Chicago: There and back again

Instead of catching up with Google Reader (which is always the first social medium I let slide, particularly on my netbook, where it's annoying to navigate), I thought I'd write up a brief post about ALA. You know, to stuff up all of your Google Readers. ;)

I admit, I was a little less star-struck this year than last. Part of that might be the location—Chicago's more spread out, with a lot more noise and traffic, than Anaheim—and part might be that I had a miserable cold and therefore took it a lot slower than I normally would. (If I didn't have seven other people depending on me to show up to the Book Cart Drill Team championship, I would have bowed out. I was so very, very sick. I'm still not feeling great.) Alternately, it could be the fact that I am almost a librarian, myself, now, where last year I was a library assistant who hadn't begun the MLIS. Not to say library assistants don't have valid opinions! I was just, you know, unnecessarily timid.

At any rate, I did attend some sessions. The bright shining star out of the ones I attended was definitely LITA's Content Management Systems panel. I thought it was very educational and fairly practical. I wish I could have gone to more LITA events—I was too tired to make Friday's Open House and Happy Hour and too busy with prior commitments (mostly NMRT and Book Cart stuff) to make most of the others. I'll catch them virtually, though.

As far as other conference activities, I staffed the NMRT booth for an hour, which is definitely enjoyable! Upon further consideration, I should probably not have signed up for the morning after I arrived; I had to orient myself within the Exhibit Hall super fast, to help others get around. I definitely enjoyed it, though! How fun is that, staffing an information desk at a library conference?!

The NMRT Awards Ceremony and Networking Night went off without a hitch—though I was a little disappointed that so few Pitt students came. There were awards, there was networking, there were cute mini-fans and pinwheels—good times! In talking to the LITA rep (the fabulous Mike Bolam), I confirmed that, yes, I do need to join LITA, because it is both member-driven and welcoming. I'll get on that before studenthood and low prices fade away. And, finally, I made some new fun library friends and went out for a couple of drinks after the official festivities had died down—bad for the cold, good for the morale.

I also got to talk to a vendor for "real business" for the first time. Unfortunately, the Serials Solutions 360 preview—of the update that's coming out soon—coincided with our departure time from Chicago, but I got the rep's card, and they are apparently very good about hosting frequent webinars.

So, conference was good. I should have stayed home and visited Student Health (I'm calling them later today), but I definitely did learn and network and do all of those things that conference lets us do.

I'm pretty excited about my new committee appointments (NMRT switches around committees every year). I'll be either chairing or co-chairing NMRT's Student and Student Chapter Outreach (SASCO) committee, which, as a new grad, I guess I'm extra able to do. And I'll be on the NMRT Web committee, as well, which is pretty exciting!

I'll make another post, this week or next, with news!

The Past Few Weeks

I make no secret of my loathing for summer classes. It isn't the standard "I'd rather have a break," though I suppose that factors in. Rather, it's the inherent lack of balance. The summer semester at Pitt is 3-4 weeks (depending how you count) shorter than the other two, and like everywhere, the professors who are stuck teaching summer classes have to decide whether to try to fit an entire semester's worth of material in--or short-change students who are paying as much for these classes as they would for classes in real semesters.

This summer's professors seem to be trying to find a balance--definitely, they are packing in more than fits in 12 weeks, but I don't think it's quite as much as they'd hit in 15. That's probably the fairest approach, in this situation.

I really believe Pitt's LIS program would be better if they would not run by the rest of the school's semester system during the year--they already run more people through summer classes than the university is designed to handle, which implies, to me, that they are not unduly concerned with "how the rest of Pitt does it." Instead, they should cut a week out of fall and a week out of spring, in order to make summer two weeks longer (since most things are pretty much closed in the summer, students are used to not having the services they need). It would not remove the imbalance entirely, but it would be a good step toward eliminating it.

Other than summer classes--and at some point I'll talk about what I'm taking and what I think of it--I have been busy with conferences and interviews--not that many of the latter, but enough to be noticeable in the scheme of my semester, certainly. (I could write up SLA, but the time has passed. I will try to blog about ALA, though.) I'm composing a series of posts about interviews--dos and don'ts, mostly--but I think I'm going to wait until I have a job to really discuss any of it in depth. My desire to help others who are about to be--or who are currently--in my shoes wars, somewhat, with my desire not to damage my own prospects. I was a little surprised--and pleased, with a tiny bit of heartburn, wondering "what else did I say?"--when a recent interviewer mentioned something I'd said months ago in my blog. (Mostly, I was pleased. Sometimes I wonder whether what I say is even a little bit interesting.) So, that's one bit of advice: people do read what you put out there. I still have few enough followers that maybe Google Analytics will show spikes when search committees decide I'm worth looking into. :)

On the being-busy-and-conference-preparation front, please do come see the Book Cart Drill Team's Pittsburgh Performance, this Thursday, 4pm, Posvar Hall. We'll still be selling raffle tickets, and the final drawing will take place after the performance!



Other posts in the hopper: comparison/contrast of the MLIS program with engineering graduate school (a coworker asked for that, verbally, and it got me thinking); some thoughts on library school in general and Pitt specifically; hopefully an announcement of a Book Cart Drill Team win at ALA :); other ALA posts, including possibly some discussion of the MLIS program accreditation discussions going on there; hopefully an announcement that I got a job, followed by discussion of the moving process; and maybe some musings on the transition from engineering to library work--I should see if I can get a guest blogger in for that one, since he's gone a different path than I plan to. :) After that, here's hoping I'm changing the focus of the blog, somewhat, from library school to librarianship!

Waffling and indecision

I've changed my summer course schedule twice, now. On the bright side, all of this fiddling has left me with courses I'm excited to be taking!

• INFSCI 2955: Special Topics: Systems – “Web Engineering” (Monday nights)
• LIS 2850: Library’s Role in Teaching and Learning, aka Library Instruction (Four weekends, Friday nights and Saturdays)
• LIS 2184: Legal Issues in Information Handling: Copyright & Fair Use in the Digital Age (Wednesday afternoons)

I also have approval to count my Aviary work as an independent study, which is pretty fantastic. I'm setting aside a day a week for that--maybe more, if I can compress my work schedule enough to allow for it--as well as some time to finish my current field placement, which will extend into the summer.

I'm still in the process of scheduling the Book Kart Drill Team practices. And I'm going to the annual conferences of both ALA and SLA, which will be a great opportunity, though I know from ER&L what conference attendance does to one's schedule, during school. I'll also run for a spot on the executive board of SCALA again; that's been pretty rewarding, and I want to see the group into the fall.

I should probably leave some room in my schedule for doing homework. Hmm.

Anyway, it's a busy and exciting summer. I think I'll learn a lot.

ER&L - 3 of 3

It's been a couple of days, and while I'm maybe a bit jet-lagged and definitely a bit behind on my homework, clearly it's time to get this blog post written! Without further adieu, a brief sharing of my thoughts on the remainder of the sessions I attended:

Confronting eShock: Electronic Resource Management and Organizational Change - I was kind of hoping this talk would be about convincing one's organization that electronic resources are important, as are workflows to manage them. But that wasn't really the focus. It turns out, the UNM Libraries have had a rough time of things, with fire and floods and three new manager-level librarians coming in all at the same time, and the talk was about how they coped. There was some good information there, for sure, and I hope to hear that they are successful in meeting their goals in the near future--things aren't stacked up in their favor, but they seem to be a great team.

Just in Time in Difficult Times - Lessons for Librarians - I thought this might be a talk about collection development policies, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was really about [at its core] digital preservation. I was equally pleased to hear that the presenter was Vicky Reich, the head of the LOCKSS program. (I kept picking talks by their titles and, when I was in doubt about what to attend, their descriptions. So who was presenting any given talk was always a surprise to me.) She painted a pretty scary picture of what we stand to lose--something we all need to hear--but showed that all is not yet lost; there are people working on these problems.

The Problem of Where to Start - This was another surprise talk, for me; I don't recall what I was expecting, but I came out of the talk happy, for sure. It turns out, Serials Solutions has come up with an enterprise search, hosted [largely?] on their servers, built [largely?] with open source products, that will search all the holdings of a given library from one search box. It's like Google, populated only with approved content! Like Google Scholar, but books are included, and you can [optionally] turn off links that won't resolve due to licensing restrictions. I just can't even tell you how psyched I am about this. ... I hope it's affordable.

Electronic Resources To Go - I've gotta admit, I don't pay mobile devices the attention they deserve. My website and blog are probably terrible on an iPhone, and when NY Public Library came out with the iPhone app to search their catalog, I thought "well, that's neat, but don't they have better things to do?" I'm seeing the light, though, and I think we'll find that a greater percentage of patrons are trying to use library resources with mobile devices, as time goes on. I really liked the idea of a "text me the call number" feature in an OPAC, as well.

Managing freely available e-resource collections with today's vendor provided OpenURL knowledgebases: A challenge in quality control - So, it turns out that the open access (ish) offerings thrown in with paid-for offerings from vendors are a little spotty. The vendors do some quality control, but there are still problems. And libraries tend to turn these offerings on without any real thought as to whether they fit into their collections or anything else, because, well, they're free. (Even having heard the talk, I'd make the same decision.) Broken links aren't so good, though, because there's a real risk of decreasing patrons' trust in the library.

Anyway, that's all of them! If you were at one of these talks and think my summary missed an important point--or even if you thought it was spectacular--feel free to discuss in the comments!

I may do a summary with my thoughts about the conference as a whole, as I finish digesting all of the information and poke at a couple of the powerpoints for talks I missed. ... Also, you know, when I get my head above water, homework-wise. It was a great conference, and I am really pleased and grateful that I got to go.

ER&L - 2 of 3

I admit, I was totally wiped out by the end of the day yesterday (and the wonderful California wine offered at the Sponsors Reception did not make me more awake), so I failed to post about the sessions I attended. As such, I'll try to keep it brief and split up today's sessions, to write about some tomorrow.

Metadata Crosswalking, Data Quality, and Semantics: Repurposing MARC records for digital collections - A pretty illuminating overview of the troubles one project faced in converting their records from MARC to DC--a process I had always [wrongly] assumed must be straightforward. The number of errors in the MARC records: rather shocking. The workarounds the speaker put into his code were pretty smart. All his talk of clever scripting made me want to learn XSLT and work as a metadata librarian, honestly.

Shelflessness as a Virtue: Preserving serendipity in an electronic reference collection - Some folks at the University of Manitoba put together a really fantastic tool that shows the covers of reference e-books, broken up by subject, with the goal of reintroducing serendipity into electronic collections. I could see this being expanded for e-books in general. I want to borrow their code and try to reproduce this for CMU!

Beyond Federated Search: The Next Generation of Information Discovery - This was mostly about using enterprise search, instead of federated search, for a consortium of law libraries. They're on to something, and the policy implications are interesting; however, it wasn't the new technology I was hoping it'd be. (Great presentation; misleading title.)

Successful Institutional Repositories: Libraries that Provide Value-Added Publishing Services to Faculty and Campus Communities - I didn't know before I went in, but this was actually a talk by a representative of Bepress. So, that was kind of neat. To his credit, he definitely kept the discussion to digital publishing by libraries in general, not specifically on the Digital Commons platform (which seems to be pretty ideal for the purpose). I found it interesting and thought-provoking.

Open Source ILS Panel - I was a little late to this one, but the discussion was fantastic (including the Twitter conversation that happened at the same time). We need more libraries and librarians who are willing to be part of open source communities; I would love to work for one of these! Also, I read Karen Schneider's blog--and so does my cataloging professor--so shaking her hand was kind of neat for me, like meeting a celebrity.

The Seismology of Google Scholar: Does Google Scholar Rock Your world? - Sometimes, things that get talked about as if they are surprising ... aren't? I mean, parts of the data were really interesting, but I was surprised that they were surprised to learn that Google Scholar has become more popular every semester since 2006, eventually overtaking their most popular database in number of searches. Also, I am inclined to question their belief that librarians teaching Google Scholar is what made it popular, particularly given that I found it myself (or through grad student hearsay) when I was in engineering school. That said, the fact that their catalog and other databases did not see lower usage: that was really interesting!

2009's eBook Think Tank - Another interesting discussion. Not much to say about it, except I really didn't think that much about eBooks before now. (They don't seem all that useful to me, unless I can load them on my own device, you know?) But there are some pretty serious workflow considerations, where eBooks are concerned.

I'll talk about the rest of the sessions in another post, most likely tomorrow. Cheers!

ER&L - 1 of 3

So, here I am, sitting in a hotel room in Los Angeles (a pretty nice hotel room, actually--I even have a sliding door to a patio with flowering plants of some sort), gearing up for a very busy two and a half days. The Welcome Reception at the Fowler was very nice. Interestingly, people didn't seem to "mingle" much; that suits me fine, since, although I love meeting new people, I always feel weird hopping into others' conversations, or out of conversations I'm in. (I'm shy in weird ways, I guess.) The sort of "find a group and chat with them for an hour" thing was actually pretty perfect, in that sense. I met fewer people, maybe, but I learned a lot more from the ones I did meet.

From what I've seen so far, I'm even more psyched about this whole thing. It seems like a lot of the folks at this conference are newer to the electronic resources area, so there's a general inquisitiveness, even on top of the standard librarian's share. I think it's going to be a great experience, and I'm really grateful to be here.

It's kind of lucky I could make it, I think: I had set aside enough time to finish my all of my school work early (except for Retrieving, but I'm not stressing that yet), and it was a tough schedule, but doable. Then I got some horrible cold-with-a-fever (flu?) over Thursday night, Friday, and Saturday, and I was knocked almost entirely out of commission. Unwisely, I still went to work on Friday, and I think that just made it worse. Luckily, though, by Sunday afternoon I was well enough to fly, if not entirely comfortably. (My fever and the worst of the other symptoms were gone, and enough time had passed that I was pretty certain I wouldn't be making others sick by flying with them. I still have a cough and suspect I will when I get on the plane home, too; it's more or less manageable, though.)

And, hey, I made it. And then I did homework for most of the day, while listening to the rain. ... Yes, it's below 50 degrees and raining. I'll take it, though--the greenery here is gorgeous! There weren't nearly as many trees in Anaheim this summer, and they were more palmy, while these are all kinds of lovely deciduous, evergreen, and indeterminate (really!) trees. Also, I saw a hummingbird the size of a sparrow on the patio today, which thrilled me to no end (enough that I made an all-caps Twitter update, which is, you know, unheard of), and there was a hawk in front of the building. I walked around campus and just thought to myself "These kids don't even know how good they have it, I bet. How lucky!" It's such a pretty place. (Some of them, I'm not even kidding, had on winter coats for 50 degree weather. I smiled.)

So, all around good stuff. I'll try to update each day--we'll see how it goes.