Hello again!
Well, I'm off to the next American Library Association conference. Philadelphia is my destination and my travel partner will be my dad, Harold Farwell.
Stay tuned for daily adventures and posts starting this Friday, January 11, 2008.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Monday, June 25, 2007
ALA Conference 6/24
My last day at the conference!
We had another beautiful day in Washington. I started my day at the ALCTS New Leadership Orientation. This was a 2 hour introduction to the ALCTS division and the various main committees. I'm beginning to understand the organizational structure and the options open to us. This group is very active in promoting presentations and publications. Later in the day, I attended the Gobi Users group meeting. We got to see the new interface that will be coming in Sept. 2007. We also heard more detail about how they will be handling e-books. This was helpful because I felt we received conflicting information from Elsevier about working with distributors. I met Jim Shetler in person, and we talked a little about our process and streamlining.
In the middle of the day, I walked through the exhibits. My sister and her family joined me for a short time, and I think they were overwhelmed by the quantity of books and publishers.
This was a great conference, I met many new people and learned a lot.
I'll be back at my next trip.
Beth
We had another beautiful day in Washington. I started my day at the ALCTS New Leadership Orientation. This was a 2 hour introduction to the ALCTS division and the various main committees. I'm beginning to understand the organizational structure and the options open to us. This group is very active in promoting presentations and publications. Later in the day, I attended the Gobi Users group meeting. We got to see the new interface that will be coming in Sept. 2007. We also heard more detail about how they will be handling e-books. This was helpful because I felt we received conflicting information from Elsevier about working with distributors. I met Jim Shetler in person, and we talked a little about our process and streamlining.
In the middle of the day, I walked through the exhibits. My sister and her family joined me for a short time, and I think they were overwhelmed by the quantity of books and publishers.
This was a great conference, I met many new people and learned a lot.
I'll be back at my next trip.
Beth
Saturday, June 23, 2007
ALA 6/23
A Saturday full of meetings!
I started my day with my morning visit to Starbucks; however, this morning I was joined by Abe, a catalog librarian from Australia. We had a nice chat.
I started my day with my morning visit to Starbucks; however, this morning I was joined by Abe, a catalog librarian from Australia. We had a nice chat.
- 8:00am and my first meeting started. I just got assigned to: ALCTS SS Education committee. Since I'm an intern, I get to take minutes. It wasn't as hard as I thought it might be. I'm excited about being on one of the education committees. The big push for the last couple of years has been to develop core competencies and syllabi for possible online courses. Very interesting, and the committee is hard at work finishing up some courses and identifying core skills in serials.
- I hiked over to another hotel for the next meeting: "Intellectual Freedom: Who's Responsible." Alonso Robinson, attorney with the National Security Agency discussed how legislation affects our national security. A brave man to bring this up in a room full of librarians who are very vocal about the Patriot Act and its affect on patron privacy. This was a good session. His mom is a librarian, so he was actually fairly pro library and at least had a good grasp of all the issues. One point he made was that the definition of what is national security continues to expand (i.e. weather, education, medicine (inoculations)) As this expansion continues, then we will continue to see acts like the Patriot Act that open up new ways to gather information in the name of "national security".
- The last 2 meetings were "Digital Asst Management: Implications for Preservation" and another preservation forum with speakers from NEH and Belfor talking about disaster planning and work done in Louisiana in salvaging library materials after the hurricanes.
A good day with lots to think about.
Friday, June 22, 2007
ALA Conference 6/22
Now the big conference starts!
I'm just going to give you the main highlight of my day. Cindy Pavelka joined me and we took a tour of the Library of Congress.
The tour was a Shakespeare-themed walking tour of the historic Thomas Jefferson building, which is the older building most of you see in pictures of the Library of Congress. John Cole lead the tour, he is the director of the Library's Center for the Book. Honestly, this was an amazing couple of hours. We saw their Shakespeare display of primarily 19th century materials that referenced Shakespeare. For example, a paper written by an famous actor 5 days after Lincoln's assassination. The paper was a list of quotes from Macbeth that the actor felt spoke to the "death of a king." And Cole Porter's original sketches of early "Kiss me Kate" versions. The most inspiring was a tour of the building pointing out all the Shakespeare quotes, statues and references. Interestingly the building was completed by the army corps of engineers and they used many different artists who were involved in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. So, Eric, how cool is that connection??? : )
And, I admit I got a little teary when we went to the gallery and were able to look into the main reading room. Wow. It really takes your breath away. I've included a picture. I highly recommend that everyone stops at the Library of Congress if you are in DC. Later we saw original manuscripts in the Manuscript Division Office (they had a special showing). An original letter from Roosevelt to his children, letter from Thomas Jefferson talking about slavery, Abraham Lincoln's original "sum" book from grade school. Again, Wow! Our last stop was at the office handling oral histories of Veterans, an interesting project hoping to capture as much oral history from vets from every war. So they are teaching the public methods to record these to help build their archives. This was the same building as the Copyright Office. Really amazing buildings and collections.
Wonderful day!
I'm just going to give you the main highlight of my day. Cindy Pavelka joined me and we took a tour of the Library of Congress.
The tour was a Shakespeare-themed walking tour of the historic Thomas Jefferson building, which is the older building most of you see in pictures of the Library of Congress. John Cole lead the tour, he is the director of the Library's Center for the Book. Honestly, this was an amazing couple of hours. We saw their Shakespeare display of primarily 19th century materials that referenced Shakespeare. For example, a paper written by an famous actor 5 days after Lincoln's assassination. The paper was a list of quotes from Macbeth that the actor felt spoke to the "death of a king." And Cole Porter's original sketches of early "Kiss me Kate" versions. The most inspiring was a tour of the building pointing out all the Shakespeare quotes, statues and references. Interestingly the building was completed by the army corps of engineers and they used many different artists who were involved in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. So, Eric, how cool is that connection??? : )
And, I admit I got a little teary when we went to the gallery and were able to look into the main reading room. Wow. It really takes your breath away. I've included a picture. I highly recommend that everyone stops at the Library of Congress if you are in DC. Later we saw original manuscripts in the Manuscript Division Office (they had a special showing). An original letter from Roosevelt to his children, letter from Thomas Jefferson talking about slavery, Abraham Lincoln's original "sum" book from grade school. Again, Wow! Our last stop was at the office handling oral histories of Veterans, an interesting project hoping to capture as much oral history from vets from every war. So they are teaching the public methods to record these to help build their archives. This was the same building as the Copyright Office. Really amazing buildings and collections.
Wonderful day!
Thursday, June 21, 2007
ALCTS conference 6/21
DC:
The ALCTS conference continued for the second day and was held at the Federal Trade Center. You can tell from the picture that this is an impressive building and was a great place for our meetings.
The next speaker was the director of preservation at the Library of Congress. Dianne Van der Reyden. She basically gave us a tour of their projects and processes. Frank, they call one of their services "Custom-made housing". I thought that was a nice way of labeling what you do with phase boxes, etc., so maybe we could use that term. Another cool thing they are beginning to play with is "Haptic training" with computer simulation. I believe this is the work with a tool on a fragile document, like a razor to scrap -- they hook themselves up to this computer which "traces" their movements. This machine can then be used later as training for others, the machine then moves a persons hand in the movement of the expert. Okay, so I obviously didn't quite get it, but found it interesting. Another new area is digital preservation. The director is working with some biologists and their work with dna as a possible way to track digital information through its evolutions since dna is a Base 4 and our computers work with a Base 2 model. Okay, so that was a little over my head too, but 4 is more than 2; so I get that! : )
The last speaker was Stephen Abram, who was very interesting. I have 4 pages of notes listing things we need to think about. I did come away convinced that we need to get all our staff aware of the 2.0 technologies so we are ready to move forward. A final quote from his presentation: "Librarians must learn that when we study something to death, Death was not our original goal." : )
This was a great conference and I met some very sharp and creative tech services leaders. I have a lot to share when I get back.
The ALCTS conference continued for the second day and was held at the Federal Trade Center. You can tell from the picture that this is an impressive building and was a great place for our meetings.
My day started early with a 15 block walk in a beautiful 65 degree morning. Stopped at Starbucks, so felt very "Metro" walking in to "work" with everyone else who was carrying their Starbucks cups.
The first speaker of the day was David Lankes who some of you heard speak at our Amigos conference. He talked about "Collecting conversations in a massive scale world". He recently put together a study for our community on "Participatory Networks: the library as conversation". Prof. Lankes gave us a lot to think about in a short talk. He started with an example of the massive amount of information that is around us now by taking a look at the Department of Transportation. If you think of all the data that is involved in road sensors, real-time traffic data, weather info, toll data, etc; soon every mile of road will generate a gigabyte of data a day. Yikes, that's just about road information and it is growing exponentially. The role of the library and librarians was a focus point highlighting the current difference in our text based world and tools vs. the growing amount of non-textual information (living documents, images, sound, etc). We must become part of the conversations. Place as Library, not Library as Place. I'll write up more of my notes and share them later. We had break out sessions after each speaker and these were very productive discussions. It was so helpful to hear other libraries and how they were looking at all these issues.The next speaker was the director of preservation at the Library of Congress. Dianne Van der Reyden. She basically gave us a tour of their projects and processes. Frank, they call one of their services "Custom-made housing". I thought that was a nice way of labeling what you do with phase boxes, etc., so maybe we could use that term. Another cool thing they are beginning to play with is "Haptic training" with computer simulation. I believe this is the work with a tool on a fragile document, like a razor to scrap -- they hook themselves up to this computer which "traces" their movements. This machine can then be used later as training for others, the machine then moves a persons hand in the movement of the expert. Okay, so I obviously didn't quite get it, but found it interesting. Another new area is digital preservation. The director is working with some biologists and their work with dna as a possible way to track digital information through its evolutions since dna is a Base 4 and our computers work with a Base 2 model. Okay, so that was a little over my head too, but 4 is more than 2; so I get that! : )
The last speaker was Stephen Abram, who was very interesting. I have 4 pages of notes listing things we need to think about. I did come away convinced that we need to get all our staff aware of the 2.0 technologies so we are ready to move forward. A final quote from his presentation: "Librarians must learn that when we study something to death, Death was not our original goal." : )
This was a great conference and I met some very sharp and creative tech services leaders. I have a lot to share when I get back.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
ALCTS conference 6/20
In D.C.:
I spent the morning with my 5 month old nephew watching him grin.
The 50th anniversary of ALCTS started in the afternoon and proved to be an excellent start to my week. The keynote speaker was Richard Lantham, author of "The Economics of Attention" 2006. An English professor, who has worked with media, copyright and now dabbles in economic theories. He was an interesting speaker and gave the group a lot of "food for thought" for our later sessions. Some important ideas he covered included the idea of the "wrapper" or "package" of information being as important as the content. So, the wrapper persuades the user. Think marketing and what Google does. Their "wrapper" is attracting the user. He also discussed the idea that we are in an attention economy and the value is in conversations.
Other ideas shared later included librarians being "facilitators of the cultural conversation" and while librarians are working hard to ensure the right skills at the right time; we will need to change our rules and customs like everyone else in this new informational "attention" age.
I met a lot of new folks, many of whom were heads of tech services at their library; so we had a lot in common.
Here are some of the interesting things I heard from my new friends:
I spent the morning with my 5 month old nephew watching him grin.
The 50th anniversary of ALCTS started in the afternoon and proved to be an excellent start to my week. The keynote speaker was Richard Lantham, author of "The Economics of Attention" 2006. An English professor, who has worked with media, copyright and now dabbles in economic theories. He was an interesting speaker and gave the group a lot of "food for thought" for our later sessions. Some important ideas he covered included the idea of the "wrapper" or "package" of information being as important as the content. So, the wrapper persuades the user. Think marketing and what Google does. Their "wrapper" is attracting the user. He also discussed the idea that we are in an attention economy and the value is in conversations.
Other ideas shared later included librarians being "facilitators of the cultural conversation" and while librarians are working hard to ensure the right skills at the right time; we will need to change our rules and customs like everyone else in this new informational "attention" age.
I met a lot of new folks, many of whom were heads of tech services at their library; so we had a lot in common.
Here are some of the interesting things I heard from my new friends:
- check out http://www.footnote.com/ (a website of original documents that allows people to add annotations)
- check out the Family History Library (http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Library/FHL/frameset_library.asp ) I met the head of cataloging, Emily.
- saw good poster sessions on merging cataloging and acquisitions (Univ of Tenn), the use of 2.0 technologies in tech services -- some cool ideas here, and some projects including international cooperation with collection development.
- Kentucky has moved Collection Development as a separate group that is a "Collections and Scholar Services" group combining cd plus scholarly communication issues
All in all, a great start!
Welcome!
All,
Welcome to my blog! I'm new to this technology, so am using this as a practice bloggy thingy. I'm going to begin this adventure by posting information about my library conference trips. Welcome, and feel free to join in the conversation.
Welcome to my blog! I'm new to this technology, so am using this as a practice bloggy thingy. I'm going to begin this adventure by posting information about my library conference trips. Welcome, and feel free to join in the conversation.
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