Better late than never: ACRL 2011

ACRL conference in Philadelphia, March 30 - April 2, 2011

Chris Patterson and I attended the ACRL conference and presented a poster entitled, "Making the Connection: Conducting Virtual Focus Groups with Distance Adult Learners." It was a success! Many people were curious to hear about how we held these focus groups with students located all over the world and how we manually analyzed the results.



I also hosted a roundtable: "Assessing Services for Non-Traditional Populations: How to Best Reach Our Users at a Distance", which included 6 participants and a lively discussion!

ACRL is always a dynamic conference and we learned a lot to take back to our colleagues.
Here are some highlights:

• Reframing information literacy as metaliteracy
• Focusing on Hispanic students-fastest growing population, game changers: http://www.erialproject.org/
• Shifting to more point of need assistance. For example, database tutorials in the database description, not on a separate tutorials page. Put in strategic places in blackboard as well.
• Convincing students we are real- create more personalized content including intro videos, images, etc.
• TungleMe- tool that can be used to let users schedule virtual office consultations
• Research at one panel showed that undergrads do not think at the discipline level and therefore are not fully utilizing or noticing subject guides. They need a course name in order to make the connection.
• Adopt a system for assessment management-organize data by outcome, not by silo (i.e. the assessment). It will then be in one place when you get the call about the value of the library for student learning.
  

Sloan/Merlot -2011 Emerging Technologies Online Learning Conference

Proceedings from the Sloan/Merlot -2011 Emerging Technologies Online Learning Conference

July 11-14 (San Jose, CA)

The conference was full of ways to take technology to the next level in online courses! The workshops and information sessions topics ranged from perspectives such as recognizing that technology has already “immerged” to how can all academic institutions both for-profit and not-for-profit, traditional and non-traditional concentrate on reaching out to each other to educate an even broader population of students who still are not able to attend college or graduate because of financial reasons of rising cost in education. Could online learning be the answer for them?

This conference addressed how different technological innovations and application of these technologies impact teaching, learning, research and best practices in their use. Effectiveness of these technologies was also highlighted. The sponsors of the conference were Sloan C, which is a consortium of institutional and professional organizations committed to improving online learning in education.

Merlot who partnered with Sloan-C is an online community of open resources of learning materials contributed by many different individuals in a variety of professions. The focus of Merlot is to increase the online resources in both qualities by most of the resources being peer reviewed and in quantity. It provides a place where resources are shared and used throughout the online community.

http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm

One very lively conversation took place with the Keynote Speaker, Brian Alexander who spoke about how he feels technology is no longer emerging but it has changed the landscape of America. He said that “social is the new default” and that mobile technology is considered a “device ecology” that is allows us to feed information back and forth through the use of laptops, netbooks, smartphones and the likes. Many colleges and universities are using building their courses around social media. Social media brings about a constant interactivity among students and faculty.

His suggestions are to perform environmental scans based around social networking and try to anticipate what will happen next through scenarios. He envisions scenarios will be played out in gaming and augmented reality. Through these scenarios we will be able to predict how education will be impacted.

One Plenary panel shared their thoughts and potential initiatives on how to improve technologies (in screen sizes) through making them more interoperable allowing for greater access to content using many different technologies. This was a key area of concern or publishers and educators. This conversation was very thought provoking.

There were many engaging information sessions highlighting the use of interactive technologies throughout all discipline areas. These technologies are thought to enrich the learning experience of the online learner. Visit the conference website to see some of the creativity in technological use.

For more information about the topics covered go to the Sloan C conference proceedings.

http://sloanconsortium.org/conferences/2011/et4online/proceedings

This conference was a great way to gage where and how technology fits comfortably into the learning experiences of online students. It also helped to anticipate which direction technology will be taking in higher education in the future.

SLA 2011 by Sue Vazakas

SLA (Special Libraries Assoc) was in Philadelphia, June 11-15.

------------
My hours in the "Info Expo" (vendor exhibit hall) were very informative, as usual.

Highlights

-- There actually *isn't* a joint e-book deal between Wiley and IEEE (said the latter); but rather just a joint imprint.

-- The American Society of Microbiology's e-books are DRM-protected.

-- Inspec's new e-book package will be delayed until the end of 2011 because they broke up with their platform partner, which I later found out was SPIE. But their e-books are already available on 7 platforms including NetLibrary and MyiLibrary.

-- Swets has an e-book ordering/comparison tool that looked great:

• acquisitions tool with a single purchasing platform


• compares purchase and access models
  


• compares prices for the same title on all available platforms


• no fee or handling charges


• includes Google Preview so you can see the book's outline


• includes pubs and aggregators (but not EBL, at least yet)


• searches book titles and LSCH headings, not FT


• shows your existing purchases so you don't buy twice


• usage stats, link resolver, etc. etc.


• can order whether we have relationship with publisher or not; if not, pop-up tells us

-- In Fall, Springer will launch Springer Reference, with peer-reviewed e-reference books. All of these will still be available in the big e-book packages, too. Good news for our biology crowd: an essential multi-volume ref that can only be searched one volume at a time will be on this platform! (Robin is thrilled.)

--Vendors and colleagues alike report that JSTOR is missing articles and has some black boxes where images are supposed to be. (Lehigh used students to do a project to spot-check JSTOR.) Harvard and UC are supposed to be the back-ups for JSTOR but they have gaps, too -- let's offer them our volumes before we trash them. We can't just blindly use JSTOR as a "trusted 3rd party" until we actually check it.

----------------------------------
Opening Speaker: Thomas Friedman

A great speaker even if you don't agree with everything he says. Memorable thoughts:

1. "Average" is officially OVER. A CEO can reach anyone in the *world* who's above average; the people who didn't get laid off were people who did old work in a new way or did new work. You have to be able to invent and reinvent the job. Find your specialty.
   
   


2. Story: TF and a pal were out having breakfast. He ordered eggs and toast, his friend ordered eggs and fruit. The waitress brought their plates and said to the friend, "I brought you extra fruit." *That* was her specialty, her power; she was in charge of the fruit. She got a 50% tip.
   
   


3. Creativity is having different specialties and using one specialty's framework through which to view another one. The most creative thing he ever heard was Steve Jobs' 2005(?) commencement address at Stanford. Find it on YouTube and listen.

--------------------------
Session Highlights

BEST ONE: Informatics

• A chemist, biologist, and astrophysicist all explained WHAT the data are, WHERE they're being generated from, and HOW we are/will handle them.
  
  


• Chemistry is using InChI ("inchy"), machine-readable code that gives you the exact, unique compound, like a more sophisticated CASRN, for easier linking. They will help find ALL the times the compound appears, even within patents, where applicants deliberately misspell things so others can't find them!
  
  


• The biologist gave a brief history of the HGP and GenBank; she was great. Now, at 1 AM every morning, all researchers' new stuff in all countries' depositories *share* it all! As of this October, 2,500 human genomes will be sequenced so we can look for polymorphisms. It's personalized medicine, and pharmacological sciences will shortly become VERY important. And bioinformaticians are the new biologists.
  


• The astro guy talked about astroinformatics and the Sloan Sky Survey and crowd-sourcing projects like Galaxy Zoo.
  

Vendor Perspectives on Mobile Libraries

• Innovative Interfaces has a platform called Air Pac that does everything you need to do from any e-device: check out, look at fines, place holds, renew, authenticates, gives real-time book status, etc. For admins, it's a wireless way to do inventory, RFID, weeding, and other projects.
  
  


• Alexander Street said that by 2014 (in 3 years), the number of mobile devices will be greater than the number of desktop computers. They have a platform that helps deal with videos and streaming music.

Science Poster Session -- They were all about e-books, mobile devices, and QR codes.

Science 2.1: Focus on Data

1. Chemistry prof - bombshell: We shouldn't be recommending trusted sources like Merck and CRC to students! He had his students find melting points from lots of different "trusted" sources, and analyzed them for outliers. Chemical companies took notice and some have built on these data to make sure that mistakes that have been perpetuated in the literature and in patents are no longer used. This is the Useful Chem Project. He also talked about the Open Notebook project. This was absolutely fascinating!
   
   


2. U. Wisconsin librarian (Dorothea Salo) on data curation - Also fascinating! Discussed various ways to handle data like the Duke Data Accesioner and SWORD. She said that she shudders when people like the previous speaker say that they keep their data on Google Docs and that they need to be kept in *real* places, like Merritt UC3.
   
   She also said that ALL of us are smarter than ANY of us, and that crowd-sourcing can be tremendous, like U. Iowa's Civil War Diaries Transcription Project.

She gave a later talk on a different topic, and exhorted us to take the opportunity of the NSF data management rule to offer a service to our faculty (like the SCG did with the PubMedCentral rule).

ILLiad Conference, Virginia Beach

I attended this year’s ILLiad International conference in Virginia Beach from March 23 till 25. In the conference, I had a chance to communicate with Atlas support staff directly and sharing difference experience and knowledge from other libraries, as well as getting updates from Atlas Systems.
March 23, 2011 is preconference session. The whole day from 9am to 5pm topic is DIY ILLiad Tune-up where the Atlas staff was showing tune up the ILLiand from database to client, and to functions.

March 24, 2011. I attended the following topic:

• ILLiand Update: The Atlas staff talked about new functions, features and releases since last year.


• The ILLiad Tune-Up: Refresh, Retrain, Renew.



• An Introduction to Developing Addons for ILLiad



• Having Fun with ILLiad: Tricks to Customize and Simplify Your Workflows
  


• Getting the most out of OpenURL requests in ILLiad – tweaks, tips and troubleshooting approaches
  

March 25, 2011.

• OCLC Update


• Putting ILL on the Map: Explorations in the Use of ILL Information & Reports to Raise an ILL Department’s Profile


• Atlas Update and Closing Remarks, and preview new functions or features Atlas will release

By Changxin Chen