I was just totally blown away by this concept video from IDEO (a global design consultancy firm) on the future of eBooks. It is totally worth watching all 5 minutes.
If you’re in the mood for additional eBook concepts, check out this post from Wired’s Gadget Lab.
I know, I know- it’s been quite a while since my last post. Over the last few months most of my time and energy has been spent settling into my new position and new (for the second time) city. I’ve also done some thinking about this blog; what I hope to accomplish with it and what the content of the posts should be. There are many, many excellent librarian blogs. Rather than add to the deluge of information by repeating the words of established experts, I’ve decided to try to limit my writing to my personal professional experience as a digital librarian (oxymoron 🙂 intended). Therefore, at this time there will only be new posts when I have something that I think is unique or exciting to share, or that relates specifically to my projects or professional participation.
Having said that, you can count on some project updates soon!
What better way to end an internship than with a party of thousands of like minded individuals? Well… not exactly a party. There was work involved, but ALA09 sure gave me the chance to end it all with a bang.
It all started with preconferences on Thursday and Friday. Thursday I played the normal intern, just helping everyone register and get to the correct room, but Friday the ALCTS staff was brave enough to let me run an off-site event by myself. I’m happy to report that “Manipulating Metadata: XSLT for Librarians” went off without a hitch, AND I got to review XSLT. Bonus!
Friday night’s ALCTS101 session was very informative in helping me decide which sections of ALCTS to join. I was given the advice to just join them all, but I thought that might be a little overwhelming. I settled on Acquisitions, Cataloging and Classification, and Preservation and Reformatting.
Saturday, the first “real” day of conference, was a little mind-boggling. In the morning I browsed the exhibits, but found myself a little lost. From what I hear, that’s normal for a conference rookie. I think my biggest mistake was going when the exhibits opened. Pushing through the swag seekers is not my idea of fun. In order to remind myself that I was present for professional development, I attended a few good programs: one on how to choose whether or not to outsource digitization (and how to buy digitization equipment if you decided to), and another on metadata workflows.
The highlight of Sunday was the ALCTS awards ceremony where I (along with Keri Cascio- another awesome Missouri librarian) received Certificates of Appreciation. My citation mentioned this blog thus provoking moderate guilt pangs due to recent lack of updates.
Monday morning was the most exciting. I learned more about ALCTS from listening to the members formulate a vision of the division’s future in their “Creating Our Future” forum than I did from ALCTS101. The President’s Program brought the President and Director of The Art Institute of Chicago, James Cuno, to speak on Who Owns Antiquities. His impromptu presentation elicited passionate reactions from the attendees. I found myself mostly disagreeing with him, but I would never complain about a speaker that made me think as much as he did.
That about sums up the majority of my first conference. Oh yeah, except for the 9 hours of ALCTS board meetings where I took minutes and learned all of the ALCTS secrets that I’m not at liberty to share. Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill, digitize, and catalog you. I think they actually publish the minutes, but humor my glamorization for now.
That’s it, I’m done! Yay!
BUT…
I still have a week of class in Syracuse before I’m OFFICIALLY done with everything and then I immediatly start the new job in Kansas City. I also need this week to think up a new title for the blog. Suggestions are welcome, but for now I’ll just be the One Week Left Librarian.
After I decided that my next move would be to Kansas City, my lovely free weekends that were reserved for blogging and making calzones quickly transformed into frantic packing and road trips to find/ set up a new apartment. Now that that’s done, ALA Annual starts tomorrow. AHHH!!!! How did this happen so fast- the internship is nearly over.
Below is a tentative schedule of events and meetings I’ll be attending. I still haven’t made plans for most of Sunday, so feel free to offer suggestions. Hope to see some of you there!
| Thursday, July 9th
|
|
| 7:00 am- 3:00 pm | Hyatt Regency Chicago
Metadata Standards- Grand C North Streaming Media- Columbus Hall G Cataloging Digital Media- Columbus Hall I/J |
| 3:00-4:00 pm | PCCTI, 216 West Jackson, Ste. 900
Site visit for Manipulating Metadata |
| Friday, July 10th | |
| 7:30 am- 4:30 pm | PCCTI, 216 West Jackson, Ste. 900
Manipulating Metadata |
| 5:30-7:00 pm | Dinner with colleagues |
| 7:00-9:00pm | ALA Headquarters
ALCTS 101 (Drinks after?) |
| Saturday, July 11th | |
| 9:00 am- 1:00 pm | McCormick Place West , Hall F, located at 2301 S. Lake Shore Drive
Visit Exhibits |
| 1:30 – 5:30 pm | Take minutes at ALCTS board meeting
McCormick Place West, room W-175a |
| Sunday, July 12th | |
| TBD, suggestions welcome! | |
| 5:30-7:00 pm | Chicago Hilton, Waldorf Room
ALCTS Awards Ceremony |
| 7:00 pm | ALCTS Staff Dinner |
| Monday, July 13th | |
| 9:30-12:00 noon | Chicago Hilton, Continental A/B
President’s Program |
| 12:00 noon- 1:00 pm | President’s Program Lunch |
| 1:30-5:30 pm | Take minutes at ALCTS board meeting
McCormick Place West, room W-175a |
| Tuesday, July 14th | |
| 1:30-3:30 pm | Take minutes at ALCTS board meeting
McCormick Place West, room W-175a |
In my opinion, one of the best things ALCTS does for its members is provide some great online learning opportunities. Right now we offer three classes: Fundamentals of Acquisitions (FOA), Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management (FCDM), and Fundamentals of Electronic Resource Acquisitions (FERA).
What’s the big deal? Well, these are topics that are usually barely covered, if at all, by a traditional library education. They are also areas that librarians tend to fall into, or suddenly find themselves in charge of. (A scary place to be without any formal education!)
Until lately, my role has been behind the scenes, uploading materials and monitoring online chats, but for the latest session of classes I enrolled as a student for FOA and FERA. I can say from first-hand experience that these are top-rate classes. The instructors are currently active in the field, performing the work that they are teaching. The other students are also well informed and from a wide variety of backgrounds. The classes are capped at 20, and there are always a few international students thanks in part to a competitive grant offered by ALCTS to librarians in developing countries. In addition to readings, exercises, and quizzes, the classes include weekly chat sessions and discussion boards where we get to share and learn from each others experiences.
ALCTS uses Moodle, a free, open-source online learning managment system to host their courses. For most of our needs, Moodle has worked very well. The only major issue we’ve had is with the chat. For a while it kept crashing, and after a lot of troubleshooting on our end (thinking it was a problem with our server volume) we determined that it was actually Moodle that was causing the problem. Now that we’re using another chat service, everything’s fine. (Hey, you can’t complain too much since Moodle is free!)
So far all of these classes have been very popular, usually filling up. Later this year we will be offering even more frequent sessions of FOA, FCDM, and FERA. There is also a new course, Fundamentals of Cataloging, that is in the works. I’ve read through the first draft of the course, and right now it’s looking to be on par with the cataloging class that I took at Syracuse.
Another positive of these courses is the price. As anyone taking classes from a university knows, education is not cheap. ALCTS classes are a great bargain at $109 for ALCTS members and $129 for non-members.
You lean something new every day. GoToWebinar DOES NOT play nice with Macs.
If the presenter is using a Mac, the attendees get this black splotch where the presenter’s toolbar appears on his or her screen. Ther are also audio issues, and a good number of features are missing or weird. Our presenter who initially wanted to use a Mac gave up.
I haven’t heard of any problems on the attendees end, no members have complained, but if anyone knows of any, please let us know!
GTW- Get your act together!
We’ve also completed our Institutional Repositories webinars for the summer, but don’t worry if you missed them. We’re working on making them available as downloads. There are also more IR webinars coming this Autumn after the conference excitement dies down.
Want an easy way to collect and manage data? Wufoo‘s easy online form builder is perfect for building secure online forms. At ALCTS, we use it as a way to collect conference program, webinar, and online class proposals. It’s free if you just need a few forms and don’t expect a lot of responses, and there are several different paid plans for users who will need multiple forms or lots of storage for responses. Their website has an impressive list of clients (though I wonder in what capacity these organizations are using Wufoo).
The types of questions available are good. It doesn’t let you create a matrix like Survey Monkey, but you can still finagle most of the questions you want to include into the formats available. There are also “Fancy Pants” options for specific types of data like prices and phone numbers.
Wufoo doesn’t use any advertising on the forms, and they can be customized with logos. The result is actually very professional.
Entries can be sent to email accounts, mobile devices, or secure RSS feeds, and the results are also saved by Wufoo.
I can’t compare this to any other online form builders since this is the first one I’ve used. Overall, it’s worked quite well for our needs. If anyone else knows of a good one out there (or a bad one to watch out for, for that matter), please leave a message in the comments or email me!
That’s what I’ve been working on the past few weeks (and my pitiful excuse for not having posted lately- I can’t post about the internship when I’m out of town). It started with an interview in Kansas City and ended with a job offer at the end of last week. I’m happy to say that come July 27th I’ll be the new Digital Project Manager for Kansas City Public Library!
Two tips for job searchers-
1. Use social networking! I found this job by following KCPL on twitter. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t posted on any of the major national job boards (at least outside the state of Missouri).
2. Know your strenghts and be yourself! I didn’t get this job because I have a ton of experience, but I knew what I wanted to do, I studied for the interview, and then I went for it. My interview wasn’t perfect- I spoke too quickly and I wasn’t afraid to admit that I didn’t have experience when I really didn’t, but that didn’t matter. I think I got the offer because I was myself, flaws and all!
I know this is kind of a lame post and really doesn’t have much to do with ALCTS, so I’ll leave you with an image of what I see from my desk.
Ahhh… trees and the new Trump Tower.
More on the internship soon, I promise!
Lately it seems like everyone is talking about Twitter. From NPR commentator John Ridley’s declaration this week of Twitter as the ultimate in American hypocrisy (not to mention his misunderstanding of privacy issues) to the conversation topic in one of my library classes a few weeks ago titled “Does Twitter Reflect a Change in How We Search?” inspired by this article from SearchEngineWatch. All of this attention generally means one of two things: either it’s either soon to be passe or it’s here to stay.
Libraries and library organizations were some of the earliest adoptors of Twitter. TwitterLeague has an ongoing list of more than 455 libraries that tweet. There’s also this article on Twitter in libraries that I learned of from an email to me at the ALA and from one of my former professor’s Tweets.
ALCTS has two Twitter accounts, one for our Council of Regional Groups Continuing Education Commite that tweets under alcts_crg_ce and one for our office, ALCTS. We primarily use them to communicate with our members about what’s happening in the organization and to answer member questions. That’s right, answer questions. This is a point that I think critics of Twitter often miss. Twitter at its best is about interaction, not telling the world what you had for breakfast. At a time when we have friends all over the country and the world, Twitter is a way to stay connected in between personal meetings. More and more people are now working and learning from home, and I think of Twitter as the watercooler of telecommuting. I love knowing what awesome things my amazing librarian friends are up to; it inspires me in my own professional endeavors.
Being a job seeker, I’m also finding Twitter very helpful in the search. If you’re in the same boat, Libgig_Jobs and LibInfoSciJobs are both fantastic. I actually have an interview this week for a position I learned about on Twitter.
Will Twitter last? We’ll see. Fifteen years ago we were having the same conversations about email. To John Ridley and the other naysayers: if you don’t want to use Twitter, then don’t, but please don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, or at least spoken with someone who uses and understands it.
One of the great things about internships is getting to actually use all of the stuff that you spent so much time learning about in school. I’m always reading about new or popular software, but no matter how cool some of it is, I might not have a pressing need to download it and try it out.
So far at ALCTS I’m averaging two new software applications each week, and getting to use them in a real, professional capacity. As I learn about some of these cool tools, I’ll share them with you here.
One that I started with my very first day is GoToWebinar.
In case you’re wondering, webinars are (as the name suggests) seminars or programs that are held over the Web. They can be small business meetings or huge presentations held for a thousand or so people. They can be simple, with one person presenting, or more complex, with mulitple users collaborating with multiple computers.
Webinars are particularly hot right now because they offer a tremendous opportunity for organizations to save money, and we all know how vital that is at this time.
The webinar software we use at ALCTS is GoToWebinar. I was first exposed to this company when helping Teach for America with a usability study for its new alumni website. For that we used GoToMeeting (slightly different features than the webinar version). The software allows for a simple and relatively cheap way to conduct user protocol studies. Since it allows presenters to screen share, the organizer can hand over control of her computer to the user and record everything the user says and does.
At ALCTS, we’re using GoToWebinar to conduct programs that are available for all of our members. It’s like attending a program at a conference, but you don’t have to ask your boss to pay for your hotel. Currently we are in the middle of a great series of presentations about institutional repositories. (Even if you missed the first two, they are all separate topics, and there are more in the works.)
What I like about GoToWebinar is it’s ease of use. Basic presentations are generally self-explanatory. On top of that, it has come cool advanced features that allow a presenter to feel more like he or she is speaking to an audience rather than an endless void. One option I particularly like is the ability to conduct polls that provide instant feedback, breaking down the results by percentage and allowing the presenter to share those results with their audience. Organizers are also able to tell who is watching the presentation and who is just checking their email/twitter feed. That’s a great one for teachers who require students to attend webinars for credit.
One thing I don’t like as much about GoToWebinar is the lack of features for the audience members. They can ask questions of the presenters, but they can’t chat with one another. One of the challanges of online communication is maintaining the best things about in person communication. At a real seminar, you get to talk not only to the presenters, but also to the other attendees, who might be people you run into just a few times a year. Other webinar software I’ve used, like WebEx, allow the attendees to chat (instant message throughout the presentation. In addition to letting attendees chat with one another, it allows attendees to provide spontaneous feedback to the presenter, which is vital. When you can’t see looks of confusion, you might not realize that your microphone is off.
Although I found the software fairly user-friendly, there are always users who prefer to read the manual. Unfortunately, the documentation for GoToWebinar is not that great. To help our presenters, I created a very basic tip sheet.
If your library or organization is looking to reach your patrons/members in a way that is convenient and inexpensive for both you and them, webinars are a great thing to try.
Jordan Fields 