Day #1, Wednesday
The Conference, sponsored by Macalester College — a small, well-respected liberal arts college in St. Paul — began with a keynote presentation by Stacey Greenwell (University of Kentucky) called “Applying the information commons concept in your library”. In her remarks the contagiously energetic Ms. Greenwell described how she and her colleagues implemented the “Hub“, an “active learning place” set in the library. After significant amounts of planning, focus group interviews, committee work, and on-going cooperation with the campus computing center, the Hub opened in March of 2007. The whole thing is designed to be a fun, collaborative learning commons equipped with computer technology and supported by librarian and computer consultant expertise. Some of the real winners in her implementation include the use of white boards, putting every piece of furniture on wheels, including “video walls” (displaying items from special collections, student art, basketball games, etc.), and hosting parties where as many as 800 students attend. Greenswell’s enthusiasm was inspiring.
Most of the Conference was made up of sets of concurrent sessions, and the first one I attended was given by Jason Roy and Shane Nackerund (both of the University of Minnesota) called “What’s cooking in the lab?” Roy began by describing both a top-down and bottom-up approach to the curation and maintenance of special collections content. Technically, their current implementation includes a usual cast of characters (DSpace, finding aids managed with DLXS, sets of images, and staff), but sometime in the near future he plans on implementing a more streamlined approach consisting of Fedora for the storage of content with sets of Web Services on top to provide access. It was also interesting to note their support for user-contributed content. Users supply images. Users tag content. Images and tags are used to supplement more curated content.
Nackerund demonstrated a number of tools he has been working on to provide enhanced library services. One was the Assignment Calculator — a tool to outline what steps need to be done to complete library-related, classroom-related tasks. He has helped implement a mobile library home page by exploiting Web Service interfaces to this underlying systems. While the Web Service APIs are proprietary, they are a step in the right direction for further exploitation. He has implementing sets of course pages — as opposed to subject guides — too. “I am in this class, what library resources should I be using?” (The creation of course guide seems to be a trend.) Finally, he is creating a recommender service of which the core is the creation of “affinity strings” — a set of codes used to denote the characteristics of an individual as opposed to specific identifiers. Of all the things from the Conference, the idea of affinity strings struck me the hardest. Very nice work, and documented in a Code4Lib Journal article too boot.
In the afternoon I gave a presentation called “Technology Trends and Libraries: So many opportunities“. In it I described why mobile computing, content “born digital”, the Semantic Web, search as more important than browse, and the wisdom of crowds represent significant future directions for librarianship. I also described the importance of not loosing the sight of the forest from the trees. Collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of library content and services are still the core of the profession, and we simply need to figure out new ways to do the work we have traditionally done. “Libraries are not warehouses of data and information as much as they are gateways to learning and knowledge. We must learn to build on the past and evolve, instead of clinging to it like a comfortable sweater.”
Later in the afternoon Marian Rengal and Eric Celeste (both of the Minnesota Digital Library) described the status of the Minnesota Digital Library in a presentation called “Where we are”. Using ContentDM as the software foundation of their implementation, the library includes many images supported by “mostly volunteers just trying to do the right thing for Minnesota.” What was really interesting about their implementation is the way they have employed a building block approach. PMWiki to collaborate. The Flickr API to share. Pachyderm to create learning objects. One of the most notable quotes from the presentation was “Institutions need to let go of their content to a greater degree; let them have a life of their own.” I think this is something that needs to be heard by many of us in cultural heritage institutions. If we make our content freely available, then we will be facilitating the use of the content in unimagined ways. Such is a good thing.
St. Paul Cathedral
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Balboa facade
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Day #2, Thursday
The next day was filled with concurrent sessions. I first attended one by Alec Sonsteby (Concordia College) entitled “VuFind: the MnPALS Experience” where I learned how MnPALS — a library consortium — brought up VuFind as their “discovery” interface. They launched VuFind in August of 2008, and they seem pretty much satisfied with the results.
During the second round of sessions I lead a discussion/workshop regarding “next generation” library catalogs. In it we asked and tried to answer questions such as “What is the catalog?”, “What does it contain?”, “What functions is it expected to fulfill and for whom?”, and most importantly, “What is the problem it is expected to solve?” I then described how many of current crop of implementations function very similarly. Dump metadata records. Often store them in a database. Index them (with Lucene). Provide services against the index (search and browse). I then tried to outline how “next generation” library catalogs could do more, namely provide services against the texts as well as the index.
The last session I attended was about ERMs — Electronic Resource Management systems. Don Zhou (William Mitchel College of Law) described how he implemented Innovative Interface’s ERM. “The hard part was getting the data in.” Dani Roach and Carolyn DeLuca (both of University of St. Thomas) described how they implemented a Serials Solutions… solution. “You need to be adaptive; we decided to do things one way and then went another… It is complex, not difficult, just complex. There have to be many tools to do ERM.” Finally, Galadriel Chilton (University of Wisconsin – La Crosse) described an open source implementation written in Microsoft Access, but “it does not do electronic journals.”
In the afternoon Eric C. was gracious enough to tour me around the Twin Cities. We saw the Cathedral of Saint Paul, the Mississippi River, and a facade by Balboa. But the most impressive thing I saw was the University of Minnesota’s “cave” — an onsite storage facility for the University’s libraries. All the books they want to withdraw go here where they are sorted by size, placed into cardboard boxes assigned to a bar code, and put into rooms 100 yards long and three stories high. The facility is manned by two people, and in ten years they have only lost two books out of the 1.3 million. The place is so huge you can literally drive a tractor trail truck into the place. Very impressive, and I got a personal tour. “Thanks Eric!”
Eric and Eric
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St. Anthony Falls
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Summary
I sincerely enjoyed the opportunity to attend this conference. Whenever I give talks I feel the need to write up a one-page handout. That process forces me to articulate my ideas in writing. When I give the presentation it is not all about me, but rather learning about the environments of my peers. It is an education all around. This particular regional conference was the right size, about 250. Many of the attendees knew each other. They caught up and learned things along the way. “Good job Ron Joslin!” The only thing I missed was a photograph of Mary Tyler Moore. Maybe next time.
Tags: Twin Cities
Posted in Travelogues | Comments Off on Library Technology Conference, 2009: A Travelogue
Creator: Eric Lease Morgan <eric_morgan@infomotions.com>
Date created: 2008-05-26
Date updated: 2010-05-09
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