Entries Tagged 'conferences' ↓

While reading comments to a blog post about whether or not faculty should ban laptops in the classroom, I came across a comment that linked to a blog post about a student using concept mapping software to take notes.

This particular student was using Visual Understanding Environment (VUE), an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The student wrote that he was taking much more useful notes by applying them to concept maps and he was at the same time paying better attention to the lectures instead of just transcribing the presentations.

This got me thinking. I’ve been considering using concept maps for projects and preparing presentations, articles, excreta. However, would this approach work for conferences notes? If I did decide to use concept mapping software for conference notes, would I make separate concept maps per session? per tract? just one for the whole conference? I’m not really sure, but I think this has some potential. Taking notes in a linear way works for certain sessions but never seems to work for a whole conference – especially a focused conference. Yes, I record information about the sessions, but it kind of misses out on capturing the whole theme of the conference and what the general vibe and intellectual feeling was. For me, it is almost like looking at the trees but not seeing the forest.

I am not sure that concept mapping would really capture the forest, but it may very well be better at it then traditional, linear, note taking. Has anyone tried this at a conference? If so, I’d be interested in your experiences. I think I’ll try it at an upcoming conference and wee whether or not it works well for me.

I was recently (re-)reading Eszter Hargittai’s Conference Do and Don’ts. The piece was definitely geared to freshly minted (and soon to be minted) Ph.D’s and not to established academic librarians, but I still found it interesting. Since I organized my first conference earlier this year (local arrangements, not necessarily the program) and have been involved with other planning committees, what makes a successful conference has been on my mind.

Eszter points out that:

While an important part of going to conferences is to present your work and hear updates on other people’s research, it would be wrong to think that formal presentations are the only key component of professional meetings. In fact, at least as significant if not more are interactions that happen in between sessions and during social outings (e.g., receptions, group dinners).

I wholeheartedly agree. In Ezster’s case, I believe her blog post is more focused on creating connections for future academic job connections, but there are other reasons why an academic librarian needs to try to take advantage of social opportunities at conferences whenever possible. This is especially true if you are the only librarian (or one of a few) in your organization that does what you do. This is often the case with systems librarians but other type of librarians, especially in small to mid-sized institutions, are often in the same position. By meeting other librarians that do similar things at conferences, you can create a network that will help you get your job done.

Say, for instance, the Director of Libraries wants to implement a new institutional repository. If you have been to conferences and met other librarians who have worked with this, you have a ready-made list of (free) consultants. While you could send out an e-mail to a mailing list, you are much more likely to get the real-scoop from someone you have met before and have even a small relationship with than you are from someone that you have never met. These relationships can be very valuable. I remember once a number of years ago we heard about this great new product from a vendor. The demos were impressive, and the developer partner presentations made the product look like it was very promising. However, once I started talking to a colleague from a developer partner site off-site over a few drinks and dinner, I learned a lot more about the day-to-day dealings with this particular product. While the product may have been good for some libraries, it became clear that it would not have been a good fit for us. We decided to not invest a significant among of time and money into a solution that would have turned out to be a mistake for us, that there was a very good chance we otherwise would have. (BTW: I think looking back, everyone would agree that the product was not successful, so I am positive we made the right choice).

So what has this have to do with virtual conferences? Nothing, and everything. Yes, at virtual conference you have the opportunity to present your work and here other people talk about there projects and that is very valuable. However, you do not get to make the same sort of connections as you can in person. While attending a conference in the comforts of your own office, it is very easy to get distracted by e-mail, printer problems, people knocking on your door, etc. Thus it is harder, at least for me, to pay attention to sessions you do attend. Likewise, you don’t get to see the audience reactions and unless attending with other colleagues from your own library, you can’t instantaneously run new ideas and concepts learned off of others.

For this reason, I am not a fan of virtual conferences and do not see them as a viable replacement for in-person get together. Yes, virtual presentations have there place, and grouping them as a conference can make some sort of sense, but I think that the virtual is better suited for training, and shorter Webinars.

You may ask then, what about travel budgets? We can’t afford to fly librarians all over the world. Yes, this is a problem. But there are cheaper options. State library conferences, regional conferences such as those put on by the Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA)’s Regional User Groups are inexpensive options. Depending where you live, there may be many other local one or two day conferences. For example, I often see some nice conferences put on by New England ASIS&T and NERCOMP in the New England area. If there isn’t any in you area, unless you are in a very remote area, that is a sure sign that someone should step up to the plate and put one on like the folks in Portland Oregon are doing with Code4Lib Northwest. It doesn’t have to be a huge production with paid plenary speakers. An unconference for example can be put on with less organization (at least by the host). You just need a date, a room or two, and someone to feed the attendees (or at least supply them with coffee).

I didn’t get to attend the LITA National Forum this year but judging from he tweets I missed one of the better LITA conference line-ups in a while. One of the major topics I saw people tweeting about was designing services for mobile devices. The general gist from the tweets I saw was that in the next few years libraries will have to support mobile users. While I agree that we need to do our best to reach our users wherever they are, whenever they want us Twitterville has got me wondering. Is it true that we have a few years to do this? By then the opportunity might be lost. I wonder if in a few years we will need to provide specific services to mobile devices. By a few I am talking about maybe 4 or 5. I think it is something we ought to be doing now, but probably won’t need to provide in a longer time frame. The iPhone and similar devices already display most Web pages fine. Sure, you need to check them, but most are usable. That said, most are also currently not as easily to be used as possible. However with the rate of technology change, in 5 years mobile devices will be much better at display Web pages and I predict they will be able to display almost all Web pages without a hitch.

That said, I think librarians need to go mobile now. We can’t, or at least we shouldn’t, wait for mobile devices to catch-up with our, often poorly designed, Web sites and associated Web applications (e.g. OPACs, Federated Search engines, etc.). We need to be rolling out services now that will provide mobile users the services they need until mobile technology catches up. If not, I whole four year class (in Academic institutions) will be missing out. We shouldn’t allow that.

I have uploaded the PDF of my IGeLU presentation, Digital Preservation: The Next Library Frontier to my personal repository, as well as the Binghamton University Libraries digital repository. Enjoy!

From September 5 until September 9 I attended the International Group of ex Libris Users (IGeLU) 2009 annual conference and associated Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) Steering Committee meetings. I had to attend the ELUNA SC meetings because of my role on the ELUNA Steering Committee. There were many topics discussed including how ELUNA can improve communication with IGeLU, and with ELUNA members. Communication with IGeLU actually is going really well and we just need to continue to build on the level of cooperation we have established in the last couple of years.

We have come up with a number of action items regarding communicating to ELUNA member institutions (and potential member institutions). One of the ways we hope to do this is with a new, and hopefully vastly improved Web site. We are planning to replace Drupal with a combination of three tools: For news and our main Web site we will be using WordPress Multi-User, for sharing conference proceedings and other finalized documents we will use E-Prints, and for corroborating on documents we will use Google Apps (mostly the Google Docs portion). Being that I am the ELUNA Web master, I think I have a busy Fall ahead of me.

The IGeLU conference itself was very nice. The local organizers did an excellent job and there was hardly any local arrangement issues. Kudos to the great job the folks in Helsinki did. They raised the bar to almost unattainable heights for those who will follow after them.

The conference itself had two general types of sessions: Ones that Ex Libris put on, and ones the customers put on. The Ex Libris sessions could farther be divided into sessions about the URM and sessions about the current products. The URM sessions did not have a lot of new information in them since ELUNA. It is obvious that Ex Libris has a clear vision and are working towards that, but it is going to take time before they can talk about specifics. Now that the development partners are in place, I expect a lot of work to be done between now and ELUNA 2010 and that they’ll be a lot more meat on the bones at that conference. The sessions on the existing products, Aleph and Metalib, that Binghamton University has also did not have a lot of new developments since ELUNA. Aleph enhancement voting for ELUNA just took place and IGeLU is in the process of voting so they didn’t have any announcements about new enhancements.

The news about Metalib was that Ex Libris is still planning on rolling Metalib functionality into Primo (and providing the Metalib functionality to existing Metalib-only customers at no additional costs). This should happen in Primo 4.0, due out in 2011. Primo and Metalib customers will get some improvements in Primo version 3.1. Since Ex Libris says that they are not going to release a new version of the existing Metalib in order to concentrate on Metalib, Next Generation (yes, that is what they are currently referring to it as), this means non-Primo Metalib customers will not have to worry about upgrading Metalib for a while [1].

There was also some talk about whether or not Primo Central (a product similar to Serial Solutions’ Summons) would be available to Metalib only customers. The IGeLU SC discussed this with Ex Libris and Ex Libris latter announced in the company Q&A session that they are going to consider making Primo Central available to Metalib only customers. My hats off to Ex Libris for listening to the customers about this.

The costumer sessions I went to were very good. Probably the best and most relevant one for Binghamton was “Easy OPAC enhancements” by Matthew Phillips, Systems Librarian, University of Dundee. Mathew should a large number of enhancements to the stock Aleph OPAC that will greatly improve the look and feel of an Aleph OPAC, as well as add some desired functionality. I plan on looking over his slides when the UISC begins to look at making some changes to our Aleph OPAC.

As with any conference, sometimes the personal connections you make can be important. I had interesting conversations about Aleph and other library software with many people. Among them was one of the people responsible for the new Library of the University of Amsterdam Aleph Catalog http://opc.uva.nl/F who offered me some pointers and ideas about how they designed their Aleph interface. Between the presentations and contacts I made at the conference I think it will be much easier to get more out of our Aleph OPAC than it otherwise would.

All and all, a productive, educational, and enjoyable conference. I hope I am able to go to IGeLU 2010 in Belgium.

[1] This does not mean at all that Ex Libris will not be doing knowledge base updates. They are continuing to come, and from my perspective, Ex Libris has been doing a very admirable job with the knowledgeable updates. With new procedures being put in place by Ex Libris, IGeLU, and ELUNA for determining which new resources to create connectors for, I expect that this will even improve more.

Tomorrow is Open Access Day. The purpose of Open Access day is to help “broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.” I am please to say that at Binghamton University Libraries we are simulcasting an informal broadcast from SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) on current issues in Open Access and trends in scholarly publishing on Tuesday, October 14, at 7 p.m., in SL-209. I think Librarians and other supports of Open Access need to help get the word out about what Open Access is and why it is important for faculty to be aware of it and the issues that surround open access. I’m not sure how often Binghamton has held these type of events, but I do hope we get a decent turnout.

Thanks to a post on Roy Tennant’s blog, I have found out about a third Code4Lib regional group to go along with Appalachia and NYC Code4Lib regional groups that I previously wrote about. This one is in New England and hopes to have a one day event in mid-November or early December. Keep the regional groups coming!

Between September 6-10, 2008 I attended the International Group of ex Libris Users (IGeLU) conference in Madrid, Spain. One thing I really miss about Endeavor Users Group (EndUser) is the international aspects. The Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) conference is mostly attended by librarians from the United States, along with some Canadians. True, there are other international attendees, including some from the Caribbean, but they are very small in number. IGeLU, on the other hand has people from many European countries with a few Aussies, South Africans, Americans, Israelis, etc. thrown in for good measure. I think of IGeLU as mostly an European conference (or at least a “Western-world” conference, if I can use that term) and I really like getting the different view of the library world I get when I go to a conference such as IGeLU. That said, it still doesn’t have that same feel as EndUser did to me.

Having just gone to ELUNA a little over a month ago, I wasn’t expecting a lot of new news from Ex Libris management. For the most part this turned out to be true. However, there was one bit of important news for Metalib customers. Metalib 4.3 will be the last version of Metalib as we know it. Metalib 5 (or whatever it will be called) will be a complete re-write. The underlying database and administration portions of the code may be based on Primo but that is still unclear. The user front-end (i.e. discovery layer) will use Primo. Apparently customers of Metalib will not be charged extra for the Primo front-end to Metalib. That is, of course, if they only use the Primo front-end for Metalib. I think using the Primo front end for Metalib like this makes sense for Ex Libris on a couple of accounts. First, they won’t have to develop a new Metalib front end. That means less development is needed and less products to support. Secondly, it will give customers a little taste of Primo. If customers that get this taste decide they like the Primo front end, they may purchase Primo for use with other products. In other words, Ex Libris saves costs and might get a few more sales of Primo out of it.

Most of the user sessions were pretty good. I’m not sure if I got anything specific to bring back home and implement however. One session I enjoyed focused on Metalib. It was interesting to learn about how others are working with Metalib and doing things like creating RSS feeds out of it. However, the approach they used appeared to require a fair bit of work to implement, and with Metalib going away as we know it, I am not sure it would be worth it for us to try to do this now.

I think my presentation on RSS A to V went well. I definitely find it harder to read European audiences than I do American ones. I am not sure if that is because I am from the USA or not, but I think it might not be based on a conversation with a Swede who has presented in the USA a number of times. He said (and I agree) that Americans are more likely to provide visual clues that they are “getting” a presentation by doing things like nodding their head. Overall, Europeans seem to be more reserved in that aspect and seem to more intently focus/concentrate on what you are saying without showing much emotion during a presentation. I am not sure why this is, maybe it is a cultural thing or maybe it is because for most of them, while excellent English speakers, English is not their first language so it takes more focus/concentration for them. For those of you in the Mid-Atlantic states, you can see an encore of my RSS presentation at the Ex Libris Mid-Atlantic Users Group (EMA) meeting in early October.

One topic I found very interesting was the presentation and ensuing discussion abut the future of e-book management. Representatives from ELUNA, IGeLU, and, I believe, Ex Libris created a report about what customers need to manage e-books. As my friend Zoe says the “first you have to acknowledge that an e-book is not always a book in “e” form and then things just go downhill from there. ”

One of the things they mentioned was the enormous challenges of managing e-books. Some of the challenges include: variety of formats, different purpose and use (textbook, research book), diversity of hardware/software, digital rights management (DRM), pricing models, licensing models (do you lease or have ownership), digital curation, metadata creation, and discovery and accessibility. With all of the different formats, e-versions, and sources of e-books, putting like items together is a problem. One of the recommendations is that libraries need a solution that provides sophisticated de-duplication in a FRBR-ized manner. Libraries and library software vendors have there work cut out for them.

Three other things stood out to me about their recommendations. First, the task force felt that the ability to meta-search full content of e-books is not an immediate priority. Secondly they believe browsing is not required for e-book discovery. Thirdly, they recommend that the e-book management system needs to allow libraries to include not just licensed content, but freely available content as well if they wanted to.

Considering the challenges of getting the full-text content into a meta search tool (esp. with all of the possible sources of electronic texts) it would be a daunting task to have full text search in an e-books discovery application. With that in mind, I can understand this one – although I think it will be needed at some point (which the recommendation also implied). We have it for journal articles and patrons will come to expect it in e-books. Also, I just think that it would be really useful if you are looking for information about a specific aspect of a topic.

My initial reaction about the no need for browsing recommendation is that I do not agree. Yes, if students are looking for a specific book (esp. a text book), they don’t need to browse. However, when not having known items, I think a browse is very effective discovery method. The task force pointed out that some ILS don’t currently have a browse function. While this is true, that doesn’t mean it is good. Also, while you might not be able to browse the catalog, you can typically (at least in the USA) browse the shelves. The physical shelf browse-ability is obviously not available for e-books. I think browsing by author, title, subject, classification number, etc is very useful for electronic items. What is great about e-items is that they can be in multiple places at once, so you can assign multiple class numbers, authors, etc. The reasoning the task force provided for not needing browsing is that while it may work for hundreds or a few thousand items, browsing is not so useful for very large collections (which is what the task force expects libraries to be dealing with). I’m not sure if I agree with this logic, I regularly browse shelves of large research libraries with millions of volumes to great effect. Just recently I was looking for a book that was on the shelf about communities of practice and I discovered two other books that were useful to my topic I didn’t find in the catalog. Other occasions you might not know the exact spelling of an author names, so browsing becomes more useful, maybe even necessary. Without full text searching, I think browsing is that much more important. This is amplified if my assumption that our metadata won’t be much better then what we get in a typical full AACR2 MARC record. I’ll have to read the report and think about this some more.

The third recommendation to allow libraries to include freely available materials in the e-book discovery system seemed logical to me. However, it prompted a good deal of discussion. Someone from a national library asked why you would want to include non-licensed (or non-purchased) items that were not selected by her library. The answer from one of the panelists was “Why not?” What you think about it, what are the books that are out there that are freely available. Typically these books are coming from mass-digitization products involving libraries. This means these books were selected at some point by librarians; usually at major research universities. The reason why other libraries wouldn’t have these items is not typically because of the content contained in them, but instead because of costs. This is when the person who posed the question mentioned that they have a very specific collection policy on only collecting items about the history and culture of their country. I can see this is an important distinction. Of course, this is probably one of the reasons why the task force recommended giving the libraries a choice.

Ex Libris did offer the conference attendees a few insights on how they will deal with these issues, but my guess is that is getting closer to proprietary information, so I’ll keep it to myself for now.

Overall a good conference and it was nice to see some of the people I used to spend time with at EndUser who because of their location now go to IGeLU instead of ELUNA. I am already looking forward to the next IGeLU conference in Helsinki, Finland next September.

I have been thinking a lot about what copyright license I want to place on my presentation slides. Generally speaking, I am a fan of open access, and I want people to be able to reuse what I do for their own purposes. However, this can cause some problems. Keeping in mind that there are different Creative Common (CC) licenses you can choose, so these examples won’t be accurate for all licenses, here are some of my concerns. For one thing, an article can be re-posted somewhere. In theory, that may be a good thing that an article is in multiple places and there are more places to find it, but it also can weaken the gravitational force of the original when it comes to search engines and the like. While it was flattering at first to see I actually published a journal article in India (that was copied from an open access journal), I think it did detract from the original. This is not to say that anyone in India did anything wrong and certainly not anything illegal since the license allowed them to do so. As Andy Powell mentioned in June in a blog post about creative borrowing there are other reasons besides gravitational force that makes people doing this more then just “downright unhelpful.” When information is inaccurate or out of date it can do more harm than good. If I find an error in something that I posted, and know where is, I can make sure it gets corrected or at least that there is a disclaimer of some sort. Also, just simple things like contact information may change and it would be good to be able to make sure the up-to-date information is available which is not possible if people re-publish things in places I don’t know about.

But I think I can live with that if that is the only downside, even if it is annoying. The overall good probably outweigh the negative. However, I have a separate issue with slides used during presentations. If I am going to put slides up on my Web site or elsewhere under a CC license, I have to make sure that all parts of it are also available under the CC license or otherwise fall under fair use. Of course relying on fair use is a sticky situation because the concept of fair use can vary greatly depending on the jurisdiction.

One example of this problem is with Microsoft Office clip art. According to Microsoft, among other things “You may not use clip art to advertise your business.” This means using this clip art would make me unable to use certain CC-licenses. OK, you say, I can find Open clip art. While this is true, it can also add significant time to preparing presentations if you try to do this (esp. if you are working with someone who only uses Microsoft products). But this is just one small example. A better example might be something that happened recently while preparing a presentation. I needed (OK, I wanted) a picture of the inscription “Free to All” above the entrance to the Boston Public Library. I couldn’t get to Boston to take my own photo and I couldn’t find a CC-licensed one, but I found a great photo by informationgoddess29 that was just what I needed. I contacted her and she generously gave me permission to use it. Since I used this image, I can’t legally release this presentation under CC without getting her permission. Now, being a fellow librarian, she may very well have agreed to change the license if I asked, but that would be very forward of me to do that. This also gets tricky with Web sites that you are showing off or other content that belongs to the University you work at. Do I have to apply to have the University agree to release this under a CC every time I am creating a presentation? I would think I do, assuming they won’t give me blanket permission.

I could go on, but I think you can see my dilemma. I want people to be able to freely use my work, but I don’t want them to be duplicating it in different places on the Internet and possibly watering it down (without asking, anyway). But even more, when I am preparing a presentation, I may need to use content I don’t own. While a friendly e-mail can usually result in permission to use it, it generally will not get me permission to give it away to someone else. I could work on being more selective about the content I re-use, and I will try to do that, but it is not always feasible. Even when it is feasible, it may be very time consuming to do so (and I probably won’t do it in that case).

I wonder what others do? Have they never thought about it? Do they just ignore the license on the content from others that they include when licensing a presentation? Do they make sure they have the proper permissions to release the re-used content? Do they just decide not to use a CC license? I don’t know what I am going to do about this. I am thinking as long as I don’t use images/content that can easily be resold (i.e. I down scale images), and I use a CC license that doesn’t allow commercial use, no one will complain, however I want to do more than to think, and hope, that no one will complain. For that reason, I think I may not use a CC license on presentations by default. I think I may just put a note saying that if you want to use my stuff, just ask and I most likely will say yes. This way, I can respond with what content I legally can’t give away. Of course, if I am only using my content, I may still use a CC license so people don’t need to ask, but a blanket CC-license on my personal scholarly archive appears problematic.

Word is getting out about the OCLC WorldCat Hackathon that will be held November 7-8 in New York City. According to the Web site, the Hackathon is “sponsored by the OCLC Developer’s Network and NYPL Labs of The New York Public Library, the WorldCat Hackathon gives participants the opportunity for two full days of brainstorming and coding mash-ups with local systems and other Web services to take advantage of all that WorldCat, the world’s largest bibliographic database, has to offer.”

As Peter Murray laments, I also “wish I could get to NYC for the two-day event.” Since it is only one day away from work (it is on a Friday/Saturday), I don’t think being away from work would be a problem for me, but staying in NYC can be quite expensive and Binghamton is a little far to drive back and forth (besides, parking would be really expensive if I actually drove into the city). Hopefully I can figure out a way to put it into my schedule/budget.

With the new Ex Libris Open-Platform Strategy, it will be interesting to see if Ex Libris will follow and host a similar event for their customers. Certainly, OCLC’s base of programmers, hackers, and tech enthusists are going to be smaller, but something like this could still attract a number of people if the 2007 EndUser Voyager Hackfest is any indication. Maybe this would be more viable as far as attracting developers if it is held in conjunction with ELUNA or the IGeLU conference? Do any of the Ex Libris product users/hackers have any thoughts?