Last week I met face-to-face with the students who signed up for LIS578LE: Technical Services Functions at UIUC GSLIS. Overall it was a great time, including an informative meeting with librarians and staff who work in technical services areas at the Main Library at UIUC, followed by a guided tour. This invariably serves to put some immediate context to the topics covered in the course and all of the students enjoyed it a lot. Many remarked on the energy and passion for their jobs that our hosts at UIUC demonstrated. One student described his impression of their work at UIUC as “drinking from the fire hose.” I thought that was a pretty apt description A major focus for discussion during the visit and tour was Karen Calhoun’s recently released report on rethinking the role of the OPAC, commissioned by the Library of Congress. This is required reading for the course section on cataloging (a few weeks away yet) and we will discuss it more in depth at that time, but the basic themes contained in the report, and debated by the students and the UIUC librarians and staff, are ones about which it is hard to remain neutral.

There are 22 people in the class and as Mark Lindner remarked on his blog, this has the makings of an excellent group, with varied backgrounds and interests. (By the way, it was great to finally meet Mark in person! A great guy, and one whom I am pleased to work with.) Several students in the class work in public libraries; one works in a school library. As usual there are other students who have no library (let alone technical services) experience, and then there are those who have worked for several years in this area already. All of them bring valuable insights to class discussions.

This year I departed from the norm by having the class meet for part of a second day (usually one day is all we get; the rest of the semester is conducted entirely online). The main focus of this portion of the time together was on discussion about the tour and visit with UIUC technical services folks, followed by a crash course in setting up blogs and the class wiki. There may be some who found this new stuff a bit overwhelming, and that is to be expected. However I tried to point out the importance of getting involved, personally, in investigating these new forms of communication and collaboration. GSLIS has a technology platform for conducting online courses that has stood the test of time — 10 years, to be exact — very well, but there are many aspects that need to be updated. The tech support folks are wonderful, incredible people. They already have begun investigating and testing a new platform for conducting classes, called Moodle (it’s open source to boot). Two of the LEEP courses this summer are using this new platform, which contains built-in support for wikis, blogging capabilities, RSS, etc. For the technical services course I teach, I have had to go outside of the bounds of the LEEP technology to integrate blogs. I chose WordPress.com as the best overall platform for a balance of ease of setup and use as well as a rich set of features (and of course, it is free). A general class blog is now operational and most students have successfully set up individual blogs as well. One of the main assignments of this course is what I’ve termed a reflective journal. It struck me that this assignment would make a perfect match with blogging technology, and it would have the secondary benefit of helping to generate and sustain conversations about themes in the course in ways that a generic bulletin board setup could not. This is all somewhat experimental of course, and we’ll see how people take to the new stuff. So far, I am really pleased.

Oh, one other new tool that I am excited about in terms of teaching this course is the new ability I have to do application sharing via another open source software called Web Huddle. This will make introducing students to ERMS, for instance, much more fruitful than, say, a PowerPoint presentation.

Now I’ve got to prepare more for tomorrow’s first online “live” session, on the topic of acquisitions and collection development. Unfortunately I have had serious problems with connecting to the GSLIS server from my workplace, such that I am forced to conduct tomorrow’s session from home, where there isn’t aren’t such tight restrictions on network traffic!