Name this Spot

Educause Center for Applied Research

2009-10-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009 report was released the other day. This is the sixth in the annual series and it always has something of interest.

Use of the university library websites seems much more promising than the 2006 OCLC !--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resouces, where they found that only 55% of students used the library website at least monthly. The ECAR reports that 94.6% of students used library websites on a weekly basis. Of course, 90% of those student use social networking sites on a daily basis.

Another point that caught my eye was that 73.1% of the students reported they were using their library website for classwork during the period when the survey was taken.

Students were asked to rate their information literacy skills and not surprisingly that are very confident about their abilities to search online, find information and evaluate it. This has real impact on how we approach information literacy instruction. Many students believe they have the skills they need already. Over 30,000 students assessed their abilities. 80% said they were very confident in their ability to search the Internet effectively and efficiently. (p16) A third felt they were experts. The survey also asked students to assess their ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of online sources. Fifty-one percent felt they were very skilled expert in evaluating online information.

Students also felt pretty capable in legal and ethical aspects of accessing and using online information. 48.4% felt they were very skilled to expert. Only 17% felt they were not at all skilled or not very skilled in this area.

Handheld Internet Access

Just over half of the students surveyed report that they own an internet capable handheld device and another 12% plan to purchase a device with that capability in the next 12 months. Use of those devices to access the internet is more variable. About a third access the Internet daily and another third have never accessed the internet from their device. Cost and the wide available of other avenues to the internet are the main reasons for people not using handheld devices for Internet access. The ubiquity of internet access won’t change but the cost of mobile internet access is likely to drop. Librarians are thinking about how to provide their resources to handhelds this supports those efforts. The majority of students accessing the internet on handhelds are looking for information (76.7%). The information sources listed in the survey report seem more personal presently; news, weather, sports and specific facts are mentioned. Chances are that as mobile internet use becomes a more common part of students’ lives academic use could grow. In focus groups electronic reserve was mentioned as a possible use for handheld devices.

Textbook Rentals

2009-08-15T07:40:00.000-07:00

One of the proposed solutions suggested to address the textbook affordability issue. Various states, including Illinois have evaluated the feasibility of establishing textbook rental programs as a way to help students better afford higher education. Many of the UW System colleges and comprehensive universities, including UW Eau Claire have textbook rental programs. Studies, like the one done by the Illinois Board of Higher Education, have focused on universities providing textbook rentals. This upcoming academic year will see publishers getting into the act. A recent New York Times article reports on this new development. Maybe this provides an answer to publishers who view the used textbook market as a threat to their business and students who see that market as their best source for recooping their textbook costs.

Fair Use Evaluator

2009-07-16T06:34:00.000-07:00

I just learned about a new tool from the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy, the Fair Use Evaluator. This tool walks a person through the evaluation process of deciding whether their use of copyrighted material falls within the provisions of Fair Use. As you go through the process you can click on statements for and against Fair Use for all four of the issues that help determine fair use. The tool then calculates the pluses and minuses and creates a time stamped .pdf document that documents the process of deciding whether or not to use copyrighted material. It should be very helpful in documenting someone's good faith effort to exercise their fair use rights as they make use of protected material.

Technician - Textbooks available on reserve

2009-06-24T11:53:00.001-07:00

The other day I learned that the D.H. Hill library at North Carolina State University is collaborating with their campus bookstore to provide one copy of every required course textbook through their reserve desk.Technician - Textbooks available on reserve

This is an impressive attempt by an academic library to address student's needs for relief from the continual rise in the cost of textbooks.

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Textbook Affordability

2009-06-11T20:07:00.001-07:00

Today I received my University of Denver alumni magazine and learned that a professor there is trying to address the high cost of textbooks through electronic texts. The magazine reprinted an article from October, 2008 about Daniels College of Business professor Don McCubbrey's work to solve the textbook affordability problem facing his students. He worked with his graduate students to develop an electronic book that would be affordable. But Professor McCubbrey was thinking about the cost of textbooks in a more global manner. If textbooks are too expensive for students in the United States, what does that mean for education in less developed areas. Working with Richard Watson of the University of Georgia, Professor McCubbrey founded of the Global Text Project. The Global Text Project's goal is to marshall the resources of the United States to bring 1,000 electronic textbooks to students in the developing world and help education around the world.

Is a New Era Dawning

2009-06-07T18:24:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine asked me, in relation to libraries and cloud computing, if we were at a point where libraries were at a point where they were willing to forego the localization and customization that commercial ILS vendors provide for what OCLC be able to provide with their plan to provide web-based library management systems. His premise is that current commercial ILS vendors are responsive to library needs and adapt as needed. While I agree that librarians can make incredibly unrealistic demands on vendors, I'm not sure I agree with the assumption that current commercial vendors are particularly responsive or agile. Certainly this has something to do with the fact that the library automation market is limited with customers of finite resources. That may be the reason that vendors have not been able to keep up with the changing expectation of our users.

I'm not sure if cloud computing represents an answer to the challenges currently facing librarians and ILS vendors but the environment is inexorably changing. The idea of splitting out different ILS components and selecting the software packets that work best for individual libraries makes a lot of sense in my mind right now. At the CUWL meeting we were talking about having our patron database managed by the campus student/personnel system and library acquisitions/finances managed by the campus financial system. The idea of running our acquisition system through campus financials scares me to death but it makes sense budgetarily. In the current budget crises these types of efficiencies may be forced upon us. I remember going through an ILS vendor migration and the trade offs that change brought. I came to realize that no, one vendor had a product that worked well for all of our library's needs. At the same time I visited the library of the Universitat Freiburg. There they had one system developed for circulation, one for the catalog and one for financial management. Each was developed separately but all interacted with each other. I would like to see an environment where libraries could buy a circulation system from one vendor, a commercial financial system and a cooperatively developed open source resource discovery system. I don't know if current vendors have a business model that would support them being able to survive by selling there systems as discrete packets. They don't have the resources to invest in the r&d needed to keep up as it is. I'm convinced that the library automation business is just another of the businesses that libraries interact with that is facing a business model crisis; just like publishers.

CUWL Day Two

2009-06-05T04:11:00.000-07:00

The second day of the CUWL conference started out with product demos from ExLibris and OCLC. The representative from ExLibris spoke about Primo and there new venture Universal Research Discovery and Delivery (URD2). The URD2 initiative looks like their attempt to address the issues that Marshall Breeding discussed yesterday. If it works, the system will harvest data from the library's ILS, DSpace, CMS, institution website and also "deep search" the library's licensed journal articles. They are also looking at ways to merge workflows in the back end that better link ebooks, licensing, journals and print.
The commercial concerns are being pressured by open source developers to better address our needs. The best quote I heard was the ExLibris rep describe open source developers as "a distraction" rather than a legitimate competitor.

OCLC continues moving steadily into the ILS world. We heard about their "web scale management services". As I understand it this initiative is a way to provide a "cloud computing" solution to manage library workflows. If this works it would take the OCLC cooperative model to our management processes. The example given was how libraries all have vendor files that they maintain individually. An OCLC cloud management service could provide a central shared space where libraries could cooperatively update one shared vendor file.

In the afternoon I attended a round table discussion of how system libraries are developing our electronic theses and dissertations repository. More and more Wisconsin universities are moving in this direction. UW-Eau Claire is moving deliberately, if cautiously, in this direction also. Dorthea Salo talked about the new software that the Digital Collections group is implementing. This software should make our system easier to manage, maintain and preserve. The big issue that came out of this was that CUWL needs to start thinking about data management. There is one project just beginning where a group at Madison is curating an archeology dataset. They are working with an archeologist who cataloged the results of excavations done in the first half of the 20th Century. In that period excavations could be much more comprehensive than what can be done currently so there is a lot work to be done to provide access to the data. The project looked very exciting. When I asked who provides a model for libraries moving into data curation, Dorothea said that Purdue is very active in the field. They have created a data curation department, D2C2.

CUWL Notes

2009-06-04T06:09:00.000-07:00

The CUWL conference began with a welcome from Dr. Rebecca Martin, the UW Sytem Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs. Then Marshall Breeding delivered the keynote address looking at the library automation systems environment. It seems like the point that many people carried from his presentation was that the costs for commercial products and open source solutions are equivilant but show up in different areas. Overall the commercial ILS systems have not kept up with the migration from print to electronic resources. He reaffirmed librarians' widely-held frustration with current OPACs and bundled front end discovery systems. What I found interesting was his description of current business software solutions that rely on Service Oriented Architecture. I'm not sure I can write about this coherently but as I understand it, this architecture offers much more flexibility and uses a "Lego-like" middle structure that allow business and librarys the ability to mix our services in a way that is more adapted to the current environment. He remarked that the current model is based on rigid silos. and redundant data sources. Breeding thinks that new systems can be built to better allow libraries to provide access to electronic resources at the same level we provide access to our print collections.

Highlights that I took away from the talk:

An anecdote about the Harry Potter book he keeps on his coffee table. He was giving a presentation where he demonstrated Amazon's one-click purchase service. In doing so he accidentally bought the Harry Potter book and it arrived on his doorstep a couple of days later. He wondered how it is too bad that libraries don't have that kind of problem. Point being that many of our processes for getting from discovery to delivery are very cumbersome.
Discovery should be decoupled from the back-end automation system and should expose the entire spectrum of our collections. Discovery should be based on havesting to create indexes searched locally not by going out to our databases one at a time and returning a small subset of information. In other words we would continually or at least often download bibliographic records from our shared catalogs, the entire fulltext data from our database vendors as well as our government publications, digital archives and institutional repositories.
Two discovery products that he talked about were Summon - Serials Solutions' product in development and OCLC's WorldCat Local. Both are making arrangements with journal aggregators to provide access to physical library collections as well as fulltext journal articles.

Later in the day I attended a presentation on RDisco, a project being developed at UW Madison to create a de-coupled discovery system that would provide one place where users could discover books from the UW catalogs and digital material from our digital repositories. There work is in the very early stages of development but provide a glimpse at the possibility of developing a home grown discovery tool that addresses some of the needs that Marshall Breeding discused.

Google Scholar and Journal Access

2009-05-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

I'm sure others have faced this problem and probably found solutions but I and my colleagues at UW-Eau Claire are struggling with the best way to provide access to journals as we move from print to electronic journals. We are attempting to move most of our subscriptions into electronic format. This is part of the severe budget crisis that public academic libraries in Wisconsin and around the country are facing. We are cutting our subscriptions significantly and in the cases where we are being asked to keep journals that have been little used in print we are changing to digital subscriptions, thinking that at the very least we will save on processing and storage costs. At the same time I worry that our electronic journals will sit unused on virtual library shelves.

Google Scholar may play a larger role as a resource discovery tool in our library as one way of providing access to these electronic subscriptions. (Our current federated search tool is not up to the job. Students have reported using it even after having attended library research instruction sessions where librarians introduce subject specific databases. But that is fodder for another blog posting.) As part of the cancellation process I have been having quite a few conversations by e-mail and face to face with faculty. At one meeting I was surprised to have one faculty member tell me that she was forbidding students from using Google Scholar. Here I was thinking it was our salvation! She was directing students to the databases the library pays a lot of money for so I couldn't fault her for that. So we had a good conversation about how her students did research and how to get students to scholarly journal articles; current scholarly journal articles. She shook my confidence in Google Scholar.

But then, in the afternoon mail I received the current issue of College & Research Libraries. There on page 227 was, "How Scholarly is Google Scholar? A Comparison to Library Databases," by Jared L. Howland, Thomas C. Wright, Rebecca A.
Boughan, and Brian C. Roberts from Brigham Young University. Their research expanded on earlier comparisons by Chris Neuhaus and used an evaluation rubric designed by Jim Kapoun to measure the scholarliness of the articles retrieved. In their research they found that articles found in Google Scholar were 17.6% more scholarly than those found in the library purchased databases. They also found that results were not significantly different across disciplines. They suggest that the same type of study should be carried out with federated search engines.

Finally, they point out that Google Scholar is dependant on cooperation of publishers. And even more significant is that access to the journal articles students using Google Scholar retrieve is dependant on their library subscribing to journal aggregating databases. I wonder if databases, Google Scholar and a good url resolver are becoming more important than actual journal subscriptions. More thoughts on that as we move through this subscription cancellation.

Student Ingenuity

2009-05-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

I love to walk around the library during finals week. The intensity and concentration fills the air with an almost electric charge. At the same time there is always something to make me laugh and shake my head at how ingenious our students are. Last semester it was the group of students who took over two tables and a couch on the second floor for the entire week. One member of the team was always there to save the space. They needed someone there to hold the space and to protect the coffee maker they brought and the food in the cooler that they had next to the window. Every time I went past someone was sacked out on the couch while others were studying.

This year I saw this sign on one of the tables on the second floor. If you can't read it, the laminated sign says, "this table is reserved. Thank you, the McIntyre Library Staff." It has our logo on the top and looks just like a sign that we would produce. There's only one thing wrong, the library staff do not reserve tables. I have to applaud the work and thought that went into coming up with a laminated table tent to keep a table. I also have to congratulate our student body as a really honest group. For the entire time it took for me to see the sign, make sure it wasn't really one of ours, and take the picture no one was at the table. In all that time they had left that laptop out and open. No one nicked that laptop. Way to go BluGolds.

The Open Group Study Area at UW-Stevens Point

2009-05-07T14:56:00.000-07:00

Librarians at UW-Steven Point gave a presentation on how they developed an open group study area for their library. They have two of these stations on their first floor near their reference desk. This is something we would like to do. It seems like students want to have a space where they can walk into the library and work as a group on the spur of the moment. They wouldn't have to sign up for a room. It would be quick. It also seems to provide that see and be seen that Brian Mathews from Georgia State University spoke about as a keynote speaker at the WAAL conference.

McIntyre Library, the place to be

2009-05-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Spectator mentioned the Library in Natalie Saeger's "Ask Anything" column. Natalie responded to a student's, Hunny Hunter's, question asking where were the best spots on campus to meet female students. Natalie said the number 2 spot is the 4th floor of McIntyre Library. Natalie says that is where the best looking people study. Its where she goes to study. She reminds her searching inquirer, "remember that you don't want to meet just anyone; you want to meet someone with dedication." College entry requirements gaurantee that fellow students have a certain level of intellect but Natalie says that the 4th floor is where the really dedicated high achievers are to be found.

Good advice Natalie!

John

Graduating Student Appreciation

2009-04-30T20:09:00.000-07:00

Today we wished our graduating seniors happiness and good luck as they are moving on with they lives and careers. We asked each of the twelve graduating student workers to pick out a book that meant something to thew. We then placed a bookplate in it with their name.

John H. Pollitz

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WAAL Keynote - Brian Matthews

2009-04-25T08:44:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday morning, Brian Matthews, who is the User Experience Librarian at Georgia Tech and soon to be of UC Santa Barbara, spoke to the group about his experience on bringing innovative services to the Georgia Tech libraries. I liked the idea that their mission was to design the "premier group study area on campus". It reminded me of the Pike Fish Market deciding to be a world famous fish market and how they decided to accomplish that goal. Here were the ideas that had resonance for me.

Furniture on wheels so students could control their space; including movable walls and whiteboards. This seems to be a current design theme that we will need to remember as we buy any new furniture.
They designed group work tables not just study rooms. This taps into the need to see and be seen while still getting work done. Bryan Vogh is already working on how we can create these types of work areas on the first floor of McIntyre Library. I think that we can use our flip-chart and map of the first floor to let students decide where we site the group workstations.
They used Wimba software to deliver social web events to students on a current topic, ideas or issues instead of holding drop-in instruction sessions. It seemed like an innovative way to deliver information literacy in a non-class based manner.
At Georgia Tech they promote class projects that use the library as a case study much like we are currently doing with Dr. Sutton's marketing class.
Matthews mentioned how he discovered how immersing himself in the activities of the library led to new insights. While his office was being renovated for three months he moved his workspace out into the library with the students. I'm thinking this might be a great way for me to get out onto the floors for a couple of hours per week instead of being cooped up in my office.

WAAL Ideas 1

2009-04-22T08:51:00.001-07:00

I arrived today in time for the first session by librarians from UW Stevens Point. Here are the ideas I found interesting.

They have used a lot of moveable furniture in their public areas.

They have a couple of rooms for presentation practice rooms. Our students have been asking for this. We need to set this up.

In their coffee bar they have kiosk computers around their architectural pillars. It seems like a good way to deal with our pillars and answer the student's requests for quick search and print stations.

They also have big screens that show computer availability on all their floors. This seems like something we could use since we have computers on all of our floors.

Jp

John H. Pollitz

Director of Libraries

UW Eau Claire

Eau Claire WI

715-836-4827

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McIntyre Library, that "foxy older woman"

2009-04-17T07:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the latest issue of Volume One came out with an article that mentions McIntyre Library in the most delightful way. Online editor, Mike Paulus, offers up a paean to libraries in general and local libraries in particular. He remembers the time he spent in McIntyre Library as a student at UW-Eau Claire by describing the library as a "foxy older woman". I hadn't thought of this place like that but like how he talks about "her". I particularly enjoyed his description of long nigths studying in the library that he described as, "... usually ending up far more confused than when I started. You seemed amused by this, you clever minx, you. but you always gave me the answers I needed." There's more. This was a fun read and a wonderful description of the role libraries play in people's lives.

Politics and Fair Use

2008-10-17T05:52:00.000-07:00

I read an interesting article on fair use, YouTube, and John McCain this morning in Library Journal's Academic Newswire. It seems that the McCain campaign recognizes the strong contribution that YouTube videos make towards the political process. YouTube, as a result of their continuing legal battle with Viacom, has been very quick to comply with DMCA takedown notices. The McCain campaign has asked YouTube to investigate more closely the request that come regarding political material. So far, Google/YouTube have maintained that this would be impossible. The LJ article notes how this is just another example of how fair use faces numerous challenges in the current climate. Librarians and educators depend on a robust fair use protection of free speech. Looks like I'm on John McCain's side on this one.

Meebo on the library website

2008-07-15T13:37:00.001-07:00

I continue to be amazed at how well Meebo works as a way to connect with our clients.

This is my second week working the reference desk from two to four on Tuesday afternoon and both days someone has contacted us (I was on desk today with Marcus, our student worker and he got the question) using the Meebo widget we have on the library homepage.Today someone wanted to know if we had a scanner in the library, which we answered that we did. Then about ten minutes later, a non-traditional student came in. I ended up helping him do the scanning. I thought it all the more impressive since it was one of our older students. This really must have appeal for a range of ages.

CUWL Conference

2008-06-04T04:57:00.000-07:00

Susan Gibbons, Vice Provost, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester opened up the meeting with an introduction to efforts on their campus to learn more about how students live, work and research. Working with a staff anthropologist they have used ethnographic study techniques to learn how the libraries might better serve students. Many of the things they did are replicable at McIntyre. Ideas that I heard were attracting students to focus groups using $5 and food. They didn't sit around speculating what students need, they asked them. They redesigned their website by giving students mockups of their site and having them circle what was good, writing in what was missing and X-ing out what was useless. Because of what they learned about students and their relationship with their parents, they focused on parents during orientation programs instead of overwhelmed students. They hosted a parent breakfast. Another thing that we could adapt was putting white boards in all the group study rooms and placed movable white boards around the library.

Other highlights:

The new Library Dynamics software will allow us to compare our collection with others in the System and other libraries across the country. It looked pretty easy to do but no one really knows all the details about the software yet.
The document delivery project has opened up more questions about how best to provide access to scholarly material for our faculty. Possibilities include ILL credit cards, everyone joining RAPID interlibrary loan (Madison and Milwaukee use it and praise it), and spreading the funds to more publisher websites.
Madison will go directly to publishers rather than pay copyright costs when ordering material that would incur those charges.
The credit cards require more fiscal management time but seem to facilitate document delivery.

Library for the long haul

2007-12-21T12:50:00.000-08:00

This morning as I walked into the library on the last day of finals week I saw people sleeping on two different floors as I made my way to my office. That wouldn't be so unusual but for the fact that one woman had a blanket draped over her and the guy had a full-sized bed pillow under his head. This is the first library where I have worked where we stayed open 24 hours during finals week and the week days leading up to it so I assumed they had been there all night. It felt kind of good to know our students feel comfortable enough to make FULL use of all we have to offer. Then I read the article from yesterday's Chronicle..., Who Needs a Dorm During Finals? Everything a Student Needs is in the Library. It looks like our experience isn't that different from anyone else.

No misscopied call numbers

2007-12-16T10:20:00.000-08:00

Last week an e-mail where a colleague was sharing some exciting technologies that are being used by libraries to make their resources more available and more useful to our students and faculty. One really captured my attention because it solves a problem that has always bothered me. I have terrible handwriting and am numerically challenged. This has always been a problem for me as I researched in libraries in the days of the card catalog. I would write down a call number and wander around the stacks until finally arriving at the place where I thought my book should be only to find that I had transposed some numbers. When I became a librarian I realized that I wasn't the only one with this problem. Then came the online catalog and these wonderful small HP dotmatrix computers attached to each terminal. I could just print out the bibliographic information and call number. No more wandering the stacks on a mission doomed from the start. Then came technology updates, networked laser printers that made me feel like an environmental reprobate every time I wasted an entire sheet of paper and toner to print out a bib record and call number. I was back to using those little golf pencils and the backs of envelopes.

Well the message I received last week held the answer to my problem it was in a blog post from Jason the Content Librarian. Jason was writing about a widget being used by the University of Oregon in their catalog that creates a button on the bibliographic record screen. The button allows you to send your cell phone a text message with the title and call number of the book you want. Students can walk up to the stacks knowing they have the correct call number. The widget is written for Innovative Interfaces catalogs. I was told that a librarian at Bryn Mawr had written the original hack and that it was also being used at the Iowa City Public Library. Its probably being used at other places that I don't know about.

Our catalog is a ExLibris Voyager product and I haven't been able to find that anyone has developed a similar widget for it. As soon as someone does, you know that we will be offering it just as soon as we can. While I was trying to find a Voyager version of this widget I did find the next best thing. It is a Firefox Browser add-on by Google called Send to Phone it allows you to do just about the same thing but requires a little more personal intervention. Once you install this add-on to your Firefox Browser all you have to do is highlight something on a page and click a little cell phone icon on your toolbar and a window comes up where you can type in your cell phone's number and indicate your service provider and within minutes the message is on your cell. Of course, there are a lot of other situations where this can come in handy but I am more concerned helping our students use our catalog information on a device with which they are extremely comfortable.

I will still be waiting anxiously for someone to write the hack for Voyager though.

Revolutions of Rising Expectations

2007-11-07T05:45:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, "Struggling to keep up" (thanks Colleen). Basically it was about the digital divide in academia. There was always a resource disparity between well funded elite universities and colleges and the rest of us. Scholars and students of my generation expected to have to travel to distant libraries in order to access rare material. Interlibrary loan was a tedious process of searching through what seemed to be miles of the National Union Catalog and waiting weeks for the material if you were lucky enough to find something. Now it would seem, the same scenario is being played out by scholars across the country looking for proprietary digital resources. People are less tolerant of this situation than they were in the past. The false sense of information ubiquity at no cost makes us chafe at the thought that others have access to material we can't get to. Undergraduates seem satisfied with the resources they pay tuition dollars for. It is our researchers and scholars who are becoming more and more dissatisfied with this state of affairs.

Within the University of Wisconsin System we are trying to find ways to address the digital divide between the comprehensive universities and our large research institutions. Currently the System libraries are looking at ways to provide document delivery for articles from high priced journals that our faculty need to support their research. Here at UW - Eau Claire this research takes on added importance because so much of it is predicated on faculty - undergraduate collaboration. As new faculty come to our university, having experienced the wealth of resources available at their post-graduate institutions, they are expecting more from us. We need to work together to find ways to satisfy those expectations.

Libraries in the Contact Zone

2007-09-26T19:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I read a couple of articles that I thought were really interesting. It started with the ACRL Blog, “Welcome to the contact zone.” That lead me to a short editorial,” Reference, Cultural Values, and the Contact Zone,” and it appears in Reference Librarian Vol. 47, No. 2 for 2007 . We have it in a print subscription on the second floor. A comment on the blog also references and article by Jim Elmborg from last year in RUSQ, “Libraries in the Contact Zone: Creating an Educational Space” and of course the presentation by Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts in the Contact Zone” that started it all.

In very simplistic terms Pratt spoke about the cross-cultural interaction between dominant and client cultures as represented by the story of a manuscript written in 1613 to the King of Spain telling him how to justly rule the colonies. She interwove the story of the manuscript and her son’s interaction with the elementary education system. Both of these stories dealt with the “zone” that was created by the the complex interaction between the two cultures as they came into contact. In both interactions there was a dominant and subordinate culture. Contact zone theory has a variety of implications for libraries. The main implication that I brought away from the articles was that we often look at our students through our world view not theirs. We expect them to learn our systems. We expect them to thirst for the knowledge that can be gained by a complex research project and not just want to get through it with as little effort as possible. Contact zone theory takes on even greater implications when librarians interact with students from diverse cultures. Read the articles, they explain it much better. I especially recommend the Elmborg article. He never fails to help me think more deeply about art of library science.

Strategic Planning at Eau Claire

2007-08-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

This morning I attended a Leaders Symposium that is part of the strategic planning process underway on campus. Attending today's meeting was a great way to spend a morning one week before classes start. It offered another opportunity to get to know people and get a feel for what the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire is all about. My sense is that people on campus are very proud of the institution but realize that the current environment calls out for change. Actually at the end of the session someone came up with the best way to frame the purpose of this planning process was more about improvement than change. Change, of course, has much more negative connotations than does improvement. That sort of thinking resonated with me and others in the room. Everyone recognized that the University has been doing great things but will need to improve on that very solid foundation in order to compete in a time of much more limited resources.

Much of the morning was devoted to the history of UWEC and the good things that should be preserved as we move towards the future. Here were some of the points that struck me as important.

A strong history of student focus throughout the University.
Close student - faculty relationships built in the classroom and through collaborative research.
A dedication to a "liberal education" which is not limited to the Liberal Arts and Sciences but which permeates throughout all University disciplines.

There seemed to be a recognition that some change was long overdue but also a wariness about the process. The assembly was divided into groups based on the decade in which they first came to UWEC. I was in the 2000's group and we decided that our era has been one of "energy, angst and possibilities. We have gone through a period where there have been a large number of leadership positions held by interim appointments. Now that many of these positions have been permanently filled, people seem ready to tackle problems and find solutions. But in order for people to buy into the process everyone recognized that people need to see the urgency for improvement and they need to see some actions coming out of the process. The community must see benefits from changes that are suggested.

It was stressed that we are in the beginnings of this planning process and that much more discussion would take place around campus. The need for transparency came up over and over. Throughout the morning I kept wondering what role should people from the Library play in this process. Without a doubt we all need to take a serious interest in the process and educate ourselves about what is going on. Throughout September there will be opportunities for input through a series of "Charrettes". (I had to look it up.) I hope that everyone in the Library takes part in the charrettes or the online discussions. This is an important process that will set the direction of the University for years to come. The Library is critical to the future of any high quality university that values excellence!

Facebook

2007-07-19T21:08:00.000-07:00

I just had an interesting thing happen; something I never expected to happen. I just received a reference question on my Facebook account. I have always been skeptical about the value of Facebook as a means of connecting librarians with students. I still am but events like these will crack my convictions. I remain skeptical because one question does not make an overwhelming argument and this question came from a graduate student. I think they may view Facebook in a different manner than undergraduates. But if things like this are happening with more regularity, I could be convinced that we need to offer services through Facebook. I would like to hear from others who have been contacted by students requesting "library type help".

Preparing for Eau Claire

2007-07-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

Friday was my last day on the job at OSU. I wrapped up all my loose ends and went around to see as many people as I could before I left. It was a bittersweet time. Although I will certainly miss the folks at the OSU Libraries, I am getting very anxious to begin working at the McIntyre Library. I now have my e-mail account set up and am checking my messages through web mail. I have a couple of annual reports from the library that I am reading and three articles on diversity that will help direct conversations on campus during the coming year. It promises to be very exciting. I am very interested in increasing diversity on campus having been an advisor to Latinos Unidos at Augustana College and a mentor with the ACRL Dr. E. J. Josey Spectrum Scholar Mentor Program. During the last year I have been serving as a mentor to someone getting his MLIS at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. I think that I learned more from the experience than he did.

In the mean time, this week will be spent packing dishes and books (of course) and canceling services in preparation of the move to Eau Claire. It is becoming more real everyday.

Hipster Shushers

2007-07-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

I finally read the article on hipster librarians that appeared in the fashion section of Sunday's New York Times; "A Hipper Crowd of Shushers". A friend of mine, who is much hipper that me, sent me a message about that post and a couple of reactions to it in the Library Journal student blog, "Student Affairs", and a blog by someone who writes as the "Annoyed Librarian". Evidently the article really annoyed the Annoyed Librarian. Personally, I thought it was a fun little article that poked another pin in a stereotype that we all know is erroneous. If you haven't read the article in the NYT (my friend says everyone in libraryland has already read it) take a look at it and the reactions to it.

As a side note, the second post in Student Affairs is written by a woman who is doing an internship at the Valley Library here at Oregon State. She talks a little bit about answering reference questions through the chat box I mentioned yesterday that is on the OSU Libraries' web pages. Her posting provides an interesting insight into virtual reference.

Whither the Reference Desk

2007-07-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

This morning when I opened my e-mail the first message I saw was from Betsy Richmond. She was forwarding on a lengthy compilation of messages that reflected a Collib-l discussion of how to best attract students to the reference desk. Many academic libraries are seeing a fall in their reference desk use statistics. The discussion was wide-ranging and I suspect is reflective of what many of us are thinking about. Is time spent on the reference desk the best way to utilize professional librarians? Is it the best way to reach students? Is that where our students expect to find help with their research assignments? Are there better ways to assist students by utilizing new technologies?

I too have been thinking about this for years but have not come up with any clean answers. At one point I was wondering how one could be a good steward of university finances if the highest paid people in the library spent a large portion of their time sitting at a desk waiting for someone to ask them a question. But that really seemed to forget the nature of libraries. Here at OSU we have been working on lessening the time librarians spend on the reference desk to free up their time for doing other activities. The question was one of impact. Could librarians make a greater impact on campus by working more closely with faculty and graduate students with their research? By developing technologies that allowed students to learn and use library services more independently? Or would they have a greater impact on student research by offering one on one consultation sessions?

They are still working on finding a model of service that works best for OSU students and faculty. I would hope that during the coming year we will discuss how best to develop our reference services that are best suited to our university and our students and faculty.

One technology that seems to have worked very well here is having a chat box available in the upper right hand corner of most library website pages. From the very beginning of offering this option, students have been submitting chat questions as much or more than they have at the reference desk.

Seems Like I am Living in O'Hare

2007-06-29T12:31:00.000-07:00

Today I am trying to travel back to Corvallis after finding a house in Eau Claire. Because my daughter works for United Airlines Cely and I are able to take advantage of some great travel fares. The only drawback is that we have to fly standby. Today is one of those days when the system doesn't work so well for us. We arrived at the airport in time to catch a 9:00 flight. That flight checked in full as did the 12:15 flight. Now we are waiting for a 5:30pm flight. After that it could be the 8pm or the 10:40pm flight. OR we could end up going through the entire process again tomorrow. It seems that Portland Oregon is a very popular place this weekend.

The important thing is that we found a house in Eau Claire and had our offer accepted. One more hurdle crossed on our way to Eau Claire. The house is just what we hoped for. It is the right size, near campus and in the 3rd Ward. Now we have to wrap up things in Corvallis and arrange for a mover.

Meanwhile I am sitting in the airport hoping to catch a flight west.

ALA Conference II

2007-06-26T20:09:00.000-07:00

This year's ALA conference was more about seeing people I hadn't seen for a long time. One was a woman who I went to library school with. I ran into her and her daughter in one of the hotel lobbies. The last time I saw them the daughter was in a stroller. I've got some pictures in my camera that I will be loading to my personal site but I forgot to take the cable to upload them to my computer.

Other than the OCLC Symposium, the most interesting thing I attended was the discussion group I was co-convening with Jan Zauha from Montana State. The topic of the discussion was around the role of academic libraries in promoting reading and literacy. Most of the discussion revolved around recreational reading programs. One library was getting surplus from the local public library's multiple copies. That seemed like a good way for an academic library to work with the public library in town. Another library provided space for a small circulating collection from the public library so that their students could have easy access to popular titles when they needed to read during their spare time. Unfortunately, everyone agreed that students don't really have much time to read anything outside of their classroom. Most of the libraries represented around the table were involved with some type of readings or programs throughout the year. Once again over committed faculty and students led to low turnouts for most programs.

On Sunday night I was able to have dinner with Chris Cox who is currently serving as the interim director at UW - Eau Claire. We talked about the town and what to expect of Eau Claire and what to expect from the area. He helped me learn more about the library community in Eau Claire and the state. I was able to learn more about the ways things worked in McIntyre. We also talked about some of the things I hope to accomplish when I get there. One of the interesting things about Eau Claire is that there are three fairly new library directors in the city. I will be the newest. The director of the Eau Claire Public Library has been in his position for about a year. And, there is a new director at the Indianhead Federated Library System, the local regional system headquartered in Eau Claire. This might be a great time to get together and see what types of collaboration we can think up.

ALA Conference

2007-06-22T20:33:00.000-07:00

Tonight I am writing from the ALA Conference in Washington DC. Cely and I flew the red-eye out of Portland and got in at 8:30. I got a couple of hours sleep on the plane but have been pretty fuzzy all day.

The first person I ran into was Chris Cox. That was pretty amazing. We had a little chat but got interrupted by a call from my realtor. I had to take the call because she needed to tell me the results of our house inspections. I will need to make a couple of repairs before the closing. I'm glad I took the call.

This afternoon I went to the OCLC Symposium that they usually have on Friday. I may have still been fuzzy but I was a little disappointed in this one. I was really looking forward to hearing Siva Vaidhyanathan but I didn't get what I hoped fore. He mostly spoke about the positive aspects of surveillance. He admitted that his view of the topic are reflexive of his environment; Greenwich Village in NY NY. Then he ended by putting more of the privacy invasion onus on corporations and not the government. I'm not sure I agree. His answer was that we need a rich dialog about privacy and surveillance in order to reestablish trust within our society. Not much to argue with that but not much in terms of insights from an insider.

Later in the early evening I attended the ACRL Dr. E. J. Josey Spectrum Scholar Mentor Program reception. I have been acting as a mentor for a student at the UNC Chapel Hill library school for the past year. Even though my protege was not there I did get to meet some highly capable and dedicated young librarians. It is good to see that the profession will be in such fine hands. It was also exciting to hear people tell me how lucky I was to be going to UW - Eau Claire. McIntyre Library is held in high regard. Ewa Barczyk, from UW - Milwaukee was there and welcomed me to the Wisconsin library community. I always look for her at the ALA conferences because my youngest daughter is working on an MA in German Translation there. I keep trying to find out if Ewa is seeing her in the library everyday.

More to come tomorrow.

Introductions

2007-06-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

I have just set up this blog to serve as a means of introducing myself to the McIntyre Library and UW - Eau Claire community. The first thing you might notice about me is that I have a difficult time thinking up names and titles for things. I have always struggled over titles for writings, names for pets and names for our cars. The last car I named is called "Baby Blue". See what I mean? I have usually relied on my wife or our daughters to come up with the good names.

I kept putting off starting this blog because I could not come up with a snappy name. So here is where you come in. Help me name this thing. We can try doing it through the comments part. You all can suggest names and decide which one works best. Let's see if this will work.

Another thing is that even though I am not a baseball fan, I am still rooting for the OSU Beavers in the College World Series. And, they just beat Arizona State 12-6! Yeah! It looks like they may have a chance to do great things this year too. (Last year they won the College World Series.) I am really excited about coming to UWEC so I can start rooting for the Blugolds! I really want to attend some hockey games. When I was at the University of Denver I got excited about college hockey.