ALA Midwinter Meeting 2011, San Diego

ALA Midwinter Meeting 2011, San Diego
Mark Cyzyk

So I went into a shop the evening of my arrival to buy a postcard to send my Girls and the cashier suddenly exclaimed, "Ya know, we have some Specials this week for librarians." "That's nice," I thought, "how in the world does he know I'm a librarian?!" -- aside from the fact that I'm in San Diego wearing a dark green corduroy jacket. (You should have seen the reaction in Hawaii to my tweed coat.) [Just kidding.]

This was my first ALA conference.

The reason I went was to attend the bi-annual meeting of the editorial board of Information Technology and Libraries, of which I am a member. This I did.

Insofar as I'm a board newby, I was looking forward to meeting the other members, and I was really looking forward to meeting our editor, Marc Truitt of the University of Alberta. He's the guy who appointed me, he strikes me as a very wise editor, and my email exchanges with him have led me to believe he's an all around great guy. I had a nice chat with him before the meeting about a paper I'm reviewing, then the meeting began. I'm not at liberty to disclose, etc. etc.

However, at the end of the meeting Marc announced that he's stepping down. Wha? I literally just met him. "Was it something I said?!" (He's stepping down for reasons other than anti-Cyziqueian....) [Is that a Carly Simon song I hear?] He will be missed. I have to say, I've only been reviewing papers for ITAL for a matter of months and I've always felt his wise and guiding and supportive presence.

Meeting adjourned, I was then free to jaunt over to the Convention Center and spend the day at the Exhibits.

Wow. Not having attended ALA before I was astounded at the enormity of the Exhibits. I was astounded at the sheer size and complexity of some of the "booths". I took a quick run around the perimeter, then circled back to systematically pace the place. Highlights for me included some things that are really not directly related to my job as a tech guy in an academic library. Nevertheless, one of the most impressive things I saw was a display by M. Moleiro of Barcelona, Spain. This firm creates fine reproductions of manuscripts and illuminated books. I sort of wandered by their booth, their wares caught my eye, and yet I wandered on. At the end of the row, though, I whirled and returned. Their reproductions are incredibly beautiful.

I marveled at the similarly beautiful and stylish library furniture by vendors throughout the Exhibits. Likewise the variety of scanning and digitization equipment there. Likewise more mundane tools like book drops.

I am generally interested in Web-based language learning systems (similar to Rosetta Stone, but Web-based). I was happy to find three vendors present at the Exhibits, so made sure to pick up their materials.

Amazon is in the print-on-demand publishing business, and I had a chat with the guy at their booth because I actually had one of their titles in my backpack that very moment. (A buddy of mine wants me to hike the Maryland portion of the Appalachian Trail with him this spring and bought me a copy of the compelling AWOL On The Appalachian Trail by David Miller, AmazonEncore publisher.) Amazon is targeting smaller markets with important works that might not otherwise be viable in traditional publishing venues. In addition to AmazonEncore they've founded another imprint that publishes little-known foreign works. Interesting, and important. Maybe micropublishing will blossom like the microbrewing industry has in this country the past 20 years?

About 15 years ago, when I worked in the Albert S. Cook Library at Towson University, I put images of our floor plans up on the library Website. At that time I had an idea: Wouldn't it be cool if the actual locations of books were dynamically mapped to these floor plans? Well, browsing the exhibits I ran into just such a product -- StackMap.com -- the idea I had at Cook Library, realized. Cool stuff.

I had a pleasant dinner with my friends, Susan [Mower] and Stewart Burke. Susan is a friend and colleague from my days in the Cook Library. She is a retired GovDocs Librarian and now a synagogue-library-automating-librarian extraordinaire. It was great to catch up with Sue and Stew, who have long lived in the San Diego metro area.

And how did I like San Diego?

An anecdote: At age 23 I circumnavigated the northern hemisphere of this globe, first studying Mandarin for a semester in China, then returning home on the Trans-Siberian railway, through Europe, then driving that summer across the U.S. from L.A. to Baltimore, the southern route. I was privileged to visit some of the greatest cities in the world that year: Beijing, Xian, West Berlin, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco. That was half my lifetime ago and I haven't really traveled much since, but of the cities I have lived in or visited, Philadelphia, Phoenix/Scottsdale, New York, New Orleans, Chicago, Montreal, I would say that Montreal and now San Diego rank, in my opinion, as the top two most beautiful. Can Vancouver beat this???

What did I learn?

I learned that serving on the editorial board of a fine journal is a pride-inducing activity. I learned that I'm excited to participate in the full duties of members of the board. (Watch for my editorial in the upcoming June 2011 issue of ITAL.) I learned that when ALA calls it a midwinter "meeting", they mean just that: lots of meetings scheduled. I learned that the conference basically starts shutting down the day before the officially published end date. I learned that American Airlines charges twenty-five bucks just to check a bag. I learned that Steely Dan's "Hey Nineteen" is a really good mnemonic if the gate of your connecting flight happens to be A19. I learned that even the far south Dallas/Ft. Worth airport has de-icing equipment at the ready. I learned that an early morning stroll on the Embarcadero listening to a random mix of the last five Bob Dylan CDs is something I hope to one day do again. I learned that drivers in San Diego stop and wait for you to cross. This threw me every time. I learned that 50 degrees in San Diego does not feel like 50 degrees in Baltimore. (I'm tempted to make the stronger claim that 50 degrees in San Diego is actually warmer than 50 degrees in Baltimore, but will refrain....)

I learned that my knees are shot.

Maybe I should rethink this Appalachian Trail thing?

Modern Language Association in Los Angeles

The MLA annual convention has moved from its habitual, dreadful time of Dec 26-29 to the first week in January! Hooray! The date change was accompanied by some other much-needed shifts in the culture of this convention: wifi throughout the conference site, lots of tweeting and blogging, and a special day of sessions devoted to the theme of "The Academy in Hard Times."

I organized a round-table for this special session, aimed at bringing to the attention of language and literature faculty and grad students some of the library issues that impact them (whether they know it or not). Our round-table was called "Meeting in the Library: Academic Labor at the Interface." Five presenters gave "lightning talks" followed by 30-40 minutes of conversation. Our presenters covered a range of interesting topics: what faculty can do to support humanities monograph acquisitions in their libraries through the design of their classroom activities and assignments; what kinds of data humanities faculty produce that they need to think about preserving--and how working with a digital collections curator can help; what kinds of skills librarians need to develop to support the new library spaces that are being designed around changing faculty and student research needs and habits; how teaching with rare books revitalizes literature pedagogy (that was me); what it is like to be involved in a college-wide curriculum renovation project as a CLIR post-doc based in the library. During the discussion (in an audience composed of faculty, grad students, librarians, "alt-ac" folks and digital humanists), two salient points emerged: 1) some (many?) humanities faculty still do not understand the basics about the costs of scholarly communications and need to be educated about this issue in ways that speak specifically to their situations; 2) if librarians want to know what humanities faculty need as researchers and teachers, they should work with faculty as faculty, ie, teach in departments.

I also attended the inaugural meeting of a brand-new MLA discussion group, "The Library and Literary Research." After appointing an executive committee, we will be able to propose sessions at future MLA meetings and have an official voice in the organization. This group thus provides one avenue for continuing the conversation on the topics that our session raised.

In addition to attending quite a few MLA panels and talks, learning what literature scholars are thinking about these days, I was invited to participate in a day-long meeting about collaboration in the digital humanities, which was convened by a group of about 20 faculty, librarians and technology specialists from across the country. It is increasingly clear that faculty involved in the digital humanities view librarians as their best allies, but that everyone finds it difficult to pursue common goals because of traditional role restrictions that have been exacerbated by economic hard times.

SPARC Digital Repositories 2010

I attended the SPARC Repositories 2010 meeting in Baltimore on Nov. 8,9, so I am posting a few notes for your enjoyment. This is the third (I think) of these meetings--co-sponsored by SPARC, SPARC Europe, and SPARC Japan--that are designed to promote all types of digital repositories including institutional and disciplinary repositories.

Keynote (Michael Nielsen)
Nielsen, a physicist, talked about the power of group work and "extreme openness" of data in advancing scientific understanding. He described two projects that have been extremely successful and couple that were not. The successful projects were Polymath Projects and Galaxy Zoo.

In the Polymath Projects, very difficult math proofs were solved by a group (37) of mathematicians on a blog. Contributions were made as comments on the blog. Gowers (the organizer) said it was the most exciting thing he had ever done. "Massively Collaborative Mathematics" in Nature is one of the articles about it. Results were published in journals under the collective author name "D.H.J. Polymath" rather than under individual authors. This approach offers a great opportunity for collaborative, open science. How do you preserve all of this collaborative work done on a blog? Currently it is not being preserved, but this poses a real challenge to the digital repository community.

In the Galaxy Zoo project, citizen/scientists have offered their services to classify hundreds of thousands of galaxies drawn from the Hubble Space Telescope archive. More than 250,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo so far, producing a wealth of valuable data and sending telescopes on Earth and in space chasing after their discoveries. Their have been 22 scientific papers based on this work. Some discoveries have been made by "non-scientists", for example, a stay-at-home mom. This type of project broadens the notion of who is a scientist. Citizen science projects bridges the gap between the "scientific community" and society as a whole
Although these two projects have been wildly successful, other scientific social networks have largely failed. Why would a scientist share knowledge on a wiki when:

• they are not very good
• this knowledge might help your competitor
• you won't get any academic credit for it

Successful projects like Polymath and Galaxy Zoo end up with conventional scientific papers. Otherwise there is no academic incentive. It is ironic that scientists are being so timid about this process. We need to strive for "extreme openness", that is, put EVERYTHING out on the web for people to work with. Grant agencies need to mandate certain types sharing and encourage other types. Digital repository folks need to lobby for open access mandates and work with scientists to sustain and preserve their data and develop new tools to utilize them.

The 16th Annual Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning

The 16^th Annual Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning was a great way to see what others are doing in distance education and to determine how we measured (in relation to others) in terms of technology use in providing services at a distance. I found some of our services (at Excelsior) to be more advanced in the area of course development and collaborating with faculty.

The overall conference covered the online environment and the impact it has had on all facets of education; from the online courses and student participation to the design of the courses and research studies that show evidence of improvements in learning as a result of delivering education at a distance; faculty training and development of online courses; and the implementation of online courses across programs and on the institutional level.

Collaboration amongst educators, instructional designers and other support services was the theme, throughout the conference. Assessment of services and how they can be improved was brought to the forefront as a result of data collected from relevant research. The researchers shared their findings and indicated ideas for future studies to continue to assess online education.

Many of the premier institutions in online education were represented at the conference. For detailed information about the conference you can visit the website for the conference proceedings below:

Conference Proceedings: http://sloanconsortium.org/aln/proceedings

Recorded Sessions: http://tinyurl.com/2010aln

Post Conference Page: http://sloanconsortium.org/2010_post_sloanc_conf

I would highly recommend this conference to anyone interested in distance education trends and challenges. I am happy to chat more about it, if you are interested feel free to contact me!

Anita Norton-ELP

Good Practices for Great Outcomes: Cataloging Efficiencies

Several weeks ago, I attended a day-long workshop hosted by OCLC at the Watha T. Daniel-Shaw Neighborhood Library in Washington D.C. The day was broken up into two main parts. In the morning, we heard presentations from a number of folks on a variety of topics. After general introductions, Christopher Cole, the Associate Director for Technical Services at the National Agricultural Library, spoke about trends in technical services. Coming to the position with the benefit of years of experience, Cole provided some interesting insights into where we as a profession have come from, and where he thinks we are going. Although there were few surprises in the outlook he presented (more automation, more reuse of metadata, more cooperation with partners outside the library world), it was nonetheless interesting to hear such musings presented in Cole's affable manner.

Cole's presentation was followed up by a talk given by the Senior Training Coordinator at OCLC, Mary Alice Robinson. The take-away that I got from Robinson's presentation was that we as a technical services department here at Hopkins are pretty far ahead of the curve when it comes to cataloging efficiencies! Robinson discussed a great many services and workflow efficiencies offered by OCLC, and we are already taking advantage of most of them. Robinson concluded her talk by discussing some of the future projects that OCLC is working on. The most interesting of these to me was an OCLC research prototype called Classify. According to OCLC's website, Classify is a FRBR-based prototype, available at classify.oclc.org, designed to assist catalogers in assigning classification numbers and subject headings. It will be very interesting to follow the progression of this prototype as it moves forward.

The second half of the day was more of a question and answer, small group discussion. These are always useful, as they give participants a great opportunity to peek into libraries and organizations around the area and see how other departments function. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to discuss issues impacting us all with colleagues from all different kinds of libraries.

American Studies Association Annual Meeting

I went to the ASA to give a talk about the class I taught last spring, “Reading Culture in the 19th-Century Library,” and the resulting exhibit that’s now on display. The talk was called “Self-Improvement and Unplanned Pleasures in the Public Library, or, Why I Had to Change the Title of this Presentation.” It’s really not a big deal to change a conference title, but in this case the change itself became my topic: how my idea about what was important in the class had to change based on the students’ responses and their independent work.

I planned the course intending to use the George Peabody to show, not just the emergence of the public library and its connections to developments in print technology, literary tastes, education and the growth of cities, but also how the public library movement was contradictory in its ideals and actual practices. That is, all the great ideas about self-improvement, civic duty, democratic participation and cultural progress that “books for the masses” would supposedly accomplish—well, they were compromised in practice, as demonstrated by the gap between Peabody’s founding letter (and similar documents like the Report of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library) and the library’s policies and procedures. I thought this was interesting in itself, and also a great representation of the cultural dynamics of late 19th- and early 20th-century progressive ideology.

What I found out as I taught the course was… students did not find this gap all that surprising or dismaying. If you’re curious about why, check out my presentation, which I’ll post in JScholarship shortly. Happily, the students’ final projects—book collections which became the exhibit—are wonderfully adept at revealing the nuances of 19th century reading practices and their connections to larger social issues. In short, without the burden of exemplifying the canned argument I had prepared, the students did a better job at actually showing that argument in action.

The panel itself, called “Archive This?!,” was about the politics of archive formation. Lauren Coats from Louisiana State University gave a talk about the proliferation of Christopher Columbus’ letters and how they appear differently in different archival contexts—often without the metadata or interpretive frameworks that help readers understand their status as objects. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun from Brown University talked about “undead” information, as exemplified/examined by a new project she is creating on the scalar platform, developed by the same folks at USC who created the multimedia digital journal Vectors. After the presentations, there was a spirited discussion with folks from museum studies programs, libraries, history and American Studies.

Two other highlights of the conference: getting to hear my favorite historian of ephemera, Ellen Gruber Garvey, talk about Civil War scrapbooks and the circulation of newspaper poetry. Also great was the meeting of the digital humanities caucus, which used a lightning talk format. People on the program spoke briefly and frankly about successes and challenges with a variety of digital projects and opportunities, most of which involve scholars, librarians and technologists working together. A few examples:

• Multiple Interpretive Markup on the Horatio Nelson Taft Diary
http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-programme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-692.html
Susan Garfinkel and Jurretta Heckscher, Libray of Congress
What’s the next step for the “American Memory” digital materials at the Library of Congress? This is one example.

• Our Americas Archive
http://oaap.rice.edu
http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/9219
Lisa Spiro, Director, Digital Media Center at Rice University
Bringing together dispersed digital collections.

• “American Enterprise” at the National Museum of American History
http://americanhistory.si.edu/americanenterprise/
Kathy Franz, Associate Professor of History, American University
Creating a pre-exhibition website to solicit feedback from the public to help set up exhibit.

• “Ranking America” blog
http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/
Mark Rice, Chair, American Studies, St. John Fisher College
Great source for twitter! This project led him to a series of articles in Forbes and a new class.

• Searching for Siqueiros
A. Joan Saab, Associate Professor of Art History & Director, Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester
Based on her research on the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros, this will be a community-collaborative digital book about his impact on the visual culture of L.A., using the scalars platform that is currently in development by the folks at Vectors.

Charleston Conference

I also attended the 30th annual Charleston Conference and found it very helpful in terms of my new role of managing our electronic subscriptions for the Excelsior College. I attended a negotiating with vendors preconference on Wednesday that brought together people with different perspectives in dealing with licensing, which made for a balanced and insightful view on how to best negotiate these contracts.

The conference itself was jam-packed and I attended over 20 sessions! Some of my favorites included:

• Let them Eat Everything…Embracing a Patron-Driven Future, Rick Anderson, University of Utah. Thought-provoking point: Libraries do fundamentally crazy things when we have no options. We get good at these things and then they become core services? ex. ILL, Big Deals, reference & instruction (like telling 25 fishermen to fish for 20,000 fish)
  
• Who Do we Trust? Meaning of Brand in Scholarly Publishing and Academic Librarianship, Kent Anderson, Dean Smith (Project Muse), Hazel Woodard, Allen Renear (Univ Of Illinois Lib School)- Brand is interesting, we all trust the brand, but why? Because it represents something else-the process. However, how far should we stretch this? ex. Nature communications.
• Open Textbook Models: View from the Library, Greg Rascke NC State. Discussed FlatWorld and their business model; Then, NC State's library policy to purchase one of every required textbook.
• Executive Roundtable Q& A- Y.S. Chi, Elsevier and Kent Anderson. A question focused on how publishers are dealing with supplemental data, how much should go online and how should it be posted?
• What can our Readers Teach us? John Sack, Associate Director for Highwire Press Thinking outside the box- Readers want information and we give them a container (books, articles, journals, etc.) and they have to unpack them. *If we can find what users want, we can get out of the box.

I have tons of notes and additional information, so please contact me if you are interested!