting was not that successful. I was the only one that showed up for the MARS Local Systems & Services meeting. No one else on the committee came to Midwinter. I ended up going over and hanging out at the Publications committee table. Overall, Midwinter went well. Had a great conversation with Chris C. about the direction of the RUSA web site and how to align RSS content with the big picture.
• February was cold and snowy and reminded me I had been gone from northwest Ohio winters for 20 years.
• Took a convoluted set of flights to get from Detroit to Richmond, VA (return flights were yet a different route) in order to save money to attend the Learning Spaces & Technology workshop the first week of March. Brought back a lot of good ideas and validation that our initial planning for a learning commons was on the right track. My takeaways: wheels give permission to move and developing successful collaborative learning spaces is an iterative process that builds on incremental change. (pictures)
• April was an intensive print reference rightsizing project to liberate floor space for a relocated computer lab and presenting on our learning commons sandbox project to faculty, staff, and new members of the board.
• May brought news of the exact dollar amount I had to work with for our learning commons sandbox area…not leaving a lot of time to source and procure furniture.
• Attend IUG 2009 back in sunny Anaheim in mid-May (felt like deja-vu since I had just been in Anaheim 11 months earlier). Conference and travel was paid for by OPAL since I had won the service award in 2008. It was my first IUG and probably my last IUG. I think it’s a good conference for systems librarians, catalogers, front-line circulation/access services folk, acquisitions folk, and public service librarians if you have your own III installation. I didn’t see a lot of value for reference librarians if you are on a shared catalog. (pictures…but none of the actual conference)
• June was jam-packed with book shifting, removal of shelving, and taking a chainsaw to the separate reference and circulation desks to come up with a new solution. Take a look at my learning commons set on Flickr to get a feel for the transformation to date.

That about wraps up the overview of this last year. I really do plan on getting back into writing mode. There is a lot more I would like to write about the Learning Spaces & Technology workshop and my experiences from our learning commons project.

I hope you stick around or at least stumble upon a future post via your favorite search engine.

Anaheim is fast approaching. Here is what I am planning to do (at the moment). Let me know if you are going to be in SoCal and want to get together.

Thursday, June 26

• Arrive at John Wayne Airport at Noon
• Dinner with LA friend

Friday, June 27

• OCLC Symposium: The Mashed-up Library, 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.
• Meet the MARtians Happy Hour (maybe), 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, June 28 

• Reference Services Section (RSS) Open House, 8 to 9 a.m.
• RSS Web Advisory Committee Meeting, 9 to 10:30 a.m. 
• Research to Understand Users: Issues and Approaches, 10:30 to Noon
• There's No Catalog Like No Catalog: The Ultimate Debate on the future of the Library Catalog, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
• ACRL-IS Current Topics Discussion I: Using the Social Web to Promote and Enhance Information Literacy, 4 to 5:30 p.m.

Sunday, June 29

• Beyond Gaming Tournaments, 8 to 10 a.m.
• What is the Future of Face-to-Face Reference? Is Face-to-Face Reference Dying?, 10:30 to Noon
• 14th Annual New Reference Research Forum, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
• RSS Executive Committee II, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
• Book Cart Drill Team Championship, 4 to 5:30 p.m.
• Dinner with former coworker

Monday, June 30

• Reference Services to Teens, 8 to 10 a.m.
• Booklist/Reference Books Bulletin: The Future of Electronic Reference Publishing, a View from the Top, 10:30 to Noon
• RUSA President's Program: Quality Service in an Impersonal World, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
• PLA President's Program: Jamie Lee Curtis 5 to 6:30 p.m.

Tuesday, July 1

• Auditorium Speaker Series featuring Khaled Hossein, 8 to 9 a.m.
• Disneyland/Disney's California Adventure

Wednesday, July 2 

• Disneyland/Disney's California Adventure

Thursday, July 3

• Fly out 9:45 a.m. and arrive in Columbus 7 p.m. 

Happy Friday the Thirteenth! I thought I would address your worst conference nightmare…wasting a session. It doesn't matter if it's ALA or ALAO (that's the Ohio ACRL chapter), but I usually end up sitting through one disappointing presentation. In this case, the content delivered didn't live up to expectations created by the session title and description. 

The issue with this specific session was the use of the phrase "lessons learned" in the title and the thought provoking questions posed in description. Instead of hearing about lessons learned or best practices or tips or sage advice…I heard an infomercial.  My disappointment stems from the content presented not being scalable or applicable to another institution. Don't tempt us with "How do you prioritize your resources and staff?" to only tell us that you were able to hire more librarians and have money for an information commons. That's great for you, however it's not practical or implementable for the majority of your audience.

The only transferable "lesson learned" (and not even to my local situation) I got out of the presentation is to share laptops between library departments. Do you use laptops for instruction and for lending to students? Great! Work with circulation/access services/whomever controls the lending side to pool laptops during peak times of the academic year. Use the majority of laptops for instruction at the beginning of the semester/quarter (when instruction is high and assignments low). Reverse the distribution model at the end of the semester. Let circulation/access services use your laptops for students to borrow to work on all of those end of term papers and projects. You're probably not doing much (if any) instruction at the end of the term. It's a win-win and a great way to extend those insufficient capital expense dollars.

Feel free to take a look at the PowerPoint slides.  You might get something out of them that is useful for your institution. My lesson learned for you? Go with your gut instinct when picking conference sessions. I'll try to do a better job with all of my schedule conflicts in Anaheim.

If I could do it over again, I would have gone to hear Paul Waelchli and Sara Holladay talk about "Fantasy Sports: The Road to Information Literacy Championships." Paul and Sara win the prize for information sharing! You have to appreciate the amount of time they put into creating an amazing Fantasy Football Toolkit for Libraries. Check it out…

• PowerPoint presentation slides
• Fantasy Football 101 Handout
• Fantasy Football Lesson Plan
• Bridge document linking Fantasy Football activities to ACRL Information Literacy Standards

"Leveraging the Economics of Information and Scholarly Communication Process to Enrich Instruction" was the rest of the title of this session presented by Kim Duckett and Scott Warren from NC State University. Their PowerPoint presentation (1.9MB) is available and you should read through the slides because I can't do them justice in this post.

Kim and Scott started with the argument that our students are not savvy enough to know when they have left our discovery tools to access paid content. Students have not made the connection yet, even though they probably have a similar mental model. Students normally don't consider how much money is spent to provide access to electronic journal articles. They go to the library web site and get access to the content for free (with few or little authentication barriers), so it's just like a lot of other content on the open web.

Strategies they have been using successfully with upper level classes…

Start with what students already know about the peer review process and build on their prior knowledge.  Challenge assumptions by asking:

• Why don't researchers just use blogs?
• Do all papers submitted get published?
• Are all journals equal?
• Do authors get royalties?
• How much does it cost an author to publish?

Examples of sticker shock were used to further challenge assumptions about how much scholarly content actually costs. This naturally leads to a discussion about why publishers charge so much and why libraries provide access to expensive content. They discuss the various stakeholders in the publishing process: author, publisher, database vendor, and library.

Continued discussion of the invisible web follows, where the concept that Google doesn't make a distinction when indexing content if it is free or free. The crawlers are just discovering content and making a pointer to it available for retrieval. Finally, Scott and Kim were able to leverage the existing mental model of online shopping (buying airline tickets at Expedia or Travelocity) to help the student make the connection between discovery and access.

Candice Benjes-Small and Eric Ackermann from Radford University spoke about how they redesigned their assessment process for instruction. They had reached a point where merely counting number of sessions was deemed no longer useful in measuring success.

All librarians had been using a standard student evaluation form that had a four point Likert scale and a single comment box at the end. They found the disconnect between the scores and the comments to be problematic and not useful in making changes. It was decided to modify the evaluation form to ask for qualitative feedback for each question.

The modified evaluation form asks the following three questions

1. I learned something useful for this workshop.

• Strongly Agree: Name one thing you learned from this workshop?
• Agree: Name one thing you learned from this workshop?
• Disagree: How can the workshop be improved?
• Strongly Disagree: How can the workshop be improved? 

2. I think this librarian was a good teacher.

• Strongly Agree: What did you like about the teaching?
• Agree: What did you like about the teaching?
• Disagree: What did you dislike about the teaching?
• Strongly Disagree: What did you dislike about the teaching? 

3. I would recommend this workshop to someone interested in library research.

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree 

They chose a comment based metric methodology for assessment. This is similar to what the University of Virginia Library is doing with their balanced scorecard metrics.  "What did you dislike about the teaching?" was chosen as the question to measure. This would allow for the librarian teaching to have something tangible for improving instructional delivery. A target of less than 5% negative comments was set to be the measure for total success. Partial success would be achieved if 5 to 10% of the comments were negative. 

Advantages

• Evidence based
• Allows for goals to be set and measured
• Flexible to measure what you want to know

Disadvantages

• Time intensive, especially coding qualitative comments
• Difficult to change evaluation forms if you want to go back and measure another goal 

Questions to consider

• What do you want to know?
• How are you going to measure? 
• Are you going to focus on evaluation scores (quantitative) or comments (qualitative)?
• What is the target for success?
• Who is going to compile the results?

Their PowerPoint slides are available.