Recently in conferences Category

Well, maybe not everyone agrees...but since my lodging was within a stone's throw of Disneyland and I could hear the screams from the roller coaster from my hotel patio, there was a certain added thrill to the 2008 ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim.

So how was this year's conference and what did I accomplish in my four days? Lots of running around looking for conference rooms (anyone else find the Disneyland Hotel a total nightmare?), lots of vendors in the exhibits hawking their schwag, and fun times reconnecting with librarians from far and wide.

I arrived on Friday afternoon and was able to register and drop in on the very end of a committee meeting before heading out to grab some dinner and meet up with former colleagues. Saturday began the marathon race to fit in as much information and experience as possible in four days and after a quick tour around the exhibits, it was time to present one of my two poster sessions. The first one was a summary of how we built the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project digital library and the poster was well-received with lots of interest and questions. I think ALA puts the poster sessions in a somewhat buried area of the exhibits and there wasn't much foot traffic, but nonetheless I gave out handouts and bookmarks and talked to several folks that are also working on oral history projects. After lunch and a few aspirin to combat a wicked headache, I attempted to find the Digitizing Indian Country presentations. This was one of the few sessions directly related to digitization, and I do wish that there were more presentations to attend in my specific area. Often I digital collections topics are spread throughout LITA, ASCLA, ACLTS, and other random groups. The last session I attended Saturday was the Collaborative Digitization Discussion Group that turned out to be the most interesting and informative session I got to see.

Toby Graham (Director of the Digital Library of Georgia) talked about the Civil Rights Digital Library, an impressive digital collection that contains digitized content from Georgia (news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives) as well as serving as a comprehensive portal to other digital collections on the subject. The video included in this collection is amazing to watch and Mr. Graham did a great job summing up the process of building the collection. This presentation was followed by two speakers from ALA's Washington Office who specialize in copyright policy: Carrie Russell and Corey Williams Green. Both speakers did a great job of providing concise and informative updates on Orphan Works legislation and how this legislation may affect those of us doing digitization of works with uncertain copyright status. All in all there are still some worrisome notions in the various bills (i.e. a proposed "dark archive" of materials seems more than a bit problematic), but I am very glad to have more knowledge of the issues to help in making local decisions.

Saturday night I ventured out to a local Korean restaurant with some colleagues and co-workers. I couldn't tell you the name of it, since I don't read Korean, but it was off the beaten path and had some seriously tasty eats. Nothing like sitting around a table with hundreds of condiment plates and piles of searing meats (sorry vegetarians out there!) to dispel the mob-feeling of the ALA conference.

Sunday, I got up early and attended a breakfast for YA authors at my hotel. I talked with some librarians at the opposite end of my professional spectrum and enjoyed the change in conversation. After the breakfast I tried to attend a session on the Myers-Briggs Personality Types in the workplace, but ended up leaving early as the whole session was predicated on deep understanding of the Harry Potter characters, and I haven't read any of the books. Instead, I went to a research presentation put on by LRRT. The various speakers all presented research results from large library studies with very interesting topics (career tracking of LIS graduates, National Board Certification and achievement in school media centers, and information services during community disasters). After this meeting, I helped my co-worker set up for her poster session before taking a quick detour to the LITA Awards ceremony.It was really fun to see some extremely talented people be recognized for their work before I headed off to attempt to attend the Alumni Reception at the Disneyland Hotel. This was a bad experience that left me frazzled in the Sleeping Beauty Tower (not good!) and frustrated at the apparent lack of a Central Ballroom. Luckily, Downtown Disney was close by to explore before attending a lavish vendor party. I even made it back to the hotel in time to see the fireworks.

Monday I attended the CONTENTdm user group meeting which packed a lot of stuff into one morning session: breakfast, networking, two presentation, roundtable discussions and a product update that previewed the 5.0 release in the Fall, which promises a totally revamped Acquisition Station and Report Generator (among other enhancements). After the user group meeting, I met up with my co-presenters at the poster sessions for my second presentation entitled, "Sayonara Party Girl, Hello Real World: Surfing Into Library Technology Positions". Things went really well and we talked to several folks in our targeted demographic of recent graduates. Our data provided some encouragement with a healthy dose of reality and I think it was interesting for people to see. We rushed a bit to pack up and load the car for the return trip, but we all returned to Vegas without incident. I don't know if I could tolerate Anaheim for every conference, but I have to say that it was a interesting venue with fun options for kids of all ages.

Over the weekend, I joined two other library staff members at the CONTENTdm Western User Group meeting in Claremont, CA. The conference was generously hosted by the Claremont Colleges where we could stroll the gorgeous campus and network with fellow CONTENTdm users in between sessions.

This two-day conference began with an extremely content-packed session (perhaps it could have been divided into two?) that included overviews of two digitization projects. Of particular interest was the Washington Rural Heritage project that involved the leadership of the Washington State Library in mentoring small rural libraries to help get them started in digitization. The projects has been very successful in building grassroots support for digitizing content because Laura Robinson of the State Library had done an impressive job of reaching out to the community with information and technical support. The financial support of continuing state library grants help sustain the initial efforts and further build the collections. There was an additional presentation by the Claremont University Consortium about their digitized scrapbooks, and a vendor presentation on large-format scanning issues and challenges.

I came away from the second session thinking about how to structure collection in CONTENTdm, because while it is possible to purchase an "unlimited" item license, there is still a "collection" limit and this has presented problems for some institutions with extensive collections. The main issue is that it can be very difficult to merge collections because you must refer users to a new URL and they may have trouble locating content they depend on. In addition, it can be hard to navigate long, long, lists of collections. Good food for thought as we start to grow our program.CONTENTdm is increasingly being used for institutional repositories, and there was a presentation from Oklahoma State about how collections were transitioned between IRs...yet another data wrangling issue that is a headache, but can be accomplished.

The afternoon was a treat for me, because UNLV's own Alex Dolski unveiled his spatial search tool, ISIS and talked about the shortfalls of text searching maps. There was a general awe in the audience when he demonstrated the searching. It is always exciting to see what can be done by creative and talented developers like Alex and his co-presenter Eric Luhrs from Lafayette College. Eric showed his MetaDB tool and how their organization has used it to streamline decentralized web-based metadata creation.

That's was it for day one and we ended the day with a meal in the quaint Claremont Village at a place called Heros and Legends where you could shuck your peanuts on the floor and order monstrously-sized portions of bar food.

Day two started with an update on the new features we can expect in new versions of CONTENTdm; including: Unicode support, Powerpoint plug-in redesign (works with Office 2007!!), a revamped acquisition station, and improved image viewers. This is all good news as we have been anticipating these changes and hoping OCLC would respond.

The second morning session detailed the University of Utah's, U-SKIS repository inventory system, which is truly a fabulous tool that they are using to manage IR content. The tool allows them manage comprehensive research on publishers, status of author's documents, notes for staff, and archival copies while seamlessly integrating into CONTENTdm for presentation. It was shared that it is a priceless "teaching moment" for faculty on Utah's campus when they experienced the scholarly communication crisis first hand. Often the library's research into publisher policies would reveal that publishers only allow the peer-reviewed (not the final version) copies of the publication or no rights at all and faculty learned quickly about these challenges.

The final session was on getting the word out about digital collections and I was pleased to see that as of our last two collections, UNLV is using all the methods mentioned in the presentation. While, we have not moved into YouTube or Flickr, we do add links to Wikipedia to our content and web statistics show that referrals do come in from those links.

The afternoon was a developer's meeting and was lightly attended. There is much discussion of a shared workspace for CONTENTdm users to create a code repository or to seperate out "newbie questions' from customization/technical enhancement questions. There is also a need to improve CONTENTdm's reporting features and search results (faceted searching was often brought up). My co-workers and I ended the conference with a bike ride around Claremont and up into the foothills of the Claremont Wilderness Park. It was an enjoyable and informative meeting. Stay tuned for next year....

This was the first LITA Forum I have attended and overall I found the size and programming of the conference to be good. There were two preconferences, which I did not attend, but I went to a variety of sessions that deserve to be highlighted here.

DAY ONE
Opening General Session: The Scientific and Social Challenges of Global Warming by Jeffrey Kiehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research
Apparently LITA has a tradition of booking a local speaker to open the conference, and despite the gloomy subject this was an interesting talk. What made it special was that Mr. Kiehl not only spoke about the science of global warming, but also about the communication of the scientific data and how the way we present information can determine whether or not it has impact. He encouraged everyone in the audience to think about their own "personal global warming" story as a means of combating the apathy, numbness, and denial, that often meet scientific news on climate change.

David and Goliath Take on Social Tools by Genny Engle and Michelle Boule
This talk introduced the variety of social tools available and delved a bit into their popularity and potential library applications. I was pleased to note that UNLV is currently exploring (or has already implemented) most of these tools (IM chat, blogs, wikis, Facebook/MySpace, etc.) Maybe it is because we have already spent time on the subject, but at times it seems hard to imagine that anyone in the library world could still be oblivious to Web 2.0.

Real World Metadata Management with the University of North Texas Libraries' Metadata Analysis Tool by Mark Phillips
By far, one of the best sessions I attended! This talk centered around a custom tool that was created to perform maintenance, reporting functions, and other types of analysis of digital collections metadata. The tool was really great at providing multiple views of the metadata, which Mr. Phillips noted "is the key to analyzing metadata" (for everything from clean-up of spelling/punctuation to plural agreement and authority control). For instance, the metadata can be viewed in such forms as an A-Z list, by contributing institution, as a report/graph, or as word clouds. Queries could also be run to find null values in required metadata fields, which would definitely come in handy with the collections I administer. University of North Texas has rapidly grown their digital collections and with the help of tools like this, their metadata is equally as rich and valuable as the digital images. Great presentation.

DAY TWO
General Session:The Future is not out of Reach: Change, Library 2.0 and Emerging Trends by David Lee King of Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library
Mr. King was a very dynamic and exciting speaker, but I am afraid with all the time I have already spent on the subject of Web 2.0 that the "future" kind of seemed more like the present. Good presenter...less interesting topic.
Podcast available!

5 Minute Madness
This was one of my favorite sessions. Quick, interesting, and practical, 5 Minute Madness was a on-the-fly sign-up at the conference spontaneous session and each person had 5 minutes to cover their project/topic/or research. It was particularly interesting to hear about the need for a fast institutional repository following the Virgina Tech massacre to preserve the variety of gifts, letter, and tributes received. I also was introduced to two very creative tools (one for Easy Borrow- a single interface search for ILL and BYU's service of custom RSS feeds of new books).

Lunch (BTW: LITA had really good food and dessert at lunchtime. Yum.)

The Biodiversity Heritage Library Mass Digitization Project: A Grandeur in This View of Digital Libraries by Martin Kalfatovic and Suzanne Chernau Pilsk
Excellent session! This was an session introducing the very large-scale, high-impact digitization project that the Smithsonian (and others) are conducting to create a digital library of biodiversity information recorded in taxonomies and historic indexes of species names. The BHL will eventually also form part of the Encyclopedia of Life. Basically, this is the kind of session that leaves you in awe of the sheer amount of work involved in a mass digitization project, but also leaves you feeling that there really is impact and usefulness in digitization. Fascinating.

Facet Forward: Faceted Navigation of Federated Search Results for Cultural Heritage Materials by Danielle Cuniff Plumer, David Dorman, and Mark Phillips
While this session focused on metadata harvesting and federated searching (which we are not currently doing) it was interesting to hear how Texas Heritage Online was handling the need to aggregate materials. Mr. Dorman also presented the open source solution that Index Data provides. Something worth looking into if you are working on this type of project.

DAY THREE
Breakfast: Breakfast burritos at the continental breakfast (I am in heaven!)

Poster Sessions Well, because I was presenting my own poster session, I missed most of the others. There was one interesting poster on SFX usability, another on MySpace vs. Facebook (verdict: both!) and a very good poster by my table-neighbor on Converting Technophobes into Technophiles: Empowering Reluctant Library Staff (one example: forbid the phrase: "I'm not "techie" enough...")

I also missed the last concurrent session that ran during the posters, but heard really good things about the User-Centered Research and Library Technology by David Lindahl and Nancy Fried Foster where usability studies were done with three different groups. One interesting idea was cutting apart the pieces of a library web site and having students piece it back together where they thought things should be. Food for thought.

Closing Session In Our Cages With Golden Bars by Jeremy Frumkin of Oregon State University
This was a very good closing session that summed up some very pertinent take-aways More can be found at The Digital Librarian (Jeremy Frumkin's blog):

• we should move away from the "next generation catalog" and stop imposing library culture and terms on a service. Instead, we should look at it from a business perspective and a user perspective.


• We need to think about the whole process from Discovery to Delivery because this is the main mission of libraries. People should be able to find in one click and have the material delivered to them in another click.


• Mr. Frumkin also stressed the importance of a diversity of viewpoints and mentioned the Code4Lib scholarships that address this need

Podcast available!
Handouts and presentation materials were provided on a flash drive, so if you would like more information on any of the session go to the LITA Blog or contact me for materials.

The first ever CONTENTdm Western Users Group Meeting is scheduled for July 23-24 at Reed College in Portland, OR. Although users of the software meet annually at ALA conferences, this two-day meeting was arranged in response to the overwhelming desire of CONTENTdm users to have more time to get together and talk about their experiences, challenges, and successes building CONTENTdm digital collections.

The agenda for the meeting includes topics such as: All Things Metadata, Customizations, Multi-state/Partner Collaborations, and Publicizing Collections. I will be participating in a panel discussion on Workflow Models with Eric Luhrs of Lafayette College and Joanna Burgess of Reed College.

The event is sponsored by OCLC Western and the organizers have set up a Western Users Group Wiki with the agenda, speaker information, and logistics for attendees.

The American Library Association Annual Conference took place this past weekend in Washington, DC. I attended a variety of sessions, presentations, discussions, and social events which I'll sum up in this list of 10 Notable ALA 2007 Moments:

1. I got to meet Nancy Pearl during a quiet moment at the Exhibits. She signed my copy of More Book Lust and chatted with me for a while. Love her!

2. The LITA Building the Next Generation Public Library Web Site with Drupal Session was packed to the gills and worth the squeeze. I have never actually been inspired by a web site before! Great contagious enthusiasm from the Ann Arbor District Library.

3. Delicious, amazing food, mojitos, and desserts at Zengo DC. (I know Asian-Mexican fusion sounds weird...but trust me it worked!)

4. My first meeting with the Collaborative Digitization Discussion Group. Important people working on all sorts of really amazing collaborative projects and discussing the next level of issues that I will have to tackle if we are to succeed in building larger collaborations. Here is my plug for overcoming shyness to meet a new group. I am very glad I fit in this one extra meeting.

5. The BIGWIG Social Software Showcase that was actually an unconference/wiki with a F2F event at ALA. I saw the wiki ahead of time so at ALA I physically attended LITA The Ultimate Debate: Do Libraries Innovate? while receiving Twitter updates from BIGWIG. Came away with lots to think about, great job everyone!

6. Ethiopian food at Zed's in Georgetown. Yum.

7. CONTENTdm Preconference Training, Success Stories, and User Group Meeting sessions provided a nice forum to interact with other digital library folks. The preconference offered a few quality hours examining the guts of the software; the success stories sesssion showcased two successful collections (University of Louisville and Gulf Coast Community College), and the user group was a nice chance to mingle while learning about upcoming enhancements. Thanks to the organizers/presenters for offering our first-ever poster sessions- they were great! There are some really welcome features coming down the pike for version 4.3, so stay tuned for more about PDF functionality, ability to import via Connexion, and additional search engine functionality through Worldcat. Very exciting.

8. Visting the Library of Congress was another highlight. I was like a kid in a candy store when I toured the Prints and Photographs Reading Room and actually got to meet the digital librarian there. What fun to see some samples from the amazing collections and talk to the creators of the LC Thesaurus of Graphic Materials (my best metadata friend). I also toured the copyright office and got to wander the endless card catalogs of copyright registrations. Very cool!

9. Murky Coffee was just a short Metro ride into Virginia and I had a perfect cappuccino at the outdoor cafe. Probably the only escape from the herds of librarians all weekend! Love that public transportation!

10. Socializing at the parties, the hotel lobbies, and in random places like the Super Shuttle. Amidst the camp-like atmosphere of hotel rooms and roommates with mad texting and cell phone calls to meet up with friends, the conference was really most valuable to me for the connections made with people. I got to know my co-workers better, I met a fellow panelist for my next conference presentation, and I put faces to names I only have the pleasure to see online. ALA may not be perfect, but it is one place where you have to be a complete hermit not to connect with at least one interesting or inspiring librarian. To me, that is worth the trip to the conference.