NISO Forum: Library Resource Management Systems

I have participated in the NISO Forum on Library Resource Management Systems from 10/8 to 10/9. As one of the twitter said, this event "was thanksgiving dinner for the brain. I'm stuffed", me, too.

The forum started with a keynote from Oren Beit-Arie, "Toward Service-Oriented Librarianship" , and ended with Marshall Breeding's closing presentation "Where can we go from here?".

Besides of the case study of successful stories from libraries used either open source ILS or vendor provided ILS, there are some open source project progress reports from OLE (by Tim McGeary, Lehigh University) and from VuFind (by Andrew Nagy, Serials Solutions). The roundtable discussion gave audience a chance to ask questions to the panlists who are from commercial and open sources support companies.

I list three points I got from the presentations and discussions, (that is my digest so far, not complete) there are: stop doing things in silo way; think where you are and where you are going before deciding on projects; and always think library is not above but part of learning society, sometimes the best solution is outside of library domain.

1. The good example of silo way doing things is CATALOGING! Open mind and open up metadata have been called by libraries and by library consortium. With today's technology it is very easy to reproduce bibliographic utilities like WorldCat, new bibliographic utility and e-resource knowledge bases are now offered to sharing the work. Silo development is also seen by libraries under the open source development, if the project is just to reproduce what is already available without new functionalities, it is wasting library resources. Why it is wasting? Because it does not match the direction that library should be going.

2. As Oren states, library projects can be "classified" into three category: traditional, transitional, and transformational.

- The traditional project is "doing the same thing differently", we still only provide "metadata services" designed for printed materials. With e-resources usage passing the 50% bench mark of library total resources usage, the majority of workflow and staff resources are still towards traditional way doing things. This is what we need to stop doing.

- The transitional project is "doing NEW things in support of traditional functions", discovery tools mentioned as in this category. Library of Congress using Flicks for its photo collection also cited as example of the project in this category. The suggestion for projects in this category is to "focus on the unique (the institutional), and integrate the common (global information). Also stop duplicate efforts.

- The transformational is " doing entirely new and different things", the Datanet project mentioned by Oren as a example of project in this category. Library services need to be considered as an integrated services to, and as part of the parent organization solution to support e-learn and e-research.

3. The functions that library provides as a stand alone services will be very limited.

MacKenzie Smith in her talk of "Integrating Library Resource Management Systems into Campus Infrastructure for Research and Education" showed the data and IT resources used by the university communities, library's data is very tiny in the map, and library services is heavily depended on the resources from university. Ezproxy, sfx, and e-reserves are mentioned as depended on SSO/Shibboleth support from the university IT, and the user data and research data will also be needed for library future development. It is important to look at the big picture before thinking of library data storage and network needs, and purchase for application software that might be better off by using enterprise applications support.

What I have learned from the meetings have direct impact on my projects such as shibboleth/remote access, course reserves system investigation, and planning for future library resources management tools...

I believe the meeting materials will help many of us to think ahead or/and rethink what we are doing now, I have included the conference link below, and the speakers' biography and most of power point presentations can be found from the link. link http://www.niso.org/news/events/2009/lrms09/agenda.

Foster Zhang/Library systems

Service Excellence: Positioning Library Staffs for the Future, New York Public Library, September 21-22, 2009

Really interesting conference put together by DeEtta Jones and the NYPL. NYPL has been going through a bit of a renaissance, their circulation is up, hours have increased, staff morale is up, yet their budget is down. Part of their transformation comes from a program they call LeadershipNow. The program is to get all staff to think about their future TOGETHER and how to bring the best of your staff out when they are tired. They also looked outside the Library world for examples.

The first morning speaker was Danny Meyer, author of Setting the Table and the founder and CEO of the Union Square Hospitality Group which runs some of New York's most beloved and highly acclaimed restaurants. His premise was that everyone has the same 5 stakeholders:

1. staff
2. customers
3. community
4. suppliers
5. investors

How you prioritize these 5 is how you build your business. He believes that most important stakeholder is not customer - but staff. If, as an organization, you put your staff first they then are positioned to create the appropriate experience for your customers. Reminded us that in your organization everything other than people is an inanimate object so it all really comes down to people.

He believed it was important to water the flowers not just keep pulling the weeds - in other words discover what it is that is working right and really build on that rather than just keep trying to work on problems. In addition, he talked about the difference between service and hospitality. Service is what you do TO someone; hospitality is what you do FOR someone. Huge difference, huge. Service is a process that has to happen the same way every time. It is what is written in your service manual. Service is a monologue; hospitality is a dialogue.

6 key characteristics of someone with high HQ (hospitality quotient): kind, curious, high work ethic, empathy, integrity, and self awareness. You cannot expect your customers to have a good experience if your staff is not having a good experience working for you. Focusing on your staff helps you set up what Meyers calls a Virtuous Cycle, which you can find out about in his book. The other important thing is that all his senior leaders are subject to 360 evaluations.

The afternoon speaker was supposed to be Jeff Jarvis the author of What Would Google Do? Unfortunately Mr. Jarvis had health problems and had to withdraw. In his place Gary Wasdin, formerly at NYPL (and co-creator of the Leadership Now program with DeEtta) and now at U. Alabama let the group in a discussion on Re-Imagining Libraries: Putting Googley Ideas Into Practice. Some ideas include:

1. Find one thing you control and relinquish it.
   
2. Screw something up. If you are a manager or supervisor, make some mistakes and make sure people know about it.
   
3. Disband AT LEAST one committee.
   
4. Ask your manager or supervisor "If I told you I was leaving my job, how hard would you work to change my mind?"
5. Take the Library Cyclone quiz...if every object and person in your library were to be blown out into the parking lot, what would you put back in place and what would you toss out?
   
6. Post a large blank banner with markers in your library and ask your customers to share their ONE GOOD IDEA FOR THE LIBRARY. Act on as many as you can and publicize that you did. Do the same thing on your Web site.
   

Wasdin highlighted the following key points from the WWGD? book:

• The customer is in charge. They may be always right, never right, or somewhere in between, but they are always in charge.
• There is no more mass market....there is now a mass of niche markets
• Your worst customer is your best friend
• Do what you do best, and link to the rest
• Middlemen are doomed
• Collaborate
• Listen and accept what you hear
• Don't be evil
  
• There is an inverse relationship between control and trust
• Your best customer is your partner
• The most effective advertising will come from your customers
• "Free" is an excellent business model
• Be transparent
• Make excellent and visible mistakes
• Somethings should always be in beta
• Keep it simple
• Create platforms where communities and thrive.
  

He asked us to think about the fact that only libraries can make what we call the people that come in and use our services controversial.....customers, patrons, users, readers....I think we need to get over that and worry much more about providing better experiences.

He also asked the crowd a very simple question - what business are libraries in? I have to admit, I think most of the answers were pretty narrow - information literacy, books, instruction, providing information resources. Granted I don't think I have the perfect answer but, upon reflection I believe libraries are really about connections - connecting people to information, connecting disparate types of information together, connecting old knowledge with new knowledge, connecting.

The final presenter I want to mention is Michael Lascarides who is a User Analyst in the Digital Experience Group at NYPL. That group (note I said GROUP) is responsible for all user interfaces at NYPL except for a few (they are a III ILS library). He talked about how we need to stop thinking about the difference between digital and physical collections - they are not two separate things.

Drill bit analogy - remember no one wants a 1/2 inch drill bit they want a 1/2 inch hole. Our collections, any part of them, are NOT special - how the collection fills a specific need is what makes it special. I think this is what is THE MOST IMPORTANT fact libraries really need to understand as we move forward - what is great about libraries is not about us or our stuff, it is about how people use our stuff.

Things we can do today for FREE to understand our user:

1. spend a day watching your users - keep your mouth shut and really observe
2. Google Analytics - does about 90% for free what you pay big $$ for
3. Twitter search for your library and see what people are tweeting about you
4. Look what is on every screen of your site - remember that in the web world instructions are a sign of bad design
5. send user feedback to your ILS or other software vendor - your patrons are not stupid
   
6. INFOMAKI - open source software that allows you to set up one question surveys
7. Decide what metrics constitute success - think about the stories you want to tell
8. List the things that make your library unique
9. write down 10 things your patrons are passionate about
10. Audience, serve, words - ask your staff who is your audience, who do you serve, and what words do they use
11. Start blogging
12. Share content
13. Play especially with the line between physical and virtual
14. steal and idea
15. look for stories in your search terms

All in all it was a great two days.

10th Sakai Conference and DataNet

I attended the 10th Sakai Conference specifically for Jim Martino's presentation and associated discussions about our NSF DataNet award. It's our intention to build on Sakai's growing ability to connect with distributed repositories to provide access to scientific data within our DataNet framework. In addition to the DataNet specific items, I noted more general trends or observations.

The attendance for this Sakai conference was at least as much as prior conferences (so much so that they ran out of t-shirts), which is especially impressive given the current economic climate and associated travel restrictions. The number of members and institutions using Sakai continues to increase. Based on conversations with a couple of Sakai Board members, I also felt that Sakai 3.0 was moving in interesting ways that emphasize learning in different ways. The fact that "management" is part of the term "course management system" or "learning management system" has always struck me as odd. Do courses or learning really need to be managed? Within the Sakai community, there appears to be a greater awareness, even embracing, of the collaborative aspects of learning for which Sakai might have been conceived of in the first place.

Inspiration, Innovation, Celebration Conference (June3-4, 2009)

University of North Carolina-Greensboro

This was the first year for the conference. It was organized under the leadership of Rosann Bazirjuan, Dean of University Libraries UNCG. Approximately 75-100 participants attended for the day and a half conference with 20 sessions.
It focused on how and why libraries are moving more toward becoming entrepreneurial in some way for sustainability. The workshops covered ways to be collaborative both internally and externally (i.e. consortia, partnerships, etc.) integrating the library into the overall university and not functioning in isolation. There were discussions on creating activities, processes, products and services for sustainability and some profitability, tying back into the mission and vision of your institution.
This link will provide an overview of the conference’s presentations. http://blog.zsr.wfu.edu/iic/program/

Anita Norton
ELP

ALA Annual Conference, Chicago, IL 7/10-13/09

I focused on Sociology and Reference at this conference, attending the Anthropology and Sociology Section's Sociology Discussion Group, the ANSS Membership Committee meeting (I'm joining this committee), and RUSA's 15th Annual New Reference Research Forum. Picture to the left is Loyola University's Information Commons (see more below).

The Sociology Discussion Group featured a presentation with Q&A by Ross Housewright, a research analyst from Ithaka (a non-profit that includes JSTOR and Portico). Ross's presentation focused on a 2006 study that Ithaka had done of faculty and librarian attitudes and preferences for research. The survey was sent to 4-year colleges with 4100 responses from faculty and 350 responses from collection development librarians. The data is in ICPSR and available as a white paper on Ithaka's site. The survey discusses much of what has been discussed across the Sheridan Libraries lately, in discipline groups and the Collection Management Council about how faculty prefer to access library resources and in what format. Ithaka's study shows patterns by discipline with results that are familiar to us--Humanities still big users of print and the library building, with Sciences at the other end of the spectrum, online, off-campus access. Social Sciences falls in the middle with Sociology in the dead center. Ross showed us findings that indicate that Economics is trending like the sciences with pre-prints and online access very important. The study asked faculty and librarians what aspect of the relationship between faculty and librarians was most important--gateway, archive, or buyer. Faculty rate the buyer aspect as most important while not surprisingly, librarians see the gateway role as most important. The study also asked faculty to rate the reasons why they publish where they do. Highest rating went to "current issues circulated widely and well read by scholars in the field." Least important was "freely available." We have a long way to go to sell faculty on open access. We had a lively discussion about the study and how the results compared to our own experiences with faculty, so much so that Ross couldn't finish the presentation, but I look forward to reading the white paper.

Regarding the ANSS Membership Committee meeting, I'll simply report that it was co-chaired by Jen Darragh, who is joining us in August as Data Services Librarian, and she did an excellent job! She'll be a real asset to the library.

RUSA's 15th Annual New Reference Research Forum had three presentations. The first was from the recipients of the Reference Research Grant, Julie Gedeon and Carolyn Radcliff, from Kent State, who administer WOREP (Wisconsin Ohio Reference Evaluation Program). We used the WOREP survey in the RCO last fall and received a call from Carolyn as a follow-up for the grant. WOREP has been used since the 1980s and the administrators used the grant to study what makes reference service successful and what are the trends, focusing on data collected from 2000-2008, where 72.9% of the transactions were deemed successful. Factors that contribute to success are: enough help, enough time, clear explanations, knowledgeable librarians, courtesy, and professionalism. WOREP administrators saw that over time, more instruction and explanation were incorporated in the reference transaction, more active collaboration, the librarians weren't as busy (a trend), and more time was spent. Factors associated with lack of success are: too much information, more in-depth information needed, information couldn't be found, information not relevant, different point of view needed. From this study, administrators recommend reference librarians play to their strengths--attention to patrons and professionalism, enough time spent and follow up offered. The second presentation came from an academic librarian and a public librarian in Kansas on the effectiveness of online tutorials. They looked at straight HTML tutorials versus streaming media and performed studies that deemed the streaming media was more effective, using verbal and visual cues, and participants reporting more confidence (and more correct answers) using the video tutorial. The final presentation came from reference librarians at a North Carolina academic library and focused on Teachable Instants in Instant Messaging. They posited a set of theories about librarian behavior that should take place in chats--reinforce positive behavior, make thoughts transparent, show, don't tell, provide active learning, be the welcome wagon, make introductions, and share secret knowledge--and went through dozens (or hundreds!) of IM transcripts to see if these stragegies were used. 62% of them used at least one strategy and they noted lots of missed opportunities. Conclusions were that reference transactions are instructional opportunities; many librarians take a pass on the opportunity to teach; and librarians require training in instructional strategies. Presenters are publishing this as a chapter.

Visit to Loyola University's Information Commons. On Sunday, July 12, Liz Uzelac and I went north to Loyola University in Rogers Park, and toured their Information Commons (invitation extended by the Info Commons Director, Leslie Haas, on a listserv and seconded by our own Jeannette Pierce). Liz and I were able to talk to library director Bob Seal, who told us the Info Commons was built in 18 months (!). It's Silver LEED certified and was absolutely stunning (it would be hard not to be when you walk in and see Lake Michigan before you). It's connected to the Cudahy Library and in fact, it was decided to close the Cudahy entrance and have a single entrance through the Info Commons (I'm blanking on the reason; Liz may remember). Jeannette has transplanted the Info Desk/RCO model to the IC but they lack the proximity to each other that we have in MSEL (and need to keep in the BLC). Plans were in place before she joined Loyola. The Info Desk is on the second floor and the RCO is several yards away from it and not in its sightline. Jeannette told me that sometimes librarians sit at the Info Desk with the student worker and tech support and use the RCO for appointments. Building use has jumped and it sounds much like MSEL in terms of busy-ness. Group studies can be reserved online and there's a mix of Macs and PCs (20% Macs, 80% PCs). In their instruction classroom, instruction sessions can be taped (although not viewed simultaneously).

McCormick Place is incredibly inconvenient for exhibits (too far from everything else and shuttles take a while). ALA exhibits seem to focus more on public libraries than academic ones. I asked a few technical questions at the EBSCO booth but they were really more set up for sales and took my card and said they'd get back to me :)

10th Sakai Conference

John Dunn, Susan Hollar, Steve Smail and Gaurav Bhatnagar presented a session on integration of library resources into the next generation of Sakai (Sakai 3). Since Sakai 3 is still very much under construction, the format was more of a conversation among librarians and developers about choosing directions for further work. As the funding from the Mellon Foundation supporting the current library integrations has now ended, a new structure will need to be created to carry on this work. While no solution was achieved at the conference, a broader set of institutions than currently involved expressed interest in moving this project forward; a list of contacts was established, and phone conferences are planned. As for the scope and direction of further work, projects will probably be proposed by institutions with the most pressing need for a service, and resources contributed by them and others. A user-centered design process is being adopted. A first step in determining what these services might be is to survey library users; it would be nice if we could contribute, in some form, results of the recent extensive faculty surveys done here. Slides from this presentation are available at http://www.slideshare.net/jwdunn/integration-of-library-resources-and-services-in-sakai-3. Of special interest are slides of mock-ups of possible future integrations.

Another interesting session was on the addition of a Z39.50 connector for the existing Citations List helper for the Sakai Resources tool, presented by Mame Awa Diop and Jean-Yves Côté from HEC Montréal. There are many libraries who do not have metasearch capabilities, and this connector allows them to use the Citations List functionality with catalogs and other services which support the Z39.50 protocol. The development team at HEC will contribute this code back to the community.

Two other library sessions were offered; one was a pre-conference workshop on library integration focused on small schools, conducted by Jezmynne Dene, Cheryl Cramer, Mike Osterman and Michael Spalti. Another panel session brought library professionals from four different institutions to discuss details of library integration with Sakai at their respective schools. Susan Hollar, Jezmynne Dene, Kalee Sprague and John Dunn presented this panel.

I offered a session on multi-repository integration with Sakai, focusing on local needs we anticipate having with repository integration in the near future, and how changes in the architecture of the next generation of Sakai will require the use of different methods from the current version. Strategies and technical information about current work from a couple of new projects in this area were discussed, with an eye toward how these technologies might be used to present a single standard repository interface to several disparate data sources. Slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/jrmdkc/sakai09-repo-case-study.

These were just the library-related talks. There were many other interesting sessions related to pedagogy etc. which were of great interest. If you are would like to check out more presentations, have a look at slides from some of the presentations at http://www.slideshare.net - search for the tag Sakai09.

SLA’s 100th Annual Conference
Washington D.C., June 13-17, 2009
Notes from Jim Gillispie

As you might guess, my activities at the SLA Conference focused on the programs of the Social Sciences Division, Legal Division, and Government Information Division. By far the best program this year was “Census 2010: Not your Grandmother’s Census. “ The 2010 census is a significant milestone for academic folks as it marks the replacement of census long form data with the American Community Survey (ACS). For many years the census long form has been used to by government agencies and academics to measure the health and well being of communities by benchmarking their social economic characteristics. Aggregated data from the long form included statistics on education, occupation, commuting, income, and housing structures. The down side of the census long form is:
- Data is only collected every 10 years
- The long form questionnaire is time consuming for citizens to complete and expensive for the Census Bureau to follow-up on when individual forms are not returned.
An ongoing solution to the decennial census long form is the American Community Survey (ACS). In 1996 testing for the ACS illustrated that a continuous survey could provide data that was once only captured every ten years. The ACS has been timed to first release small geography data at roughly the same time as the 2010 decennial census – now with just a short form incouding questions on age, race, Hispanic origin and household relationships. A positive aspect of ACS is that data will be available for small geographies (i.e. census tracts and block groups) for every year after 2010. The annual information will represent information that is more like a three year average then data from a single point in time. This will be a new concept for readers to understand and see how it applies to their specific research.

The 2010 census and ACS represents an exciting time for the availability of new information for library readers. I’m looking forward to sharing this information, and teaching reader how to use the data.